Chapter 2: The Morning After the Night Before
The first thing I became aware of was the cold. The empty space beside me in the bed was a stark, linen-wrapped expanse of chilled air. I stirred, the silk sheet slipping from my bare shoulder. My body protested in a series of delicious, aching reminders. Then my eyes opened.
He was already dressed.
David stood silhouetted against the wide hotel window, the morning light bleeding around his tall frame in a hazy gold corona. He wore his rumpled trousers from last night and a clean white t-shirt, the sleeves straining slightly over his biceps. A cigarette dangled from his lips, unlit, as he stared down at the city below, his hands shoved deep in his pockets. The posture was so familiar it made my chest constrict: the broad shoulders slightly hunched, the quiet intensity of his gaze fixed on something miles away. The whiskey glass from last night sat abandoned on the windowsill beside him, a lone amber sentinel.
I didn’t move. Just watched the careful rise and fall of his back as he breathed. The scent of him—soap, clean cotton, and the faint, clinging ghost of last night’s sweat and sex—still clung to the sheets around me. It was a stark contrast to the crisp, sterile air of the room, now flooded with unforgiving daylight that exposed every detail: the twisted sheets, my discarded dress a puddle of black on the cream carpet, the two empty glasses on the nightstand.
And the note.
A torn scrap of hotel stationery, crumpled and hastily discarded next to the lamp. I didn’t need to pick it up to know what it said. I’d seen it last night when I’d gone to the bathroom, his hurried scribble illuminated by the digital glow of his phone screen: Sera - call you tomorrow. Promise. D. A call he hadn’t made in the end, choosing instead to lose himself in me.
I pushed myself up on my elbows, the sheet pooling at my waist. The movement drew his attention.
He turned his head, just slightly. The unlit cigarette bobbed between his lips. “Morning,” he said, his voice gravelly from sleep and disuse. The Lancashire in it was thicker in the mornings, a soft, rolling burr.
“You’re up.” My own voice sounded small, scratchy.
“Never really went down.” He finally took the cigarette from his mouth, tapping it against the window frame. He still hadn’t lit it. “Bad habit, thinking. Worse company for it.”
He turned fully then, leaning back against the glass. The light framed him, making the details of his face hard to read—the shadows under his eyes, the set of his mouth. But his gaze was clear, and it swept over me, a slow, appraising look that felt different in the cold light of day. Less hungry. More… cataloguing.
I fought the instinct to pull the sheet higher. My insecurities, usually so well-managed, stretched and yawned awake beside me. The narrowness of my hips, the slightness of my breasts—all felt suddenly, painfully apparent under that blue, morning-after scrutiny.
“You’re staring,” I said, aiming for lightness. It landed with a thud.
“Aye.” He didn’t deny it. A faint, rueful smile touched his lips. “Just trying to work out if you’re real.”
“Feels pretty real from here.” I shifted, the ache between my thighs a blunt, physical confirmation.
His smile didn’t reach his eyes. “Things often do, in the moment.” He pushed away from the window and walked toward the bed, his footsteps silent on the plush carpet. He stopped by the nightstand, his eyes falling on the crumpled note. A muscle ticked in his jaw. He picked it up, balled it tighter, and tossed it into the empty whiskey glass.
The gesture was so final, so dismissive. And yet, he’d written it.
He sat on the edge of the mattress, the dip of his weight rolling me gently toward him. The distance between us was both inches and miles. He smelled of soap and toothpaste, but beneath it, I could still smell us—the musk of skin on skin, the sharp tang of passion now gone stale. He reached out, his fingers brushing a strand of copper hair away from my cheek. His touch was careful. Almost clinical.
“You alright?” he asked.
It was such a mundane, terrible question. I wanted to laugh. No, I’m naked in a hotel bed with a man who was writing notes to his ex while I slept. I’m fantastic.
“Bit sore,” I said instead, and was rewarded with a genuine, fleeting grin that transformed his face.
“Good.” His thumb traced the line of my cheekbone. “Means I did my job.”
I caught his wrist. His skin was warm, his pulse a steady thrum against my fingers. “Your job?”
“Last night. You needed… I needed…” He trailed off, the grin fading. He looked down at where my hand held his, his long fingers curling slightly. “A reset. A reminder of something that wasn’t fucking misery.”
