121 Act of kindness

It seemed like there was an argument going on in the next room. She initially tried to ignore it but after few more minutes, she couldn't take it anymore. Calling the reception, she lodged a stern complaint and waited for the noises to subside.

Even after fifteen minutes of waiting, there was no lowering in the decibel level. She got up from the bed in a huff and slipped a jacket over her night pyjamas. Stepping out of her room, she was taken aback at the tableau. A woman was ready to nearly throttle the daylight of a man, while the hotel staff looked on in frozen horror.

"Stop this nonsense right now. Even if you have no qualms about your privacy, try and respect that of others," she raised her voice authoritatively.

The woman looked at her curiously before giving a mirthless laugh, "if the noise is bothering you so much, stuff some cotton in your ears and go to bed, princess. This man is going to die at my hands tonight."

A look of recognition dawned on Mei Zhen's face, "aren't you the couple from the afternoon who couldn't get enough of each other sitting in the coffee shop? And this is a honeymoon suite, if I am not mistaken. Can I ask you then to take your lover's quarrel or whatever it is to your own room and sort it out there? Else I will have no option but to call the police."

The woman seemed to back off a little at the mention of police and relaxed her death grip from the man's collar. He looked at Mei Zhen with gratitude dripping from his eyes.

"You have ten minutes to collect your luggage and get out of here. I will stay here till the weekend, so make sure you pay for it and leave. Also, don't even think of getting in touch with me ever again," the woman threatened that man before releasing him.

Relieved to have the issue sorted, Mei Zhen made a move towards her own door. Before she could shut it, the woman followed her and came inside Mei Zhen's room.

"You don't expect me to stand out there in these clothes while waiting for him to finish packing, do you," she said, referring out to her revealing nightdress.

Mei Zhen wanted to point out the fact that she had been making a scene for the past half hour clad in precisely these clothes standing in the hotel's corridor but she let it pass.

Unscrewing the cap, she handed over a bottle of water to the woman.

"Thanks, my throat is raw from all that shouting. Are all men born b****** or do they train for it?" she asked, almost to herself.

"Imagine that I had felt sorry for him when I first met him. He with his sob story about his bitchy ex-wife. Since I was trying to get away from a bad break-up myself, I thought it would be fun to hook-up for a while. And the sex seemed promising, at least he knew what he was doing in bed, unlike my previous lover, whose idea of foreplay was a one second kiss. Then wham, bam and over," Mei Zhen tried to politely interrupt her by saying she didn't want to know any further details.

Not that the woman was listening.

"I met him last month in a bar. We bonded over bitching about our ex-lovers. Apparently, he couldn't seem to move on in life because of his wife. He had been married for five years but the woman had been madly in love with her childhood sweetheart all through those years. She was never there for him, blah blah…he had gone on and on. I should have known then only that something was wrong. Out of the two hundred words that he uttered that night, half of them would have been - Jia Li this, Jia Li that," she narrated.

Mei Zhen, who had barely been paying attention to the grating monologue till now, came alive and alert suddenly. The woman didn't pay any attention to her changed demeanour though. She seemed to be in love with her own voice.

She continued ranting, "anyways, I felt sorry for him. And things were progressing smoothly till this afternoon, like you saw, right. In fact, somewhere I had started to dream about a future with him. But after tonight, I am never going to allow that psychopath anywhere near me."

She shuddered recalling whatever had happened. Mei Zhen waited impatiently for the woman to continue but she seemed to have exhausted her supply of words.

"What happened tonight," Mei Zhen prodded her.

"Huh! Oh you mean what happened between him and me…well, let's see. We began by polishing off a couple of bottles of wine. One good thing about him is that he isn't stingy, when it comes to the good things in life. And why not, with a cushy job with a top MNC, he can afford to be generous," she cackled.