by Raquel Belle
Hayley nodded. “Yeah. I also need to go to the bathroom, so I’ll meet you on Level 2.” James eyed her warily. Hayley didn’t look up to walking, let alone finding her way around the labyrinthine airport, but she was a big girl, so he let her go, carefully watching her movements as she wound her way toward the ladies’ room.
“Mom?” Hayley said into the phone as she leaned against the tile wall outside the bathroom. As always seemed to happen in big airports, there was a long, snaking line for the ladies’ bathroom and Hayley figured she had at least ten minutes to wait before a stall opened up.
“Hi, Hayley. Don’t tell me you’re calling about a cancelled flight. Your dad and I have been watching the news and they’re claiming this is a ‘freak blizzard.’ That meteorologist has obviously never spent much time in Minnesota. This is just a bunch of flurries!”
Hayley laughed. Her mom was a Midwestern woman through and through, with a tried and tested hot dish recipe ready to whip up at a moment’s notice and an innate suspicion of anyone who snubbed their nose at casseroles. She was also so used to snowfall, which covered the ground in Minneapolis from October through April and sometimes May, that three feet of snow was, to her, light flurrying. Too bad the people running the O’Hare airport departures didn’t feel the same way.
“Sadly, yes. Our flight has been delayed at least until tomorrow afternoon. James and I are grabbing dinner and then heading to the airport hotel, because the weather is so bad we can’t take a taxi back into the city.”
“Oh dear. Well, try to make the best of it. Hotels can be fun! All those movie channels and comfy sheets and little bottles of alcohol. Pour yourself a nice Dark and Stormy and settle in for the night. Don’t worry. I’m sure everything will be clear by tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Mom. I’ll check in tomorrow morning.”
Fifteen minutes later, Hayley walked to the table James had saved them realizing that her mom was right. She couldn’t change the weather and there was no use bemoaning the fact that they were snowed in for the night. She just had to make the best of it; at least she had good company.
“Okay!” James said, clapping his hands as Hayley sat down. “I’ve scouted out the eating options and we have quite the variety to choose from. There’s a Mexican place, a pizza place, a salad bar, a café with sandwiches and for dessert, an ice cream place that makes reasonably priced sundaes. What are you feeling?”
Like a true Chicago resident, Hayley’s answer was “deep dish pizza,” and so she and James walked to the pizza place and ordered two big pies, plus giant fountain sodas. The cheesy, meaty pizza soothed Hayley’s soul and warmed her heart, as did James’ stories of all the times he’d been stuck in airports over the years. Hayley knew he’d done a bit of traveling after graduating high school, but she had no idea he’d gone to quite so many countries.
“Nineteen, by the time I’d left,” he said, answering her question of how many countries he’d visited on his travels.
“Which one was your favorite?” she asked, as she stole a slice of pepperoni from his pizza.
He took a sip of his Sprite and pondered the question. “Probably Germany. Really cool street art, great beer, nice, friendly people.”
“Your least favorite?”
“France. Though not for the reasons you’d think. French people are actually really nice, outside of Paris at least, but my French was, and is, terrible, so I had a lot of trouble getting around. I’d like to go back one day, after I brush up on my language skills.”
“I’ve always wanted to go to Italy, personally. I nearly did a semester abroad there my junior year of college, but then decided to do an internship at the local youth arts program instead.”
James nodded. “That’s somewhere I haven’t been, actually. Decided to do Spain instead. Maybe we can go there someday and see if the pizza there tops this stuff,” he said, gesturing to his half-eaten pie.
It wasn’t hard for Hayley to imagine James in Italy, his face tanned from the Mediterranean sun, his hair littered with golden highlights. Hayley knew James would look gorgeous on the beach, shirt off, bathing suit on, but she tried to keep those thoughts from invading her brain, because he was talking again.
“Ice cream, then head to the hotel?”
“Sure thing.”
Chapter Thirteen
The hotel room was huge, with a couch, two end tables and a separate coffee table on one size and a giant bed, smack dab in the middle of the room, perhaps the biggest Hayley had ever seen.
