“Don’t,” I whispered.
“I won’t.”
“Who is it?”
“I won’t know without looking at it. It’s probably nobody.”
“At a quarter to twelve on a Wednesday?”
“It can wait.”
I pushed my face into his collarbone and closed my eyes.
Rook rarely stayed past midnight on the road. He had taught me early that midnight was the soft limit and one was the hard one.
I pressed my hand flat against his chest, feeling his heartbeat. He kissed me again and sat up.
I watched him put himself back together. He raked his fingers through his hair once. He didn’t look in the mirror.
He came back to the bed and bent over me, kissing me on the forehead. “Sleep.”
“Okay.”
I watched him walk to the door. He opened it six inches, looked through the gap with one eye, opened it the rest of the way, and was gone.
I lay where I was.
It took nineteen minutes.
We’d been doing it for five seasons. We never ran over twenty.
I closed my eyes. The duvet was rumpled at the foot of the bed. The pillow next to me had the dent of Rook’s head in it. It was already fading.
I rolled onto his side of the bed. The sheet was already cooler than on my side. I pressed my face into the pillow and breathed in once. He smelled of the hotel body wash. Underneath that was the scent of his warm skin and lingering cedar. It was the smell of our sheets at home, and it didn’t wash off. I could pick it out of a lineup of two hundred men in the dark.
The dent faded a little more under the weight of my face. I rolled onto my back.
The ceiling had a popcorn texture and a smoke detector with a small green light. A water stain in one corner looked like the state of Tennessee.
I turned my head toward the door and thought about the hallway on the other side of it. Rook’s room was across from mine. Heath and Kieran were two doors down, sharing one room and one bed.
I pictured Heath waking up first because Heath would be the type. He’d call room service before Kieran was a person yet. The two of them would sit against the headboard, drinking bad hotel coffee.
I want a night on the road where he doesn’t have to leave.
The sentence landed flat in my chest. There was no way to dress it up as something else.
I reached for my phone.
Varga:You back?
I’d sent that message at least a hundred times before. It only took thirty seconds for the response.
Rook:I’m back. Goodnight.
I set the phone down and looked at the door. Down the hall, Heath had his arm or his leg over Kieran in bed in a city away from home on a Wednesday night in October.
Rook was across the hall, alone.
