The Layover

by Roe Horvat

  “Are you cold?” I asked instead.

  He shook his head, not opening his eyes. So I dragged my fingers through his sweaty hair and brushed my lips against his forehead, counting on his helplessness.

  “Thank you,” he mumbled, his pale face perfectly smooth in his half-asleep state.

  I SHOWERED quickly, trying to think and process, but it was of no use. I felt completely out of control.

  Kicking and squirming on the sofa, I tried to entertain myself while Jamie slept. I read the news on my phone, feeling only more desolate, and I even tried googling some jobs but gave up in like three minutes. Fatigue and restlessness played tug-of-war inside my body.

  After one hour, I saw Jamie stand up from the rumpled bed. He smiled my way drowsily and went straight to the bathroom. When he emerged a few minutes later, he stood at the foot of the bed looking like he’d keel over any second. His eyes were red, and his eyelids seemed swollen.

  “Jamie, you don’t have to do anything. Just tell me what you need.”

  “I…. It’s cold.”

  “Do you want your hoodie?”

  “No.” He squinted at his sock-clad feet—they were bright orange—and at me again. He looked adorably helpless. I wanted to beat my chest with my fists and shout in bewildered victory. He needed me.

  I put my phone down on the coffee table and reached him in three strides. I took his hand and brought him with me onto the bed. He curled into my embrace immediately, hiding his head under my chin and folding his hands next to my frightened heart.

  He shivered a little, and his forehead was burning again while his hands were cold. I counted in my head how many hours I should wait before giving him the next dose of ibuprofen.

  He slept restlessly, alternately clutching onto me and turning away, sweating and radiating heat like a furnace. I did my best to accommodate him, forced him to drink whenever he woke up, and I gave him the ibuprofen to keep the fever down. Again, we didn’t talk.

  Around five in the morning, after he’d sweated through his T-shirt, I helped him change into dry clothes. He seemed to rest calmer. So I hugged him from behind, his smaller body fitting into mine perfectly. I was careful not to put any pressure on his chest and allowed myself some sleep with my nose in his hair.

  DAY THREE

  JAMIE SLEPT for the greater part of the next day as well. I took a walk, mostly to avoid staring at the beautiful picture a sleeping Jamie made, sick or not. But my brain wouldn’t shut up. So I went back to the hotel, checked on Jamie—still asleep—and changed into my running gear.

  I ran along the Rhine. The sky was overcast, a steely gray that threw a black-and-white film over the city, and soft mist blurred out the contours of the picturesque houses on the other side of the river. The crooked knobby fingers of the old naked trees spread gloom over the riverbank. The air was freezing, but at least it didn’t rain anymore. The sidewalk was narrow and almost empty at this time of the year. There were patches of ice to avoid, and I counted the lamps as I passed them. I ran to the Solitude Park, marveling at the mood-fitting name for the place, then in the other direction to the Hofburg Tunnel, and back to the hotel again. My face was burning from the cold wind and exertion when I came back.

  Jamie, wide-awake now, gave me a perplexed look when I beelined for the bathroom, all sweaty and gross.

  “You run regularly?” he asked when I emerged from the shower later. I went to look for a clean T-shirt.

  “When I can. Some cities are good for that. Dubai was impossible, though. Too hot, obviously. I swam instead when I was there.”

  “That explains it, then,” he said with a smirk.

  “Explains what?” I asked, standing in front of the bed in my old jeans.

  He waved his hand up and down, gesturing toward me with a hint of indignation. “That.”

  I looked down at myself. I don’t pack any muscles directly. I was a skinny kid once and grew up to be wiry, square-shouldered, and unnecessarily tall. I don’t work out. It’s the word “work” that bothers me. I use physical exertion to drain my frustration with myself. So I run and swim a lot.

  When I looked back at Jamie, I caught him staring absentmindedly in the direction of my unimpressive hint of a four-pack. I grinned. Jamie liked my body. Then the annoyance hit. Will that be what he’ll remember me for? Abs and orgasms?