She had been too busy worrying about missing their flight and then talking to James to remember that they would be sharing a bed that night, but now, with the huge, king-sized mattress staring up at her, she suddenly realized that she would be spending the whole night snuggled against the man she had been dreaming about for months. In theory, this was perfect: perhaps their bodies would naturally gravitate towards each other in the night, and she would wake up in his arms, cuddled in his warmth, their bodies pressed close together. It was what she’d been dreaming about for months, often the last thought she had before she fell asleep at night and one of the first that entered her mind each morning. This could be her chance to finally see if there was a physical connection between them. After all, forced proximity had led to more than one happily ever after for the couples in the romance novels her mom sent her.
But as excited as Hayley was at the prospect of sharing a bed with James, she was also terrified. Sure, she’d brought sexy pajamas and had had the forethought to shave her legs, but that didn’t mean she was mentally prepared for this. For what this would mean for their friendship. Because if something happened between them, there was no going back. They’d already nearly ruined their friendship once with just a kiss. What would spending the whole night in bed together, with all that it might entail, do to them? She was reluctant to find out.
Hayley was surprised by her own hesitation. She’d spent so long imagining what it would be like to get up close and personal with James that she’d always assumed that if and when the opportunity arose, she’d jump at the chance. But nothing about Hayley was jumping, except perhaps her heartbeat as she looked from the bed to James and back again. She was stuck, frozen, unable to move. The bed was too big, the room too spacious, James too close. It was overwhelming. She needed a breather.
“You okay?” James asked, waking Hayley up from the dark spiral her mind had started to take. He peered at her with concern, and Hayley realized she must look terrified. Which she was. Damn, why was her face always so honest? She’d never been able to hide her feelings from anyone. It was partly why she always lost at poker with her dad.
“Yup! Fine! Totally fine. Never better. I’m just going to use the bathroom really quickly, okay? Why don’t you pick out a movie for us to watch on TV? I’ll be out in a few minutes, I swear,” she said, then grabbed her makeup bag from her purse and sprinted the three feet into the bathroom and shut and locked the door firmly behind her.
The makeup bag was a ruse to make James think she was in fact going in there to freshen up. In reality, Hayley was in the bathroom for a firm pep talk with herself. Which started with her actually making eye contact with her reflection in the mirror. Despite the stress of the last few hours and the anxious, thought-filled hurricane that was currently whirling in her brain and belly, she actually looked pretty good.
Her hair was still secured in the high ponytail she’d put it in before leaving her apartment; her sweater and jeans weren’t overly wrinkled, and her makeup was still in place, lucky peach lip-gloss firmly intact. Really, the only thing wrong with her was the expression on her face, which was one of abject fear and anxiety. This is no big deal, Hayley told her reflection silently, mouthing the words to herself. James is your friend, and you don’t have to do anything with him that you don’t want to. You know that, and he knows that. Also, for all you know he’s planning on passing out in an hour and staying firmly on his side of the mattress. Then, you can both wake up tomorrow, have a nice hote
l breakfast and catch the first flight out to Minneapolis and the rest of the weekend can pass normally, with both of you in separate bedrooms and no thoughts of what his penis might feel like inside you.
After a few more minutes of pep talk with herself, Hayley felt immeasurably better. She touched up her lip-gloss so it wouldn’t look like she’d just been standing silently in the bathroom for the last ten minutes, girded her loins, and opened the door.
James was seated on the end of the bed flipping through the channels on the large flat-screen TV mounted on the wall on the opposite side of the room. “You okay?” he asked.
“Yup! Totally fine. Just wanted to freshen up a bit.”
James nodded and then gestured toward the TV. “Well, for tonight’s entertainment we have a winning selection of choices. There’s Fried Green Tomatoes, which I watched with Lucy once and cried for a solid half an hour about afterward, then there’s the fourth installment of the Harry Potter series, Bridget Jones’ Diary and The Devil Wears Prada. There’s also a James Bond film, but if it’s okay with you, I’d rather not watch it. I’m really not a fan of his stuff. I’m sure it worked in the 70’s, but now it all just feels a bit racist and misogynistic.”
