Page 46 of Blind Spot
I’d done it for years, but I couldn’t do it forever.
This trip, somewhere between the first city and the last, in a hotel room with the chain on the door, I was going to stop orbiting and say it out loud. The whole thing.I want more than this, and I think you do too, and I’m done waiting for you to decide it for both of us.
I just had to figure out how to say something like that to the sun.
Chapter twelve
Rook
Ihung the Do Not Disturb sign on my door at 11:06 p.m. and crossed the hall to Varga’s room with my key card in my pocket and my shoes in my hand.
He opened at the first knock. He was down to shorts and the road-trip T-shirt with the collar he’d stretched out by pulling it up over his chin on planes. Stepping back, he let me in without a word.
I threw the deadbolt and put the chain on. He flopped onto the bed as he watched me do it.
We had forty-nine minutes. We spent them with the television on low and me sitting behind him, back against the headboard. I wrapped my right arm around him, and he held my forearm in both hands, like gripping a railing on a boat.
“These pillows,” Varga said.
“Here we go.”
“No, Rook, listen to me. Feel it.” He tugged the pillow out from between his head and my shoulder and pressed it back against my face without turning around. “Feel that. What is that?”
“It’s a pillow.”
“It’s aformerpillow. It died, and they kept it. There’s no loft. You put your head down and it just—“ He made a small sound, like air leaving a balloon. “It surrenders. The souls of dead pillows haunt every room in this hotel.”
“You say that every time we’re here.”
“Because it’s true every time we’re here. They have not bought a pillow in this city since the Flyers were good.” He wedged the pillow back under his head and resettled against me, pulling my arm across him like a man adjusting a seatbelt. “Detroit, fine, the water pressure is a crime, but at least Detroit lets you sleep. Columbus has the curtain gap. You remember the curtain gap.”
“You said you slept with a shirt over your face.”
“Like a kidnapped man. Like cargo, Rook. And tomorrow we get Pittsburgh, where the elevator was built by a union that hated its own members. Rafe is going to get in it at four o’clock, get trapped, and he’ll miss the team dinner.”
“I’ll tell him to take the stairs.”
“He’ll listen to you. He’s from Saskatchewan, and he’ll take the stairs politely.“ His voice slowly dropped as he continued to talk. He punctuated one sentence with a yawn.
I relaxed and let him run. He had a complaint for every building in the Eastern Conference, and I’d been collecting them for five years. His commentary never bored me.
“You’re not listening,” he said.
“Dead pillow souls. Union elevator. Saskatchewan.”
“You’re listening.” He pulled my arm tighter. On the television, a documentary about caribou played at a volume neither of us could hear. He’d chosen it on purpose. He’d told me once that wildlife migration documentaries were the best thing to not-watch in a hotel, and he was right. Many of my best hours happened in front of things we weren’t watching.
As we neared midnight, Varga’s commentary thinned to single words with long gaps between them. At home, this would bethe part where I turned off the lamp, and he rolled into me. I’d nudge him off the couch and follow him upstairs to bed.
Two minutes before midnight, I moved my arm.
He let go of my forearm, one finger at a time. In five years he’d never asked me to stay past curfew. I used to think that was discipline. Now I understood it was a gift.
I dressed in the dark.
“Hey,” he said.
“Yeah.”
