“You would not,” he argues.
And here’s my chance to let it go, but I’m still too fired up, too annoyed to let him think he’s right about this.
“Well, I would for you too,” he retorts, like somehow this is all some sort of argument.
“Don’t say something you don’t mean,” I warn. “I wouldn’t be wearing a blazer or sitting behind a desk, smiling.”
His lips press closed. His jaw muscles bounce as he swallows. “Okay, show me.”
I open my own Tinder app and hand my phone over so he can see the picture. I’m smiling sleepily, dressed like an alien in a silver dress and face paint with aluminum antennae hot-glued to my headband. Halloween, obviously. Or wait, was it Rachel’s X-Files-themed birthday party?
Alex considers the photo seriously, then scrolls down to read my bio. After a minute, he hands my phone back to me and looks me dead in the eye. “I would.”
My whole body tingles with pins and needles. “Oh,” I say, then manage a small “okay.”
“So,” he says, “are you done being mad at me?”
I try to say something, but my tongue feels too heavy. My whole body feels heavy, especially where my hip is touching his. So I just nod.
Thank God for his back spasm, I think. Otherwise I’m not sure what would happen next.
Alex studies me for a few seconds, then reaches for the forgotten laptop. His voice comes out thick. “What do you want to watch?”
ALEX AND I were both pretty strapped for cash when the resort in Vail, Colorado, reached out to offer me a free stay.
At that point, whether the trip would happen was up in the air.
For one thing, when Guillermo broke up with me for a new hostess in his restaurant (a waifish blue-eyed girl almost fresh off the plane from Nebraska)—six weeks after I took the plunge and moved into his apartment—I had to scramble to find a new place to live.
Had to take an apartment on the high end of my price range.
Had to pay for a U-Haul for the second time in two months.
Had to buy new furniture to replace the stuff that had become redundant and thus been discarded—Gui already had nicer versions of my things: sofa, mattress, Danish-look kitchen table. We’d kept my dresser, because the leg on his was broken, and my bedside table, because he only had the one, but other than that, pretty much everything we’d kept was his.
The breakup came just after we’d gone to Linfield for Mom’s birthday.
For weeks beforehand, I’d debated whether to warn Gui what to expect.
For example, the Beverly Hillbillies–style junkyard that was our front lawn. Or Mom’s Museum to Our Childhood, as me and my brothers called the house itself. The baked goods my mother would pile up around the kitchen the whole time we were there, often with a frosting so thick and sweet it made non-Wrights cough as they ate, or the fact that our garage was riddled with things like once-used duct tape Dad was sure he could repurpose. Or that we’d be expected to play a days-spanning board game we’d invented as kids based on Attack of the Killer Tomatoes.
That my parents had recently adopted three senior cats, one of whom was incontinent to the point of having to wear a diaper.
Or that there was a decent chance he’d hear my parents having sex, because our house had thin walls, and as previously stated, the Wrights are a loud clan.
Or that there’d be a New Talent Show at the end of the weekend, where everyone was expected to perform some new feat they’d only started learning at the start of the visit.
(Last time I’d been home, Prince’s talent had been having us call out the name of any movie and trying to connect it back to Keanu Reeves within six degrees.) So I should’ve warned Guillermo what he was walking into, definitely, but doing so would’ve felt like treason. Like I was saying there was something wrong with them. And sure, they were loud and messy, but they were also amazing and kind and funny, and I hated myself for even considering being embarrassed by them.
Gui would love them, I told myself. Gui loved me, and these were the people who’d made me.
At the end of our first night there, we shut ourselves into my childhood bedroom and he said, “I think I understand you better now than ever before.”
His voice was as tender and warm as ever, but instead of love, it sounded like sympathy.
“I get why you had to flee to New York,” he said. “It must’ve been so hard for you here.”
My stomach sunk and my heart squeezed painfully, but I didn’t correct him. Again, I just hated myself for being embarrassed.
Because I had fled to New York, but I hadn’t fled my family, and if I’d kept them separate from the rest of my life, it was only to protect them from judgment, and myself from this familiar feeling of rejection.
The rest of the trip was uncomfortable. Gui was kind to my family—he was always kind
—but I saw every interaction they had through a lens of condescension and pity after that.
I tried to forget the trip had happened. We were happy together, in our real life, in New York. So what if he didn’t understand my family? He loved me.
A few weeks later, we went to a dinner party at his friend’s brownstone, someone he’d known from boarding school, a guy with a trust fund and a Damien Hirst painting hanging over the dining room table. I knew this—would never forget it—because when someone said the name, unrelated to the painting, I said, “Who?” and laughter followed.
They weren’t laughing at me; they genuinely thought I was making a joke.
Four days after that, Guillermo ended our relationship. “We’re just too different,” he said.
“We got swept up in our chemistry, but long term, we want different things.”
I’m not saying he dumped me for not knowing who Damien Hirst was. But I’m not not saying that either.
When I moved out of the apartment, I stole one of his fancy cooking knives.
I could’ve taken them all, but my mild form of revenge was imagining him looking everywhere for it, trying to figure out if he took it with him to a dinner party or it fell into the gap between his enormous refrigerator and the kitchen island.
Frankly, I wanted the knife to haunt him.
Not in a My-Ex-Is-Going-to-Go-All-Glenn-Close-in- Fatal-Attraction way, but in a Something-About-This-Missing-Knife-Seems-to-Be-Conjuring-a-Strong-Metaphor-and-ICan’t-Figure-Out-What-It’s-Saying way.
