fakediary

We made love.

And somewhere along the way, the nervousness that had consumed me since the airport disappeared entirely.

David was nothing if not passionate. All that time spent longing for each other seemed to have caught up with us at once. He was affectionate, attentive, and apparently in no hurry to let the world outside our hotel room reclaim our attention.

Neither was I.

For months, the world had been an obstacle between us. There were oceans, continents, time zones, and thousands of miles separating our lives. We had learned to work around them, stealing hours from our sleep and arranging our days around the narrow windows of time when we could be together.

But here, inside this room, none of those things mattered.

There were no screens, no unstable connections, no clocks reminding us that one of us needed to sleep while the other was only beginning the day.

There was just David and me.

Time lost its usual meaning. The hours passed unnoticed, marked only by the changing light filtering through the curtains.

By the time David finally collapsed beside me, the room had fallen into darkness.

I lay on my back, exhausted, staring at the ceiling as I slowly caught my breath.

Beyond the window, New York had transformed into a sea of lights. The last traces of daylight had disappeared, leaving behind a glittering skyline of illuminated buildings and countless little windows.

I turned my head toward the view.

There was something beautiful about the city at night. Thousands of people living thousands of different lives, all stacked on top of one another, separated by little more than walls and windows.

Somewhere out there, people were meeting friends for dinner, hurrying home from work, arguing with their spouses, or going about the countless ordinary routines that made up their lives.

And here I was, in one of those rooms, with a man who had flown halfway across the world to meet me.

For several hours, I had forgotten that any of those other lives existed.

I was still trying to absorb the absurdity of it all when I heard voices outside.

Footsteps approached along the hallway, followed by a conversation between what sounded like two hotel guests.

At first, I paid little attention.

Then I caught a few words.

The voices were unusually clear. Loud enough that I couldn’t help wondering whether the people outside were deliberately speaking for our benefit.

A horrible realization crept over me.

Oh, God.

Had we been that loud?

I stared at the door.

The footsteps slowed briefly before continuing down the hallway, accompanied by a few more remarks I couldn’t quite make out.

My face grew hot.

Apparently, in all the excitement, I had forgotten that hotel rooms were not entirely soundproof.

I had also forgotten that other people existed.

And apparently, those other people had not been afforded the same luxury of forgetting about us.

Suddenly mortified, I grabbed the white duvet and pulled it over myself, sinking farther and farther beneath it until only the top of my head remained visible.

Beside me, David stirred.

He had heard them too.

I could tell by the way he turned toward the door, then back toward the increasingly suspicious mound of bedding beside him.

For a moment, he said nothing.

Then he chuckled.

I pulled the duvet higher.

“Don’t laugh.”

That, naturally, only made him laugh more.

I gave him an indignant look from beneath the covers.

“It’s not funny.”

He was still smiling.

I wanted to disappear.

Not metaphorically. I genuinely wished the mattress would open up and swallow me whole.

David, however, seemed entirely untroubled by the possibility that we had disturbed half the floor.

He leaned toward me, gently tugged the duvet down just enough to uncover my forehead, and kissed it.

The gesture was so tender, so utterly at odds with my embarrassment, that I almost laughed myself.

Almost.

I pulled the covers back over my face.

He chuckled again and slipped an arm around the bundle of blankets that had become me.

I could feel the warmth of his body beside mine.

And despite my humiliation, I found myself smiling beneath the duvet.

It was funny, really.

For months, David and I had existed almost entirely outside each other’s physical worlds. We had shared our thoughts, our memories, and our most private fears, yet remained strangers to the people who surrounded us in our everyday lives.

To anyone passing us on the street, we would have been nothing more than two people looking at their phones.

No one would have known how much of ourselves we had entrusted to someone living on the other side of the world.

And now, for the first time, we had a world of our own.

A rather small one, admittedly.

Four walls, a bed, two suitcases, and a spectacular view of Manhattan.

But it was ours.

Inside, we could be affectionate, ridiculous, vulnerable, and entirely ourselves. We could forget the distance that had once separated us and the complicated lives waiting for us back home.

Outside, however, the world carried on.

There were strangers in the hallway who had no interest in our romantic reunion and would probably have preferred a quieter evening. There were people in the neighboring rooms who knew nothing about us except, perhaps, more than they had ever wanted to know.

I buried my face against David’s chest, still embarrassed.

He kissed the top of my head.

And just like that, the outside world seemed to retreat again.

The voices faded down the corridor. The footsteps disappeared. Soon, all I could hear was the distant hum of traffic and the steady rhythm of David’s breathing.

I found myself thinking about how peculiar intimacy was.

It allowed two people to create a space that felt entirely separate from the rest of the world, even when that world was only a few inches away, on the other side of a wall.

Of course, the separation was an illusion.

The walls were thin. The city was loud. Our lives were waiting for us beyond the hotel door, and eventually, we would have to return to them.

But for the moment, I was content to pretend otherwise.

David tightened his arm around me, and I settled more comfortably against him.

I looked toward the window once more.

New York glittered beyond the glass, indifferent to the fact that something rather extraordinary had happened in one of its countless hotel rooms.

I smiled to myself.

We had crossed oceans to be together, only to discover that our little private universe wasn’t quite as private as we had imagined.

Still, I liked it there.

And I wasn’t particularly eager to leave.

Unfortunately, we had dinner reservations.

And before we could face the outside world again, we were both going to need another shower.