Re: Second Floor Landing
Sam had never been timid, and she'd never been a dreamer. Life had always been up and down for her, straight lines and hard choices. She didn't linger on things, and she didn't wait around for someone to make her choices for her. She was impulsive, and she didn't plan, and she got angry way too often. Being angry, that led her straight to the hotel when she found out the thing was finally opening.
She'd been fighting with Clarissa (again) about the amount of time she spent on the internet, which was utter bullshit. She'd just come home from a ten-hour shift on the construction site, and she had a right to unwind, just like anyone. Clarissa was on her way out the door anyway, off to deal, and it's not like they were going to have any long and meaningful conversations or anything like that. No, so they'd fought, and the walls had shaken and they'd both ended up looking like alley cats. A shower later, Sam was making the short walk to the hotel.
She was dressed in a tank top, white, with a black bra beneath it. Her cargo pants were lose, baring a sliver of white at her hip, and she was too curved and soft to be considered the ideal weight for a woman in a society that was stupidly unrealistic about shit like that. Her long black hair (obviously dyed) was in a loose tangle, and her boots were thick and black and heavy as she stamped them clean inside the hotel doors.
Great. It looked like fucking Tower of Terror, she thought as she walked inside, and she pulled the old French lock and key from the chain that went from her beltloop to pocket. It was a rusted old thing, and she liked the roughness of the metal beneath her fingers. She was so lost in the feel of it beneath her calloused fingertips, that she didn't even notice she'd stopped at a door. Backtracking told her she was on the second floor, and she wandered away from the door, back to the landing with the wary look of someone who trusted nothing and no one - and definitely not that door.
In her haste to get away, she backed right into the man with the pencil and paper.