“Uh.” Charlie looks acutely nervous. “Do you need to take...” He glances at Simon’s bag, where he’s just stuck his pill case.
Simon’s best—his only—strategy for being anxious in public is to lock his emotions down under a layer of ice. He might feel like he’s crumbling to pieces but on the outside he’s smooth and cold.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Simon says, and walks out the door.
Charlie’s quiet as they check out of the motel, and he’s quiet for the first few minutes in the car.
“You want to tell me what’s the matter?” Charlie asks.
“Everything’s fine.” Simon doesn’t say anything for the rest of the ride.
Charlie parks the car, even though Simon asks to be dropped off at the curb. Charlie gets Simon’s suitcase out of the trunk, glaring at Simon, daring him to protest.
“Look, I’m just going to say this once and you’re going to stand there and listen, okay?” Charlie says. His fists are clenched, and that’s where Simon looks instead of attempting eye contact. “I’m glad you came with me, all right? Like, yes, obviously because of the sex but also because if you hadn’t been around, I’d have forgotten to eat and probably would have wound up sleeping on Dave’s couch. I was fucked up and you helped me. So. Thanks.”
“It wasn’t anything,” Simon says, when what he means is that he can’t stand to hear it.
Simon has never seen an airport this small. The security checkpoint is basically right there as soon as they walk through the door.
“Text me when you land,” Charlie says, his hands in his pockets.
“Sure.”
Charlie frowns. “Simon—”
“I’d better go.”
He makes himself walk through the tiny security checkpoint and into a terminal that has—he can’t quite believe it—only two gates. He buys a granola bar and sits down, and at no point does he look over his shoulder to see if Charlie’s still there.
Chapter Fifteen
By the time he boards the plane, Simon’s head is already throbbing and there’s an ominous blind spot in one eye. He’d known it was coming, but thought maybe it wouldn’t catch him this time.
He spends the first leg of the flight participating in the fun little tradition of listing all the ways he deserves this migraine. Maybe it was the Parmesan on his salad last night, or that he skipped breakfast on Saturday. Too much coffee, not enough sleep, that glass of wine he had last week. Cigarette smoke at the car show. Pollen. Existing on a planet that sunlight can reach.
And, most annoying of all, even good stress—like whatever he and Charlie were doing—still counts as stress, at least as far as his body cares. He should have known he wasn’t getting out of this weekend without a migraine.
By the time he lands in Phoenix, he’s already put on his darkest sunglasses and taken his emergency migraine meds and an extra anti-nausea pill, because the thing about airplanes is that there just isn’t anywhere reasonable to throw up. He figured that out at fifteen, on the flight home from his oldest brother’s wedding, his mother’s tentative hand on the back of his neck as she apologized to the flight attendants.
The meds don’t completely wipe out the headache. When helands in New York, half his forehead is numb and there’s a grenade of dull pain behind his left eye that detonates whenever light leaks in around the edges of his sunglasses.
By some minor miracle, he manages to look at his phone screen long enough to find the address of his sublet. He reads it to a cabbie who keeps looking in the rearview mirror like maybe he recognizes Simon, or maybe just like he’s worried Simon’s going to be sick in his cab. The cabbie takes turns too quickly, steps on the brakes too abruptly, leans on the horn. Charlie never does any of those things.
When he finally gets inside the apartment, it looks how it did in the pictures—minimal and tidy—and that’s all he notices before he collapses on top of a fluffy white duvet and falls asleep.
He wakes up to his phone buzzing in his pocket. And since he has no idea how this apartment is laid out, he can’t tell if the light slanting through the window is dawn or dusk; he doesn’t know if he’s been asleep one hour or ten. The migraine’s mostly gone, but he’s wrung out.
Wincing at the brightness of the screen, he checks his phone and sees that it’s the middle of the morning on Tuesday. He slept for over twelve hours. He’s grimy from sleeping in his clothes. His phone buzzes again. Jamie’s texting, but Simon’s head is too fragile to look at a screen for long, so he uses voice controls to make a call.
“Sorry,” he says when Jamie picks up. “Just woke up.”
“You went completely radio silent for twenty-four hours.”
Simon texted Jamie from the airport to tell him he was heading to New York earlier than he expected. And then, not wanting to answer Jamie’s questions about the change in plans, he’d put his phone into airplane mode a little earlier than necessary.
“Migraine,” Simon says. “I should have let you know when I landed. Sorry.”
“You want to tell me what happened?” When Simon doesn’t say anything, Jamie goes on. “Theaters don’t just randomly start rehearsals a week early without any warning. We both know this.”