“And was I? A reminder?” The question hung in the air, fragile and dangerous.
His eyes met mine, and for the first time that morning, I saw a flicker of the previous night’s intensity. “You’re always a reminder, Jill. Of what I’m not supposed to want.”
The honesty of it was a sucker punch. I let go of his wrist. “Sera,” I stated flatly.
He flinched, just a tiny recoil of the shoulders, but I saw it. “Sera is… a fucking car crash in slow motion.” He sighed, a heavy, weary sound that seemed to come from his bones. “You know this. You’ve seen the wreckage.”
I had. The frantic phone calls, the screaming matches overheard in hallway whispers, the way he’d show up on my doorstep at three AM smelling of betrayal and cheap gin. Sera was his beautiful, toxic whirlwind. I was the calm after. Or maybe just the eye of the storm.
“And last night?” I pushed.
“Last night,” he said slowly, deliberately, “was about you and me. And a bottle of very good bourbon.” He leaned forward, bracing his hands on either side of my hips, caging me in. His face was inches from mine. “Don’t cheapen it by bringing her into this bed. She wasn’t here.”
“Her name was on a note ten inches from where you fucked me.”
The vulgarity hung in the air, sharp and cold. David’s eyes darkened, but he didn’t pull back. “I wrote that before you arrived. When I was alone and pissed and thinking the world was ending. Then you walked in.” His gaze dropped to my mouth. “And you have a terrible habit of making me forget how to end the world.”
It was a good line. A very David line. Charismatic, disarming, flavored with just enough self-deprecation to feel like a confession. I wanted to believe it.
My stomach growled, a loud, ungainly sound in the tense quiet.
The spell broke. David’s serious expression melted into a genuine, surprised laugh. It was a warm, rich sound that filled the too-quiet room. “Christ. Someone’s hungry.”
“Someone didn’t have dinner,” I muttered, feeling heat rise to my cheeks.
He stood up, the sudden movement a relief. “Right then. Eggs?” He was already moving toward the phone on the desk, his energy shifting, compartmentalizing. Last night was being folded away, boxed up. “Bacon. A mountain of toast. Coffee the colour of my soul.”
“Black and bitter?” I offered, swinging my legs out of bed. The cool air hit my bare skin, and I quickly gathered the sheet around me, a toga of regret and silken defiance.
He glanced back at me, the phone receiver in his hand, and his smile softened. “Something like that.” His eyes swept over the sheet-draped form, and for a second, the mask slipped. I saw not just appreciation, but a flicker of something like tenderness. “You look good in my sheets, Tallentire.”
“I look good in most things,” I retorted, padding toward the bathroom. “Order the eggs. I’m ravenous.”
I closed the bathroom door and leaned against it, letting the sheet drop. My reflection in the vast, lit mirror was a study in contradictions. Hair tangled from his hands, a faint red mark on my shoulder from his mouth, eyes too bright, shadowed underneath. The woman looking back at me seemed both utterly sure and completely shattered. I’d crossed a line with him, again. A line we’d drawn in the sand years ago and kept redrawing, each time a little fainter.
The shower was a brutal, necessary blessing. Scalding water pummeled the aches from my muscles and washed the scent of him from my skin. I scrubbed until my skin was pink, but some sensations lingered—the phantom pressure of his hands, the echo of his voice in my ear. When I emerged, wrapped in a thick, white hotel robe, the room smelled of coffee and frying butter.
David had opened the curtains wide. The city sprawled beneath us, a relentless, glittering panorama. He’d set a small table by the window with two covered silver domes, a carafe of coffee, and a single, stolen flower from the lobby arrangement stuck in a water glass. He was pouring coffee, his back to me.
“You stole a flower,” I said.
“Liberated it,” he corrected without turning. “It was looking profoundly bored. Milk, no sugar, right?”
“Right.” I settled into the chair, tugging the robe tighter. The domesticity of it was unnerving. We’d shared a bed countless times—as friends, collapsing after parties, nursing hangovers, offering platonic comfort. But we’d never done this. The morning after. The breakfast.