I started feeling guilty after a week in my new apartment—once the sobbing wore off—
and considered mailing the knife back but thought that might send the wrong message. I imagined Gui showing up to the police department with the package, and decided I’d just let him buy a new knife.
I thought about selling the stolen one online, and worried the anonymous buyer would turn out to be him, so I just kept it and resumed my sobbing until I was done threeish weeks later.
The point is, breakups suck. Breakups between cohabitating partners in overpriced cities suck a little extra, and I wasn’t sure I’d be able to afford a summer trip this year.
And then there was the matter of Sarah Torval.
Adorable, willowy yet athletic, clean-faced, brown-eyeliner-wearing Sarah Torval.
Who Alex has been seriously dating for nine months. After their first chance encounter when Alex was visiting friends in Chicago, their texting had quickly evolved into phone calls, and then another visit. After that they’d gotten serious fast, and after six months long distance, she’d taken a teaching job and moved to Indiana to be with him while he finished his MFA. She’s happy to stay there while he works toward his doctorate, and will probably follow him wherever he lands afterward.
Which would make me happy if not for my increasing suspicion that she hates me.
Whenever she posts pictures of herself holding Alex’s brand-new baby niece with captions like family time, or this little love bug, I like the post and comment, but she refuses
to follow me back. I even unfollowed and refollowed her once, in case she hadn’t noticed me the first time.
“I think she feels kind of weird about the trip,” Alex admits on one of our (now fewer and farther between) calls. I’m pretty sure he only calls me from the car, when he’s on his way to or from the gym. I want to tell him that calling me only when she’s not around probably isn’t helping.
But the truth is, I don’t want to talk to him while anyone else is around, so instead this is what has become of our friendship. Fifteen-minute calls every couple weeks, no texting, no messaging, hardly any emailing except the occasional one-liner with a picture of the tiny black cat he found in the dumpster behind his apartment complex.
She looks like a kitten, but according to the vet she’s fully grown, just small. He sends me pictures of her sitting in shoes and hats and bowls, always writing for scale, but really I know he just thinks everything she does is adorable. And sure, it’s cute that cats like to sit in things . . . but it’s quite possibly cuter that Alex can’t stop himself from taking pictures of it.
He hasn’t named her yet; he’s taking his time. He says it wouldn’t feel right to name a grown thing without knowing it, so for now he calls her cat or tiny sweetie or little friend.
Sarah wants to call her Sadie, but Alex doesn’t think that fits so he’s biding his time. The cat is the only thing we ever talk about these days. I’m surprised Alex would be so forthright as to tell me that Sarah feels weird about the Summer Trip.
“Of course she does,” I tell him, “I would too.” I don’t blame her at all. If my boyfriend had a friendship with a girl like Alex’s and mine, I would wind up in The Yellow Wallpaper.
There’s no way in hell I could believe it was wholly platonic. Especially having been in this friendship long enough to accept that five (to fifteenish) percent of what-if as part of the deal.
“So what do we do?” he asks.
“I don’t know,” I say, trying not to sound miserable. “Do you want to invite her?”
He’s quiet for a minute. “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
“Okay . . .” And then, after the longest pause ever, I say, “Should we just . . . cancel?”
Alex sighs. He must have me on speakerphone because I can hear his turn signal clicking.
“I don’t know, Poppy. I’m not sure.”
“Yeah. Me neither.”
We stay on the phone, but neither of us says anything else for the rest of his drive. “I just got home,” he says eventually. “Let’s talk about this again in a few weeks. Things could change by then.”
What things? I want to ask, but don’t, because once your best friend is someone else’s boyfriend, the boundaries between what you can and can’t say get a whole lot firmer.
I spend the whole night after our phone call thinking, Is he going to break up with her? Is she going to break up with him ?
Is he going to try to reason with her?
Is he going to break up with me ?
When I get the offer of a free stay from the resort in Vail, I send him the first text I’ve sent in months: Hey! Give me a call when you’ve got a sec!
At five thirty the next morning, my phone rings me awake. I peer through the dark at his name on the screen and fumble the call on to hear his turn signal tapping out a rhythm. He’s on his way to the gym. “What’s up?” he asks.
“What else?”
“Colorado,” I say. “Vail.”
I WAKE UP NEXT to Alex. He insisted that the bed in Nikolai’s Airbnb was plenty big, that neither of us should risk another night on the foldout chair, but we’re right in the middle of the mattress by the time morning comes.
I’m on my right side, facing him. He’s on his left, facing me. There’s half a foot between us, except that my left leg is sprawled over him, my thigh hooked up against his hip, his hand resting high up on it.
The apartment is hellishly hot, and we’re both drenched with sweat.
I need to extricate myself before Alex wakes up, but the ludicrous part of my brain wants to stay here, replaying the look he gave me, the way his voice sounded last night when he sized up my dating profile and said, “I would.”
Like a dare.
Then again, he was on muscle relaxants at the time.
Today, if he remembers that at all, he will almost definitely be regretful and embarrassed.
Or maybe he’ll remember sitting next to me for the length of an egregiously underwhelming documentary about the Kinks and feeling like a live wire, sparking every time our arms brushed.
“You usually fall asleep during these,” he pointed out with a mild smile, jostling his leg against mine, but when he looked down at me, his hazel eyes seemed to be part of a different expression entirely, one with sharp edges and even some hunger.
I shrugged, said something like, “Just not tired,” and tried to focus on the movie. Time moved at an oily slog, every second beside him striking me with new intensity as if we’d just started touching again and again and again for almost two hours.
