“Jesus, Jack! Are you hurt? Look at me. Let me see your neck.” Boris grasped his chin, forced him to turn his head. Dim light flooded in from the hallway.
“I-I don’t think so.” Jack floundered against him and tried to pull away, but Boris’s grip only tightened.
“What does that mean? Here, come on, let’s turn on the light. Fuck, Idefinitelybroke that lamp?—”
Light flooded the room. Jack blinked against it. Wished he were back in bed, nursing his terrible hangover. “Why are you here?”
“Just shut up for a second, I need to make sure you’re OK. Fuck,fuck! I thought that fucking thing fuckingkilledyou?—”
“What thing?”
“Thething, Jack! The lady! The fuckinglady! The fucking time loop reset. I was just here, like, two minutes ago. Don’t you remember?”
“What?” Jack blinked at him, struggling to parse through the fog in his brain. “I-I don’t?—”
“It’s fine, OK? You’re fine. I don’t see any marks. You’re already better.” Boris collapsed onto the edge of the bed, elbows to his knees, face buried in his hands.
Hit by a sudden wave of nausea, Jack stumbled to the bathroom and only just made it to the toilet. Vomit splashed into the bowl.
Boris appeared at his side. “You’re OK, you’re OK,” he chanted, hand rubbing circles between Jack’s shoulders.
He heaved again. That hand tensed against him, then resumed its circles.
Fuck. What the fuck had happened? He remembered a dark room, cavernous eyes, the sort of bliss that could only be conjured in a dream, and Boris wielding a lamp like a spear?—
Shit. He was supposed to be keeping watch, but he’d fallen asleep and… And then what?
He wiped bile from his lips, sat back on his heels. “Did I die?”
“I—Nah, I don’t think so.”
“I couldn’t move.”
“Yeah, I think that thing—I don’t know what it did. You just froze and it, um, it latched onto your neck so I-I threw some salt at you, and I think that’s what woke you up.”
“You were yelling my name.”
“Yeah. You scared me. Real bad.”
“I fucked up.”
Boris shrugged, leaned over him to jiggle the handle of the toilet until the yellow bile swirled away. “You wanna come hang out with me in the lobby?”
Jack shook his head.
“I’m scared to leave you here, man.”
He couldn’t bear the thought of all those stairs. Was afraid to stray too far from the toilet, his bed. Nausea fluttered in his stomach. “I’ll be fine.”
“We almost died.” Boris dragged his fingers down his face, moaned. “If that loop didn’t reset?—”
Jack threw up again.
Boris spentthe rest of the night hidden under the blankets, curled around Jack, shaking. Another time, Jack might’ve relished the contact, the hard press of Boris’s body against his own (finally,finally). But his head ached and his throat throbbed. He drifted in and out of sleep, occasionally startling awake, afraid of the shadows despite the yellow lamplight. The warm body at his back, coupled with a firm embrace and murmured reassurances (“I got you, no one’s gonna hurt you now, alright?”), was just comforting enough that he could fall into sleep the same way one might fall down a well; quickly and gracelessly.
When daylight finally seeped between the curtains, Boris slipped from beneath the covers, cupped Jack’s face so very gently (and fuck if he didn’t absolutely melt into those hands), looked him in the eye, and ordered him to call the front desk if he neededanything, anything at all. He returned to the lobby pale-faced and unusually sweaty.
Jack spent rest of the day huddled under a blanket, religiously sipping the water that Boris kept bringing him, nibbling on stale soup crackers pilfered from the kitchen. The television blared.
