Wish You Were Here

Chapter 10

When you've stayed in hotels before, you've always woken with a split second of panic, wondering where you are. But these days, waking up beside him, all you feel is peace. You slide closer to him, nudge him a little to see if he's awake. He turns to look at you. "Hi," he says.

You smile. "Hi."

You like the way everything feels luxurious here, even with it being only a four-star hotel – the quietness of the room compared to the noisy location of your apartment building, the starched white sheets, the fresh juice and baked goods from the café downstairs. When neither of you have anywhere to go, he makes you instant coffee wearing nothing but his sweatpants, just like he did the first time you stayed over. You like those mornings better, when the fanciness of his hotel room is juxtaposed with spilled coffee granules and toast crumbs, when you steal whatever t-shirt he was wearing yesterday so it still smells like him, when he lifts you and spins you around the kitchen. But every morning you get to wake up next to him is special, even if it's happening so frequently the memories are starting to blur together.

The two of you eventually amble out of bed and eat breakfast together, your seats positioned next to each other instead of at opposite ends of the round table. His free hand rests in your lap, always affectionate. "Are we still on the same page?" you ask.

He's chewing, queries you with his mouth full. "Hmm?"

"In terms of what we agreed on? In your bedroom?" You try to remember the phrase you had used. "Just boning?"

He swallows. "Yeah? Of course."

"No, like seriously."

"Seriously?" he repeats, making fun of you.

"Are we?"

"I am..." He's rubbing your thigh absent-mindedly under the table, "...having a really good time doing this, privately, with you. I like that there's no pressure the way there would be if this was a public relationship."

It's not a yes or no answer. "But we're still just boning, right?"

"Yeah," he says. "Just boning."

Now that rehearsal has started for his play, the two of you adopt a new schedule: you write while he's in the theater, and a few nights a week you sleep at his. No more rules. Some nights you tell each other you can't make it, that you have plans with other people or you're in too deep in your current projects. But you miss him so much when you're not there that you find yourself trying to make time to see him as often as you can. He must be operating under the same thought pattern, because quickly you've fallen into a routine.

Even though you're seeing each other regularly, you fuck like you haven't been together in weeks. You get used to the new sounds in this hotel room – the clatter of him sweeping everything off the table before he lays you out on it, the squeak of the mattress springs and rattle of the frame, the difference in his moans to indicate how close he is. You even finally figure out the right angle for the two of you to do it in the shower. You trust each other on such an intimate level that you've never experienced with another person, doing things you would never ever have done with your ex, that your ex would never have done with you. It's so much effort having so much sex, you think to yourself as you lay beside him, both of you wiped out. As though reading your mind, he looks at you across the bed and smiles. You smile back. While it is exhausting, he makes it worth it, every single time.

One morning, when you wake together on the white hotel sheets, nude as usual, he says, "Hey, how come you don't get your period?"

You knew this was coming, that after agreeing to something exclusive he would probably ask at some point if you could stop using condoms. But you hadn't been looking forward to this conversation. It was bad enough the first time around. "I'm on the pill."