My career would crash and burn like a Japanese plane on the flight deck of a US destroyer. But what if my plane from South Bend to New York crashes tomorrow, and I die without ever having been naked with him? What if my plane doesn’t crash, and I die in my bed at the ripe old age of eighty-three, like my grandmother, without ever having been naked with Giles Cleveland?
Chapter 26
IF ANY EVIDENCE WERE NEEDED that I did not come on this trip with any thought of seducing anyone, my pajamas would do it. Baby-blue flannel with white sheep. Thick woolly socks. You never know how warm or cold these hotel rooms will be, and I hate cold feet.
Out the door, down the mercifully empty elevator, into the hotel lobby. It is past midnight, and residents have retired to bed or the bar. The receptionist is on the phone to a friend, talking in loud, over-emphatic cadences. No one notices me as I stroll nonchalantly toward the restroom. Like a child sneaking out to buy candy in a corner store, I clasp my coins in my hand. I have loose change enough to buy two.
Two, in different colors.
Hand deep in coat pocket, as if I had stolen them, I sidle back toward the elevator. Again I am lucky; no one rides up with me. I pad along the carpeted hallway, half-expecting to see Kathleen round the next corner. But the hall is silent and empty. And now…
I knock.
I knock, and the door gives a little, as if the door hinges were loose, or as if someone had very carefully not quite closed it. One false move and it will latch. I so dread being seen in the hallway that I slip in and quickly close the door behind me before I realize that there may already be two people in the room.
Why else would the door not be shut? Careless.
I force myself past the cubicle formed by the bathroom toward the dim pool of light round the corner—and there he is, lying in bed, propped up on his elbow, reading. Like a boy.
Not reading now, of course. He is watching me, waiting. He does not look as I would if I had just heard someone enter my hotel room in the middle of the night. Did he leave the door open for me? That must be nonsense, and yet it adds to the poignancy of the situation, because I know that in a pathetic kind of way this whole thing is about me wishing someone would leave the door open for me.
Giles closes his book and puts it on the bedside table. He is wearing a white t-shirt, and the light of the lamp shimmers on the knobbly bones of his wrist and elbow and on the long strands of muscle that connect them. He looks like a boy waiting to be tucked in, and at the same time it is one of those moments in which I am overwhelmed by how big he is. The swell of his shoulders and the sudden bulge of his bicep as he bends his arm to lift the corner of his blankets.
My flannel knee looks childish on the edge of his mattress, and he could touch it without moving his hand more than a few inches. But he does not. He is so grave he almost looks forbidding. No smile, no flippant remark to relieve the tension. Waiting. Watching me with those light green eyes. There is a low crackle of plastic in one of the pockets as I let the robe slide to the ground. But I still don’t have the courage to climb into bed with him—the enormity of what I’m doing has rooted me to the edge of it. His eyes crease in a slow, wary smile, his shoulders relax, and his hand is warm and hopeful around my knee. The temperature in the room rises. He sits up and bunches his pillows against the headrest of the bed, scoots up so that he can lean against it and lifts his comforter to reveal blue-and-gray-striped pajama bottoms. I crawl up to him, into his naked arms, unsure of how fast this is going to happen. One arm is around my waist, and he pulls me onto his lap, astride, facing him. So near, suddenly. So close. So hard.
He slips his hands under my pajama top, up my back to my shoulders, his fingertips hard in the tense muscles, and