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The hotel room they rent in New Hampshire is not the worst Jerma’s ever seen. It has all the makings of a nicer hotel room; the fancy soap bottles, the two twin beds made up in sparkling white sheets, the widescreen TV. The view is even of a small park and not a concrete parking lot or a dumpster. But.
“Does it smell in here?” Jerma says. They’re shuffling into the room one by one, their snow gear restricting their movements so it looks like they’re two toddlers coming in from making a snowman. Their bags were unwieldy to carry up the stairs, so Jerma’s just holding his to his chest like a forty-pound backpack.
“I don’t smell anything,” Ludwig says, shoving past him. He’s wearing a large puffy jacket and is dripping chunks of snow everywhere. “Smells like a hotel room to me.”
“Huh,” Jerma says, watching as Ludwig shakes his hair out and runs a hand through it. “You don’t get a, like, smoke smell?”
“Smoke? Like in which way?” Ludwig says, kneeling down to unlace his boots. Jerma reluctantly joins him, his hands careful on his own old laces. They dropped by his mother’s house to get all of Jerma’s old snow stuff so that the visit in New Hampshire wouldn’t be too shocking on Jerma’s soft Las Vegas body. His mother was unsurprisingly charmed by Ludwig and his French-speaking, turtleneck-wearing confidence, and told him on no uncertain terms to visit again after their group ski trip. Ludwig had nodded and kissed her cheek as they finished loading the rental car with his stuff, and Jerma had watched it all quietly.
“Like cigarettes, I don’t know. Barbecue maybe?” Jerma says. Ludwig scrunches up his face, fingers digging into his boot and yanking it off.
“Lots of campfires from last summer, I don’t know. I could see it.”
“Maybe,” Jerma says, taking off his coat and hanging it in the closet. He wonders if the smell will eventually go away. Maybe he should leave a window open. “Are you hungry?”
Ludwig stands up and shrugs, stretching his arms up and over his head. His turtleneck slips up from his pants, showing off a pale slice of his stomach. Jerma’s eyes stay on the television. “Kinda. Nothing will be open though.”
“There’s a hotel bar downstairs,” Jerma says, scrolling through his phone. “Closes at 2am. I feel like we can both eat a burger in an hour.”
“Sounds pog,” Ludwig says, yawning. The drive was hard on him — they switched off driving duties in Boston and Jerma’s been sitting pretty in the passenger seat ever since. They listened to two hours of Ludwig’s inexplicable Japanese lo-fi and classical music playlist. Jerma liked it though. He liked hearing Ludwig humming along Clair de Lune under his breath. He thought that if he moved at all it would ruin the moment, so he just stayed quiet, listening and watching the snow fall on the highway.
Ludwig motions with his head over to the bathroom and Jerma wordlessly gives him the thumbs-up, still scrolling through his phone.
Ludwig had tweeted a picture of the two of them, taken excruciatingly by Jerma’s mom before they left. In it, Ludwig smiles one of his usual smiles, the one that takes up his entire face. His arm is around Jerma’s shoulder, who is awkwardly smiling with his mouth closed with his arm around Ludwig’s lower back. He cringes looking at it. They look like two kids on their first day of school. Ludwig had titled the photo BOY’S TRIP with a dozen ski emojis after it. The photo has a couple thousand likes, some comments he purposefully doesn’t look at. Jerma saves it to his phone.
He zooms in on his own face, then Ludwig’s — the ten years isn’t super obvious. He thinks you could see them out and assume, well, whatever you’re assuming, but mainly that they’re the same age. His greatest fear is that he’ll see a photo of himself that looks well and truly old, and that Ludwig will see it too, and he’ll look at him differently because of it. So he checks himself in every reflective surface almost obsessively. He finds that he just looks like normal most of the time, just with his hair in different, uniquely awful positions.
He puts a hand through his hair as he zooms in on Ludwig again. It’s getting long again — curling behind his ears and onto his neck. He should go get it cut soon.
“Hey, ready?” Ludwig’s voice says. Jerma turns his head and sees Ludwig in the doorway, drying his hands on a towel. His eyes are intent on Jerma’s phone, where the picture of him is still blown up and supremely obvious. When Ludwig looks back up again, his eyes are dark and his head is cocked to the side, like he’s considering.
Jerma clicks off his phone and puts it in his pocket. It’s too late to deny anything — he’s as transparent as a sheet of fucking glass. “Yeah. Let’s go.”
—
They get a booth near the window. It’s pretty outside — the sky is that weird purple color that you always get during blizzards, and the courtyard is slowly getting smothered with snow. If Jerma squints, he can make shapes out of the random hedges and sculptures.
