New fiction
Room Service
Original fiction · 6-minute read
The minibar had a card in it, cream with gold lettering, propped against a small glass bottle like an invitation.
Petite. A complimentary nightcap from the Lindell. For a smaller, softer sleep.
Jamie had been in Manchester for eleven hours, ten of them in a meeting room with no windows, so he didn't read the small print. He drank it in two swallows (pear, and something warmer underneath), ordered the full English for seven, and was asleep before the television had finished its jingle.
He woke because the pillow was too big.
Not plumper. Bigger. It rose behind him like a snowdrift, white and endless, and the sheet under his hands had a weave he could see, every thread as thick as rope. The bedside lamp was a lighthouse. Far below the edge of the mattress, the carpet stretched away like a field after harvest.
He sat up. The T-shirt he'd slept in lay around him in a collapsed tent of cotton. Only his boxers had come with him, and they were the only thing in the room that still fitted.
"OK," Jamie said, to nobody. His voice came out thin and high. "OK. OK."
Three knocks at the door, each one a thud he felt through the mattress.
"Room service."
A key card clicked, the door swung open, light from the corridor poured across the carpet, and with it came a man.
From the pillow, Jamie saw him the way you'd see weather. Polished black shoes, each one four times as long as Jamie was tall, the toecaps shining like the bonnets of parked cars. Charcoal trousers. A burgundy waistcoat with brass buttons, straining very slightly across a chest that had clearly once played rugby and never quite stopped. White sleeves rolled to the elbow over forearms like ship's rope. A shaved head, a short black beard, and a name badge: MARCUS, NIGHT PORTER.
He pushed a trolley in front of him, its silver dome big enough to live under.
"Mr Reid? Your breakfast." He glanced at the bed, at the flat duvet, at the T-shirt collapsed on the pillow. Then he looked at the empty bottle on the minibar, and sighed the long, patient sigh of a man who has seen this before. "Oh, not again."
"I'm here!" Jamie shouted. It came out like a squeak from a dog's toy. "On the pillow! Down here!"
Marcus bent over the bed. His face came down out of the dark like a moon rising: brown eyes, a crease between the brows, a beard close enough now that Jamie could count the hairs. Warm breath rolled over him, smelling of coffee and mint.
"There you are," Marcus said, and smiled, and the smile was so big Jamie felt it in his chest. "Third one this month. Did you drink the Petite?"
"It said it was complimentary!"
"It is complimentary. It also says, in very small print, one sip." He laid his hand flat on the sheet beside Jamie, palm up. It was the size of a single bed. "Come on. Step on. I won't drop you."
There was nothing else to do, so Jamie stepped on. The palm was warm and dry, creased with lines like riverbeds, and it rose with a lurch that left his stomach somewhere near the mattress. He sat down hard. Marcus brought him up to eye level and studied him the way a jeweller studies a stone.
"Three inches," he said. "Three and a quarter, maybe. You'll wear off. Most of them do."
"Most of them?"
"House rules," Marcus went on, ignoring that. "Shrunken guests are the night porter's responsibility until they're back to size. So." He looked at the trolley, at Jamie, back at the trolley. "You're mine till my shift ends."
· · ·
He set Jamie down on the white plate, beside a croissant the size of a sofa, a pat of butter like a hay bale and a cup of coffee steaming like a factory chimney. Then he lifted the silver dome and lowered it over him, slowly, until the room disappeared and there was only the inside of the cloche, Jamie's own face reflected a hundred times in the curved silver, and the warm smell of bacon.
"Marcus!"
The dome lifted again. Marcus was grinning.
"Sorry," he said, not sorry at all. "I've always wanted to do that."
He let Jamie eat what he could manage, which was a crumb of croissant and a single drop of coffee from the tip of Marcus's little finger. Then he unbuttoned the breast pocket of his waistcoat, held it open with two fingers, and nodded at it.
"In you get. I've got eleven more breakfasts to deliver, and I'm not leaving you on a plate for housekeeping."
The pocket was dark and close and smelled of starch and warm skin. Through the lining at his back, Jamie could feel Marcus's heartbeat, slow and enormous, a drum in the next room. Every step the porter took rolled through him like a wave. He heard doors, voices, "Room service," the rattle of the trolley. Once, a fingertip came down from above and pressed gently on the top of his head, just to check he was still there.
At ten to six the trolley stopped. Marcus's voice came down to him through the waistcoat, low and amused.
"Right. My shift's over at six. You're not back to size, and house rules are house rules." A pause. The pocket shifted as he shrugged on a coat, and the dark got darker. "So you're coming home with me."
Jamie opened his mouth to argue.
Then the heartbeat behind him quickened, just a little, and he closed it again.
To be continued…
Want more? Tell us at @GayShrinkingMen if Jamie should go home with Marcus in Issue 5.
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