The towers of the Eros Hotel, a great neo-gothic vision of rich stone and gleaming metal, stood like a great pillar of warmth against the grey-scale darkness of the New York City winter.
Jennifer didn't know what to expect on the inside, but from the outside the Eros Hotel had a mystique to match its name. Her long legs extended to clear a puddle as she crossed the street in front of the hotel, and cab behind the red light honked at her passing ass.
Jennifer had to be used to it by now. She was a fitness model, and something of a celebrity in a body-obsessed youth culture and its ancillary consciousness, the social media complex. She had been invited to the Eros' grand opening to attend a "Symposium on Beauty's Future...Now!"
She'd balked at the name, but on a whim she'd accepted an invitation to speak and, she hoped, not to be strung up for deciding to post pictures of herself in yoga pants on the internet by a crowd of gawking mothers in cable-knits.
Didn't feminism mean that Jennifer, as a woman, didn't have to take shit from anyone if she felt like showing the world some negotiated version of her naked form? Who really knew at this point. Jennifer set her teeth to her bottom lip as the porter opened the great glass door of the Eros and set her long, gym-tapered leg through into a warmth so rich she could scarcely remember the cold.
Inside, the hotel stood, enraptured in its own magnificence. A dark crimson cathedral, a vaulted field of ceilings interlocking, from them falling great sculpted buttresses and facades of marble. An elaborate fountain took the center of the tiled marble.
The Eros contained a panoply of the beautiful so decadent Jennifer wondered if she had been lured into some bizarre singles party for the young, the beautiful and the extremely fit. Leggy amazons and would-be supermen lines the place, exchanging model's greetings and model's small talk, wandering and haughty eyes sizing up friends, enemies, and targets.
Jennifer knew the crowd, and knew she was one of many "fit chicks" at the Eros tonight. Was that reassuring somehow?
Perhaps not. For even still, eyes fell on her. The assembled beautiful were never reassured by the presence of one another, Jennifer remembered. The insecurity that fueled their physical obsession only bristled at the sight of so many competitors. And Jennifer could feel the room bristle at her arrival. Everyone knew her face, or some part of her body, Jennifer reasoned. She found many more eyes staring just behind her than right at her, so to speak.
Even still, she had to maneuver through an obstinate crowd to the reception desk. A short and feline man stood behind a cobalt marble embankment,the front desk of the Eros. His hair, shaven close at the sides, was oiled and slicked into a quavering pompadour, and his smile moved with visible elegance; Jennifer could trace its progression across his cheeks as he regarded her approach and began to speak.
"Welcome, Ms. Summers. We've been expecting your arrival, and may I say you're looking just smashing this evening!" said the concierge, brightly enough to make drain the comment of subtext. Jennifer caught his name, Ramon, from his glinting brass name tag as a porter took her trench coat.
She stood under the lights of The Eros in a tight black halter with wire-sculpted-torso and a bandage-wrap, gunmetal dark pencil skirt that hit above the knee, showing ample slim leg and romancing the divinely perky cheeks of Jennifer's famous ass. Between the two, bare midriff showed a set of sinuate abdominals, visible beneath Jennifer's tan, fine skin no matter how she sat or stood.
Jennifer's face was drawn sharp and sleek as her figure, usually frozen into an unaffected pout. Her smile came slow and a little unpracticed in reply to Ramon's chipper salvo. "Thank you, I...I'd like to check in and see my room. I have to ask...is this really a conference?" Jennifer asked, leaning in to Ramon and smelling thick cologne. The concierge nodded, his grin growing cheshire wide as he nodded vigorously.
"Oh yes, Ms. Summers! We're delighted that you could join us for our first symposium. We plan, this weekend, to explore every glory of the 21st century body. You'll see demonstrations going on throughout our gallery, and if you'd like you'd be more than welcome to put on one of your own..."
Jennifer blinked. As Ramon spoke her eyes had wandered beyond the expansive, cathedral-like lobby of the Eros and through its back wall, made all of glass, just behind the reception desk. Behind it, a massive crystalline blue pool contained a single swimmer, rippling through the water at astonishing speed. The bold, broad-sculpted shoulders of a beautiful man came surging from the water, his long, sinewy arms fanning out in final butterfly stroke and met the sides of the pool.
As if in one motion he met the pool's edge and hauled himself up, out of it, a long and positively built torso, his trapezius rippling with the power to effortlessly hoist himself onto his feet at the pool. Rising, Jennifer could see that he stood easily 6'4" or taller, his whole body a cathedral of male power and physique that rivaled the decadent splendor of the Eros itself.
Ramon seemed to catch Jennifer's gaze and to know its target, for he smiled knowingly without looking behind and said, "Ah, that's Xavi." Jennifer felt a dull rumble in her core. "Another guest here, of course. A musician, I'm told, apparently he's quite good!" Ramon's words turned upward at the end of his declaration, his practiced grin encroaching his face again.
Jennifer's mind was suddenly filled with questions. "A musician? Why haven't I heard of him? Is he famous?" Jenn almost dug her nail into her palm to stop herself. That was hardly a becoming outburst, she thought. Independence shouldn't ask so many questions about mysterious musicians with wicked, chiseled bodies. Ramon only chuckled in reply.
"Why don't you go ask him yourself?" he said, motioning her to the partition and glass doors between lobby and pool. Jenn took no time to answer. She found herself walk past the reception desk, her purse forgotten, toward the double doors that separated buzzing lobby to the serene, rippling pool. Jennifer felt she could see the colors of her world shift, churning rich reds into pale crystalline blues.
Electric anticipation seemed to run along the walls as she strutted, hips swaying, toward the reposing Xavi, reaching for his towel and dabbing at his broad chest. His shoulders and back were adorned with elaborate, constellation-like tattoos, a winged cuneiform done all in glowing cobalt ink.
