“Because…,” she says, searching for an answer. “Because now that I know what we’re working with here, there are a whole lot of other movies you should see before my rejected audition film.” She turns up the volume on the TV. “Starting withMurder on the Orient Express.”
As they watch, Hugo keeps shifting around on the cot, which creaks and groans beneath his weight. Eventually, he sits up so that his head is blocking the entire screen.
“Uh…,” Mae says, and he scrunches down again.
“Sorry. It’s just…I’m too close. It’s hard to watch.”
She glances over at the sprawling bed and the stack of pillows beside her. “You can sit up here if you want,” she says, trying to sound breezy. “Just till the end of the movie.”
“Yeah?” he asks, sitting up again.
Mae swallows. “Yeah.”
The bed is so big that her half barely dips when he climbs on. There are several pillows between them, but they’re still careful to keep to the edges, both with their arms folded across their chests, eyes fixed on the TV—though Mae can no longer concentrate on the mystery unfolding on the screen, not when Hugo is so close.
He glances over at her. “Do you still feel like you’re on a train?”
Until that moment, she didn’t notice, but now she realizes she can feel the phantom motion beneath her too. She nods.
“I wonder if tomorrow night we’ll feel like we’re on a hotel bed,” he says.
She smiles. “I don’t think it works like that.”
“Who actually uses this many pillows?” He tosses a few of them off the edge, breaking down the barrier between them. “It’s like being stuck inside a marshmallow.”
Outside, the rain is still pinging against the window, but Mae is distracted by the newly empty space between them. She starts to run through her list of reminders again:He just broke up with his girlfriend. They won’t see each other after this week. He lives on the other side of an ocean. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.But this kind of vigilance is exhausting, and already her eyelids are growing heavy in the flickering dark.
Sometime later in the night, she wakes to find their hands clasped between them.
Though it might just as easily have been a dream.
Hugo’s eyes flash openat the sound of his mobile.
It’s only after he’s pulled his hand from Mae’s to silence the ringing that it registers he was holding her hand at all. He blinks, still bleary eyed, wondering when that happened.
Across the room, the TV is still on, but it now features a man in an apron using a machine to blend vegetables, blaring on about all the many features in a flat American accent. Hugo rubs his eyes, then reaches for his mobile, and when he realizes the call came from his parents, he sighs.
It’s a little after two in the morning, which means it’s eight o’clock at home. For a second, he misses it fiercely: his brothers and sisters around the kitchen table, his dad frying bacon, and his mum already on her third cup of coffee. Then a heavy dread settles over him at the thought of actually ringing them back. He slips out of bed and into the bathroom, closing the door gently behind him.
“Haven’t you ever heard of time zones?” he says when their faces appear on the video chat. They always look slightly befuddled by this mode of communication, moving their heads in birdlike fashion as they both try to center themselves on the small screen.
“We got your message about the wallet,” his dad says, “and I have to say, I’m disappointed in you, son.”
“Look,” Hugo says with a sigh, “it was an accident. I just—”
“Now I owe your mum five quid.”
“Frank,” his mum says, giving his shoulder a smack.
“And another five to Alfie.”
Hugo groans.
“This is why I told you to get a money belt,” his mum says, still glaring at his dad in a way that makes it clear she’s forgotten Hugo can see her too. She turns back to the screen. “I read an article that says everything is safer that way.”
“Right, but I wasn’t pickpocketed,” he says, though maybe it would’ve been better to be mugged than to be irresponsible. At least then it wouldn’t have been his fault. He sits down on the closed seat of the toilet. “I just forgot it. Stupid, I know.”
His mum simply nods, as if she’d been expecting as much. The lack of surprise on her face only makes it worse. “Are you okay, darling?” she asks, and for some reason, this makes him feel like crying.
