Chapter 4. Chris
I wake up to snow on the floor and Mads Holm watching me from the opposite bunk.
The compartment is cold. Really cold. Morning light filters through the broken vent in thin, pale stripes, catching on the dusting of snow that’s settled over the metal floor between us. I’m still wearing his hoodie, the fabric warm around my shoulders, and my breath comes out in small clouds.
Mads is already sitting up, his eyes on me with a look I’ve never seen on his face before. He’s not angry or annoyed. He looks soft, almost shy.
“Morning,” he says.
His voice is rough from sleep, his hair flattened on one side, and there’s a crease across his cheek from the pillow. I don’t remember him leaving my bunk during the night, and the fact that he did sits strangely in my chest.
“Morning,” I say back.
His eyes flick to the narrow space between us, like he knows exactly what I’m thinking.
“I moved before dawn,” he says.
I nod, trying to keep my face neutral.
“You were asleep,” he adds quickly. “And I was freezing.”
“Right,” I say. “Because the opposite bunk is famously tropical.”
A quiet laugh slips out of him, and my heart squeezes.
He looks at me for a beat, like he’s deciding whether to be honest, then says, “I didn’t know if it would be weird for you. If I stayed.”
I smile before I can help it. “It wouldn’t be.”
“Oh.” His smile comes back, small and shy. “Cool.”
We don’t say anything else for a moment.
Mads looks down first, like the smile embarrassed him, then gets up and reaches into his duffel for a clean T-shirt.
He pulls off the one he slept in—I look away, then look back, because after what we did last night, it’s kind of dumb—and tugs the fresh one on before pulling on his pants and a clean pair of socks.
I should say something too. Fill the silence. But my brain is stuck on a loop of last night—his voice in the dark, the way he touched me and moaned in my hands, how good he made me feel. And still, my chest is tight with anxiety.
Because I’ve been here before. The morning after. The part where the guy who thought he might be into men wakes up and realizes he was drunk, or confused, or just lonely, and now he has to find a polite way to take it all back.
I’ve been that guy’s experiment more times than I care to count.
So I keep my mouth shut and start changing too.
I pull off his hoodie—it smells like him, which is a problem—and reach for my own clothes.
I make my bunk with more care than it deserves, folding the bedding and putting everything on the shelf above it, because having something to do with my hands is better than sitting here waiting for rejection.
Mads watches me the whole time. I can feel his gaze on me, and when our eyes meet, the corner of his mouth twitches again.
“Did you sleep okay?” he asks.
“Yeah,” I say, feeling my cheeks heat up just because he’s talking to me. “You?”
“Yeah,” he says. “Like a baby.”
I smile at him before I can stop myself, and he smiles back.
Silence settles again. It should be awkward, but it isn’t, which is somehow worse, because awkward I know how to handle. This tender, careful thing between us is completely new territory, and I have no idea how to navigate it.
Thankfully, that’s when I hear metal slam against metal outside our compartment—a door between the cars being opened and closed.
I’m on my feet before I think about it, crossing the space in two strides and hammering my palm against our own door. “Hey! We’re stuck in here! The door’s jammed!”
For a second, nothing happens.
Then a muffled male voice comes from the corridor, saying something in another language, followed by the hard clack of someone trying the door.
Nothing.
He tries again. The mechanism gives a dull metal thunk, but the door doesn’t move.
Another muttered sentence comes through the metal, this one sounding a lot less patient.
“I think he just said ‘fuck you’ in Norwegian,” Mads says, one eyebrow raised.
“What, seriously?” I say.
Mads chuckles, shaking his head. “No idea. My Norwegian is mostly limited to swear words and hockey insults, so maybe I’m projecting.”
I snort.
The man outside says something else, sharper this time, then his footsteps move away. A second later, I hear the heavy bang of the connector door opening, then closing again.
I stay by the door for another second, listening. When nothing else happens, I sit down on the edge of my bunk and look back at Mads.
“Well,” I say. “I hope he comes back.”
Mads grins at me. “I’m choosing to believe he went for tools.”
I look back at the door, listening for any sign of the conductor. For a minute, there’s nothing but the rattle of the train and the wind hissing through the broken vent.
Then the footsteps return.
For twenty seconds, there’s only the scrape of metal against metal.
Then the door groans and slides open about six inches before catching again.
The conductor—a thin guy with a gray mustache and the tired expression of someone who’s seen every possible thing that can go wrong on a train—peers through the gap, a pry bar in his hand.
