KENNICK: A Bad Boy Romance Novel (25 page)

THE
END

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Part
One

~ 1 ~

Oh great, a used condom.

Oh, wow, super, a bloodstain.

What is this even, yogurt?

Who does this to a pillow?

Was it very necessary, whoever you are, to completely cover the walls
with shit?

What is this…oh please…don’t even…no…yup, it’s piss.

Jesus Christ, is it that hard to put your used needles in the damn trash
can?

Oh…a dollar tip, how nice, considering they left an entire week’s worth
of rotting fast food and half-empty beers all over the floor.

How did they manage to get cum on the ceiling?! That’s actually
impressive, I can’t even be mad…

All in a day’s work for me.
I pushed my cart from room to room, arms sore from scrubbing at mysterious
stains, clothes splotched with bleach, mind numb to what wonders might await me
behind the next door.

People are animals, I tell
ya. No one knows that as much as a cleaning lady at a hotel. And, no, before
you start dreaming up my identity for me, I’m not an “illegal alien”. I am
half-Latina, but I’m a full-blooded American citizen, born and raised, and I
speak perfect English, thank you very much.

What is it about staying at
a hotel that can turn even a mild-mannered person into an untamed beast with no
problem pissing all over the floor or dumping an ashtray onto their sheets
before checking out? Is it because it’s not their home, so they don’t care what
happens to it? Is it because they don’t realize someone like me has to come and
clean it up? Or – and perhaps this is the scariest possibility – is it possible
that they’re actually like that at home, too, and you just never see it?

Not everyone who came
through the doors of the Gateway were like that, of course, but way too many
were. We had our fair share of families, businesspeople, truckers. But for
every guest who left the room in a decent state, there were two prostitutes,
pimps, drug dealers, alcoholics, or other such devils who took it upon
themselves to make my job as hard as humanely possible.

And I never held anything
against those people for what they
did
.
If you’re a lady and you need money and you don’t mind letting someone give you
the old in-out to get some, go on with your bad self. Got a drinking problem
and can’t drive home? By all means, keep everyone safe and stay at the hotel.
Need to “figure stuff out” through a drug-fueled weekend? Not my place to
judge.

But, goddam, a little
decorum would be nice to see once in a while.

“Gabriella, Rosa is taking
her break now, can you make sure 215 is ready? Early check-in,” my
walkie-talkie crackled on my hip.

“Already checked it, boss,
all good,” I said, pushing down the ‘talk’ button and hoping that my manager
would actually hear me for once instead of badgering me about why I “didn’t
respond”. The woman was a sweetheart, but she was deaf as hell and the flask of
vodka she sipped on all day didn’t help her comprehension skills.

As I heaved my cart down the
hall, legs already aching from all the bending over and crouching down my job
demanded, I tried not to think about what would happen at the end of my shift.
To be honest, as much as I hated playing nursemaid to the lost souls of the
world, tidying up after them, wondering whether that puddle was vomit or melted
ice cream, there wasn’t a whole lot to look forward to once I was done for the
day, either.

It was late June, when it’s
really only just beginning to warm up in the high Rockies.

Maybe it’s a good night for a barbeque,
I thought
idly, until I opened up the door to the next room and my list and remembered
that it was raining lightly. No use stopping at the store on my way home for
hamburgers and potato chips.

Maybe I’ll make lasagna,
I thought.
Lasagna is good for a rainy day. Jeremy loves my lasagna.

Lasagna was a safe bet.
Anything that I already knew Jeremy loved was a safe bet. Anything I wasn’t
sure about was a gamble. And if I made anything that he’d told me once, even if
he’d said it years ago in a conversation that I had no reason to remember, I
was treading on ice so thin it might as well be paper.

Yeah, lasagna,
I thought, thankful that this room, at least, wasn’t
as bad as some of the others I’d seen that day. As I pulled up the covers,
balling them up with the sheets, ready to throw them in the hamper, I made a
quick mental inventory of the room. I was looking for chargers, cell phones,
socks, shoes, a ski goggle, anything that a rushed guest might have left behind
on their way out the door.

You’d be surprised what
people leave behind in hotel rooms. Usually it’s just crap, but sometimes you
find interesting things: photographs, mysterious pills, strange powders in
baggies, gold jewelry. Some of the girls I worked with, I knew, were prone to
taking such finds home with them instead of bringing them to the front desk,
like we were supposed to. I didn’t hold it against them, but I always brought
anything I found straight to the clerks to hold onto or dispose of as they saw
fit.

It wasn’t worth the risk of
getting caught, for me. And besides, I didn’t do drugs, and I didn’t need
jewelry. Jeremy, though he had many flaws, was an excellent provider. Or, I
should say, the police force he worked for was an excellent provider. We didn’t
want for money. The fact I had this job at all was due to one of his whims.

After we’d married, three
years before the shit hit the fan, he didn’t like the idea of me “sitting
around at home” all day. Unfortunately, he also didn’t like the idea of me
getting a job that would be “too mentally taxing” or take up “too much time”.
Really, he just wanted me to get a job where I’d come home too dog-tired to do
anything but put up with his shit, and working for housekeeping at the hotel
was the perfect mix of physical labor and mind-numbing repetition.

“But what did I get a degree
for, if I can’t do anything with it?” I’d said, still so naïve.

