"Hound Dog Part Two: A Little House Cleaning" A story of packing a suitcase

"Pulizie!"
She stood by the cleaning cart and knocked again.  "Housekeeping!" she said in English.  She could feel the emptiness through the door.

 There was no answer so she took her pass key and unlocked it.  She pushed the door open and stayed by the cleaning cart.  She announced herself again in Italian and waited. Staying with the cart, she leaned in the doorway cautiously and glanced around.  There was no one.  She went in.

 On the dresser below the wall mounted TV screen an open suitcase was still in the process of being packed.  She glanced at it in passing as she went to the bathroom. 

She had been working in the little hotel in Rome for ten years.  In that time there had been four suicides.  Also two murders, most likely a result of adulterous affairs, but the poliziotto would never tell you anything.  She glanced at the bed, which had been roughly made up.  She stepped into the white tiled bathroom, alert for spots of blood.  The toilet had been flushed, that was nice. The American woman who was staying there, she had met her once, had neatly folded the towels out of that guilty thoughtfulness rich Americans sometimes put on for the working class.

 She took the towels and carried them out to the cleaning cart and brought back a fresh armful.  She replaced the towels, went back to the cart and took the soap bottles and sponges. She scrubbed down the toilet bowl and the sink.  She emptied the waste basket. 

She went back to the cleaning cart and took the spray bottle of glass cleaner and tore off a wad of paper towels.

 She didn’t like cleaning mirrors.  It was something she got through quickly.  When she was a girl she had seen a horror movie of a mirror that imprisoned a woman's soul. You could see the woman trapped behind the glass beating her fists, screaming soundlessly. In the movies people were always looking in mirrors and seeing someone's bloody face there. 

And this morning, as any morning, she did.  The face of an aging woman with tired eyes holding up a blue bottle of cleaner and a paper towel.  A woman who had not been touched for a long time.  A woman with two children and a useless run away husband she hadn't seen since the birth of the second one, a son.  A son!  He wouldn’t even stay for a son.  She did not like mirrors.  They did steal your soul.

She finished the mirror, took a critical glance around and went back to the bedroom.  She peeled off the comforter and tossed it in a pile on a chair.  Sure, the bed sheet had a wet spot, there it was.  Two of them.  A busy night.  She checked the bedspread to make sure it was clean underneath and it was.  Americans.  Full of this kind of catholic guilt, but then doing these things like hiding their spunk under bedspreads, like a dog burying its shit. 

I'm a just a cleaning maid, she thought.  I’m not your priest.

 She tore off the sheets, but the wet spots hadn't gone through to the mattress.  She gave it a sniff, shook some cleaning fluid on a sponge and wiped it down anyway.  She changed the sheets and put the bed back together.

 She stood next to the bed, thinking about the two wet spots.  How would they have done it?  Had she lain across the small bed with her legs in the air?  Had she gotten on all fours?

She felt herself shaking.  It was an effect of being in a room where sex had occurred. It made her apprehensive as though being haunted by the ghosts of the living.  Her body told her what to do next.  What to do with that tension.  Trembling, muttering softly, she went to the open door, looked outside both ways and gently shut it.  She threw the deadbolt lock.  She went to the TV, turned it on, found a talk show and turned the sound to a neutral level.  Loud enough to hear a knock and still give herself a little time. 

 She lay across the bed with her legs wide apart, with her feet dangling over one side and her hair dangling down the other. She looked up with the fucked woman’s traditional view of the overhead light in its baroque little glass globe and the odd cracks running across the ceiling. 

 Had the woman with the suitcase laid across the bed counting the cracks while the man  - did what?  Laid over her, belly on belly?  Made the bed springs squeal to the rhythm of his grunts while her head dangled over the edge of the mattress, eyes half closed looking up at the bouncing ceiling?  Maybe he had been a good lover, he spread her legs, maybe put his face down deep, maybe took her swelling, ticklish nub between his lips and licked and sucked it.  Slipped a wetted finger inside her and rubbed his finger tip in and out while he sucked at her, and gently batted her nub with his tongue tip for as long as it took to conjure her ecstasy.

 They start like that to suck you in, to make the sale, to convince you they will always make love to you, just that way.  But you marry and it all changes.  You're not a lover, you're a responsibility.  Some men have the ability to be friends with women over time.  Some men just don't.  They want their mothers, and you are not, are not never, their mothers.

It had been so long since she had laid like this, across the bed, laid out in such a way you could shift a man off his balance ever so slightly,  making him drive the weight of his delicious thrusts into you.  He might have to grip you by the shoulders to keep you from slipping off the mattress while he drove you hard.  Feeling yourself being banged and inched towards the void so that you might grip him as well, wrap your thighs around him, so tight that he would never leave you, while he slipped an arm behind your shoulders and hugged you hard as he made the bed springs shake with each famished thrust and your hips ached deliciously, painful and eager. 