“The door is stuck,” he says in barely accented English, like it’s still not obvious.
“Yes,” I say.
He nods once, very seriously. Then he pulls the pry bar free, mutters something under his breath, and disappears from view again. I hear him rummaging through what sounds like a toolbox before he comes back with a longer pry bar.
This time, he wedges it into the gap with both hands and shoves. The door groans again, louder this time, then finally slides open all the way, warmer corridor air spilling into our freezing compartment.
The conductor steps inside, and his eyes immediately catch on the broken vent. Then he notices the snow on the floor.
For a second, he just stares.
Then he points at the vent. “What the hell happened here?”
I don’t even blink. “The glass fell out. Last night. We were sleeping, and there was this crack, and then it just dropped outside.”
Mads makes a sound—a choked, suppressed thing that might be a laugh—and when I glance at him, he’s looking at the floor with his lips pressed together, the corners of his mouth fighting a smile.
The conductor looks at the vent again, then at me, then at Mads. His expression says he doesn’t believe a word of it, but he also clearly doesn’t want to deal with two oversized hockey players at seven in the morning.
Finally, he points at the door. “Do not close this again.”
“Right,” I say.
He gives the vent one last suspicious look, mutters something under his breath, and steps back into the corridor.
The open door should be a relief, but instead it makes the compartment feel suddenly too exposed, like whatever happened between us in the dark has been dragged into the morning for anyone to see.
Mads looks at me.
“The glass fell out,” he says, doing a terrible impression of my voice.
“I panicked.”
“You’re a terrible liar.”
“I’m an excellent liar. Just not this early.”
He laughs then—a real laugh, rough and warm—and holds my gaze the whole time, like last night isn’t something he’s embarrassed about or already trying to take back. Some of the tightness in my chest loosens, even if I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop.
I get about three seconds to enjoy the moment before the connector door bangs open again and familiar voices drift down the corridor.
Mads’s smile fades into something more careful, and by the time the voices reach our compartment, we’re both looking toward the corridor instead of at each other.
Roman appears first, already dressed, his team jacket zipped halfway. Sam is right behind him, his hair wet at the edges like he stuck his head in the sink and considered the job done.
They slow when they reach our compartment, then stop in the doorway.
“Morning, guys,” Roman says, then freezes.
His gaze moves over the broken vent, the snow on the floor, and Mads and me sitting there in the middle of it all. His eyebrows lift before his face goes carefully blank.
“Sleep well?” he asks.
“Yup,” we say in unison.
Sam has no such restraint. His gaze jumps from the vent to Mads, then lands on me like I’m the only reliable witness in the room.
“What the fuck happened in here?” he says. “Did you two fight? Did Mads try to throw you off the train through that tiny fucking vent, Rodriguez? Because if so, I’m on your side, but I also want details.”
“The vent broke,” Mads says, deadpan.
Sam looks at him. “Broke?”
“Yep.”
“As in, by itself?” Sam asks, stepping into the compartment to inspect it.
“Norwegian engineering,” Mads says with a shrug. “What can you do?”
While Sam is busy squinting at the vent, I catch Roman’s gaze. It sweeps over the compartment, drops briefly to Mads’s hoodie still lying on my bunk, then moves back to Mads and finally to me.
For one terrifying second, his mouth twitches like he’s trying not to smile, and I swear he knows exactly what happened last night.
I brace for him to say it out loud.
Instead, he looks at Mads. “Toledo wants you in the next car.”
Mads blinks. “What? Why?”
“No clue,” Roman says. “Sounded urgent.”
Mads looks at me, and I can tell he’s thinking the same thing I am: if the conductor said anything to Toledo, we’re screwed. He’ll probably assume we got into a fistfight in here or something. Why Toledo only wants Mads, though, I have no idea.
“All right,” Mads says after a beat. “I’ll be right there, Rome.”
“Okay,” Roman says, then turns to Sam. “Let’s go, Sammy.”
Sam looks almost offended by that. “Whoa, sorry, but I’m not done with this. How does a vent just—”
Roman catches him by the back of his jacket and pulls him away like he’s picking up a feisty kitten. “Later.”
“But I have follow-up questions.”
“I’m sure you do.”
They disappear down the corridor, Sam still protesting, until their voices fade behind the connector door.
For about two seconds, neither of us says anything.
Then Mads turns to me. “Well, they’re not going to throw me in jail, right?”
I shake my head, then add with a smirk, “They might deport you, though.”