He placed the cup in front of me and sat down, lifting the dome off his plate to reveal a heart-stopping pile of eggs, bacon, sausages, and tomatoes. He’d even cut the toast into soldiers.
I stared at my own plate, then at him. “You remembered.”
He shrugged, picking up a fork. “You eat like a twelve-year-old at a sleepover when you’re hungover. Toast soldiers. It’s endearing.”
We ate in a silence that was almost companionable. The food was good. The coffee was better. The world outside the window continued its indifferent march. For a few minutes, it was possible to pretend.
“What now?” I asked finally, breaking the fragile peace. I wasn’t looking at him. I was watching a tiny black cab navigate the grid of streets far below.
He didn’t answer immediately. He finished a bite of bacon, wiped his mouth with a napkin. “I’ve got a reading at two. The Coppola project.”
“And Sera?”
A long pause. The clink of his knife against the plate. “Sera,” he said, the name a weary sigh, “is flying back to LA tonight. The car crash… it’s reached the junkyard stage. Just the clean-up left.”
“And you’re the clean-up crew?”
“I’m the one who calls the wreckers.” He met my gaze then, his eyes clear and utterly tired. “It’s done, Jill. Truly. Last night was… a punctuation mark. A full stop.”
“On her? Or on us?”
The question surprised even me. It hung there, raw and exposed.
David put his fork down carefully. He studied me, his head tilted slightly. “There is no ‘us’ to put a stop to, is there? There’s you and there’s me. And there’s last night. And there’s breakfast.” He gestured to the table. “And then there’s you going back to your life, and me going to a reading.”
It was so precisely, painfully logical. It was the script we’d always followed. The one that kept things safe, and clean, and ultimately lonely.
I nodded, looking back out the window. “Right.”
He reached across the table, his hand covering mine where it rested beside my coffee cup. His skin was warm, his grip firm. “But the full stop isn’t a period. It’s…” He searched for the word. “It’s an exclamation point. On you. On me being a fucking idiot for waiting this long.”
My heart stumbled. “David…”
“I’m not asking for anything,” he said quickly, his thumb stroking the back of my hand. “I know the rules. I invented half of them. But don’t pretend last night was just the bourbon. Or just the misery. Don’t pretend you don’t feel it too—this fucking… gravity between us.”
I couldn’t breathe. The city outside blurred into streaks of light and motion. The gravity. That was it exactly. The inexorable, exhausting pull that had kept us orbiting each other for years, sometimes colliding, always burning.
I pulled my hand away. “Gravity hurts when you hit the ground.”
He leaned back, the wounded look flashing across his face before he could hide it behind a sip of coffee. “Aye. It does.”
The rest of breakfast was finished with a quieter, more subdued politeness. We talked about the Coppola project, about a script I was considering, about everything and nothing. The conversation was a life raft, and we clung to it.
An hour later, I was dressed in last night’s clothes, my hair still damp at the ends. My bag was on my shoulder. We stood by the door, a cavern of awkward space between us.
“I’ll call you,” he said. Not I’ll call you later, just I’ll call you. A statement of vague intention.
“You better,” I said, forcing a smile. “Who else will bring you bourbon at two in the morning?”
He didn’t smile back. He just looked at me, a long, searching look that seemed to take inventory of every freckle, every flaw. Then he stepped forward and kissed me. It wasn’t like the kisses from the night before. It was soft. Brief. A seal on something. A promise of nothing.
“Take care of yourself, Tallentire,” he murmured against my lips.
“You too, Thewlis.”
I left without looking back. The elevator doors slid shut, sealing me in a silent, mirrored box. My reflection showed a woman in a crumpled black dress, leaving a hotel room at eleven AM. The gravity he’d spoken of was already reasserting itself, a dull, familiar ache in the center of my chest. He’d call. Or he wouldn’t. Sera would fly to LA, or she wouldn’t. And I would go back to my life, to my scripts and my solo dinners and my pristine, silent apartment, where the only ghosts were my own.
The elevator pinged, the doors opening to the bustling, marble-clad lobby. The real world rushed in with its sounds and smells and judgments. I walked through it, my head high, the ghost of his touch on my skin already beginning to fade, leaving behind only the faint, stubborn bruise of his words.
An exclamation point.