  JAMIE SEEMED even more fragile since the fever abated. He started coughing, complaining about the ache in his chest. According to what I’d read, and what the dwarf of a doctor had said at the hospital, that was to be expected.

  I forced him to drink tea and eat a bowl of chicken soup I made. I was happy to have a decent kitchen to cook in. It was a good way to entertain myself and force my attention away from the unbearably bright light that seemed to be emanating from Jamie. He was curiously oblivious to my inner qualms. He looked impressed with my cooking skills, though. I took what I could get.

  “I learned out of sheer boredom,” I told him, and he smiled, but there was sadness in his eyes. I tried to be funny, and he felt sorry for me? Fucking hell.

  Directly after lunch, he fell asleep again like an overtired toddler. One minute he was complimenting me on my soup and the next he was snoring softly into the pillow. I adjusted his blanket so he wouldn’t get cold around his shoulders. I tried to read the news, but my mind wandered, and that was never good.

  So I borrowed Jamie’s tablet. I wouldn’t touch his things, but he’d told me to earlier. You’d be amazed by how much you can learn about a person when you are browsing their Kindle app. There was a ton of books and articles on stem cell research, and I didn’t dare to touch that particular sleeping monster. There were some Atwood and Murakami, which quite frankly intimidated me just as much as the scientific stuff did. But then I found Christopher Hitchens and John Cleese sitting on their virtual shelf cozily next to several romances and mysteries. I thought I could very easily love Jamie.

  I managed a short story about an FBI agent who was looking for his missing lover in the deep dark woods of Oregon. I was smiling all the time at the thought of Jamie reading the same not long ago, maybe enjoying the way his brain finally shut up and relaxed into another, simpler world of comforting letters. Later I was exchanging witticisms with Mr. Cleese when Jamie woke up. I felt a twinge of unease that he caught me reading his electronic library, despite the fact that he’d told me to. But he just gave me an awkward, sleepy wave and disappeared into the bathroom.

  “How are you?” I asked as soon as he emerged a few minutes later.

  “I’m fine,” he grumbled and eyed me. “You must be bored.”

  “Well, now that you mention it. You should entertain me.”

  He snorted. “Sure. Put on some Spice Girls and let me just slip into my firefighter costume.”

  I laughed. Jamie half jumped, half fell on the bed and wormed his way around until he was settled comfortably against three pillows.

  “I’ll take you up on the striptease when you can keep yourself upright for longer than twenty seconds. I made do with your Kindle app. Thanks.”

  “You did? Great.” He turned on his side and closed his eyes. “I’m weak as a kitten.”

  “Kittens are actually very resilient and strong compared to their size.”

  “Then I’m weak as a premature baby, whatever.”

  “You’re not good at being sick, huh?”

  “And you are?”

  I shrugged. “I have no idea, haven’t been sick in years.”

  “Not even a common cold?”

  I shrugged. “Nope.”

  Jamie scowled. “You shouldn’t say things like that. It makes people hate you.”

  “You don’t hate me,” I said. “I make awesome chicken soup and keep you warm at night.”

  Jamie cast his eyes down and smiled, looking exceptionally lovely. “That you do.”

  In the evening, he looked decidedly better. The fever got manageable, and he sat on the sofa for a while, fiddling with his tablet. After a few m
inutes, he leaned back and put the tablet aside. His eyes landed on me where I sat on the floor pretending to check my email but, in reality, watching his every move. He smiled at me weakly.

  “How about we play a game?” I asked. His eyebrows flew up.

  “I can barely move, Ondro. What kind of game?”

  “You don’t have to move. Just think a bit. And you do that all the time anyway.”

  We played Personalities, but after one round we limited ourselves to movie characters. He was good at it, and I was glad to find that we’d seen a lot of the same stuff. He asked quirky questions sometimes and hated to lose. We had to expand the rules because of his attempts to cheat his way to some answers. Instead of a simple yes or no, we added unknown, irrelevant, both, and, after one particular round, stop yanking my chain, to the possible answers. I had genuine fun playing a silly game for the first time in forever.