It was early when the movie ended, so we started another documentary that was boring and mindless, just background noise to make it feel okay that we were riding this line.
At least I was pretty sure that was what we’d been doing.
The way his hand is spread over my thigh now sends another prickly rush of want through me. A very nonsensical part of me wants to nestle closer, until we’re touching all over, and wait to see what happens when he wakes up.
All those memories from Croatia froth to the surface of my mind, sending desperate flashes out through my body.
I pull my leg off him, and his hand tightens on me reflexively, loosening when I drag myself clear from under it. I roll away and sit up just as Alex is stirring awake, his eyes slitting open sleepily, hair wild with bedhead. “Hey,” he rasps.
My own voice comes out thick. “How’d you sleep?”
“Good, I think,” he says. “You?”
“Good. How’s your back?”
“Let me see.” Slowly, he pushes himself up, turning to slide his long legs over the side of the bed. He cautiously stands. “A lot better.”
He has an enormous erection and seems to notice at the same time I do. He folds his hands in front of himself and looks around the apartment squinting. “There’s no way it was this hot when we fell asleep.”
He’s probably right, but I have no real recollection of how hot it was last night.
I wasn’t thinking clearly enough to process the heat.
Today cannot go the way of yesterday.
No more lounging around the apartment. No more sitting together on the bed. No more talking about Tinder. No more falling asleep together and half mounting him while unconscious.
Tomorrow, wedding festivities will begin for David and Tham (bachelor parties, rehearsal dinner, wedding). Today, Alex and I need to have enough uncomplicated, unconfusing fun that when we get home, he doesn’t need another two-year break from me.
“I’ll call Nikolai about the AC again,” I say. “But we should get moving. We’ve got a lot to do.”
Alex runs his hand up his forehead into his hair. “Do I have time to shower?”
My heart gives a sharp pulse, and just like that I’m imagining taking a shower with him.
“If you want,” I manage. “But you will be drenched in sweat again in seconds.”
He shrugs. “I don’t think I can make myself leave the apartment feeling this dirty.”
“You’ve been dirtier,” I joke, because I have misplaced my already faulty filter.
“Only in front of you,” he says, and rustles my hair as he walks past to the bathroom.
My legs feel like jelly under me as I stand there waiting for the shower to turn on. Only once it does do I feel capable of moving again, and my first stop is the thermostat.
Eighty-five?!
Eighty-five miserable degrees in this apartment and the thermostat’s been set to seventy-nine since last night. So we can officially rule the air conditioner fully broken.
I walk onto the balcony and dial Nikolai, but he sends me to voicemail on the third ring. I leave another message, this one a little angrier, then follow up with an email and a text too before going inside to search for the lightest-weight piece of clothing I brought.
A gingham sundress that’s so baggy it hangs on me like a paper bag.
The water turns off, and Alex does not make the mistake of coming out in his towel this time. He emerges fully dressed, hair wicked back and water droplets still clinging (sensuously, I might add) to his forehead and neck.
“So,” he says. “What did you have in mind today?”
“Surprises,” I say. “Lots of them.” I try to dramatically fling the car keys to him. They fall to the floor two feet short. He looks down at where they lie.
“Wow,” he says. “Was that . . . one of the surprises?”
“Yes,” I say. “Yes, it was. But the others are better so pick those up and let’s hit it.”
His mouth twists. “I probably . . .”
“Oh, right! Your back!” I run over and retrieve the keys, handing them to him like a normal adult human might.
When we walk out onto the exterior hallway of the Desert Rose, Alex says, “At least it’s not just our apartment that feels like Satan’s anal glands.”
“Yes, it’s much better that the entire city be this ungodly hot,” I say.
“You’d think with all the rich people vacationing here they’d have money to just air-condition the whole place.”
“First stop: city council, to pitch that bomb-ass idea.”
“Have you considered building a dome, Councilwoman?” he says dryly as we plod down the steps.
“Hey, that one guy did it in that one Stephen King novel,” I say.
“I’ll probably leave that out of the pitch.”
“I have good ideas.” I try again to give him the puppy face as we’re crossing the parking lot, and he laughs and shoves my face away.
“You’re not good at that,” he says.
“Your severe reaction would suggest otherwise.”
“You legitimately look like you’re shitting.”
“That’s not my shitting face,” I say. “This is.” I strike a Marilyn Monroe pose, legs wide, one hand braced against my thigh, the other covering my open mouth.
“That’s nice,” he says. “You should put that on your blog.” Quickly, stealthily, he whips his phone out and snaps a picture.
“Hey!”
“Maybe a toilet paper company will endorse you,” he suggests.
“That’s not bad,” I say. “I like the way you think.”
“I have good ideas,” he parrots, and unlocks the door for me, then circles to the driver’s seat as I get in and take a deep whiff of the perma-weed smell.
“Thank you for never making me drive,” I say as he gets in, hissing at the feel of the hot seat, and clicks his seat belt.
“Thank you for hating driving and allowing me to have some modicum of control over my life in this vast and unpredictable universe.”
I wink at him. “No prob.”
He laughs.
Weirdly, he seems more relaxed than he has this whole trip. Or maybe it’s just that I’m being more insistently normal and chatty, and this really was the key to a successful, old-school Poppy and Alex summer trip all along.
“So are you going to tell me where we’re going, or should I just aim for the sun and go?”
“Neither,” I say. “I’ll navigate.”
Even driving full speed with all the windows down, it feels like we’re standing in front of an open furnace, its blasts racing through our hair and clothes. Today’s heat makes yesterday’s look like the first day of spring.
