The First Weekend in August (Part 2): Scott and Susie and Carl and Cathy and One Motel Room

“Okay,” Carl said, slipping back into the car and shaking the water off his body like a dog. “Do you want the good news or the bad news?”

“The good news,” I said. “And stop getting us all wet.”

“That’s what you get for making me run out. Well, the good news is they’re not filled up. The bad news is, they only have one room. The good news is, it has two king beds. And the bad news is, I think they’re charging us special ‘torrential rainstorm and every other motel in the area is booked’ rates.”

“I say let’s go for it,” my wife Susan said. “It’s getting late, and if we wait we’ll end up spending the night in the car.”

We all agreed, and this time it was my turn to dash into the lobby and check us in. Then we drove around to the front of our room and ran inside like maniacs, but were all still soaked by the time we made it inside.

Scott went into the bathroom and came back with four towels, and we dried ourselves as best we could.

What a disaster this night had been so far: we’d been looking forward to going to this concert with Cathy and Carl for weeks (Cathy is Susan’s sister and Carl’s her husband, and we’re a lot closer with them than we are with any other couple), but halfway there, the rain started. Streets began to flood, we ended up taking a detour, we almost skidding off the road once, the concert was canceled after all that, and now we were stranded 60 miles from home with both the weather and the roads getting increasingly bad. So yeah, we weren’t going to turn down any clean, dry place to stay.

Once we were as dry as we going to get, Susie and I sitting on the edge of one bed and Cathy and Carl on the other, Carl said “Okay, are we going to address the elephant in the room?”

“I guess the world won’t end if we slept in our underwear,” I said. “It’s not as if haven’t been to the beach together a dozen times.”

“Sleeping in our clothing isn’t an option,” Susan agreed. “Everybody’s clothing is soaked.”

“Um,” Cathy said softly, “I’m not wearing a bra.”

Without intending to, my eyes shot over to her chest, to see whether I could see through her shirt. No such luck, she was wearing a thick, black t-shirt with the band logo on it, but she noticed what I was doing and crossed her arms over her chest. “Sorry,” I said, having managed to offend my wife, my sister-in-law and her husband with a single glance.

“I’m wearing my shirt to bed,” Cathy insisted.

Susan slapped me on the side of the head. Hey, if I hadn’t looked at her, would that really have made anything different?

“You’re not wearing your shirt to bed,” Carl said. “You’ll be miserable. Listen, you’ll get undressed under the blanket. Nobody will see anything. And this way I can hang up your shirt so it’ll be dry in the morning.”

I hadn’t thought about that, hanging up our clothing to let it dry. I figured we’d all just slip out of our clothing and slip under the blankets.

I decided it would be my penance to go first. I took a pair of hangers from the closet, stripped off my shirt and hung it, then stepped out of my jeans and hung them. I wear both boxers and briefs, and fortunately I’d chosen boxers this morning.

By the time I’d turned back around, Cathy had slipped off her shirt and Carl, stripped down to his own boxers, was coming over to hang his clothing and hers. “You’re no gentleman,” Susie scolded me with a grin a moment after, getting out from under the blanket and walking to the hangers in her bra and panties.

Since I was already up, she could have stayed under the blanket and just tossed me her clothing, rather than walking across the room half naked in front of our friends, but she’d chosen not to.

Carl didn’t even pretend not to stare.

Susie was the last back in bed, so she shut out the light and crawled in beside me.