Giving Up the Ghost (8 page)
“I kept looking for it in the news. I didn’t know what else to do. There weren’t enough details for me to figure it out.” Nick smoothed out John’s clothes in the suitcase. “I have to go. I already booked the flight, and…would you come with me?” It sounded as if he was steeling himself for John to refuse.
“I thought --” John gestured at the open case, stepping into the room. His eye was caught by a second case, already fastened, standing behind the door. Nick’s case, battered by use. “I thought you were kicking me out.” He pushed his hand through his hair, rubbing at the back of his neck as he studied Nick. “Aye. I’ll come with you. If that’s what you want.” He walked over to Nick, who had straightened and was looking at him with eyes that were still blank with shock. “Nick…”
He touched the back of his hand to Nick’s face, stroking it gently. “Come here, will you?” he whispered, pulling Nick into his arms without a thought for anything but taking that stricken, frozen look off Nick’s face. Better the anger or the hurt than that.
Nick melted into the embrace as if nothing were wrong between them, clinging to John. “I don’t think I can do this alone.” He sounded numb, pressing closer to John for warmth and comfort that John was more than happy to give.
“Don’t have to.” John tightened his arms around Nick, leaning into their embrace and feeling as if he didn’t want to let go for a long time. “I’ll be there.” He turned his head a little, brushing his lips against Nick’s cheek. “Just where
are
we going, anyway?”
“
“I’m sure. If you’ve packed, I’ll make a few calls; let people know we’re going so they can keep an eye on the place.” He turned to look out of the window, ignoring the blue sky, which could cloud over in minutes, and watching the branches of the closest tree instead. “Lucky the wind’s died down or we wouldn’t have even been able to get off the island, let alone leave the country.”
He took Nick’s face in his hands and kissed him, for once feeling no flare of desire. “You’ll be fine, Nick. Just fine.”
* * * * *
John dragged his attention away from a fifteen-foot-long stuffed alligator decorating the foyer of the hotel they’d chosen and frowned. Nick had just asked for a single room with two beds, passing his credit card over without looking at John.
The journey had been hard on both of them, and John wanted nothing more than sleep, hours and hours of it, deep and dreamless sleep while his body and mind caught up with what had happened to it over the past few days.
Didn’t mean he wanted to do it in a narrow little single bed, though.
Even discovering that two beds meant two queen-sized beds, each big enough for two, didn’t make him feel better. The last time they’d had a king-sized bed; wide and luxurious, and they’d used every inch of it, too, sprawled out across it, mouths on each other, hands roving, happy, the two of them.
He dumped his case in a corner and collapsed onto one of the beds, deciding that his legs might as well be back in
“I feel like the time we had a run of salmon and we fished for two days and nights with hardly a break,” he said, the words emerging from his mouth but echoing distantly as if someone else had spoken them. “Can we sleep for a bit, do you think, or is there someone you want to call first?”
“No, no, it’s okay. Go to sleep. I don’t think I could, but you go ahead.” Nick sounded awful and looked worse. “I think I’ll take a shower.”
John undressed slowly to the accompaniment of the water running in the bathroom; Nick had shut the door, but he could still hear it, the rush of the water against the plastic hotel shower curtain enough to have his eyelids closing despite himself. He pulled down the covers and crawled between the sheets wearing nothing but his boxer shorts, the fabric crisp and clean against his skin.
He was nearly asleep when the bathroom door opened, and roused enough to open his eyes. Nick’s hair was slicked back away from his face. The towel around his waist was pulled tight; normally it would have been half hanging off his hips, revealing the tempting line of his hip bone, but now he turned away from John as he put on a pair of cotton sleep pants and lay down on the other bed.
The room was quiet -- it was late afternoon, John thought, although it was hard to keep track when traveling, and the hotel wasn’t crowded at this time of day. John was nearly asleep again when he heard Nick clear his throat. “John?” he asked softly, as if unsure if John were awake.
John managed a questioning grunt by way of reply and then forced his eyes open. “’M here, love.” The endearment came easily when he was this tired; it took more effort to remember that he and Nick weren’t quite right than to forget it.
“Can --” Nick rolled onto his side, looking at John. He licked his lips nervously. “Can I sleep with you?”
“Aye. Of course you can.” John was too sleepy to feel more than a distant relief. He threw the covers back and moved over, making room for Nick. Nick slipped in beside him and John drew the covers up over them, sighed, and settled down the way he always did, although he never woke that way, his arm across Nick’s chest, his head on Nick’s shoulder.
Nick was warm against him; he smelled of unfamiliar shampoo, but other than that and the sheets, John could have thought they were home in their own bed. “Go to sleep,” Nick whispered.
“I
am
asleep,” John told him.
“I can tell.” Nick might actually have sounded a bit amused, although it was difficult to tell through John’s own exhaustion.
“I feel…” John turned his head a little, murmuring the words against Nick’s skin, feeling his lips touch it in what wasn’t a kiss, not really. “We’re a long way from home.”
“We are.” Nick’s arm around John’s shoulders squeezed slightly in a half hug. “Too far. I wish we were there instead of here.”
“You’re here. I’m here.” John made it a definite kiss this time, dizzy with the feel of the world spinning under him, far too fast. Thousands of miles…hours lost or relived, he wasn’t sure which. None of it felt real. Last time they’d flown to the States they’d planned it for weeks; he’d been prepared. This was too sudden, too violent a disruption to their lives, and given the way things were between them, he didn’t feel as if he could ask for or give reassurance the way he normally would have.
It wasn’t going to stop him kissing the smooth hollow of Nick’s throat, though. Not when it was there, and Nick wasn’t stopping him. He wasn’t wanting to take it any farther than that -- he didn’t think he could -- but kissing Nick was what he did before he went to sleep and it didn’t feel right not to.
