I REMEMBER IT ALL WITH CLARITY.

What, when, how.

But I don’t remember the room number.

It’s funny, I guess, because it was, it is, the crucial bit.

The only piece of information that mattered. Like the details of your credit card on the pre-printed form that you fill in to hire a car. You can give in your driver’s licence, home address, different address for invoice, name, surname, phone number.

Yeah.

Thing is, if you don’t provide the credit card number, you ain’t getting the car.

But I still remember everything else.

The walls of the long and narrow hallways were of a colour that one could say was an interesting mix of burgundy and ebony. Burgunbony.

The ceiling was violet, dappled and flamboyant.

It matched the burgundy/ruby/ebony colour on the walls.

I watched a documentary on hotels once; the presenter said that narrow hallways and corridors with high ceilings are a financially clever solution because they’re associated, on a subconscious level, with the hallways and gates of an airport.

Apparently, that’s good for business. Some marketing malarkey, I imagine.

This is what this hotel was like. Endlessly long and narrow corridors with a high ceiling, but someone as big as Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson would probably have to walk sideways to fit in them.

Well I’m not him, so I fit O.K.

The air was thin and fresh, and aseptic, like it often is in hotels. The building was quiet and spooky. Most rooms were probably vacant, or maybe people in them were fast asleep. Or maybe occupants were busy having sex with one another, desperately trying to be quiet. No noise. Not my problem.

I kept walking for what felt like a thousand miles and a thousand years.

The door of her room was wooden and dark. Same as everybody else’s. Standard hotel business.

I knocked. Once.

I heard footsteps on the floor and the door opened. She didn’t ask who it was. Didn’t even bother. She knew.

I felt my pupils glowing as I looked into her eyes.

Her eyes were vigilant and bright, her hair uncombed but clean and shiny. She was wearing no make-up and she was barefoot.

She was wide awake and had been for some time, that was clear.

But then she would be. I had kept her awake on my way to her hotel.  

“Maybe you forgot about me”.

She had said with a text message, just minutes earlier.

Regular txt, no WhatsApp.

I HAD NOT forgotten.

I was thinking about her when she texted me. Truth be told, I had been thinking about her all day, every day, ever since we had met for the first time just a few weeks earlier.

It had been a long and nice day.

Nice, because I had spent it at the beach. I had driven to Portovenere with a friend. Seaside, sunshine, promenade. Coffee, drinks, and more coffee. And then more drinks. Fish dinner. Drinks again. I was sated, satisfied. Yet I wasn’t really sated and not completely satisfied.

The day had come and gone, and I had kept her in my mind for the whole time. Or rather, she had stubbornly occupied it.

It had been long, because hours stretch and one minute lingers on and becomes more than the 60 seconds it is actually made of when you’re only just waiting for one thing to happen.

I was dressed up and showered and ready, black t-shirt and a light jacket and jeans and shoes and so on. I wasn’t expecting a message from her but I was waiting for it. Hoping for it. Ready for it. It had been sent. I had received it.

And it said, “Maybe you forgot about me”

I read it twice.

Relaxed and calm the first time. Ready and vibrating the second time.

I had called her twice during the day, then three times. I’d even texted. She had never answered. She thought I had forgotten? I was rather convinced she had. Actually, I was certain she was deliberately ignoring me.

In the best tradition of unrequited interest, I had opted not to insist. Enough was enough and I wasn’t really surprised nor disappointed.

She was a 5 foot 9.5’’, 82-61-89, idealna professional model. I was a 5 foot 9-something -jack all of trades but ace of none- dude. I was not enough for her, was I? I couldn’t blame here, could I?

Thankfully, I was wrong.

There was no hesitation on my part. No shilly-shallying, no stalling.

In the blink of an eye, I was on my way.

Messages had been sent and things had been said and plans had been hatched. I was as ready as I was ever going to be and I wasn’t going to waste seconds wondering why and how and what.

I would drive to Florence, and in Florence I would drive to her hotel. I’d kept her awake with messages. I had to. Yeah, I know. Don’t text and drive. Mind you, it’s legal in Sweden. And I had to because it was late night, midnight actually, and I wasn’t going to show up at her door only to find she was already asleep. There’d be no fanfare. no welcome. No “Hey, fool boy”. Just the lethal sound of absolute silence. It was not a valid possibility. And so I had to keep her awake.

It had worked. There she was. She was awake.

“Hello, Italian boy”, she said.

She grabbed the back of my neck and leaned forward to kiss me. Softly.

Then she asked, “You’re here to talk?”

It wasn’t a question, it wasn’t a statement. Somewhere in between.

But I had a simple and univocal answer.

I said, “NO.”

I kissed her again, harder this time. She held me tight and kissed my neck, then my lips again; then she bit my neck, then she kissed me again.

I traced her spine with the fingers of my right hand and pushed her hair with my left. Rule of thumb, push, don’t pull. I’ve learnt this a long time ago and stuck with this policy ever since. It works wonders. I grabbed her by her hips and lifted her off her feet. She hugged me.

I used my back heel to shut the door behind me. And almost literally threw her on her bed.