Page 28 of Up All Night
Chapter 9
There were no messages from Hadrian the next day. I went back to my share house, changed, took a nap, and went off to my concert with a mixture of feelings that I couldn’t put words to. Here I had one of the greatest nights with a man I would probably ever have in my life. He washot,multilingual, driven to succeed, and so damn respectful that I was afraid he wouldn’t give me what I wanted (nay, needed) in the bedroom until he proved otherwise. He didn’t treat me like a piece of meat. He didn’t scare or threaten me. If anything, he was the consummate modern day gentleman. And he was gone.
Sigh. Even now, thinking back on that surreal day where I went about my business and enjoyed other facets of my life, I get this strange sense of foreboding. I was still the same Cyndi. Nothing had changed in the sense that I had gone through something brand new to my life, although finally getting what I wanted was a nice change.
No, what kept me hung up on Hadrian was the overall experience. That glimpse of life that slips through your fingers and makes you wonder if you’ll ever come close to that again.
So I wasn’t quite over him yet. Can you blame me? You read about my date and the great way he loved on me, even if he didn’t love me. And since this is technically a romance novel, you know how it’s probably going to end.
Yes, folks, this is the part of the story where I hate everything and am convinced I’m never gonna have love again.
But I’ll spare you the angst and drama by telling you it lasted about a day. Because if we’re going to have our happy Romance ending with only a week to spare, I gotta get over this shit quickly!
It also helps that I got a message from Hadrian around eleven that night. Do you know what it said?
“I’m sorry because last night. The room air is hard on my throat. I cough a lot.”
On one hand, the air was dry in that hotel room, yes. On the other? Ha! Bullshit, dude!
Of course, I wasn’t going to tell him that.“It’s okay. I understand. How are you today?”
Because I wanted to see him again, duh. Might as well segue him into it.
“I am okay. You?”
“I am also okay.”You know, I read back these messages I have saved on my phone and think… God, we’re so lame!“I had fun last night.”
“Me too.”
I waited a few minutes. Odds were he was at work. But did he know how badly I wanted to see him again? How much I wanted to nestle my head against his chest and inhale that intoxicating cologne? Aftershave? Whatever it was? How much I wanted one of his terrible kisses? How I yearned to feel him on top of me, behind me again? I was so pathetic, I even fantasized about sucking his cock again. Hey, if you saw and felt that thing, you would be fantasizing about it too! Hell, I wanna do it right now!
“Should we meet again?”
“Yes, again. Me too.”
“When is good for you? I leave next weekend.”
Trapped in my room that night with nothing but my mind to keep me company (my neighbor had thankfully toned it down on the sex for a couple of days. Probably had his dick in a splint,) I agonized that he was never going to answer me, even if he was busy at work right now. As a child of the ‘90s, I grew up with these images of women waiting by their phones, their answering machines, anything that would create correspondence between her and that mystery date from the night before. Was he going to call? Would it be uncouth if she called first? Well, as an older Millennial and a child of the ‘90s, I can safely say I grew up to a different world. With instant messaging, we don’t have to turn each other down face to face. Hell, we don’t even have to say anything at all. True, people could have not called back then, but now it hurts even to think about howeasyit is to contact people… and never do it.
Basically, the son of a bitch ghosted me.
Fordays!
I was a nervous wreck those first two days. Why wasn’t he answering me? Did he change his mind? It had been two, three, four fucking days. At first I told myself he was working late and needed to sleep through the next day. Fine. Whatever. He’d get back to me, right? Anytime now. I’d be at dinner, at a café writing, on the subway playing Neko Atsume between stations, doinganythingin my day to day life when he would finally contact me again. Probably with another apology.
Except he didn’t.
After the second day, I stopped checking my phone every fifteen minutes. I had to stop living like that. I had shit I needed to get done. People to see.
Illnesses to fucking have.
That’s right, folks. Yours truly got sick two days after seeing Hadrian. See, there was a plague in Japan. A coughing, hacking, wheezing plague that completely knocked you off your ass with a fever for a day and then, if you were oh-so-lucky, made you hack up your lungs for days afterward. Now, I had actually been a little sick with the same thing a couple weeks ago. I felt so terrible back then, because of those thin share-house walls, but now I didn’t give a fuck as I suffered with my even worse relapse. I would cough as loudly and proudly as I possibly could when my neighbor went back to his fuck-a-thons.
I was particularly proud when one night he woke up at 4 am and cried,“Nemurenai! Minna urusai!” Loose translation?“I can’t sleep! Everyone’s too fucking loud!”Good. Eat your god damn heart out, you French asshole.
I was miserable in more ways than one, and this piece of shit was going down with me.
So there was pitiful little me, hacking up both of her lungs all day, every day, staring at her phone wondering when Hadrian was ever going to get back to her. If ever. Meanwhile, the only reason I got any sleep at all was because I was that knocked out. Although my neighbor continued to fuck his way through the night and occasionally wake me up. Whenever that happened, I made sure to cough harder to spite him.