The lobby air was a different kind of cold. Sterile, perfumed, thick with the quiet judgment of marble and potted plants. My heels clicked a sharp, too-loud rhythm on the floor as I walked toward the doors. Every sound felt amplified. The murmur of the concierge, the sigh of the revolving door, the city’s growl waiting outside. I kept my eyes straight ahead, a familiar act of contained composure. My body ached in quiet places.
A doorman tipped his hat. “Cab, madam?”
I nodded, not trusting my voice. The cool leather seat of the black cab was a relief. I gave my address in Soho, then leaned back and closed my eyes. The driver’s partition was up. The silence was my own. I replayed his words on a loop. An exclamation point. Not a full stop. What the fuck did that even mean? It was the kind of poetic bullshit he excelled at, designed to sound profound while committing to absolutely nothing.
My phone buzzed in my bag. Once. Twice. I let it go to voicemail. It would be my agent, or my sister, or the producer from the Netflix thing. Normal things. The world insisting on its due. I wasn’t ready for normal. Normal felt like a foreign language. The cab lurched into traffic, and the motion jolted the memory of his hands on my hips, the exact pressure.
I opened my eyes. We were stopped at a light. A newsstand sprawled to my left, a riot of glossy headlines and stark black type. My gaze, unfocused, drifted over it. Then snagged. There, nestled between a celebrity weight loss story and a political scandal, was a familiar face. David. Or, a version of him. A paparazzi shot, grainy and off-balance. He was coming out of some club, head down, hand up against the flash. His face was drawn, tense. The headline was bold, brutal: THEWLIS IN TEARS AS SERA JETS OFF: “IT’S OVER FOR GOOD.”
The light changed. The cab pulled away. The newsstand vanished behind us. My heart was a frantic, caged thing beating against my ribs. She’s flying back to LA tonight. He’d said that over eggs. The car crash had reached the junkyard. Just the clean-up.
But the photo wasn’t from last night. The clothes were wrong. The setting was wrong. That photo was from at least three days ago. He’d been out. He’d been seen. He’d been in tears. And then he’d called me.
The gravity he’d spoken of twisted suddenly, turning into a sickening pull deep in my gut. I wasn’t an exclamation point. I was a footnote. A distraction he’d reached for in the messy, public aftermath of his latest disaster. The ache in my body morphed into something cold and sharp. He’d used the raw, authentic wreckage of his very public breakup as the foreplay for our night. My fingers dug into the leather seat.
My phone buzzed again. This time, I fumbled for it. The screen glowed with a notification. A text. Not from my agent. From David.
Did you get home alright?
Five simple words. The banality of it was insulting. As if we’d shared a pleasant drink. As if he hadn’t just turned my insides out and left me to parse tabloid headlines for the truth. I stared at the screen, the cab’s motion making the streetlights smear past the window. The city felt alien, a grid of indifferent lights.
I typed a reply. Deleted it. Typed another. The cursor blinked, a silent dare.
The cab turned onto my street. The familiar red-brick façade of my building offered no comfort. It looked like a set, something staged for a life I was supposed to be living. I overpaid the driver and stepped onto the pavement. The air here smelled of wet concrete and takeaway, a comforting, unchanging London smell.
My flat was dark and quiet. I dropped my bag by the door, the sound too loud in the emptiness. I didn’t turn on the lights. I walked to the kitchen, poured a glass of water, and stood drinking it in the dark. The silence was a physical presence. It pressed in, asking questions I didn’t want to answer.
My phone screen lit up the counter where I’d tossed it. Another text.
Jill?
A single question mark. The universal symbol for I know you’re there. I picked up the phone. My reflection in the dark window stared back, a pale ghost superimposed over the city lights. I looked exhausted. I looked like someone who’d believed a beautiful lie at two in the morning.
I called him.
He answered on the second ring, his voice cautious. “Hey.”
I didn’t say hello. “The newsstand at the corner of Park and Brook. Have you seen it?”
A beat of silence. I could hear traffic, the echo of a space that wasn’t a hotel room. He was outside. Maybe walking to his reading. “What about it?”
“You’re on the cover. In tears. With Sera.” My voice was flat, devoid of the tremor I felt inside. “The headline says she jetted off. That it’s over for good.”
