He wakes up, taking a minute to figure out where he is. He can smell her on the sheets, and feels his stomach sink when he reaches out to touch her and comes up empty.
"Stevie?"
"I'm in here," she says, her voice strained. Has she been crying? He gets up and pulls on his jeans, joining her in the living room. Her eyes are pink and she closes her journal as he enters the room, quickly wiping her face.
"What's wrong, baby?"
"I love you, Lindsey."
"And that's why you're sitting in here crying at 4:30am?"
She shakes her head, wiping her cheek again, her eyes cast down. "Loving you hurts so much."
"Not as much as loving you does," he says, sitting down beside her.
"I thought I'd be okay having you once in a while. I thought it would be better than nothing. But you fell asleep and all I could think about was you leaving and I remembered why we never did this."
"I wish I knew what to say," he says, pulling her into his arms, letting her cuddle up to his side as he leans back on the couch.
"I'm so sick of talking. I'm so exhausted by this."
"Can you just let me love you when we're together?"
"And remind myself how lonely I am the rest of the time?"
"I can make you not lonely. At least some of the time," he says, then kisses her hair, holding her tightly. He feels her tears on his chest, silent but for an occasional shaky breath.
"When you leave, do you know what it's like for me? Have you ever thought about that?" Her questions are calm and quiet and met by silence, and he waits for her to continue. "There's no one else that loves me. I can't go home to a house full of people that miss me. I share my bed with Sulamith."
"Stevie..."
"When we leave here, you'll call your wife and kids. They'll come see you. And you'll pretend we don't exist again. The sick part is, I know that we'll be here again as soon as we can. Because I need you, too."
"I don't know if I can go back."
"Go back to what?"
"To a life where this doesn't happen. I don't want to be without you."
"Please don't torture me by pretending that you're going to leave her." She pulls away and holds her hand up and shuts her eyes to fight back tears, hanging by a thread to the last bit of her dignity.
"Can you let me love you?"
"I don't know what I'd do if you didn't."
"Good. Come back to bed," he says, tugging on her hand.
"We're not going to stop, are we?"
"No. We never really have," he says, taking her hand and leading her back to bed.
When they finally wake up again, the sun is high and they've ignored at least a dozen phone calls. Neither of them care. He holds her, playing with her hair. She keeps her eyes closed, smiling and fixating on how his fingers feel on her skin. Everything she'd felt the night before was forgotten. No one made her feel like this. The pain was worth it.
"I could get used to this."
"We have nothing to do today."
"Oh, you've got something to do," she says, rolling over on to him and planting kisses on his chest.
"Mmm... we're not going anywhere until we have to get on that plane."
True to his word, he doesn't leave her room until an hour before they're due at the airport, sneaking across the hallway into his own room. He packs everything quickly and hurries to the airport, careful to take a separate car. Neither of them wanted to answer any questions - they knew they'd been missed for the past two days.
By the time she finally gets onto the plane he is deep in conversation with Christine, but quickly abandons her to hurry to Stevie's side. Chris watches him greet her, eyebrow raised.
"When did you two stop hating each other?"
"We fight, you're pissed. We make up, you grill us," he says, hoisting her bag into the overhead for her.
"You two are like children," she says, laughing to herself.
Stevie takes her usual seat by the window, settling in under her cashmere blanket, Sulamith at her feet. Lindsey slips in beside her, pulling her easily int0 his arms. She leans back into him and falls asleep on him. No one says anything, grateful for the sudden break in fighting between the two of them.
