First Night – Second Night – Third Night – Fourth Night – Fifth Night – Sixth Night – Home
He’s sitting cross-legged on the bed, scribbling away in his notebook. You can’t help but notice that familiar wrinkle right in the middle of his brow, the one he gets when he’s focussed on one thing and one thing only. It’s come to be—informally—his ‘Disturb Me and Feel My Wrath’ face. You should know better by now than to distract him, but sometimes he just looks so damn cute with his nose all scrunched up in concentration that it’s impossible to resist.
‘Don’t.’
Maybe he felt the bed shift as you made to lean towards him, maybe he heard your little intake of breath. Whatever the case, he hasn’t even looked up from his writing but you can see his shoulders are tensed, if he’s just waiting for you to do something stupid.
‘Come on,’ you whine, and you crawl up the bed anyway, taking his notebook into your hands and resting your head in his lap instead. ‘What are you writing, anyway? It can’t be more important than dinner, which, oh’—you make a show of looking at an invisible watch on your wrist—‘should’ve been about three hours ago.’
‘I’m not hungry,’ he says, which you know isn’t entirely true. Put a Big Mac in front of him and he’d probably devour it instantly, but when he’s so caught up in writing, things like eating and sleeping and fucking don’t seem to matter any more.
You heave a sigh but you don’t move—won’t move, not until he gives in. He doesn’t, usually, and when it seems like he won’t today, you worry for an instant that this’ll all escalate into yet another of your World Famous Stupid Fights, from which one or both of you will emerge crying. You remember the last one, when you both so stubbornly refused to back down that he wound up sleeping on the couch but you went out and stayed at your friend’s place, anyway. This time it’s different, though; you’re in a hotel with whitewashed walls and no couch to speak of, and there’s a look of defeat in his eyes when his gaze meets yours.
‘Okay,’ he says softly. ‘I’ll take a break. You want to order in?’
You say no, that there’s a pizza place just down the block and you don’t want to waste your minutes calling somewhere up to have them deliver. Really, you’re just scared of how tense things were for a moment there and hope that the change of scenery will do you both some good.
Soon you’re outside, the sidewalk slick beneath the soles of your boots from the earlier downpour. You like the smell of a city after it rains and when you tell him, he laughs and remarks that it would make a good line in a song.
As you pass the assorted thrift stores and boutiques together, you feel his hand clasp yours.