We are going to be spending a lot of time outdoors today, and I make a mental note to buy enormous water bottles the first chance we get.
“This next left,” I say, and when the sign appears ahead, I cry, “Ta-da!”
“The Living Desert Zoo and Gardens,” Alex reads.
“One of the top ten best zoos in the world,” I say.
“Well, we’ll be the judge of that,” he replies.
“Yeah, and if they think we’re going to go easy on them just because we’re delusional from heat exhaustion, they’ve got another think coming.”
“But if they sell milkshakes, I’m inclined to leave them a largely positive review,” Alex says quickly under his breath, and turns the car off.
“Well, we’re not monsters.”
It’s not like we’re zoo people, but this place specializes in animals native to the desert, and they do a lot of rehabilitation with the goal of releasing animals back into the wild.
Also they let you feed giraffes.
I don’t tell Alex this because I want him to be surprised. While he is a young, hot cat lady in his heart, he’s also just a general animal lover, so I expect this to go over well.
The feeding goes until eleven thirty a.m., so I figure we have time to wander freely before I have to figure out where the giraffes are, and if we happen upon them by accident before then, all the better.
Alex still has to be careful with his back, so we move slowly, wandering from an informative reptile show to one about birds, during which Alex leans over and whispers, “I think I just decided to be afraid of birds.”
“It’s good to find new hobbies!” I hiss back. “It means you’re not stagnant.”
His laugh is quiet but unsuppressed, rattling down my arm in a way that makes me feel light-headed. Of course, that could also be the heat.
After the bird show we head to the petting zoo, where we stand among a coterie of five-year-olds and use special brushes to comb Nigerian dwarf goats.
“I misread that sign as ghosts, not goats, and now I’m just disappointed,” Alex says under his breath. He punctuates it with the face.
“It is so freaking hard to find a good ghost exhibit these days,” I point out.
“Too true,” he agrees.
“Remember our cemetery tour guide in New Orleans? He hated us.”
“Huh,” Alex says in a way that suggests he doesn’t remember, and my stomach, which has been somersaulting all day, rolls into a wall and sinks. I want him to remember. I want every moment to matter as much to him as it has to me. But if the old ones don’t, then maybe at least this trip can. I’m determined that it will.
In the petting zoo, we meet some other African livestock, including a few Sicilian dwarf donkeys.
“There sure are a lot of tiny things in the desert,” I say.
“Maybe you should move here,” Alex teases.
“You’re just trying to get me out of New York so you can swoop in and get my apartment.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” he says. “I could never afford that apartment.”
After the petting zoo, we track down some milkshakes—Alex gets vanilla despite all my desperate pleading. “Vanilla isn’t a flavor.”
“It is too,” Alex says. “It’s the taste of the vanilla bean, Poppy.”
“You might as well just be drinking frozen heavy cream.”
He thinks for a second. “I would try that.”
“At least get chocolate,” I say.
“You get chocolate,” he says.
“I can’t. I’m getting strawberry.”
“See?” Alex says. “Like I said last night, you think I’m boring.”
“I think vanilla milkshakes are boring,” I say. “I think you are misguided.”
“Here.” Alex holds his paper cup out to me. “Want a sip?”
I heave a sigh. “Fine.” I lean forward and take a sip. He arches his eyebrow, waiting for a reaction. “It’s okay.”
He laughs. “Yeah, honestly it’s not that good. But that’s not Vanilla as a Flavor’s fault.”
After we’ve polished off our milkshakes and tossed the cups, I decide we should ride the Endangered Species Carousel.
But when we get there, we find it’s closed due to heat.
“Global warming’s really hitting the endangered species when they’re down,” Alex muses. He wipes his forearm up his head, catching the sweat gathering there.
“You need some water?” I ask. “You don’t look so good.”
“Yeah,” he says. “Maybe.”
We go buy a couple bottles and sit on a bench in the shade. A few sips in, though, Alex looks worse. “Shit,” he says. “I’m pretty dizzy.” He hunches over his knees and hangs his head.
“Can I get you something?” I ask. “Maybe you need real food?”
“Maybe,” he agrees.
“Here. Stay here and I’ll get you, like, a sandwich, okay?”
I know he must be feeling awful because he doesn’t argue. I walk back to the last café we passed. There’s a long line by now—it’s almost lunchtime.
I check my phone. Eleven oh three. Just under thirty minutes left to feed the giraffes.
I stand in line for ten minutes to get the premade turkey club, then jog back to find Alex sitting where I left him, his head resting in his hands.
“Hey,” I say, and his glass eyes rise. “Feeling any better?”
“I’m not sure,” he says, and accepts the sandwich, unwrapping it. “Want some?”
He gives me half, and I take a couple bites, trying my best not to time him as he slowly munches on his half. At eleven twenty-two, I ask, “Is it helping?”
“I think so. I feel less dizzy anyway.”
“Do you think you’re okay to walk?”
“Are we . . . in a hurry?” he asks.
“No, of course not,” I say. “There’s just this thing. Your surprise. It ends pretty soon.”
He nods, but he looks queasy, so I’m torn between pushing him to rally or insisting he stay put. “I’m okay,” he says, climbing to his feet. “Just need to remember to drink more water.”
We make it to the giraffes at eleven thirty-five.
“Sorry,” a teenage employee tells me. “Giraffe feeding is over for the day.”
As she walks away, Alex looks at me hazily. “Sorry, Pop. I hope you’re not too disappointed.”