Hayley was touched to hear that James had cried at Fried Green Tomatoes. It was one of her and her mom’s favorite movies to watch together, and it always left them groping for the tissues to stem the flow of tears that erupted the moment Ninny appeared on screen and kept going right to the end of the film. But she wasn’t all that keen on sobbing her eyes out in front of him and risking ruining both her makeup and any sexual feelings he might have had for her before he saw just how blotchy her face got when she cried.
The second option seemed like the best one, because as much as Hayley loved romantic comedies, she loved Harry Potter far more. She would happily watch it any time of day or night, though she did think the first three films were the best and wouldn’t hear any argument to the contrary. Prisoner of Azkaban was by far the best book and movie—from there, the series got too dark, too violent for her liking. She preferred the happy scenes where the gang was eating in the Great Hall and making small mischief.
Hayley was glad to know that James didn’t like the Bond films, though. Eric was always trying to get her to watch them when they were together, and wouldn’t hear of it when she tried to explain to him how sexist and racist they could be.
“I honestly like the sound of all of those, except the Bond film, so you should choose.”
“In which case, I choose Harry Potter,” James said, looking at Hayley and smiling.
***
Half an hour later James and Hayley were settled in bed watching the movie. They’d both changed into their pajamas, with James in a long-sleeved henley and flannel pajama pants and Hayley wearing yoga pants and a sweater, because the hotel room was way too cold for her sexy lingerie-like pajamas, and she’d felt a bit weird at the idea of wearing them when James looked so cozy. Movie nights were for comfy clothes, anyway, and it wasn’t like yoga pants and a sweater were that much more difficult to remove if things did in fact get heated, which Hayley was increasingly hoping they would. The henley James wore gave her a peek of his chest hair as it curled over the soft cotton fabric and Hayley itched to trace her hand down it to where she hoped it led to his cock.
She shoved a large handful of popcorn from the bowl sitting between them in her mouth, hoping James wouldn’t notice the blush coloring her cheeks at the thought of what lay beneath his pajama pants. James was sitting to her right on the large, beige couch in the hotel room that faced the TV. The couch was small, so they were pressed fairly close together, even with the bowl of popcorn between them. On the large, flat screen in front of them, the scene where Harry defeats the dragon during the Tri-Wizard tournament was playing.
“I was really into dragons as a kid,” James said as he dug his hand into the bowl for more popcorn. Hayley was happy to find out he was a talker during movies. So was she, but she couldn’t count the number of times Kerry, Sam, or one of her ex-boyfriends had scolded her for it. She couldn’t help it—she needed to talk through what she was seeing!
“Really? Like, reading about them or drawing them?” Hayley asked as she tried to surreptitiously fish a popcorn kernel out of her molar with her tongue. She’d forgotten that was the price you paid when you munched on delicious, buttery popcorn kernels for a snack.
“Both. I was obsessed with them. My first tattoo was actually of a dragon, and most of the dragon tattoos my dad’s shop did for people were my creation. I actually started drawing dragons for him when I was in middle school—depending on the client, he’d tell them it was my drawing, and I used to get all these really nice cards from people telling me how much they liked the dragon I’d drawn them.”
“Wow,” Hayley said. When she was in middle school she was still drawing stick figures. “So there are people all over Chicago with dragons on them that you created as a kid?” Hayley asked.
“Yup,” James said, turning and smiling at her. “I love drawing them, reading about them. When I was little, I hated any fairy tale with a dragon in it, because they usually got killed by some knight in shining armor. I cried the one time my mom read me a story like that, and she couldn’t figure out why, until my dad told her about my obsession. After that, the few times she visited, she made sure to buy me books that were firmly in the pro-dragon camp.”
“That’s so sweet. So presumably you’ve seen How to Train Your Dragon?” Hayley asked, referencing the well-known DreamWorks film.
“At least fifteen times, though three of those were while working as a teaching assistant, so I couldn’t hear the movie over the shouting and squeeing of all the kids. I was just as excited as they were, though I kept it in much better.”
Hayley smiled, then asked the question she would never have allowed herself to if they hadn’t spent the last five hours stuck in each other’s company. She’d wanted to see more of his tattoos for so long, and this seemed like the perfect segue. “So, can I see your dragon tattoo?”
