Page 25 of Nights Without Night
“Sometimes.”
“Do you have nightmares?”
“Sometimes.”
“Is that why you don’t sleep? And don’t say sometimes,” I say, lifting my head to look at him. He smiles slightly.
“Right after Mosul, we did some vampire work. Night extractions. Guess I’m just used to having nights without night,” he says. I frown. That wasn’t a no.
“Sounds exhausting.”
“Sometimes.”
“You know, you can come into my bed if you want. Whenever you want. If it would help,” I say. He looks at me for a moment.
“Don’t think I don’t see how hard you’ve been working yourself, Iván. You need to sleep.”
“So do you.”
“I don’t think it’ll do us good to both be sleep deprived.”
“Depends on what we do instead of sleeping,” I joke, but I don’t make a move, pressing my nose against his shoulder. His arm is still wrapped around me, and it falls to my waist, his palm flat against my stomach. There’s another moment of TV-filled silence.
“Why don’t you quit the bartending job? I have money,” Isadoro says.
The truth is I’ve thought about it. It would be a huge relief, but I don’t want to leave him working at the bar on his own. I’ll wait until I’m sure he’s adjusting before I consider quitting.
“Maybe,” I say, turning my attention towards the TV. “What are you watching?”
“Time Traveller’s Wife.”
“Hmm, I wish I could time travel,” I say absently, thinking about all the paintings and buildings I could see in their prime if I could go back in time. “It would be such a cool superpower.”
“What! Iván, that would literally be the worst superpower to have,” Isadoro says. I lift my head again to narrow my eyes at him.
“Why the hell?”
“It’d be too much responsibility. Think of all the terrible historic moments you could alter in retrospect. But every time you went back, you don’t really know what you would change, or—there’s like a million things to think about,” he says sensibly. I don’t pout.
“You could just go to the future, then! That’d be cool.”
“Yeah, but then you would learn things from that future’s past, so you wouldn’t be able to go back again 'cause you’d be travelling back in time and changing that future. So you would only ever be able to go forwards, alone…It would be an endless cycle.”
“Jesus. Fine, then. I’ll stick to flying as my superpower.”
“Then you’d have to think about how the altitude would affect you, the speed, the cold…”
“Oh my God. You are the biggest downer ever. What’s the best superpower then Mr. Marvel?”
“Teletransportation. We could go anywhere. The Bahamas. Great Wall of China…”
“Taking me with you, are you?”
“Who else?” he says.
“Well, my superpower would be multiple orgasms. Zero refractory period,” I snark. Isadoro snorts, but his eyes are dark as he looks at me.
Isadoro tries to carry me to the bedroom, but I smack him across the head until he lets me go. We laugh into my room and I bounce as I throw myself onto my bed. Isadoro follows, and we play-fight for a while like we used to do as children. This time, however, we’re distracted by wandering hands and lips. I pull at his clothes until he relents, letting me strip him bare for me. I push him away as he tries to do the same to me and force him to watch my smirk as I undress slowly on the bed. When I’m done, he’s smiling too, like he knows something I don’t.
