# Chapter Twenty: The Weekend of Everything Else

## One — Chips at Midnight

The knock came at 11:44.

Two quick raps, then a pause, then a third. Sneha came up out of sleep in stages — first her hand moving on my chest, then her head, then her eyes opening and closing twice with deep suspicion.

"What's that."

"Food."

"Food," she said, and sat up so fast she took the whole sheet with her, and I was left on the bed with nothing at all while she pulled the sheet around herself like a very slow mummy and shuffled to the door.

I found my shorts on the floor. By the time she opened it I had them on, sitting on the edge of the bed, and the waiter was a young man of about twenty-two who had clearly been briefed that a woman in a sheet was going to open this door and had decided in advance to look at the trolley and nothing else.

She signed the slip for him. He handed her the pen. She signed it, and the ring caught the corridor light, and he looked at the slip and said, "Have a good night, ma'am," and left.

She wheeled the trolley in herself.

"Two desserts," she said, "and I want you to know that the idea of sharing is not on the table. You can watch me eat them, and then if you're very good you can have a bite."

The chips were in a paper cone, absurdly tall, hotel-priced. The chocolate fondant was in a small ramekin with cream on the side, and the other one had berries in it, and there were two forks and a bottle of water she insisted on opening herself.

We ate sitting cross-legged on the ruined white sheets with every lamp in that room still on, and she talked with her mouth full, and she put her feet under my thigh where they were cold.

"Right," she said at the end. "Nap."

"Nap?"

"It's midnight and I've had a proposal and three orgasms, and I am twenty-five years old." She lay down and pulled me down by the wrist and put her feet back under my thigh. "Nap. Then we'll see."

We slept like two people who'd run a race.

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## Two — The Window

She woke me at twenty past one, and it was her …