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I enter the hotel, and pick up my key at the front desk as instructed, under the name Allison Barron. I've never done anything quite like this before, and I try to hide my nervousness as I collect the key while lying about my name. It feels like the desk clerk notices my nervousness and sheepish smile, but he doesn't say anything and hands over the key, without checking my ID to verify my name. Key card actually, hotels don't have real keys anymore.
The desk clerk, a cute young man in his 20s, says:
"We've been expecting you."
I wonder why my 'date' didn't just leave me a key card along with his other directions. He could have easily left it with the envelope, but he didn't. I wonder if this is because he didn't know when I would get the envelope, and couldn't pay for the room for a longer than a set period of time, or whether he purposely wanted me to go through the nervousness of having to make this transaction with the desk clerk. Or if it was a protection against someone random having found the envelope meant for me. The desk clerk grins at me, like he knows something illicit is happening. Rather and being reassuring, this makes me feel a little skiddish and embarassed, but I take the key card, and move to the elevators.
Room 408. Being familiar with hotels, I knew this meant it was on the 4th floor. The hotel had seven floors, so it wasn't like this was the penthouse or anything fancy like that. I had looked up the hotel, so I knew that it had two views, one of a park across the street, and one of an 'urban lake' the city was particularly proud of on the other. The fact that this was an even numbered room meant that it would have a view of the park and city, but I didn't know if this had any additional significance to him or our 'meet up". The town wasn't where I lived, and I wasn't sure, but thought it wasn't where he lived either. Based on the information I had gleaned so far, I thought it was somewhere a little bit south of me, and a bit more north for him. A kind of neutral ground.
We met online, on 'The Cage', a BDSM site I had been experimenting with, and found out we were relatively close to each other. Same state at least, although on the West Coast, that could be a very long distance.
We had started out our conversation a little flirtatious, as you might imagine, but tame in its own way. Flirting, innuendo, but nothing flat out sexual, or sexting, or anything like that. As we got to know each other better, it seemed like we were getting closer, but in a very high school kind of way. Like we were digitally trading letterman jackets. I couldn't resist the fact that he just kept making me hotter, witout actually being explicit in any way. When I pushed the envelope and got pretty explicit, like offering to send pics, he right away told me he was 'demisexual'. I had no idea what that meant, and he went on to explain that it could mean a lot of things, but 'for him' it meant that he couldnn't have, wasn't interested in sex with anyone he wasn't 'almost in love with'.
This felt kind of crushing. On the one hand it was a simple statement that we were moving too fast for him. But on the other end, it was painful. He was basically saying he didn't love me. And that hurt. It's not like I would have said I loved him at that point, we'd only met online. But at the same time, the fact he didn't love me 'yet' felt like a sudden open wound and rejection.
But, as though he could feel me drawing away, he said we should meet in person. I thought he meant like a coffee shop date. In my experience, no matter how intimate you had become with another person, coffee was a whole awkward weird thing. Like you were starting over from scratch with some random stranger.
But that is not what he proposed. He asked me if I was familiar with the safeway in my hometown located at the corner of 5th and Main.
I said yes, actually. That is where I do most of my shopping, except when Albertson's has a better deal.
He asked if I knew / recognized the ice machine outside the safeway in my neighborhood. I did. He told me to go as soon as possible after midnight on the next friday, and look behind the ice machine.
This felt crazy and weird and stalkery. But exciting. And it was Thursday.
He continued to not respond to me, no matter what I said. And I am ashamed to say how thirsty and stalkery I got between Tuesday and Friday, and particularly on Thursday. On Thursday, he finally responded. Not with any dialog, or answers to my previous messages. He told me to 'follow the rabbit'. I went to the ice machine at safeway and reached behind it, finding a packet of various stuff. Among which was a message to look behind the dumpster in a different town, and recover whatever I found. I immediatly drove an hour south of me towards this other town, after calling in to work that I wouldn't be able to come in the next day. If it weren't for google maps, I might not have found the store. It was a weird combination of hipser vinyl store, and second hand clothes...