She rolled over on her side, reached over and took a pillow.  She put the pillow between her legs.  She crushed it hard with her thighs and felt the thickness of it pressed all up into her, all the while listening for any rattle of a key in a door lock. She reached for the other pillow and took it into her arms and held it tight to her face.  She put the corner of the white pillow case into her mouth, between her teeth and sucked it ferociously. 

She stretched her legs out, crossed her feet, wiggled her toes, squeezing the pillow hard between her strong legs.  She imagined a man who would not leave her, thrusting harder, perhaps to fend off her own aggression, riding a horse gone wild, struggling to keep his very balls from being mashed by her mindless frenzy for him.  She bit with her teeth, crushed with her mighty thighs and thought she could feel for a moment, that lost, reeling, suspended moment of a man when he rears up like a stallion, makes that final hard, brainless push, all the way in, hard, holding it right in there, their groins clenching at each other like animals mating, eyes squeezed shut as he makes that desperate cry of release and then the warm thick splatter reaching at her insides, deep, so deep within, filled with possibility. 

Antonio, that fucking finnoccio, would always burst into tears in that moment, lay his head between her breasts, sag his weight down crushing the breath from her, weeping his little boy heart out.  Men never tell you why they do these things.

To be so desired again.  Maybe, maybe to sit in a restaurant with the man who had stayed in this bed with the woman.  In the restaurant, his eyes would scan the room jealously and he might say something like -

"There.  Don’t look at him, no – don’t - but at the table by the window the man in the rich suit is looking at you.  He is staring at you.  His mouth is open, I think he is drooling.  And now there's that other man with the red beard, the one who looks like a pirate.  Now he is staring at you.  He has that dull far away look.  I know that look.  Now a third man, standing in the line waiting for a table, staring at you with that dumb face.  His eyes move up and down, because he can see the profile of your breasts from where he is standing and he is imagining how it would feel, the weight of them,to hold up your breasts in his hands.  He has that look of a man under the spell of a woman. If there is an afterlife he wants to be reincarnated as your bra.

"Do you know what they are thinking?  These men?  They are imagining you naked.  Right now they are imagining it! I know that look because I have that look.  You know it too, because you make me stare just that way, when you stand right in front of me and lift your breasts. You do it slow, to torture me. You make my eyes beg. And then you allow me a little touch.  That's your game. Its not enough to fuck you is it?  You have to stop my heart with one look, so that you are the only woman in all the world.  How do you seduce these men from across a noisy room?  Without even looking their way?  How do they pick you out and fall for your spell?"

And then maybe he would say, these pillows between her legs, maybe her man would then say -

"Every man wants to fuck you.  I want to tell these men – she’s even more beautiful, more impossible when she’s naked than you will ever know.  More than you can ever imagine.  You get to want her.  But me, I’m the one who gets to fuck her anytime she calls to me.  I’m the blessed one."

Are there men like this?  She wondered.  Or do they all turn into dried up old husbands in the end? 
  She opened her legs and tossed the crushed pillow up against the bed stead.  Took the other pillow from her teeth and looked at the wet crescent she'd drooled onto it.  She yanked the pillow case away and got off the bed.  She unlocked the door, looked left and right, took a fresh pillow case from the cart and changed the pillow.  

 The bed was done.  The bathroom was done.  A quick once over with a vacuum cleaner and there an end.

As she ran the vacuum over the carpet under the bed it made that whine of something stuck in the nozzle.  She turned it off and flipped it over.  There was a sheen of three gold wrappers which she pulled out and held in her hand.  Three fresh torn condom wrappers, one with teeth marks, two stains on the bed.  She had worked her man hard, that woman.  Drained his balls.

She tossed them into the trash bag of the cart and sighed. She wrapped the cord of the vacuum and put it out by the cart.

As she passed the open suitcase, she saw the corner of good stationary.  Listening for the door, looking around her, she carefully drew it out and read the English hand writing.

“  .  .  . and then I shove my face down there and just flat out rape your pussy with my tongue while you curl your toes and curse me until you come in my face.  I miss you so much I want to take out my dick and look at it standing up in the morning air. I'm keeping it for you. I have the celibate patience of a monk.  You'll be here soon. . .”

She took the hotel stationary from a drawer, scribbled down the faithfully waiting man's return address on the front of an embroidered envelope.  She put the condom wrappers inside, licked it and sealed it.  She put the envelope in her work apron and carefully replaced the American woman's letter back in the suitcase.

She would pass the post office on the way home. Airmail with a 1st day delivery, even if it cost a little more.