Another silence. Longer this time. I heard him exhale, a slow, deliberate sound. “Yeah.”
“Yeah?” The word cracked. “You were crying over her. In public. Three days ago.”
“It wasn’t… it wasn’t like that.”
“Then what was it like, David?” The question hung in the dark kitchen. “Was it the kind of crying that happens before you call your best friend for a rebound? Or after?”
“Don’t.” His voice was low, a warning. “Don’t reduce it to that.”
“Then give me the full equation. Because from here, it adds up pretty cleanly. Your grand love affair explodes. You’re devastated. You get photographed looking properly wrecked. And then…” I gestured at nothing, the phone tight against my ear. “You call for a reset. You needed a reminder of something that wasn’t fucking misery. That’s what you said. Was I just the most convenient ‘not misery’ you could find?”
He was quiet for so long I thought the line had dropped. Then, a raw, shaky breath. “You think it’s that simple?”
“I think you make complicated things so you don’t have to look at the simple, ugly truth.” I took a gulp of water. It did nothing. “The truth is you used me. Again.”
“Is that what last night felt like?” His voice dropped, stripped of its usual surety. “Being used?”
The question caught me off guard. The memories flooded back, unbidden. The feel of his mouth, the desperation in his touch, the way he’d looked at me like I was the only real thing in the room. It hadn’t felt like being used. It had felt like combustion.
“It felt,” I said slowly, each word a stone dropped into a deep well, “like you were trying to forget something. And I was the something you chose to forget with.”
A car horn blared on his end. He muttered something away from the phone. When he spoke again, his voice was closer, more contained. “I can’t do this on the street.”
“You started it in a hotel room.”
“Christ, Jill.” He sounded tired. Defeated. “You’re right. Okay? The picture. The timing. It looks like shit. It is shit. But last night… that wasn’t about her. Not by the time you walked in. It was about the space you take up in my head. The space you’ve always taken up.”
“A space conveniently vacated by her departure.”
He made a sound, halfway between a laugh and a groan. “You’re determined to make this ugly.”
“It is ugly!” The volume of my own voice surprised me. “Your mess is all over a tabloid. And I’m in your bed. Don’t tell me that’s not ugly. Don’t tell me that’s some beautiful, pure exclamation point.”
Silence again. I could almost hear him thinking, wrestling with the script. The one where he was the tortured artist, misunderstood. I wasn’t playing my part.
“What do you want me to say?” he asked finally, his voice quiet.
“I want you to be honest. For once. With me. With yourself.” I leaned my forehead against the cool glass of the window. “Were you crying over her?”
A pause. Then, a single, whispered word. “Yes.”
The admission, blunt and unadorned, was like a key turning in a lock. It didn’t set me free. It just opened the door to a colder room.
“Thank you,” I said, my own voice hollow.
“It’s not the whole story.”
“It’s enough of it.” I pushed away from the window. “You should go to your reading, David. Don’t be late.”
“Jill, wait—”
I ended the call. The silence rushed back in, louder than before. I placed the phone carefully on the counter, screen down. The flat was too big, too empty. The ghost of his touch on my skin now felt like a brand. A mark of foolishness.
I walked to the bathroom, turned on the shower, and stepped under the water without waiting for it to warm up. The cold was a shock, a brutal clarity. I stood there until my teeth chattered, until the memory of his hands felt like something that had happened to another person in another life.
When I got out, my phone was lit up again. Not a call. A text. I wrapped a towel around myself and picked it up.
It was a picture. A photo of a page, slightly crumpled. It was his handwriting, the same hurried scrawl as the note to Sera. But these were lines, not a message. Dialogue. It was a page from the Coppola project script. He’d highlighted a section. A single line of dialogue for his character.
The highlighted line read: Sometimes the only way out of the labyrinth is to stop looking for the door and start building a room where you stand.
Beneath the photo, he’d typed three words.
You’re the room.
I stared at it. My hair dripped onto the screen, blurring the words. It was another beautiful line. Another piece of poetic bullshit. I threw the phone onto the bed. It bounced once and lay still, the screen glowing faintly in the dark room. I stood there, shivering, the damp towel clinging to my skin, gravity holding me to the spot. The city’s light painted faint stripes across the floor, leading nowhere.