Hotel rooms are pastel and quiet so when you pee the sound slips under the bathroom door to the room where the beds with more sheets than necessary and the black TV and the windows that watch a parking lot day and night--they listen, awkward between the childish response of laughing and the grown up one of ignoring. He listens too. Hears, rather, the way he hears you shower when the day begins, whenever it begins for the two young beings you are, the rattle of curtain rings sliding along the rod, the first fierce jet of water shooting at the bathtub floor, the pop of the shampoo bottle flicked open, while he lies in bed with sticky morning eyes.

Then he knows you in beautiful and embarrassing ways, and you can kiss without having brushed your teeth. You can make faces as you hear the moaning ecstasies of somebody in a neighbouring room, their intimacies drifting from wallpaper to wallpaper, softly in the night with the carlights that streak and twirl across the ceiling.