by Hank Edwards
Shit. Now what?
Will rolled onto his belly and did an Army crawl away from the window until he’d reached the far side of the bed. He got up and hurried into the bathroom where he sat on the lid of the toilet with his head in his hands.
Rex Garland was staying at his hotel.
Rex Garland was having a hard time with something and had shouted at one of his team.
Rex Garland had more than likely seen Will standing in his boxer briefs at the window and watching him.
Carter was going to love this story.
“You have got to be fucking kidding me,” Carter said.
“I can assure you, I’m not,” Will said, giving the phone propped up on the desk a raised-eyebrows glance. “Rex Garland is staying in my hotel.”
“The Rex Garland?” Carter narrowed his eyes. “You’re sure it was him?”
Will gave him a stone-faced stare. “Honey, I know Rex Garland.”
“Yeah, I’ll give you that,” Carter said. Then his face brightened. “Are you going to go knock on his door and fanboy all over him?”
“Um, that’s going to be a hard no,” Will said and quickly looked away from the phone back to his laptop, where he was trying to find the best route to take to get to The Side-Eye.
“You’re acting funny.”
“Hm? What?” Will pretended to be studying the same map he’d been looking at for several minutes.
“What happened? Something happened. Out with it.”
Will sat back in the chair, hands on his head as he stared up at the ceiling and groaned. “I don’t want to tell you!”
Carter gasped. “Oh my God, you did go to his room and fanboy all over him!” He made tsking sounds. “Oh, Big Willie.”
“No, I did not do that,” Will snapped. He took a breath and let it out before returning his gaze to the phone. “It’s really hot in my room because the heating unit won’t stop blowing.”
“Sounds dirty,” Carter said.
“Believe me when I tell you it is not, in any way, dirty,” Will said. “That’s why I’m wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts right now. I called down to the desk, and they sent someone up who managed to get the heat down to something like eighty-two degrees, but…”
“You’ve got hot blood in you, and every degree above sixty-nine is like five degrees,” Carter said in a monotone.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been that specific with my temperature complaints,” Will grumbled. “Did you just say that so you could say ‘sixty-nine’ aloud?”
“Maybe.” Carter grinned. “Anyway, enough about me. Back to the hot maintenance man. Did you sixty-nine him?”
“Um, he was kind of gross, and, no, we did not engage in sixty-nine.”
“Probably a good move on your part.”
“Probably.”
“So it’s really hot in your room, so you….” Carter’s expression went slack. “Were you standing at the window naked, and he saw you?”
“What? No!” Will shifted his gaze back to the laptop screen.
“Oh my God, you can’t look at me,” Carter nearly shrieked. “You were naked! He saw you naked? Did he look happy about it? I bet he loves bears. He seems like a bear lover to me. Did he whip it out and start masturbating right there on the spot like in a porn?”
Will thumped his head down on the desktop. “Oh my God. Please stop talking.”
“You have to tell me what happened right this fucking minute before I explode!”
If only he would explode. That might save Will years of embarrassment as Carter brought the whole thing up over and over again.
“I wasn’t naked,” Will said without lifting his head.
“Really? Well, shoot.”
Will picked up his head and looked at the phone. “I was in my underwear.”
“Yes!” Carter danced around with the phone in his hand, giving Will a blurry view of his apartment living room. “It was a porn. I’m so happy right now I can’t stop smiling. So did he come on his chest and then run his fingers through it and lick them clean?”
“Please stop talking,” Will groused.
“Come on, give me the deets.”
“The deets are as follows,” Will said and held up his index finger. “One, my room will be overly warm for probably the length of my stay, and there are no other rooms available because half of them are booked into January and the other half are being remodeled.”
“Too bad you couldn’t have gotten a remodeled room, am I right?”
Will glared at him in silence.
Carter cleared his throat. “Sorry. Please continue with your countdown. Or count-up.”
“Two.” Will held up a second finger. “I have a window that opens to allow in cool, fresh air.”