Ludwig hands him a menu silently and they both look it over. The waitress is talking to the sleepy-looking couple behind them, who talk back in muted tones about specials and Chicken Parmesan or whatever.
“You do want a burger, right?” Ludwig says. Jerma feels like he’s not even fucking awake right now. He’s going to wake up in his old Boston bedroom, the last fifteen years a fucking fever dream.
“Yeah,” Jerma says. The conversation isn’t really free-flowing, nor does he really want it to be. Ludwig doesn’t appear to mind. He’s just sipping his coffee quietly, seemingly just happy to be there.
Ludwig does seem to just be happy in Jerma’s presence a lot. During the Dollhouse, they gravitated toward each other, half because Ludwig was the outsider and half because there was something in Jerma that wanted to be next to him. To ask his opinion. To coax the few smiles of the day out of him. Ludwig always leaned forward, drifted over beside him, asked questions that didn’t really feel necessary. It was nice. Then Ludwig called him to ask him on a ski trip with his friends. He said yes, despite not having skiied for at least ten years. Here they are.
“Great,” Ludwig says. He nods at the waitress, who comes over like she was watching them. “Hi, two burgers, please. No cheese and pickles on mine. J?”
The nickname floors Jerma into just shaking his head. Ludwig shrugs and thanks the waitress, who leaves like nothing out of the ordinary has just happened in front of her.
Ludwig takes another sip of his coffee. Jerma doesn’t think he has called him anything other than Jerma during the duration of their friendship, which is fine. It’s close enough to his name that he doesn’t really blink twice at it. He doesn’t really expect him to call him ‘Jeremy’ either; it’s weirdly formal. Jerma is honestly, perfectly fine. But J feels good too.
J actually feels really good. He sips his coffee, the warmth in his chest pulsing in and out like an organ. It’s something that seems to pump whether he likes it or not, as unconscious as breathing.
“Thanks for inviting me to this,” Jerma says suddenly. His palms itch. “This whole trip. I forgot how much I liked it up here. I think I actually missed the snow.”
“You don’t know what you got until it’s gone,” Ludwig says, sagely. “But yeah, me too. I could do without the cold, but-,” he gestures out the window to the winter wonderland there, “It’s nice.”
“Refreshing even,” Jerma chimes in.
“Brisk,” Ludwig says. His phone buzzes on the table. He picks it up and scrolls through. If Jerma moves his feet a little further, they’d be touching.
“Nick says there’s three feet of new snow on the mountains,” Ludwig says as he types back a reply. “Sounds promising.”
“Yeah,” Jerma says. “I’m just hoping I don’t break my leg up there, man.”
“I got appendicitis last time I was on a ski hill,” Ludwig says, sending whatever text he wrote and putting the phone back down again. “You’d have to do something big to break my streak.”
“No, no, don’t say anything, no. You’ll jinx it. Next thing we know I’ll,” Jerma cracks his head to the side and makes a pop with his mouth. “And you’re the one who’s going to have to tell my mother.”
“I’ll bring your body home in a snowboard bag,” Ludwig says. “I’ll make sure to say it wasn’t me.”
“I’m so fucking clumsy, it could happen,” Jerma says, leaning back against the booth. “I can’t even walk and talk at the same time sometimes.”
“Nah, you don’t seem clumsy,” Ludwig says. “Maybe nervous. You get jittery, I think.”
“Oh, did you notice that on our drive over here?” Jerma says, smiling. “My mom always said I couldn’t stay still for the life of me as a kid.”
“I wish I’d known you then,” Ludwig says. He’s looking squarely at him now, his big brown eyes bloodshot but sincere. “I think I would’ve liked you a lot.”
“Thank you,” Jerma says, hunching his shoulders into himself and smiling. “I was just a weird theatre kid.”
“You’re smoking weed if you think I was anything other than that,” Ludwig says. “I was an improv kid. That’s, like, a thousand times worse.”
“If it’s anything,” Jerma says. He can’t look directly at Ludwig, but he can look at his shirt, the expanse of his chest. He is saying it to him like it’s a secret. “I think I would’ve liked you a lot too.”
When he bears to look at Ludwig’s face, it is a mix of fondness and terror that greets him. Jerma doesn’t like it — he doesn’t ever want to make Ludwig sad, even for a second, ever at all. So he cocks his head and is about to ask what’s up in his neurotic overthinking way, but he feels pressure on the ankle of his foot.
