The Layover Gift

Okay so here's how my Tuesday went completely sideways, and I mean that in the best possible way.

Lionel turned twenty-seven last week. I say "last week" because his actual birthday was a disaster, work-wise. He was in Denver. I was at the front desk of the Hotel Rios in downtown Chicago, where I've worked since I was twenty-one and where I met him two years ago at a hospitality conference, of all boring places. We bonded over how terrible the conference coffee was, and we've been best friends ever since. Best friends, full stop. Two years of coffee breaks and texting and him crashing on my couch when his flights collapse, which happens a lot because he's a consultant and consultants live in airports.

So his birthday happens while he's in Denver, and I feel bad about it, and then I look at his travel schedule because of course I have his travel schedule, we work in the same industry, and I see he's flying back through O'Hare on Tuesday. A layover. Ninety minutes.

I had a plan. The plan was small and reasonable. I would show up at his gate with a wrapped gift and a coffee, we would hug, he would say "Jeanine, you did NOT," I would say "I absolutely did," and he would board his flight and I would go back to work feeling like a good friend. That was the entire plan!

What I did not plan on was his flight getting cancelled.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let me back up to the part where I'm standing at the gate with a gift bag and my heart doing a weird stutter thing, because honestly, even before any of the rest of this happened, standing there was already a big deal for me.

Here's why. I had spent the previous night thinking about Lionel, and not in the usual friend way. I mean, okay, maybe a little in the usual way too, because yes, fine, I've noticed he's handsome, he's got these long eyelashes and this voice like warm honey, everyone notices, I'm not blind. But mostly I was thinking about what to give him. Because twenty-seven felt like a deadline to me, weirdly. Like his twenties were getting used up and I had been sitting on my feelings for two years, telling myself the friendship was too good to risk, and birthdays have a way of making you do math you've been avoiding.

I bought him a nice pen. A really nice pen, sixty dollars, engraved. And then I stood in my apartment holding the box and I thought, a pen? A pen for the man I've been half in love with since the coffee line at that conference? A pen!

So the plan changed, is what I'm saying. The plan changed in a way I'll get to later in this story, because I need you to understand that by the time I walked up to Gate B14, I was carrying two gifts. One was in the bag. The other one was just words, and I hadn't figured out how to say them yet.

There he was, slumped in one of those terrible gate chairs, all six feet of him folded up like he was a lawn chair, scrolling his phone. Black roller bag at his feet. Suit jacket draped over the seat next to him because even after two years of this he still hopes nobody will sit there.

"Lionel."

He looked up and his whole face did this thing. This slow, delighted, confused sunrise thing.

"Jeanine? No. No way. Why are you, what are you doing at my gate?"

"It's your birthday week! The birthday tour continues! I'm your surprise!" I held up the bag. "I did research. I know your layover schedule. I'm a little embarrassed about how much research, actually."

He stood up and hugged me, and he held on longer than usual, and I felt that hug in places I wasn't planning to feel things at Gate B14 on a Tuesday afternoon. He smelled like airplane air and his stupid good cologne.

"You're actually the best person alive," he said into my hair. "Denver was miserable. My birthday was a hotel room and room service and a video call from you that my mom crashed."

"Your mom crashed my call?"

"She wanted to tell me about her neighbor's gutter. It went forty minutes."

"Riveting stuff, that gutter."

And then the gate agent's voice came over the speaker and ruined everything, or saved everything, I still haven't decided. Flight cancelled. Weather in Chicago, which, in April, sure. The whole gate groaned at once. Lionel closed his eyes the way a man accepts a punch he saw coming.

"Okay," he said. "Okay. They'll rebook me on the morning flight. I guess I'm, um. I guess I'm here."

"Guess you're here," I said, and my voice came out strange and quiet, and he looked at me funny, and that's when I knew the second gift was about to come out whether I was ready or not.

"Come on," I said. "You've got status. Take me into your fancy lounge and buy me a drink while you grieve your Tuesday."

* * *

The premium lounge was empty. Like, properly empty. It was that dead stretch of afternoon, four-something, and the storm outside had turned the floor-to-ceiling windows into a wall of gray. The tarmac lights were coming on one by one, all orange and blurry through the rain. We picked the couch in the far corner, the one nobody uses, and he got us drinks from the bar, a whiskey for him and the pinot grigio for me, and we clinked glasses and I said happy birthday a week late and he said the day wasn't over yet, which, ha. He had no idea.

We talked about normal stuff for a while. His Denver client, my nightmare of a check-in afternoon, some gossip about a manager we both used to work with. Two glasses in, the rain got heavier, and the lounge attendant went on break, and it was just us in this big glass room over the airport, and my mouth got dry, and I put the glass down.

"Lionel."

"Yeah?"

"I have a confession. Two confessions, actually."

"Oh no." He was grinning. "Confess."

"First one. The pen is not your real gift."

"There's a pen?"

"There's a pen. It's very nice. But it's a decoy gift, because I chickened out at the register of my own life, basically."

He set his drink down. "Okay, now you have to tell me."

"Second confession." I took a breath. It was now or never, and never was starting to look permanent. "I didn't come here to give you a pen. I came here because I've been your best friend for two years and I've wanted to be more than that for most of it, and I decided that if I let another birthday pass without telling you, I deserved the pen. The pen is a punishment. Does that make sense?"

The rain filled the silence. He wasn't smiling anymore. He wasn't not smiling either. He did that thing where he goes very still when something matters.

"Jeanine," he said slowly. "For how long?"

"Since the coffee line. Since literally the coffee line. Year one, day one. You handed me a cup and said the conference coffee tasted like punishment and I thought, oh no. Oh no, this one."

He laughed, one short breath, and rubbed his hands on his knees. "I thought you had a boyfriend that whole first year. You mentioned a guy named Derek like six times."

"Derek was my landlord. Derek was seventy and had a parrot."

"I didn't know that. I grieved, Jeanine. I quietly grieved a man named Derek."

"You grieved Derek?"

"I grieved Derek. And then this year I figured, well, she'd have said something. And I travel too much for anything to work anyway. And then you show up at my gate with a bag." He shook his head. "You show up at my gate."

"So." My heart was loud and the room was quiet. "What happens now?"

"Well," he said, and he reached over and took my hand, and his thumb went over my knuckles once, slow, like he was confirming I was real. "First, you tell me what the real gift was going to be. The one you chickened out on."

And that's the part where I have to stop and gather myself even now, writing this, because I said it. I said the thing out loud, in an empty lounge, to my best friend, and I'll tell you exactly what I said and what happened next, because my hands are actually shaking a little remembering it, in the good way.

He waited. He was good at waiting. He always was.

"Okay," I said. "Here's what I wanted to give you."

I took a breath and told him. I told him that I'd been reading up for months, that I'd bought things, that what I wanted, for both of us, was to take it slow and careful, and that what I had in mind was him and me exploring anal together, gently, me on top so I could control everything, because I trusted him more than anyone and I wanted our first time to be something neither of us would ever forget.

He went still again, that still thing, and then he blew out a long breath.

"Jeanine," he said. "I have thought about this exact conversation about four hundred times and never once did it go like this."

"How did it go?"

"Worse. In every version I panicked and said something dumb about the weather." He laughed, and his knee was bouncing, and I could see the nerves and the want fighting it out on his face. "Okay. Yes. God, yes. But you have to promise me we go slow. Like, embarrassingly slow. I don't want to hurt you."

"That is the entire plan, Lionel. Slow is the plan. I've got lube in my bag and I've watched enough videos to qualify for a medical license."

He stared at me. "You packed lube in your carry-on for a ninety minute