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He knocks on the door of Room 665, and Zane answers. Honey-coloured light streams from the doorway behind him. 'Alan! You should've called,' Zane says, smiling slyly. 'Well, come in, come in.'
Room 665 is warm as always, the kind of warm he associates with both balmy days at the beach and sticky backrooms at apartment get-togethers. Smoke curls from the bathroom. He doesn't ask, simply sits himself down on one of Zane's understuffed chairs and slumps back.
'Long night?'
Alan covers his face with his hands and says, 'Give me a damn drink.'
A knowing laugh. Zane obliges in half the time it would've taken a normal person to mix a cocktail, delivers it to him with a flourish. Alan skulls it and holds out his glass for another. 'I'm so fucking tired,' he says, and Zane nods, abruptly beside him swirling a straw around the rim of Alan's now-full glass. 'It's been so long, Zane. I don't even remember how I knew to come here. I was just so tired, and nobody - I thought the hotel...'
'My house is your house,' Zane says. He taps his fingernail on the side of Alan's glass; it rings sharply, like the payphone in the plaza. 'Our little hideaway. You're always welcome.'
It might've sounded ominous any other night, any other loop, but Alan means what he says when he says that he's fucking tired. He could fall asleep right then and there, half-reclined on Zane's couch, bathed in the golden light of a summer house party. He considers it. Zane mixes his drinks strong, and he can feel the room's sharp lines softening, mellowing as he sips. Zane would - would Zane keep him safe? He doesn't know.
Some part of him must think so, because he came here of his own accord. He rolls his neck to get out a cramp, watches Zane watching him. Accepts another drink when it comes. Alan hasn't drunk to get drunk in a very long time, but turns out it's like riding a bicycle: it comes back to you. 'You're quiet,' he says after the fourth round of cocktails. 'Thought you loved the sound of your own voice.'
'You're not in a mood for talking,' Zane says, saluting him with his glass.
'That's not true.' He's slurring now. 'I - I'd love to do some fucking smalltalk right now. Oh, God, I miss people.' This is, of course, a complete lie. Even at the height of his partying, even when he'd enjoyed it, he'd always craved solitude, wanted to be curled up with a notebook and pen instead of a bottle. The heady thrum of creation, words falling out of you like they came from some other place beyond you, that was better than any drug when he could find it. But now that's all he does. He has to do it. Write to live, write to escape, alone in an attic room with only himself for company. The memories of those glittery, awful Tuesday night blow-outs have the allure of the other side of the fence.
He drinks. Maybe what he's missing is the quiet after those parties. The darkness. Pale lights from the building opposite like salt circles through his apartment window while he tried not to wake his sleeping wife undressing. Alan closes his eyes.
'Falling asleep?'
'Light's hurting my eyes,' he mumbles. He can detect movement through his closed eyelids, a dark figure against pinpricks of gold and blood-pink.
'If you want to pass out,' Zane says, 'be my guest. Get your beauty sleep.' There's a smile in his voice. Always teasing.
Alan says, 'Don't - don't make fun of me,' and opens his eyes. The bulbs overhead blare a halo around Zane standing over him, a little too close. In shadowed half-profile, he resembles Alan even more: the slight curve to their noses, the weak jaw and cleft chin hiding under Alan's beard. Alan stares, suddenly afraid Zane will collapse like a mirage if he moves. Afraid he's alone on stage.
On the other side of the hotel room, the stereo clicks on by itself, a man's voice winding deep and slow around the room. Zane tilts back unsteadily and grins a toothy, tipsy grin, transforming his face into someone unfamiliar. 'If you're not gonna sleep,' he says, holding out his arms in an extravagant gesture, 'dance with me.'
'I'm tired,' Alan says, but the absurdity of the invitation tickles his muddled brain, reminds him of a time he and a friend had ended up dancing alone in a laundry room on New Year's. He extricates himself from the couch with difficulty to stagger over to Zane. Zane places one hand on Alan's hip, then fumbles with his other to clasp Alan's hand - a very close pose, with Zane in the lead, the man's role. Something in Alan bristles violently; something else tells him to relax, something familiar, like a snug scarf around his shoulders. There's nobody else here to see him.
'Have we done this before?' he asks. His head spins. Zane's hand on his waist leads him in a poorly described circle. He's surprised neither of them trip over each other's feet, but then, Zane knows how he moves.
'Not that I remember.'
The singer croons in Finnish on the stereo. The heat in the room is on the tropical side of balmy now. Alan's tweed jacket is back on the couch, and he rolled up his sleeves a glass or two back. Zane's blue eyes are misty. On their next revolution, he leans close and kisses Alan gently.
Alan should bristle at that, too. He should tear himself away, take a drunken swing at Zane. That feels familiar. But it makes a certain kind of sense. The gilded light, the bitterness of the alcohol on both of their lips. Zane watches him, waiting for a rise out of him; Alan kisses him in return, soft, sighing against his mouth.
