The Turbulence?? (#1 in the Our Side of The Dice series)

Christopher
Bonn, Germany

I wake up in a hotel I have never seen (which should be explanatory since I'm in a foreign country) but more importantly, why the heck am I in a hotel room? I should be at my business meeting in Berlin right now!

No matter how hard I tried to think about it, I have no memory of how I got here, what must have led to it or what happened the night before.

There are beer bottles all over the side table, not to mention an empty bottle of Jack Daniels. What looks like some fancy foreign wine bottle, also drained, is filled with cigarette sticks. The TV, one of those old, boxy sets, is fallen back against the wall, and in the corner, an armchair is lying on its side. Feathers are everywhere; one of the pillows has been torn open.

I am alone.

No one is in bed with me. When I lean over to check the floor, I see only more feathers and more beer bottles scattered across the carpet—along with my clothes—all of them. My jeans are in a pile against the wall. My boxer hangs over one armchair that is still standing.

Then I realize that I am naked.

I feel a slight throbbing on the right side of my head as soon as fragments of last night start to hit me like a heavy wallop on my head. Slowly and painfully, bits of what went down the previous night begin to tease my memory.

Filthy tables, filthy sailors, and filthy factory workers. Nasty women playing soiled cards, filthier songs from a dingy piano, dirty long bars with large barrels of drinks behind them.

Several people were sitting at a filthy bar, filthy tankards, me drinking away and smashing a stubborn vodka bottle in an alehouse. Then, a lady with a horsey face walking up to me, spewing out gibberish that my ears could barely catch—like her name, for instance. Still, there was a word she kept on mentioning that my brain had unfortunately seemed to register—betrothal.

What the heck did she do afterward? The memory lingers teasingly at the tip of my brain, but it's not clear.

I screw my eyes shut with an unusual force, praying to God not to torture me with forgetfulness for too long. There's only so much I can bear. After saying the short prayer, I make another forceful attempt to remember what she did that must have resulted in me waking up in a shabby hotel room.

Then it hits my head again, this time like the firing of a cannon. What else do two people of the opposite sex do together in a hotel room?

My eyes flutter open immediately when memories of her talking about the entire kissing subject play in my head and the feel of something plump on my lips. I bring my hand to touch my lips. They are abnormally swollen now. She had kissed me last night.

Holy Ghost!

What on earth have I done? How could I have been too drunk and sloppy to push her away? Why did I let it happen? Why did I allow a woman who wasn't my wife to kiss my lips?!

I raise the blanket covering my body, and I look down at my manhood. I screw my eyes shut again, saying another prayer to the God of heaven not to let what is on my mind be what must have occurred.

Oh God, I know I messed up, but please have mercy on me just this once, will you? Things cannot be going haywire just from one mistake I made. Please bail me out of this, and I'll never make this error again. often. Show me mercy, Lord

I vowed to stay faithful to my wife. I admit that we are not good terms, and it is entirely my fault. Heck! I even tried to call her yesterday, but when I couldn't reach her, I tried contacting her friend, Karen. It felt like she was aware of what was going on between my wife and me, but when I remembered that Yemisi was a secretive person, I knew that wasn't the case.