  Losing made Jamie grumpy, and grumpy Jamie was all kinds of adorable, but I let him win at least twice just to keep him in a good mood. I let him get away with a Weeping Angel as if I hadn’t seen his “Don’t blink!” T-shirt just two days ago.

  “It’s the single smartest episode of Doctor Who, seriously, no contest,” Jamie explained as if I needed convincing. “The terrifying subtlety of the threat you could never see moving. How the angels change from mildly depressing British garden decor to those bloodthirsty monsters in the cellar in the end. Mindfuckingly brilliant!” I was captivated by him when he unleashed his inner geek. What was that about?

  When I won the next round, he was on his way to being downright sullen. I’d already guessed his Cat Woman two questions ago. I offered to tell him mine, but he refused to give up.

  “You’re sure that I’ve seen that?” Jamie asked suspiciously.

  “Even if you haven’t, you know the character.”

  “But how can she be dead for the whole of the movie and one of the main characters at the same time?”

  I shrugged. I loved watching him stew.

  “You said no zombies,” he accused.

  “There are no zombies.”

  “Is there a funeral in the movie?”

  “No.”

  “Is she buried?”

  “No.” My cheeks hurt from my grinning.

  “Wait a minute. So she is a corpse.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you can see the corpse in the movie?”

  “Yes.”

  “Like a dead decomposing human body,” he clarified. “Flesh falling off the bones, worms and all.”

  “You can smell it from the screen.”

  Jamie frowned, his head lolled back for a bit, and he sighed exhaustedly. “Hitchcock?”

  “Took you long enough,” I poked.

  “Bloody hell, Ondro. Mrs. Bates? Really?” He asked in mock outrage, mixing British and American English in the unique fashion of his.

  I laughed, and he huffed. “That is so lame!”

  “What? It’s a classic! And not lame if I win.” I laughed, and he threw a pillow at me.

  “Tomorrow we play Shag–Marry–Kill. There are no losers in that one,” I suggested.

  “Give me some twelve hours of sleep, and I’m game,” he said, his eyes already closing.

  “How are you feeling?” I asked, swallowing a term of endearment at the last second.

  “It hurts a bit.” He rubbed at his chest. “But the world is not swaying anymore.”

  “Time to go back to bed maybe?”

  “Join me?”

  I don’t know why I winced. It was like a knee-jerk reaction. There were too many emotions running wild in my head, and every time Jamie acted as if we were together, I felt myself growing more and more desperate for it to be real. He misunderstood my reaction.

  His mouth formed a grim line, the tense brackets in the corners reappearing. He frowned and looked down into his lap.

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Why? What are you apologizing for?”

  “I don’t mean to use you. It was supposed to be a hookup, and instead, you’ve been taking care of me for the past two days. I am grateful for that. I swear I’m not taking it for granted. I’m sorry I forget.”

  “Forget what?” My heart started thumping loudly. This was an unexpected confession.

  “That we’re not… together like that.”

  Do you want us to be? At that moment, he seemed so vulnerable. He shook his head at himself and braced his shoulders. “Don’t listen to me. It’s just odd. That’s all. We barely know each other, and here we are. I don’t know how to behave sometimes.”

  I didn’t know how to do this kind of thing either. I went with instinct. I closed the distance between us and took his hands in mine. “I liked holding you last night, and I want to do that again. Come to bed, Jamie.”

  HE INSISTED on taking a shower, but I made him hurry up. He shouldn’t stay on his feet for too long. I was leaning against the headboard enjoying the feel of his body close to mine. I checked my Facebook feed on the phone, scrolling back and forth, too distracted to actually read the posts.

  “How was it really, the flight attendant gig?” Jamie asked out of the blue, his voice already thick with sleep.

  “Temporary,” I said, and he cocked his head groggily, trying to look up at me. “I wanted out of Slovakia, and this happened to be the available alternative. It wasn’t my dream job, that’s for sure.”

  “Why did you want out?”

