7,248 Words and Jackie's Place!!

I vaguely promised myself that I would make an effort to avoid writing the same novel again this year as I have written every other year. At the same time, I really didn't care if I did... so when I had to take my characters to a motel, I instantly knew what motel it would be, and who the grumpy proprietor would be.
Here are a couple of excerpts from Annie and Ryan, current day, at Jackie's Place:

The hotel, or to be more accurate, she supposed it would be more aptly described as a motel, was called ‘Jackie’s Place’, or so she concluded from the flashing neon sign above the motel office. Underneath the blinking red and blue lights of the sign was a vacancy sign, the ‘NO’ in front of the word ‘vacancy’ dubiously lit. The place looked completely deserted, with only a couple of cars (that had seen better days) littering the otherwise empty parking lot. Jackie’s Place was in a state of disrepair, but unlike some of the really seedy joints the Elmira Jackals had frequented over the years, it did not appear to be on the verge of collapse. At least not in the structural sense. It did appear to be on the verge of perhaps complete economic collapse. Or, if one wanted to wax philosophical, which Annie clearly didn’t, the verge of moral collapse.
As they walked past the office, Annie noticed what she took to be the proprietor glaring at them fiercely through the window. His blonde hair was spiked just so, and his blue eyes blazed maniacally. To Annie he looked unhinged, but Ryan merely cast a bored wave in his direction. Annie saw the blonde man withdraw his hand from behind him where he had been reaching for the waistband of his DILF brand faded jeans. It looked like he had been reaching for a gun. She noticed a sign, handwritten on a piece of lined paper and taped to the inside of the window, reading ‘This Ain’t The Hilton’. She wondered if she had ever read a more obvious statement, then considered her career as a college teacher, and decided she had seen worse. She nodded at the proprietor (Jackie, perhaps?), and he squinted his eyes and nodded at her in an overly familiar fashion. She decided immediately that she liked him.

and:

Annie had guessed (correctly) that Ryan and Tom were in town to play the local ECHL team, the Las Vegas Wranglers. She didn’t see any sign of any of the other players, but she guessed (correctly) that if anyone saw Ryan Brady bringing a woman into his room, no one (the crazed proprietor aside) would find anything suspicious about that. There was a time when she knew all of the Elmira Jackals, but the roster changed frequently, and she hadn’t been to a game in some time. She doubted anyone here would recognize her as Tom’s sister. This bothered her more than she was willing to admit, at least to Ryan. She didn’t want to be mistaken for one of the many women he spent his free time with.
Not that she had anything against those women… her education in sports sociology had taught her not to blame the victims of patriarchy, but rather to blame a system of inequality that perpetuates competition among women for male attention, particularly males at the top of the hegemonic masculinity food chain. Or, as Ryan might have said in fewer and more easily digestible words, ‘don’t hate the player, hate the game.” Truth be told, if given the choice between those two alternatives, she hated them both, just a little.

Ryan opened the door to his room, and she saw that the maid service, such as it was, had been through. That is to say, it looked as though a Class 4 Hurricane had just missed the room but perhaps devastated a trailer park nearby. She stepped into the room, sticking to the edges and staying close to the door, already planning to flee if he came too close. She had come so far from the lost little girl who had once believed in love, and she had no intention of returning to that place. Not this day, and not with this man. She tried not to look around too much; there is something strangely intimate about stepping into someone’s hotel room, but she couldn’t help but notice the horrid and troubling décor of the room. She assumed that the horrid wreath made out of chili peppers hanging above the papier mache headboard was Jackie’s idea of hotel room art. She also had to believe that the hook crocheted rug adorning the wall was Jackie’s as well. It portrayed a disembodied hand clutching a hand gun, with the words “I don’t dial 911” eerily and yet cheerfully crocheted in elegant script along the side. It was a morbid and troubling message for any locale, but for a broken down hotel room on the edge of the Las Vegas slums, it seemed particularly threatening. The overall effect was pleasing.