Ludwig gently drags the toe of his boot up Jerma’s leg, slowly enough that the deliberateness is unmissable. Jerma swallows hard and slowly inches his own foot out so Ludwig will have more to work with.
It’s another moment like the car — if he says something about it, he will disturb their part of the universe. So he stays quiet and lets Ludwig trap his feet between his.
The burgers come then. At gunpoint, Jerma couldn’t tell you what was in it. There was probably tomato, probably cheese. Meat of some kind. It’s probably even good — the kind of burger that checks all the necessary boxes at 1am.
But all he can do is watch Ludwig eat his and then look away when he looks back, sucking sauce off his fingers. Ludwig is doing it on purpose, either to cruelly taunt him in the way he likes to, mindlessly and for his own personal enjoyment, or that he actually wants something from him. Jerma doesn’t know which one.
They finish their burgers and pay. Jerma insists. It’s only right since Ludwig drove them all the way here. Ludwig just shrugs and puts his own card away, too tired to fight.
“Back to the room,” Ludwig says, smiling. The circles under his eyes are dark. Jerma nods. The waitress lifts her hand to them as they leave, and Jerma raises his back before the door shuts behind them.
—
The room is dark when they get back into it, and the smell of smoke still lingers as they quietly shuck their clothes. Ludwig disappears into the bathroom and comes out a few minutes later rubbing moisturizer into his face. Jerma watches him from his twin bed, his t-shirt and boxers on.
He wants to go over there and wind Ludwig closer by his hips. He wants to do what he’s done to other men in other hotel rooms in the past.
The difference is that it’s been a while since all that. The invisible rules might’ve changed since. Maybe he’s just supposed to come out with it, ask the question while avoiding Ludwig’s eyes. He tries to practice saying it while he brushes his teeth. Do you mind if I kiss you? Just let me do it.
It sounds lame. He spits into the sink and rinses his brush. He won’t say anything and he will go to sleep wishing he did.
He comes out very similar to Ludwig. He’s rubbing moisturizer on his face and elbows. The television is on and blaring some food show, what looks like MasterChef. He’s about to ask a stupid question about it when he turns to look at Ludwig.
Ludwig is watching him. Ludwig doesn’t have a shirt on. Ludwig says “Come on,” and flips an edge of his blanket down, shoving it further down with his foot. Jerma wants to ask why and for what, but he thinks it would just sound dumb. He rubs the rest of his lotion into his hands and comes over to Ludwig and slides into bed next to him, easy as that. It feels inevitable to have their months of tension break like this, in the early hours of the morning in a twin bed.
The first cautious press of Ludwig’s mouth on his breaks whatever stupor twelve hours of traveling gave to him. Ludwig kisses him and then winds the hotel sheet over their heads with an arm, looming over him for a hot second. When Jerma opens his eyes under it, Ludwig’s red and terrified face looks back at him. No, Jerma thinks. He reaches up. None of that. Ludwig bends back down.
Ludwig kisses him and touches the edges face very carefully, so light he only knows they’re there because they’ll rest on his jaw, his forehead, the edges of his cheeks like he’s trying to map them all out as they kiss. Jerma is doing the same — touching his neck, the indented space between his pecs, his arms around his waist.
They tangle their legs together and just kiss and kiss and kiss like teenagers. Ludwig giggles quietly when Jerma hits a ticklish spot on his neck and Jerma just breathes unevenly until Ludwig comes to kiss him again. When Ludwig runs his tongue over his teeth, he lets him. He doesn’t know if he’s ever refused him. He doesn’t know if he could. He moans quietly as Ludwig pants into his mouth, but it doesn't go anywhere fast. It just happens as it does, slowly and without fervour.
“Hey,” Ludwig says, later. Jerma’s whole mouth feels puffy and red. He feels dizzy. Ludwig’s skin is gold against the bedspread. “I gotta go to the bathroom, I’ll be back.”
“Okay,” Jerma whispers. “Okay, sure.”
Jerma leans on his back to release him from their prison, and Ludwig kisses him again before he goes. The lights of the television turn him blue and red as he passes.
Jerma closes his eyes. He’ll be back in a minute. Then maybe — maybe. Maybe anything.
A second later, or an hour, Jerma feels the bed shift as a heavy body gets in next to him. He opens his arms without opening his eyes and Ludwig carefully slides in, his head above his, his minty breath warm against his forehead. One of his hands — Jerma does like those hands, piano player hands — holds his jaw and traces little circles on to the skin there. If he listens, Jerma can hear the sounds of MasterChef still on in the background. It’s nice.