“Of course not,” I insist. I don’t care about feeding giraffes (at least not much). What I care about is making this trip good. Proving we should keep taking them. That we can salvage our friendship.
That’s why I’m disappointed. Because it’s the first strike of the day.
My phone buzzes with a message, and at least it’s some good news.
Nikolai writes, Got all of you [ sic] messages. I’ll see what I can do.
Okay, I write back. Just keep us updated.
“Come on,” I say, “let’s go somewhere air-conditioned until our next stop.”
I DON’T KNOW HOW Alex got Sarah on board with the Vail trip, but he did.
Asking how strikes me as dangerous. There are things we talk around these days, to keep everything aboveboard, and Alex is careful not to share anything that might embarrass Sarah.
There’s no talk of jealousy. Maybe there is no jealousy. Maybe there’s some other reason she didn’t initially like the idea of the trip. But she changes her mind, and the trip is on, and once Alex and I are together, I stop worrying about it. Things feel normal between us again, that fifteenish percent of what-if shrunken back to a manageable two.
We rent bikes and rumble over the cobblestone streets, take a gondola up the mountain, and pose for photos with the vast blue sky behind us, wind blowing our hair across our faces in midlaugh. We sit on patios, sipping chilled green tea or coffee in the mornings before it gets hot, take long hikes on mountain trails during the day with our sweatshirts shed and tied around our waists, only to wind up at different outdoor patios, drinking red wine and sharing three orders of fries with pressed garlic and freshly grated Parmesan. We sit outside until we’re goose-bump-covered and shivering, and then pull on our sweatshirts, and I draw my knees up to my chest inside mine. Every time I do this, Alex leans over and flicks my hood up over my head, then tugs the drawstrings tight so that only the very middle of my face is visible, and most of that is blocked by tufts of wind-tangled blond hair.
“Cutie,” he says, grinning, the first time he does this, but it feels almost brotherly.
One night, there’s a live band playing Van Morrison hits while we’re eating dinner outside under strands of globe lights that remind me of the night we met as freshmen. We follow older couples onto the dance floor, hand in hand. We move like we did back in New Orleans
—clumsy and rhythmless but laughing, happy.
Now that it’s behind us, I can admit that things were different that night.
In the magic of the city and its music and smells and glimmering lights, I felt something I’d never felt with him before. Scarier than that, I’d known from the way Alex looked into my eyes, smoothed his hand down my arm, eased his cheek against mine, that he felt it too.
But now, dancing to “Brown Eyed Girl,” the heat has gone out of his touch. And I’m happy, because I never want to lose this.
I would rather have one tiny sliver of him forever than have all of him for just a moment and know I’d have to relinquish all of it when we were through. I could never lose Alex. I couldn’t. And so this is good, this peaceful, sparkless dance. This sparkless trip.
Alex calls Sarah twice a day, morning and night, but never in front of me. In the morning, they talk while he jogs, before I’m even out of bed, and when he gets back, he wakes me up with coffee and a pastry from the café in the resort’s clubhouse. At night, he steps out onto the balcony to call her and shuts the door behind him.
“I don’t want you to make fun of my phone voice,” he says.
“God, I’m an asshole,” I say, and though he laughs, I do feel bad. Teasing has always been a big part of our dynamic, and it’s felt like our thing. But there are things he won’t do in front of me now, parts of him he doesn’t trust with me, and I don’t like how that feels.
When he comes inside after his jog and morning call the next day, I sit up sleepily to accept the proffered coffee and croissant and say, “Alex Nilsen, for whatever it’s worth, I’m sure your phone voice is amazing.”
He blushes, rubs the back of his head. “It’s not.”
“I bet you’re all buttery and warm and sweet and perfect.”
“Are you talking to me or the croissant?” he asks.
“I love you, croissant,” I say, and tear a piece off, lowering it into my mouth. He stands there, hands in his pockets, grinning, and my heart swells, Grinch-style, just looking at him.
“But I’m talking about you.”
“You’re sweet, Poppy,” he says. “And buttery and warm and whatever. But I still would just rather talk on the phone alone.”
“Heard,” I say, nodding, and hold my croissant out to him. He tears off the teensiest piece and pops it between his lips.
Later that day, while we’re sitting at lunch, something brilliant occurs to me. “Lita!” I cry, seemingly out of nowhere.
“Bless you?” Alex says.
“Remember Lita?” I say. “She was living in that dumpy house in Tofino. With Buck?”
Alex narrows his eyes. “Is she the one who tried to put her hand down my pants while she was giving me a ‘tour’?”
“Um, one, you didn’t tell me that happened, and two, no. She was hanging out with me and Buck. She was leaving soon, remember? Moving to Vail to be a rafting guide!”
“Oh,” Alex says. “Yeah. Right.”
“Do you think she’s still here?”
He squints. “On this earthly plane? I’m not sure any of those people are.”
“I’ve got Buck’s number,” I say.
“You do?” Alex gives me a pointed look.
“I haven’t used it,” I say. “But I have it. I’ll text him and see if he has Lita’s number.”
Hey, Buck! I write. Not sure if you remember me, but you gave me and my friend Alex a water taxi ride to the hot springs, like, five years ago, right before your friend Lita moved to Colorado? Anyway, I’m in Vail and was gonna see if she was still here! Hope you’re well and that Tofino is still the most beautiful place on this whole entire planet.
By the time we’ve finished eating, Buck has written back.
Damn, girl, he says. Is this sexy little Poppy? Took you long enough to use those digits.
Guess I shouldn’t have kicked you out of my room.