'Wow,' Zane murmurs. 'Not protesting your heterosexuality?'
'I'm drunk,' Alan says. And warm, and so comfortable, there with Zane's arm slipping further around his waist, like hugging himself. It's far too easy to kiss Zane again, lazy and tectonically slow, while they turn uneven spirals around the room. 'I'm so, so tired,' he tells Zane again.
Zane laughs. 'I've never seen you like this,' he says, wondering. 'You're adorable.' He kisses Alan's mouth, his mole, his jaw; Alan nuzzles into his neck, enjoying the contact. It's been so long since anyone touched him like this. He wishes it wasn't Zane, wishes it was Alice, and at the same time he's thankful that it's Zane, thankful that the diver's light is there to cradle him once more. The fuzziness of fatigue quietens his shrieking inhibitions to a low buzz of anxiety. He can deal with the shame next time. If he remembers.
Zane's hand comes up to cup his cheek, tangle in his hair. Alan twines his arm around Zane's neck and surrenders himself to another kiss, one that Zane deepens until Alan can't tell where he ends and Zane begins. A sweetness in his chest he can't identify, with notes of gin and vermouth. Yellowed light like falling asleep in front of a television in the living room as a child. He is falling asleep. Is he asleep already? Is he dreaming?
'No,' Zane says, though Alan had been sure he hadn't spoken aloud. He can feel Zane's heart beating in time with his, pulsing in his neck as Alan presses his mouth to it; Zane sighs, and his heart races ahead, and for a weightless moment Alan has the frighteningly distinct impression that he is the mirror and Zane the man in front of it, that he is a dream Zane is having. He finds relief in that, in being the shadow, not the man casting it.
Then he snaps back to himself, or as much of himself as he can be drunk and a few metres from unconsciousness. He gasps. Zane's lips brush the shell of his ear. 'Alright there?' A delicate kiss at the point his jaw meets his neck. Zane's voice is half mocking - only half. 'Did you remember who you were dancing with?'
'I know who you are,' Alan says. 'Ki - kinda.' Laughter bubbles up from his throat. 'Tom Zane. Director. Actor.' He threads his fingers into Zane's hair to bring him closer. 'Poet. Diver. Writer. My... My...'
'Yours,' Zane agrees, tilting his face into Alan's palm to kiss it. 'Your friend.' He meets Alan's eyes and smiles like he knows Alan doesn't quite believe that, not when he's sober. 'I got you, Alan. You're safe with me.'
The song on the stereo crawls to a stop and loops back to the beginning. Alan sways in Zane's arms, still cupping his face. Their face. Zane hums along with the music and it brings to mind another memory, lit with flickering candles: he and Alice, tipsy, singing badly, embracing as a litany against the dark. He misses her. He misses this, this easy intimacy with another body that he knows as well as his own. A sense of peace, however temporary. He sighs, bleary, and says, 'Alice, I-'
The crinkles at the edges of Zane's eyes deepen. 'You did forget, didn't you? Do I look that much like your wife?'
'I didn't,' Alan says, half-laughing. He glances away into the glare of a lamp, then looks back at Zane. Really looks at him. He sees - not Alice, no, not Alice, but he sees a flash of the man she married. The way he looked at her, looking back at him from the other side of the mirror.
His breath catches; his thumb strokes Zane's cheek. 'I miss you,' he says, and kisses Zane as if he were someone else, as if he loved him. Zane holds him tighter, whispers his name in a tone Alan has never heard him use before and kisses him back with the same longing until Alan feels he might melt with it, overflow his borders like a dam bursting. It's too much. He's home. He's never been farther from home than he is now.
His vision is hazy and wet when he opens his eyes. 'I should,' he says, trying to keep his voice from breaking. Regret comes to him in waves. His sensations blur. 'I - I - I-'
'Sleep,' Zane murmurs. 'Sleep. I got you now. Oh, Alan.' The music drawing to a close. Zane's lips on his hair. 'I got you.'
He has the dim impression of Zane leading him to the bed. Lights spangling the ceiling with murky stars, as if seen from the bottom of a lake. Zane's wavy hair falling wild in his face as he leans over him to speak, voice low and fond. 'You rest up, Alan. We've got a lot of work to do.' Zane making to leave him alone, to dream of the Writer's Room that looms in his skull.
Later, he will regret this more than anything else: he tugs Zane's wrist and asks him to stay. To be a warm thing he can hold next to him, embrace as a litany against the dark. He doesn't say 'please'. He's not sure he says anything at all, but Zane understands him. He lies down with him and lets Alan lay his head on his bare chest, curls around him so that there is no space between them and there, for a short while, cocooned in the glow of a lighthouse beacon as he drifts to sleep, Alan doesn't miss anyone.