“Oh, that’s a nice feature.”
Will nodded. “I agree.” He held up a third finger. “Three, I stripped down to my boxer briefs and stood in front of the open window to cool down. That’s when I realized Rex Garland was in the first-floor room directly across from me. His room has a sliding door to a small patio, and he was out there talking with someone.”
“How’d he look?”
“Rex?”
Carter made a face. “No, the stranger who was with him. Yes, Rex!”
Will smiled. “He looked good. Really, really good.” His smile faded, and he cocked his head. “But he was upset about something the other guy was saying. I couldn’t make out any of their conversation, but I heard Rex when he practically shouted something like, ‘I know I have to get it done’ or something like that.”
“Huh, wonder what that was about,” Carter said.
“Yeah, me too.”
“So any more fingers you want to show me, or are you done now?”
Will fixed the phone with a scowl and held up another finger. “Four, Rex may have looked up at my window and possibly seen me standing in my underwear, but I can’t be sure. Either way, I dropped down out of sight and crawled to the other side of the bed.”
Carter pursed his lips and nodded. “Classy.”
“Not my finest hour, I admit,” Will said.
“Well, even if he did see you, I’m sure he’d never recognize you again, right?” Carter said.
Will nodded as a tiny flame of hope flickered in his chest. “Right. He was pretty far away.”
“Maybe he didn’t have his contacts in?” Carter suggested.
“Right!” Will said, feeling even better. “And who knows? Maybe the sun was reflecting off the window glass.”
“There you go,” Carter said. “That’s the spirit.”
A horrendous buzzing sound erupted on Carter’s end of the call, making them both flinch.
“You still haven’t gotten your door buzzer fixed?” Will asked.
“I’m on the list,” Carter said, then waggled his eyebrows. “That’s my Grindr date, baby.”
Will smiled and shook his head. “You’re incorrigible.”
“Don’t knock it till you try it.”
“Be careful,” Will said.
“Hey, it’s me.” Carter smiled. “You be careful out there in Montana.”
Will sighed. “I’m in New York state.”
“Same. Love you, William.”
“Love you back, Carter. Text me later so I know you’re okay.”
“I’ll send you all the gory details.” The buzzer sounded again, and Carter rolled his eyes. “Ugh, he’s so needy. Bye.”
Will laughed and disconnected the call. He looked at the map to the Side-Eye bar some more, then closed his laptop. Tonight was definitely not the right night for him to go see Rex perform, but definitely soon. He turned off the desk lamp, and darkness consumed the room. The only illumination was the glow from the courtyard lamps coming in through the sheer curtain.
Moving to the window, Will pushed aside the curtain and looked down at the sliding door to Rex’s room. All the lights were off, and Will thought about one of Rex’s songs titled “Lights Out, No One’s Home.”
The air coming in the open window was deliciously crisp, and Will breathed in deep. There was a hint of snow in the air, and he smiled. He really was a winter person. Carter liked to tease him about moving to the Arctic, but Will had always run a little hot. And now with the extra weight, he really could imagine living in the Great White North.
Now that he’d thought about Rex’s song, the lyrics were running through his mind.
I’ve been knocking at the
Door to your heart so long,
And all I get in response is
Lights out, no one’s home.
A walk to one of the nearby restaurants for dinner and while listening to Rex’s latest album through his headphones sounded like the perfect ending for this day. He left the window open and went about getting dressed, humming Rex’s song.
2
A couple of days later, Will entered the alcove in the hotel lobby where the breakfast bar was arranged. It was included in the price of his room, and the food was surprisingly better than Will had expected. He had started eating a big breakfast and taking a couple pieces of fruit to the office with him for lunch. The only problem with that setup was extreme hunger by the time he got back to the hotel.
There were a couple of other people meandering back and forth between the many offerings of the buffet, but Will ignored them. He didn’t have the energy to meet anyone’s eye until he’d had a cup of coffee. Meeting someone’s gaze might mean an exchange of head nods or, even worse, spoken greetings.