“Night, J,” Ludwig mutters. There it is again. The nickname. Right now, it just feels like another kiss, laid in front of him.
“Night,” he whispers back, and the sheets go back over them again, and all is white.
—
The day starts noisily the next morning. The room next door gets vacuumed at about 7:30 and the phone call Ludwig gets around 10 is enough to wake both of them up. Jerma grimaces against the sudden cold as Ludwig scrambles off him to grab his phone from the charger.
“Hello?” Ludwig says groggily. He brings the phone away from his ear and squints at the time. He turns away from the bed and Jerma scrubs his eyes, finally committing to actually getting up. On the TV is an infomercial dedicated to a knife sharpener. The guy is supernaturally happy and the knife he uses is spectacularly sharp. His teeth are very white.
Ludwig drifts into his vision again, walking around as he talks to whoever’s on the other end of the line. Nick, maybe. Ludwig gesticulates as he talks, and he does it even more now freshly waken up. He says skiing and his hand goes up to hold an imaginary pole. He mimics driving as he talks about their excursion on the 1-93. It’s charming. Jerma watches the guy on the TV slice some more paper.
“Nick wants to say hi,” Ludwig says from a mile away, and a warm phone is suddenly pressed next to his ear.
“Yuh?” Jerma says, putting his hand over Ludwig’s to steady it. “Hello?”
“Hey man,” Nick says. He sounds very smug . “Good sleep?”
“Pretty good, man,” Jerma says. He squints at Ludwig, who shrugs. “H-how about you?”
“Baller,” Nick says. He sounds like he won the biggest bet in the world. “You still meeting us tonight?”
“Yeah, that’s the plan. I-I’ll see you then?”
“Not if I see you first, whoa! Hey, hand me back to Coots,” Nick says. “Good talking to you.”
Unbelievably confused, Jerma just takes his hands off Ludwig’s and Ludwig puts it back up to his ear. He wanders away again, phone pressed into his neck as he grabs his pants from the floor.
Jerma sits up and grabs his t-shirt that’s resting on the bedspread and carefully slips it on. His hopes for any specific romantic morning had been dashed, but hopefully they’ll be another. At least one more. Maybe Jerma will volunteer to share Ludwig's room in the ski cabin, and no one will look too deeply into it.
He goes into the bathroom and looks at himself in the mirror, trying to see if there’s any difference between last night and now. If there’s a shine. He thinks his cheeks might be permanently red now. The other guys might believe it if he just pretends he’s cold all the time.
He brushes his teeth and puts on all of his clothes. Ludwig is doing the same, still on the phone call. Apparently there was a dilemma with the merch company last night. Ludwig nods and nods and nods. Jerma packs up his stuff carefully, not that there was much spreading to do in the ten hours they were there.
He’s waiting, fully suited, in one of the armchairs when the call finally ends. Ludwig sighs and runs his hand through his hair, looking around the room. He looks at Jerma, who looks up from scrolling Reddit.
“Good morning,” Jerma says, clicking his phone off and putting it facedown on his leg. He waits to see what Ludwig will do, now that the curtains are peeled back and MasterChef is off.
“Hey,” Ludwig says back. He looks unsure of himself, which is out of place. He scratches his neck. “Can I-?”
Jerma nods jerkily, and Ludwig comes over and kisses him again and again in the cold light of the morning. Jerma smiles into it and then Ludwig tears himself away, stumbling over to the bathroom.
“By the way,” Ludwig says, poking his head back out for a second. “There’s a bunch of cigarettes under your bed for some reason. That was what the weird smoky smell was.”
Huh. Jerma sits back. He peeks under the bed, and sure enough, there they are, crumpled with their papers black. He knew he wasn’t making it up.
—
It’s still snowing when they check out. Jerma grumbles about his back and his chest and Ludwig has been silently listening, it being too early to have a real conversation until they both get a couple of coffees in them. Ludwig slams the trunk after he hoists both of their bags on top of their gear.
“You driving or me?” Ludwig says, rubbing his hands together under his mitts. Jerma watches as the snowflakes land on his hair, on the tips of his eyelashes. There’s such a hard lump of feeling in his chest that it’ll take him hours to sort it all out. He thinks he could convince Ludwig to hang around while he did.
“I’ll drive,” Jerma says. He takes the keys from Ludwig’s outstretched hands. “You’re on music.”
There’s a long conversation they need to have. Jerma doesn’t really want to have it. But Ludwig smiles at him again, his big smile, the one that scrunches up his whole face, and there's no terror in sight. He thinks he can handle it.
“Deal,” Ludwig says, and off they go.