I snort-laugh, and Alex leans over the table to read the message upside down. He rolls his eyes. “Yeah, you fucking think, pal?”
No, no, no worries about that, I tell him. It was a great night. We had an amazing time.
Sweet, he says. I haven’t talked to Lita in years but I’ll shoot u her contact info if u want.
That would be amazing, I tell him.
If you ever make it back to the island r u gonna tell me? he asks.
Obviously, I say. I have no idea how to operate a water taxi. You’ll be invaluable.
Lol, he says, ur such a freak I love it.
By that night, we’ve booked a rafting trip with Lita, who does not remember us but insists on the phone that she’s sure we had a great time together.
“To be fair, I was on, like, a ton of drugs back then,” she says. “I was always having a great time, and I remember almost none of it.”
Alex, overhearing this, pulls a face that reads as anxiety with a side of unanswered questions. I know exactly what he wants me to find out.
“So,” I say, as casually as I can, “do you still . . . use . . . drugs?”
“Three years sober, mama,” she replies. “But if you’re looking to buy something, I can send you my old dude’s number.”
“No, no,” I say. “That’s okay. We’ll just . . . do . . . the stuff . . . we brought . . . from home.”
Looking beleaguered, Alex shakes his head.
“All right, then. See you two bright and early.”
When I hang up, Alex says, “Do you think Buck was on drugs when he drove our water taxi?”
I shrug. “We never did find out what he was ranting to no one about. Maybe he thought Jim Morrison was hovering on the water just in front of him.”
“I am so glad we’re still alive,” Alex says.
The next morning we meet Lita at the raft rental place, and she looks almost exactly as I remember her, but with a wedding band tattoo and a small baby bump.
“Four months,” she says, jogging it in her hands.
“And it’s . . . safe? To do this?” Alex asks.
“Baby number one did just fine,” Lita assures us. “You know, in Norway, they stick their babies outside to take naps.”
“Oh . . . kay,” Alex says.
“I would love to go to Norway,” I say.
“Oh, you’ve got to!” she says. “My wife’s twin sister lives there—she married a Norwegian. Gail sometimes talks about legally divorcing me and offering to pay a couple nice Norwegians to marry us so we can both get citizenship and move there. Call me old-fashioned, but I just don’t feel right about paying for my sham marriage.”
“Well, I guess you’ll just have to survive on Norwegian vacations, then,” I say.
“Guess so.”
Out of an abundance of caution, we opt for the beginner route, and we soon discover that this means that our “rafting trip” consists largely of sunbathing and floating with the current, sticking out our oars to shove off of rocks when we get too close, and amping up our rowing whenever a rapid crops up.
Lita, it turns out, remembers a lot more than she let on about Buck and the other people she lived with in the Tofino house, and she regales us with stories of people jumping off the roof onto a trampoline, and drunkenly giving each other stick-and-poke tattoos with red ink pens.
“Turns out some people are allergic to red ink,” she says. “Who knew?”
Every story she tells is more ludicrous than the last, and by the time we drag the raft onto the riverbank at the end of our route, my abs ache from laughing.
She wipes laugh-tears away from the just-starting-to-wrinkle corners of her eyes and heaves a contented sigh. “I can laugh because I survived it. Makes me happy knowing Buck did too.” She rubs her tummy. “Makes me so happy every time you find out how small the
world is, you know? Like, we were in that place at the same time and now here we are. At different points in our lives but still connected. Like quantum entanglement or some shit.”
“I think about that every time I’m in an airport,” I tell her. “It’s one reason I love traveling so much.” I hesitate, searching for how to pour this long-steeping soupy thought into concrete words. “As a kid, I was a loner,” I explain, “and I always figured that when I grew up, I’d leave my hometown and discover other people like me somewhere else. Which I have, you know? But everyone gets lonely sometimes, and whenever that happens, I buy a plane ticket and go to the airport and—I don’t know. I don’t feel lonely anymore. Because no matter what makes all those people different, they’re all just trying to get somewhere, waiting to reach someone.”
Alex gives me an odd look whose meaning I can’t interpret.
“Ah, shit,” Lita says. “You’re gonna make me cry. These damn pregnancy hormones. I react worse to them than I did to ayahuasca.”
Before we part ways, Lita pulls each of us into a long hug. “If you’re ever in New York . . .” I say.
“If you ever feel like taking a real rafting trip,” she answers with a wink.
Several silent minutes into our drive back to the resort, with worried creases shooting up from the insides of his eyebrows, Alex says, “I hate thinking about you being lonely.”
I must look confused, because he clarifies: “The thing about how you go to the airport.
When you feel like you’re alone.”
“I’m not really that lonely anymore,” I say.
I have the group text with Parker and Prince—we’ve been planning out a no-budget Jaws musical. Then there are the weekly calls with both my parents on speakerphone. Plus there’s Rachel, who’s really come through for me post-Guillermo, with invites to exercise classes and wine bars and volunteering days at dog shelters.
Even though Alex and I don’t talk as much as we used to, there are also the short stories he’s been mailing me with brief hand-scribbled notes on Post-its. He could email them, but he doesn’t, and after I’ve read each hard copy, I put it in a shoebox where I’ve started keeping the things that matter to me. (One shoebox, so I don’t end up with huge plastic bins of my future children’s dragon drawings like Mom and Dad have.) I don’t feel alone when I read his words. I don’t feel alone when I hold those Post-its in my hand and think about the person who wrote them.