He scooped scrambled eggs onto his plate and reached for the spoon to the hash browns. The man in front of him turned back and reached for the spoon at the same time, and his fingers closed around Will’s hand, trapping both of them there holding the utensil.
“Oh, sorry,” Will said, and tried to pull his hand away, but the man held tight.
“I guess since you’re on the bottom that means you beat me to it.”
The familiar deep voice brought Will’s head up with a snap.
Rex Garland smiled at him. All the air left Will’s lungs in a huff of disbelief, taking along his ability to think and any possible capacity of speech. He stared at Rex’s handsome face, taking in the careful messiness of his dark hair, the neatly trimmed beard around full lips, and warm brown eyes with fine lines at the corners. White wireless headphones nestled in his ears, and Will wondered what Rex Garland listened to when he wasn’t singing.
“Sorry, guess I should let you get your hashies,” Rex said and released Will’s hand.
Will thought he made a sound, something like, “Garmph,” but he couldn’t be sure. His hand seemed disconnected from his arm as it lifted the spoon and dropped a heap of hash browns on top of his eggs.
Rex lifted perfectly trimmed eyebrows as he looked at Will’s plate.
“Going for the budget farmer’s omelet, I see,” Rex said.
“What?” Will couldn’t look away from the man.
“Farmer’s omelets have hash browns folded right inside,” Rex said, then shrugged. “It was a stretch for a joke, since you have scrambled eggs and not an omelet.” He widened his eyes, and his smile widened. “And I’m rambling because I haven’t had coffee yet.”
Will managed a breathless laugh that sounded more like a wheeze. “Yeah. Me too. Or neither. Me neither.” He made a face and finally looked away. “Either?”
“Either?” Rex said, pronouncing it “eye-ther” and sending a blast of lust right to Will’s groin.
“Let’s call the whole thing off!” Will practically shouted.
A horrendously loud barrage of laughter burst out of him that sounded like a donkey in labor.
During a breech birth.
In an echo chamber.
He clamped his mouth shut as shame practically lit his face on fire.
“Sorry,” Will whispered.
Rex chuckled. “No worries.” He plopped some hash browns on top of the scrambled eggs on his own plate and winked. “Now you can tell everyone you started a trend. The budget farmer’s omelet.”
Will smiled and restrained himself from laughing. “Yeah. I’m trendy.”
Rex looked him up and down with a smirk. “I can see that.” He lifted a hand and turned his back, humming as he walked away and leaving Will standing speechless at the breakfast buffet.
What the hell just happened?
Will still hadn’t fully recovered from his breakfast run-in with Rex by the end of the day.
He couldn’t bring himself to tell Carter about the interaction, not yet, anyway. Carter would completely ridicule Will for how he’d reacted, and Will wasn’t yet ready to share that humiliation. Also, a small part of him wanted to savor the meeting for a time, keep it inside his chest like a delicious secret, even if he had acted like a babbling idiot.
The room was stifling when he walked in, and it made him gasp. The housekeeper, Doreen, must have closed the window after she’d cleaned his room. He hurried to the window and pushed it aside, letting in the beautifully cold air.
On his second day in the hotel, Will had rushed out of his room and nearly knocked over the housekeeping cart parked outside his door. Doreen had poked her head out of the room across the hall and apologized, and they shared a laugh before Will introduced himself and let her know he’d be staying there up to Christmas.
He’d have to remember to ask her to leave the window open when she was done.
The lamps in the empty courtyard illuminated the light snowfall, and Will smiled. Even if traffic would be in a snarl tomorrow morning, he did hope they got more snow soon.
He changed out of his work clothes and pulled up a restaurant app on his phone to pick a new place to eat. A rib joint had a number of positive reviews, and Will decided to give it a try. After one more look out his window—no sign of Rex—he ventured out.
