Floods

I stayed up late just because I knew she wouldn’t do anything with me when the others were awake. She can’t take the risk; she’d lose her job.

We’ve been hooking up on and off for the last 5 months, but only when I’m staying at the hostel, and she’s working the night shift. She mentioned something about having a boyfriend a few times, but she did it in a joking way. I had thought that she meant that she wanted me to be her boyfriend. Turns out she actually does have a boyfriend that everyone else at the hostel knows and I’ve seen a few times but never talked to. He looks sort of scary and I’m sure if he found out that he’d try to kill me. I should probably stop, now that I know for sure.

A couple weeks ago she and I were both at the hostel again and the whole thing started over. I was promising myself that this would be the last time, but I quickly focused on other things than if and/or when this would happen again. I won’t go into the details of what happened. I know you don’t want to hear that. Well, maybe you do, but I’m just not perverted enough to tell you.

Afterward, I was walking to my room and heard a noise that sounded like someone taking a shower downstairs, where I knew there was no shower. Turning to ‘her’ I asked if she saw anyone downstairs on the camera. She said, ‘no’ and that she couldn’t hear any noise. I went down to investigate this showering phantom.

The lights were off, but as soon as I stepped down off the last step, I knew what was happening. The basement was flooding! The noise was coming from the bathroom, which had only a sink and toilet. I know my plumbing fixtures pretty well, having been raised in a family of plumbers, and neither a toilet nor sink should be making the noise that was coming from behind the door. Opening the door I was hit in the face by a wall of steam, such as covers the bathroom after a particularly hot shower. My glasses instantly fog up and I can’t see a thing. Taking them off I can see a jet of water shooting out of the wall next to the sink. My first thought is that the hot water pipe in the wall burst, and if that’s the case I had no idea how to stop it. I didn’t know where the main water valve was for the building and ‘she’ was too afraid to ask anyone to help, because of the chance ‘she’ might get caught with what we had just finished doing.

Eventually enough of the steam left the room and I was able to put my glasses back on and found that the water wasn’t actually coming from wall, but from the flex pipe at the back of the sink. This I could fix! I turned the water off coming to the sink and then assessed the situation of how much water had flooded into the basement, which had just opened one week ago as the new common room of the hostel. There was water over most of the floor, but not all of it. Because of the way the floor is slightly slanted from the building being on a hill and the fact that the basement used to be a garage (I assume there wasn’t a ton of effort to make the floor perfectly flat.), there were different levels of water all over the room. The highest was almost two inches. The interesting thing about the water was that as you walked through it, the temperature changed from cold, to warm, to hot again.

‘She’ and I started the clean-up work by trying to shove the water toward the only drain in the entire basement; in the bathroom away from where most of the water had settled. After about 30 minutes of just the two of us trying to shove all the water toward the tiny drain, we woke up the other staff member at the hostel (who I’ve also hooked up with in the past and actually had made out with earlier that night, yes I know I’m a bad man.) and had her come downstairs to help us. Luckily I have a reputation for staying up very late talking to the staff members, so I’m sure no one was questioning why I was up at 2am.

We got all the water cleaned up by a little after 3am and I went to bed exhausted. I remember thinking to myself and possibly saying out loud, ‘It’s like a damned flood.’ 

Turns out, there was more than one flood in the hostel that night.