Unclaimed #3 – Unfiled, Then Unforgettable
What I left out. What came back. And why she wasn’t supposed to matter.
This is the Vault post for the Unclaimed post titled “Extended Stay.” You can read it below the subscribe button:
Extended Stay
I was married, late twenties. Twelve nights in a 2.5-star extended stay off the beltway, enrolled in a graduate course in a city I’d never live in for a career I’d never end up pursuing. Days were lectures and bad coffee. Nights were microwave meals, porn on a laggy Wi-Fi connection, and the kind of masturbation that only deepens the ache.
I didn’t have her on the list.
That’s the part that still gets me.
I have dozens of these stories planned, mapped, outlined—some half-written, some just headlines and fragments. And still, on a quiet afternoon at Starbucks, some girl I haven’t thought about in fifteen years will press her way back into memory. Not because she loved me. Not because I hurt her. Just because she let me do it.
She knocked on a motel room door and obeyed. She screamed like a girl in a browser tab but came like someone who meant it. And then she vanished.
LEFT OUT OF THE FREE POST:
I mentioned that a neighbor in the next room banged on the wall when the headboard slammed against it. But that was just one moment in a night that turned loud fast.
The neighbor was pissed. I have no idea who it was. Thankfully, they never called the front desk. Or if they did, no one cared. This was the kind of hotel where people lived long-term, dealt drugs, fucked prostitutes. Noise was just part of the architecture.
The first bang came when she started actually screaming—not porn screaming, real screaming, surprised by what her body was doing. The second was from the headboard. A third came later, when I threw a chair aside and pushed her into the corner to get the angle I needed to bottom out. I was a bad neighbor. But she was too hot for me to care.
REDACTED:
She might’ve had a boyfriend. She never said. But I remember how quickly she got dressed. How she checked herself in the mirror before she left. Midnight, and she still wanted to look composed. That’s when I realized she may have said “roommates” or “family,” but the rush had a different shape. A man’s shape. Maybe waiting up. Maybe texting.
Not that it matters. And I make no claims to moral uprightness—I was married, after all.
But there were plenty of nights—over quite a few years—when I fucked someone else with my wedding ring on.
That night wasn’t one of them.
But thinking back on how horny she was, I seriously doubt she would’ve cared.