“As long as you’re going to stay,” Nick murmured. “With me, I mean. If you left…I don’t know what I’d do.” He tilted his head obligingly, giving John better access, but he wasn’t entirely relaxed.
“Staying…Go to sleep, will you? Please? Can’t if you don’t…” John wasn’t sure that what was coming out of his mouth made sense, but he hoped it did.
“Shh. I am,” Nick said, reassuring. “It’s okay.” It barely mattered at that point; John had been holding onto consciousness by sheer force of will, and sleep was already pulling him under whether he wanted it to or not.
* * * * *
Nick woke around the same time he would have at home. Of course, it was five hours earlier in
When he woke up again, the sun was rising. They hadn’t thought to close the curtain that led to the balcony off their room, and the sunlight was streaming in. Nick crept from the bed and went to shut the curtain, but ended up slipping behind it and opening the sliding glass door to the balcony into the warm
Behind him he heard the faint rustle of the sheets as John stirred awake. John always seemed to know when Nick left the bed, no matter how deeply he was sleeping.
“It’s not raining, then?” John’s voice, soft, and with a lilt to it that was going to get every waitress, cab driver, and store assistant they met commenting, admiring and dredging up relatives who were Scottish, had been to Scotland, or owned something tartan, sounded amused. “We should’ve stayed home. There was a nice gale on the way.”
“Come out here,” Nick said. At that moment, the wonder of the morning had him firmly in its grasp and nothing else mattered; not why they were there, not even that things had been so shaky between them. “You have to see this sunrise.”
John got out of bed and joined him, slipping his arm around Nick’s shoulders in a brief hug before walking to the edge of the balcony and staring out at the spectacular landscape neither of them had really taken in the night before. The hotel was on the beach; directly beneath their third-floor balcony was a narrow strip of thick-bladed grass, bordered by a concrete path, and then the white sand began, lapping up like a sea against the buildings.
Nick knew John’s eyes would be on the sea, though; the wide, endless expanse of it, holding the shifting colors of the sunrise now, though it’d be intensely blue soon. The rush of the waves made it feel like home. A different shore, but the same ocean.
“Aye, that’s something,” John said after a while. He turned his head, studying Nick with the same concentration he’d given to the view. “You look better for the sleep. Are you hungry? You ate next to nothing yesterday, not that I can blame you.” He wrinkled up his face. “By the time I’d got all the plastic wrappings off that meal on the plane, they were coming around to take the plates off us.”
Nick’s stomach growled at the suggestion of food, but he only had eyes for John; he reached for John’s hand and pulled him closer, hugging him, inhaling his scent. Holding John like this gave him a profound sense of peace, one that he wanted to keep for as long as he could, even though he knew it would only be a few minutes. “I’ve missed this.” He meant it as an apology. “I didn’t realize what was going on. Well, I did, but I didn’t know how bad it was. I’m sorry.” The last words were whispered, but he knew John would be able to hear him.
“I wish you’d been able to tell me.” John’s hands on his bare back, stroking it slowly, firmly, were easing muscles Nick hadn’t realized were tense. “I feel as if I’ve done nothing but let you down, somehow, what with that and -- and it’s the last thing I wanted to do.” John pulled back enough that Nick could see his face, the blue eyes bright against the skin that even in winter was still tanned because John spent more time outside than in; always had, always would. “I love you.” John’s gaze didn’t waver. “Very much.”
“I love you, too. More than anything.” Nick stroked John’s cheek, rubbed a thumb over his lips. “I don’t know why I didn’t tell you. I think, at first, I thought it was just a dream, and then I really thought…it had to be, I don’t know, my mind playing tricks on me.” But deep down, he hadn’t really thought that, or else he wouldn’t have spent so much time scouring the Internet for reports of planes having gone down. “But I should have said something.” The secret had driven a wedge between them that had done more damage than Nick would have thought possible.
Above them, seagulls cried out, wheeling in wide circles over the beach. Even this early the beach wasn’t empty; a couple was walking their dog, and someone else was running down close to the water, where the sand was hard and packed.
Nick’s peaceful mood was already evaporating. “Can we get room service for breakfast?” he asked. “I don’t think I want to be around a lot of people right now.”
“Fine by me.” John leaned in and kissed Nick, his lips tasting somehow of home. “Do you think they do waffles? I liked them last time we were here, and those wee frozen ones we get aren’t anything like the same.”
“We should probably give up on them and get a waffle iron,” Nick said. “It can’t be that hard to make waffles.” Not that he’d ever been much of a cook, of course, but he’d learned some things in the past year, and weren’t waffles just pancakes cooked in a waffle iron?
While John went to take a shower, Nick called room service and ordered breakfast for them, then he went back out to the balcony and sat down, letting the warm sunshine seep into his bones and trying not to think about what the day ahead was going to hold.
He heard the shower finish but didn’t go back inside. Out here, with a salt-scented breeze whipping away each thought of his father and the others who’d died on the small plane, some thirty or so, he thought, he could cope. Inside, closed-in, he was a target. He knew that it didn’t matter; if the spirits wanted to talk to him, they’d find him wherever he was, but he wasn’t feeling very logical right then.
Even when a tap on the door, and the murmur of voices told him that their food had arrived, he stayed where he was, his eyes taking in the blue and white and green around him without seeing details.
Then John appeared, his brown hair damp and tousled, a white, skimpy towel hitched around his hips, looking flushed. “I didn’t know where the dollars were that you got at the airport. Had to promise I’d remember his name, and tip him later.” He glanced down at himself, shaking his head. “He’ll remember me, that’s for sure. I damn near lost this towel trying to go through the pockets in your jacket.”