The rib place was close by, and the food was amazing. When Will got back to the hotel, he typed the restaurant’s name in a note-taking app on his phone. A brief consideration of driving to the Side-Eye to catch Rex’s performance was quickly dismissed after a healthy burp and a swirl of snow against the screen of the window.
Will promised himself he’d get to the Side-Eye sometime soon as he stripped down to his underwear and stretched out on the bed. In minutes, he was asleep.
Sometime later, he awoke to singing. No, that wasn’t right. It was more like someone playing guitar and practicing a song. Where was he?
Memory returned, and he popped his eyes open, wide awake as if hit by a bucket of cold water.
Rex Garland.
Holy hell, that voice. Though it was tainted with exasperation, the velvet timbre soothed Will’s sleep-addled brain. The room was dimly lit by the lowest setting on the lamp farthest from the window. A frigid breeze gusted in the open window, making Will shiver in delight.
He got up and scrounged through the dresser drawers for a pair of sleep pants and a T-shirt, then switched off the lamp. The courtyard lamps cast their gentle glow through the window, drawing Will closer.
“Heart filled with season…” An aggravated strum of strings followed by, “Fuck me.”
Will’s heart beat faster as he lowered himself into the desk chair by the window. He slowly leaned forward until he was able to peer down into the courtyard and see the patios across from him. Rex sat at the café table outside his room, guitar in hand and head bowed down. He wore a black leather jacket over a flannel shirt and faded jeans. The snow had fallen steadily while Will had been asleep, accumulating at least two inches so far, and flakes dusted the shoulders of Rex’s jacket and the dark tangles of his hair.
“Fuck this fucking song,” Rex grumbled, voice carrying perfectly through the crisp and quiet air. “And fuck Christmas right up its evergreen-scented ass with a candy cane.”
Will snorted a quiet laugh, but cut it short when Rex looked up and directly at his window. A spark of panic sent Will’s pulse racing as he leaned back in the chair and out of view.
“Record a fucking Christmas album, they said,�
� Rex groused. “It’ll be great, they said. Do some covers and a couple of original songs, what could be easier, they said.”
Will’s mind raced as he sat in the dark, hands clinging tight to the arms of the chair. He was listening in on Rex’s creative process as he worked on a Christmas love song. Carter was never going to believe this. Hell, Will was having a hard time believing it himself. He checked the time on the clock radio across the room and was surprised to find it was shortly after midnight. Rex must have finished his set at the Side-Eye and come right back to the hotel.
Waves of gentle affection pulsed through Will at the thought. Instead of staying at the bar and drinking and being hit on by a bunch of hot guys, Rex had come back to write his song. This was a glimpse of the man underneath the image, so different from the laughing party-boy picture Will saw on Instagram and Twitter. This Rex was a serious songwriter, and Will’s attraction maybe turned a little more toward desire.
Rex softly played the guitar, humming to himself. It wasn’t a song Will was familiar with, and he could absolutely identify each of Rex’s songs by hearing just a few chords. From what Will could tell, Rex had the melody of the song but was having trouble with the lyrics. Will hummed quietly along with Rex, his head trying to make sense of what his heart was feeling.
“Something something Christmastime,” Rex sang, and even the goddamn nonsense lyrics sounded amazing.
The music stopped, and the resulting silence sounded lonely. Will eased up to the edge of the chair to be able to see the patio. Rex slouched in the metal chair, legs stretched out, head tipped back, and eyes closed. He hugged the guitar to him like a child with his favorite stuffed animal. Snow swirled around him, some landing on and sliding off the instrument’s polished wood.
After some time watching Rex sitting there unmoving, Will started to feel like a creeper. He needed to get some sleep if he was going to be worth anything at work the next day. Or, rather, later that day.
Sending a silent wish down to Rex for inspiration, Will returned to his bed and climbed under the covers. He quietly hummed the melody Rex had been strumming, his nearly sleeping mind putting words to it even as sleep circled him. He mumbled them and thought briefly he should get up and write them down, but his tired mind had other ideas, and sleep swallowed him.