“Well, I don’t know what you
got a degree for, I sure as hell didn’t tell you to get it. I mean, what can
you even
do
with a degree in
philosophy? You’d have to go to grad school if you want to make anything of
yourself, and we can’t afford that right now. Besides, if you went back to
school, you’d have your nose in a book all the time again, no time for me. I
waited two years to have you all to myself, I don’t want to wait another four,”
he’d replied, appealing to that sappy part of me that loved him beyond reason.

“I guess you’re right,” I’d
resigned, not wanting to have the same argument again for the third time that
week. After our honeymoon, that had been our first major issue. The first of
many, I’d like to add.

So I’d started looking for a
job. With almost no work experience, it was tough. I could flip burgers, but
that seemed beneath me, and with a degree I was way overqualified, anyway. I
wanted to take a position as a secretary at a law firm, but Jeremy had thought
that would be too stressful for me, with crazy hours and demanding lawyers to
cater to. He was the only man I should be catering to, in his opinion.

So, I’d taken the gig as
housekeeper at the Gateway. I’m pretty sure I was only hired because I looked
like I could speak Spanish. Which I can’t, by the way. Well, I can, but only
curse words. Plus, my name, Gabriella, is only one “l” away from the
traditional Hispanic spelling of the same name, blurring the line even further.
Being half Puerto Rican and half Italian, I’m what they call “ethnically
ambiguous”, which is a nice way of saying “no one knows what the hell you are
right from looking at you.”

With large, almond-shaped,
dark chocolate eyes, a deep tan complexion, and crazy, kinky, black hair that
does whatever it wants at all times, I’ve been mistaken for a Jew, a Mexican, a
Filipino, and even, on one occasion, a Hawaiian. My body, though, is pure
Latina. I blessedly missed out on the dark body hair and stick-thin frame of my
Italian mother, and got my paternal grandmother’s luscious hips, large, C-cup
breasts, and wide, womanly thighs.

Not that I always
appreciated that, mind you. In fact, when I was with Jeremy all those years, I
hated it. He was as Irish as they get, pale as the moon and thin as a rail. He
always made me feel like I was fat.

He’d buy clothes for me,
intentionally buying sizes too large, because he knew that it made me think I
belonged in the “plus” size section. He’d make little backhanded compliments
about my roly-poly tummy, which never seemed to shrink no matter how much I
tried to diet or exercise.

Now, of course, when I look
at myself in the mirror and see the slight pudge in my stomach, I know it’s
just a necessary evil of being what they call “voluptuous.” But back then? I
did all I could to hide my body, thinking that, since it didn’t look like a
fashion model’s, it wasn’t any good.

But that was just par for
the course when it came to Jeremy. I was never good enough, never pretty
enough, never smart enough or funny enough. He never ceased to remind me, in
little ways, never outright, how he’d “settled” for me because he loved my
personality, not my mind or my body. And how much could he have loved my
personality, anyway, considering how much he thought I screwed up on a daily
basis?

As I went into the bathroom,
gathering towels and making note of what toiletries needed to be restocked, I
instinctively paused to check myself in the mirror.

I’ll need a touch-up soon,
I thought, brow furrowed, hand
gently touching the tender spot above my left eyebrow where my concealer was
just starting to look splotchy. You could just barely, if you looked hard
enough, make out the dark purple markings underneath my make-up. I flinched
under my own touch, the spot still tender although it’d been three days.

Here’s something you should
know about humans, if you are one.

None of us are of one mind.

Or, maybe I shouldn’t be so
broad. But I’ve met a lot of people, and there’s always two sides to the coin.
It’s not like some old, tired, trope, like good and evil or black and white.
It’s just…there’s the “you” that you’ve always believed yourself to be, the one
you want to be, and there’s the “you” that you’d like to ignore, that you don’t
want to take ownership of.

I don’t tell many people
about that time in my life, because in that time of my life the latter “you”
was in charge of me. I thought of myself as feisty and smart, with a spitfire
wit and a take-no-prisoners attitude. The way I’d been raised, in a household
that was half
no mames, guey!
and
half
fangul!

But, of course, that wasn’t
who I was. I was – and this pains me to write – a “battered women”. Ugh. What a
horrible phrase. It makes me think of cake, or cookies. When, in reality, there
was nothing sweet about my marriage. Jeremy, love him though I did, was a
gigantic asshole. A
disgraziat.
A
so pendejo.

He didn’t always hit me.
Maybe once, maybe twice a month. But I never deserved it – does any wife
deserve it, really? I can
maybe
see
if you walk in on her banging three dudes at once, or
if she’s got a knife to your head. I wouldn’t put someone in jail
for smacking their woman if she was about to go full-on
Misery
on the guy. But a good, hard, close-fisted slug because you
spilled coffee on his shirt in the morning?

But, the thing is, he made
me feel so low, emotionally, that I
thought
I deserved it. Even though, deep down in the back of my mind, I knew that
it was all a lot of macho bullshit and that he was wrong about me, he was
really, really good at making me feel like I’d have nowhere to go, no one to
turn to. He made me feel like being his wife was really my only purpose on this
earth. And lord, even if it was the most fucked-up love in the world, I did
love him.

How’s that for honesty? I
can still admit – now, after everything – that I loved that man with all my
heart.

But some loves are just no
damn good. Heroin addicts love heroin, don’t they?

See, this is the thing I
need you know about me before I go any further. I’m not stupid. I’m not
pathetic. I’m not a mindless bimbo. I was, and am, smart as hell. I graduated
top of my class from Baruch University, with a degree in philosophy. I can think
my way out of a steel trap.