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My plan, apparently, was to keep walking. It was a plan my body had committed to without running it past me first, and it had done so, I noted, over the loud and increasingly physical objection of every other part of me.

The next door held two men who’d clearly known each other a while, tangled loose and easy on a bed, one mouth grazing the other’s shoulder. They looked up at me with the synchronized, welcoming brightness of people who had been discussing exactly this. One of them patted the empty stretch of sheet between them, as though smoothing a place at a table set for three.

“There’s room,” he said. “We’ll make room.”

“There’s no room,” I said, gesturing at the entirety of myself. “I’m a fire code violation. I’d have to be grandfathered in.”

The brow of the guy who’d spoken furrowed.

His friend was undeterred.

“We’re flexible,” he said, letting the word breathe, as his hand resumed its slow path along his partner’s thigh to demonstrate.

They laughed.

They probably thought I was flirting.

But I was estimating square footage, mostly. And I was pointedly, desperately not thinking about the part of their offer that had nothing to do with square footage, the part my body had already accepted on my behalf and was clearly expressing through my now-tented towel.

I moved on. The moving on was harder now, the heat working in me like something poured.

Here is what a very large man in a very small towel learns quickly: People look.

I could’ve been fully clothed and they’d stare, but a towel built for Frodo raised the gaping-factor to ten.

They looked when I came in.

They stared as I passed.

They were still looking as I strode the halls.

The looking wasn’t cruel. It was hungry, in the easy, unembarrassed way this place made permission for, and God help me, the hunger was contagious.

Every pair of eyes that dragged over my chest left a warm trail. I felt each one. My body kept its running tally, and the tally was getting loud. There was interest, increasingly, in the open question of whether the towel would survive my next ten steps, a question the entire hallway now seemed emotionally invested in.

Honestly, so was I.

A guy leaning in a doorway held out a paper cup of water as I approached, the way you’d hand a runner a drink at a marathon, his own towel slung low and loose and losing its own argument.

“You look like you’re working hard,” he said, and let his eyes make clear he’d be happy to give me a reason to.

“You have no idea.”

“I could help with that. I’m good with my hands.” He turned one over, palm up, as if to prove the point. The promise in that gesture went straight through me.

And something in me, tired of walking, tired of being a monument to restraint in a building designed for the opposite, said, “Why not?”

I stepped into him and put my free hand flat on his stomach, felt the warm give of him, the quick catch of his breath. I let it slide over his chest the way three men had slid theirs over mine, and God, it felt good to be the one doing it.

He made a low sound and leaned into my palm.

His skin was so damn hot.

His towel gave up entirely and neither of us cared.

He rubbed against me through my towel.

I wanted more.