  I put my phone on the nightstand. “A lot of reasons. I didn’t get on well with my family. When I announced I wouldn’t be finishing my master’s and took a job as a steward instead, they went into a full-on rage. They’d disagreed with me studying in the first place, but then I gave it up for a ‘fag’s work.’” I made finger quotes to mark my father’s words. “Dad threatened to disown me. That was ridiculous in itself because there wasn’t anything to inherit. It was bad, then worse. Then my older sister joined my parents in the crusade. Cowardly, I cut the cord myself.”

  Jamie looked horrified. “You’re not in contact anymore?”

  I felt like I should be sorry for that. But my parents weren’t very affectionate. When at eighteen I left our little village and moved to study in Bratislava, they refused to support me. I worked two jobs for four years only to drop out of university anyway.

  “Yes and no. My mother and I exchange the occasional email. I wish I could come up with some sorrowful tale about me coming out to my Catholic parents and being thrown out because of that. But I’ve never told them. They were disappointed enough even without that particular information.”

  He was silent for a while. In hindsight, hiding my sexual orientation from my family should have felt like a big deal, yet it was just one symptom of many. Our relationship was almost nonexistent, so they had no way to find out, and I had no motivation to come out.

  “What did you study?” Jamie asked.

  I hesitated. “English language and literature. I wanted to be a teacher. High school level.”

  “Why didn’t you do it?”

  “I grew up. I realized that I’d have to live on five to seven hundred euros a month for my whole life.”

  “Really? How much is that in Slovakia?”

  I had to laugh briefly. “Jamie, Bratislava is just as expensive as Vienna or Berlin. Sometimes more.”

  “But that’s like four hundred pounds.”

  I shrugged. Money was the only reason I’d worked in Dubai for so long. I was very aware of what it said about my character.

  “There was a breakup as well that played some role in my leaving,” I admitted, deflecting. “And I didn’t want to face the impossible gridlock of trying to have a career as an openly gay teacher in Slovakia.”

  “You didn’t have to be out at work.”

  I sighed into his hair, and he wiggled in my embrace. Was it really only two days ago we met?

  “Somebody would always find out someday, several times for sure. I wanted it all. I wanted a stable job that felt a
bit meaningful. I wanted to have a life partner to share an apartment with, go to dinners and on vacations…. Even if other teachers would have been okay with a homosexual colleague, the parents wouldn’t.” I paused, searching my memory. “Or to be completely honest, I didn’t know. I was afraid to go and see it work out. The whole hassle was surely not worth a few hundred a month. I had a sort of falling out with my boyfriend, and it all somehow came apart. I finished my bachelor’s degree but quit school one year before I could get my master’s. I had had a part-time gig at the airport in Bratislava, customer service, supporting myself at school. I completed the training, jumped on a plane, and flew away. I haven’t stopped flying ever since.

  “It felt freeing in the beginning. I could be out while staying in Frankfurt, had a decent salary, a steadily increasing number of friends, a never-ending source of casual hookups. Then I got lured to Dubai. The money was something else. I had many colleagues from all over the world to hang out with. It used to be good. And then it wasn’t. It took me eight years, but I finally gave my notice.”

  “When?”

  “A few weeks ago. This is me flying home. Or to the place where it used to be. It probably isn’t there anymore, but I guess, I’m going to build myself a new home. I’m curious about how it would feel, how the city changed.”

  “So you’ve been pretty much everywhere.”

  “Chile, Bali, Chicago, Iceland, Moscow, Pakistan, Shanghai, Lagos, Turkey…. It’s just different hotels and airports. It felt the same everywhere in the end. With the exhausting exceptions of weather and time zones.”

  Jamie was silent for a while, stroking the back of my hand with his thumb. I closed my eyes, soaking up the warmth of his body next to mine. I was in just another hotel here in Basel, Switzerland. Just another layover in just another city. Still, it felt so different that it terrified me to my core.

  “Ever been to Edinburgh?” Jamie asked quietly.

  I didn’t open my eyes. I held them shut by sheer force of will, kept my face impassive, tried not to move. He still must have felt the tension shift through me.