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and packaging stations, and every time he’d call for me.  He would visit Io more than any other businessman I’d heard of, and I came to suspect that he often came for other reasons. I didn’t let myself dwell on it much, though.
    About a year ago he stopped calling. He stopped visiting. No one heard from him, and we all wondered where he had gone until one night, attending to a different client at The Hotel, I saw a story on a trashy news show. They reported on his wild antics, the day-to-day insanity of a man who couldn’t possibly spend all his money if he tried.  Boost-sailing off the rim of Olympus Mons, deep-sea exploration on Europa, navigating in the Kuiper Belt. He purchased Nix from the Plutonian Commune, held a party on a specially-designed-and-built space station, and blew the whole moon up as fireworks for the Fourth of July.  He bought up entire nations on Earth, reinventing them like a capitalist Alexander the Great.
    Now, here he is, bathed in burning light. His face slowly broadens in a wide grin and he looks happier to see me than he could look about anything else. This is not the wild man I saw on the television. He bites his lip as his eyes narrow in anticipation.  I want to kick off my heels and run at him, throw my arms around his neck and wrap my legs around his waist. I want to squeal and kiss him all over his face.
    I’ve never felt this before, but the look in his eyes, the subtle way his alpha-stance has melted ever-so-slightly at the sight of me…I know he’s missed me and that desire creates something within—something I guess might be love. It’s not something I’ve known, and it seems that the sensation pulsing in my heart has been crafted from the raw materials of passion and yearning that lay restlessly at the base of my skull.
    But I don’t run. I walk. I sashay. I draw this moment out. I want to build a fever in him and I need every moment to carve this into the bedrock of memory. Each click of my heel, every twitch of his long fingers, every blink, is a chiseled mark in stone.
    Before I’ve finished, it seems, I’m upon him. I’ve pressed my chest to his and looked up into his crystalline eyes. I don’t know what he’ll do. I suspect that he’ll kiss me.
    His lips are parted by a deep breath and his eyes soften with longing. He looks nothing like the man on the television. He places one hand on my shoulder and runs it over the bare flesh of my arm, down to the fingertips, off, and pressed against my waist, squeezing me with his strong, long fingers. His other hand comes up, cups the side of my face and slides behind my hair, winding through my thick curls and squeezing. I gasp.
    He wants to say something. I can tell. His eyes are searching my face. I can tell as he lingers on my lips or traces the contours of my ears with his gaze. I’m becoming more convinced that this is love which I’m watching blaze right in front of me.
    He’s hypnotized for a moment, then his stare snaps away and scans the room. He pulls me closer to him and whispers in my ear, “I have something to tell you.”
    I feel something I’ve never felt before. I go flush with an intense excitement, the kind of passionate fever that I’ve seen in films, in scenes preceding sex, yet never believed existed in real life. For a moment, I’m afraid.
    “But not here.” His confident swagger seems to flag entirely as he bites his lip. “Let’s go to my room.”

3
    Julius has the penthouse suite—a part of The Hotel that I’ve never been to before. It’s a completely open space, as large as The Hotel itself, almost a city block—I get dizzy looking around as we step out of the elevator.  There’re no walls, just a single twenty-foot high, conical glass window rising to a peak. At random spots around the suite there are free-standing spiral staircases holding up platforms with leather chairs and bookcases, or televisions. It’s an impossibly large room where all your entertainment needs hover