“I’m sorry if I haven’t been there for you,” Alex says quietly. He opens his mouth as if to go on, then shakes his head and closes it again. We’ve made it back to the resort, pulled into our parking space, and when I turn in my seat to face him, he angles toward me too.
“Alex . . .” It takes me a few seconds to go on: “I’ve never really felt alone since I met you. I don’t think I’ll ever feel truly alone in this world again as long as you’re in it.”
His gaze softens, holds steady for a beat. “Can I tell you something embarrassing?”
For once, it doesn’t occur to me to joke, to be sarcastic. “Anything.”
He runs his hand over the steering wheel in a slow back-and-forth. “I don’t think I knew I was lonely until I met you.” He shakes his head again. “At home, after my mom died and my dad fell apart, I just wanted everyone to be okay. I wanted to be exactly what Dad needed, and exactly what my little brothers needed, and at school, I wanted to be who everyone wanted, so I tried to be calm and responsible and steady, and I think I was nineteen
years old the first time it occurred to me that maybe that wasn’t how some people lived.
That maybe I just was someone, beyond who I tried to be.
“I met you, and honestly . . . at first, I thought it was an act. The shocking clothes, the shocking jokes.”
“Whatever do you mean?” I tease quietly, and a smile winks in the corner of his mouth, brief as a beat of a hummingbird’s wings.
“On that first drive back to Linfield, you asked me all these questions about what I liked and what I hated, and I don’t know. It just felt like you really wanted to know.”
“Of course I did,” I say.
He nods. “I know. You asked me who I was, and—it was like the answer came out of nowhere. Sometimes it feels like I didn’t even exist before that. Like you invented me.”
Heat rushes to my cheeks, and I adjust my position in my seat, pulling my knees into my chest. “I’m not smart enough to have invented you. No one’s that smart.”
The muscles along his jaw leap as he considers his next words, never one to blurt anything out without first weighing it. “My point is, no one really knew me before you, Poppy. And even if . . . things change between us, you’ll never be alone, okay? I’ll always love you.”
Tears cloud my eyes, but miraculously I blink them clear. Somehow, my voice comes out steady and light, and not like someone reached into my rib cage and held my heart inside his hand just long enough to run a thumb across a secret wound.
“I know,” I tell him, and, “I love you too.”
It’s true, but not the full truth. There aren’t words vast or specific enough to capture the ecstasy and the ache and love and fear I feel just looking at him now.
So the moment sweeps past, and the trip goes on, and nothing is different between us, except that a part of me has woken up, like a bear emerging from hibernation with a hunger it has managed to sleep through for months but can’t ignore one second longer.
The next day, the second to last of the trip, we take a hike up a mountain pass. Near the top, I step to the edge of the path to take a photo through an opening in the trees of the deep blue lake below and lose my footing. My ankle rolls, hard and fast. It feels like the bone jabs through my foot to hit the ground, and then I’m sprawled in mud and leaves, hissing out swear words.
“Stay still,” Alex says, crouching beside me.
At first I can barely breathe, so I’m not crying, just choking, “Do I have a bone sticking out of my skin?”
Alex glances down, checks my leg. “No, I think you just sprained it.”
“Fuck,” I gasp from beneath a wave of pain.
“Squeeze my hand if you need to,” he says, and I do, as tight as I can. In his giant, masculine palm, my own looks tiny, my knuckles knobby and bulbous.
The pain lets up enough that mania rushes in to replace it. Tears falling in great gushes, I ask, “Do I have slow loris hands?”
“What?” Alex asks, understandably confused. His worried expression judders. He turns a laugh into a cough. “Slow loris hands?” he repeats seriously.
“Don’t laugh at me!” I squeak out, fully regressed into an eight-year-old little sister.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “No, you don’t have slow loris hands. Not that I know what a slow loris is.”
“It’s kind of like a lemur,” I say tearfully.
“You have beautiful hands, Poppy.” He tries very, very hard—perhaps his hardest ever—
not to smile, but slowly it happens anyway, and I break into a teary laugh. “Do you want to try to stand?” he asks.
“Can’t you just roll me down the mountain?”
“I’d rather not,” he says. “There might be poison ivy once we get off the trail.”
I sigh. “Okay, then.” He helps me up, but I can’t put any weight on my right foot without a lightning bolt of pain crackling up my leg. I stop shambling along, start to cry again, and bury my face in my hands to hide the snotty mess I’m crumbling into.
Alex rubs his hands slowly up and down my arms for a few seconds, which only makes me cry harder. People being nice to me when I’m upset always has this effect. He pulls me in against his chest and hooks his arms against my back.
“Am I going to have to, like, pay for a helicopter to get down there?” I get out.
“We’re not that far,” he says.
“I’m not kidding, I can’t put any weight on it.”
“Here’s what’s going to happen,” he says. “I’m going to pick you up, and I’m going to carry you—very slowly—down the trail. And I’m probably going to have to stop a lot and set you down, and you’re not allowed to call me Seabiscuit, or scream Faster! Faster! in my ear.”
I laugh into his chest, nod against him, leaving wet marks behind on his T-shirt.
“And if I find out you faked this whole thing just to see if I would carry you half a mile down a mountain,” he says, “I’m going to be really annoyed.”
“Scale of one to ten,” I say, leaning back to look into his face.
“Seven at least,” he says.
“You are so, so nice,” I say.
“You mean buttery and warm and perfect,” he teases, widening his stance. “Ready?”
“Ready,” I confirm, and Alex Nilsen sweeps me up into his arms and carries me down a motherfucking mountain.
No. I really could not have invented him.