James turned to her, surprised, but complied. He lifted up the left leg of his pajama pants. All along the side of his calf was the most beautiful green and gold dragon with intricately drawn scales and beautiful amber-colored eyes. It wasn’t ferocious or terrifying like most of the dragons she had seen drawn or depicted; rather, it was simply beautiful, a noble creature gorgeously shown in crisp emerald greens and shining yellow golds. Hayley had never seen anything like it. She loved it instantly.
“Oh my god, that’s so beautiful. Can I… Can I touch it?” she asked James, looking up at him with her hand hovering over his leg presumptively. He nodded, and she gently placed her palm on the dragon’s chest, running it down to the animal’s legs and up its tail. The drawing was so detailed she expected to feel the creature’s myriad scales, but instead what she felt was the smooth skin and soft leg hair of James. His calf was muscular but lean, and the curly hair on his legs was a rich, deep black much darker than the hair on his head. Here and there were scattered freckles and moles around the dragon, almost like stars on a backdrop. Hayley spied another, much smaller tattoo just underneath the dragon’s tail where it sat at the junction of James’ ankle and leg bones.
“What’s this?” she asked, her index finger resting on the shape. She couldn’t make out what it was—it looked like a foreign language, though not one she could recognize. The letters weren’t part of the Latin alphabet—they were curved, swirling and intersecting each other with little dots and symbols above and below.
“It’s… it’s Elvish. It says ‘Faithless is he who says farewell when the road darkens.’ I’m a bit of a Lord of the Rings fan. Well, not a bit. I’ve done the tour of the set in New Zealand, read all the books at least fifteen times, taught myself Elvish. Nerdy, right?” James asked, laughing nervously. Hayley traced the shape with her finger, feeling the curves of the letters as they intersected with one another.
“I like it. I like that you
’re a little bit nerdy,” she said, smiling at him. “It honestly just makes you hotter. You’re the perfect combination of cool, smooth bad boy, and nerdy fan boy.” She saw a relieved look on James’ face, almost like he’d been worried she would be put off by his interests. But they only made him more attractive to her, because it made him real. He wasn’t just some extremely hot tattoo artist-turned-kindergarten teacher. He was a man with wide-ranging interests, some of which just happened to involve mythical realms.
“Do you have any other tattoos on your leg?” Hayley asked. She’d completely forgotten about the movie they were watching, the popcorn spilling out of its bowl between them as she moved closer to him. All she was focused on now was the feel of his skin beneath her hand, and how much she wanted to run her hands over the entirety of him, learning each mole and freckle by heart until the constellation of his body was all she saw in her mind’s eye.
James nodded and hooked his thumbs into the waistband of his flannel pajama pants. “I… I have to take these off to show you. You okay with that?” he asked Hayley. She nodded, more than okay with him taking a piece of clothing off. She was hungry to see more of his bare skin. She would have been fine with him undressing completely in that moment, though the pants were a good start. All those pairs of tight jeans he wore to work had had her fantasizing about his legs for months. She couldn’t wait to see them in bare.
James slid the flannel pants down his legs and threw them over the couch, where they landed on the side of the bed. Hayley couldn’t help but notice that he was wearing tight, black cotton boxer briefs that showed off his generous package, which, if she was not mistaken, was just starting to grow hard with an erection she hoped wasn’t involuntary. She wanted to be the cause of his arousal.
James’ legs were lean and muscular, his thighs slim and dotted here and there with more tattoos. He began explaining the tattoos to Hayley, who moved the popcorn bowl to the floor and scooted even closer to him, until she was practically touching his leg with her chest, so she could see them better. “So, this one’s a charcoal pencil and a scribble. It was my second tattoo, to represent my art at the time. My dad got me a set of charcoals and an easel for my eighteenth birthday, and I went a bit crazy with them. I looked like that kid from the Peanuts, the one always covered in dirt, for a while. My whole room was full of charcoal dust, and I started wearing all black clothing to cover up the smudges I’d get on myself. Eventually my dad got sick of the mess and let me use some of his shop space as a studio, and I finally bought myself some shitty drawing clothes so I wouldn’t keep ruining my whole wardrobe. It took months to get all the dust out of my room, though. I swear there was still some in there when my dad moved a few years back.”