FULLY RECHARGED AFTER two water bottles and forty minutes in a zoo gift shop full of stuffed camels, we head to our next destination.
The Cabazon Dinosaurs are pretty much exactly what they sound like: two big-ass dinosaur sculptures on the side of the highway in the middle of nowhere, California.
A theme-park sculptor built the steel monsters hoping to drive business to his roadside diner. Since he died, the property’s been sold to a group that put in a creationist museum and gift shop inside the tail of one of the dinosaurs.
It’s the kind of place you stop at because you’re already driving past. It’s also the kind of place you drive to, out of your way, when you’re trying to fill every second of your day.
“Well,” Alex says when we get out of the car. The dusty T. rex and brontosaurus tower over us, a few spiky palm trees and scraggly bushes dotting the sand beneath them. Time and sunlight have drained the dinos of almost any color. They look thirsty, like they’ve been shambling through this place and its harsh sunlight for millennia.
“Well, indeed,” I agree.
“Guess we should get some pictures?” Alex says.
“Definitely.”
He takes his phone out and waits for me to strike some poses in front of the dinosaurs.
After a couple tame Instagram-appropriate pictures, I start jumping and flailing my arms, hoping to make him laugh.
He smiles but still looks a little peaked, and I decide it’s best if we get into the shade. We amble through the grounds, take a couple more photos closer up and with the smaller dinosaurs that have been added within the scrubby brush surrounding the two main offerings. Then we climb the steps to poke around the gift shop.
“You can hardly tell we’re inside a dinosaur,” Alex jokingly complains.
“Right? Where are the giant vertebrae? Where are the blood vessels and tail muscles?”
“This is not getting a favorable Yelp review,” Alex mutters, and I laugh, but he doesn’t join in. I’m suddenly aware of how pathetic the AC is in this shop. Nothing compared to the zoo gift shop. We might as well be back in Nikolai’s hellhole.
“Should we get out of here?” I ask.
“God, yes,” Alex says, and sets down the dinosaur figurine he’s been holding.
I check the time on my phone. It’s only four p.m. and we’ve burned through everything I had planned for today. I open my notes app and scan the list for something else to do.
“Okay,” I say, trying to mask my anxiety. “I’ve got it. Come on.”
The Moorten Botanical Garden. It’s outside, but it’s sure to have a better cooling system than the gift shop inside a steel dinosaur.
Only I don’t think to check the hours and we drive all the way there only to find it closed.
“Closes at one during the summer?” I read the sign incredulously.
“Do you think it has anything to do with the dangerously high temperature?” Alex says.
“Okay,” I say. “Okay.”
“Maybe we should just go home,” Alex says. “See if Nikolai has fixed the AC.”
“Not yet,” I say, desperate. “There’s something else I wanted to do.”
“Fine,” Alex says. Back at the car, I head him off at the driver’s-side door, and he asks,
“What are you doing?”
“I have to drive for this part,” I say.
He arches an eyebrow but gets into the passenger seat. I open my GPS and enter the first address on the list for the “self-guided architecture tour of Palm Springs.”
“It’s . . . a hotel,” Alex says, confused, when we pull up to the funky angular building with its flagstone siding and orange-outlined sign.
“The Del Marcos Hotel,” I say.
“Is there . . . a steel dinosaur inside?” he asks.
I frown. “I don’t think so. But this whole neighborhood, the Tennis Club neighborhood, is supposed to be full of all these ridiculously amazing buildings.”
“Ah,” he says, like that’s all he can muster in the way of enthusiasm.
My stomach drops as I punch in the next address. We drive around for two hours, stop for a cheap dinner (which we drag out for another hour because Cold Air), and when we return to the car, Alex cuts me off at the driver’s-side door. “Poppy,” he says pleadingly.
“Alex,” I say.
“You can drive if you want,” he says, “but I’m getting a little carsick, and I don’t know if I can take seeing any more strangers’ mansions today.”
“But you love architecture,” I say pathetically.
His brow furrows, his eyes narrow. “I . . . what?”
“In New Orleans,” I say, “you just walked around pointing at, like, windows the whole time. I thought you loved this kind of thing.”
“Pointing at windows?”
I throw my arms out to my sides. “I don’t know! You just, like . . . fucking loved looking at buildings!”
He lets out a fatigued laugh. “I believe you,” he says. “Maybe I do love architecture. I don’t know. I’m just . . . really tired and hot.”
I scramble to get my phone out of my purse. There’s still no word from Nikolai. We cannot go back to that apartment. “What about the air museum?”
When I look up, he’s studying me, head tilted and eyes still narrow. He runs a hapless hand through his hair and glances away for a second, sets his hand on his hip. “It’s, like, seven o’clock, Poppy,” he says. “I don’t think it’s going to be open.”
I sigh, deflating. “You’re right.” I cross back to the passenger seat and flop down, feeling defeated as Alex starts the car.
Fifteen miles down the road, we get a flat tire.
“Oh, god,” I groan as Alex pulls off to the side of the road.
“There’s probably a spare,” he says.
“And you know how to put that on?” I say.
“Yes. I know how to put that on.”
“Mr. Homeowner,” I say, trying to sound playful. Turns out I too am deeply grumpy and that’s how my voice portrays me. Alex ignores the comment and gets out of the car.
“Do you need help?” I ask.
“Might need you to shine a light,” he says. “It’s starting to get dark.”
I follow him to the back of the car. He pops the hatch door, moves some of the mats around, and swears. “No spare.”
“This car aspires to destroy our lives,” I say, and kick the side of the car. “Shit, I’m going to have to buy this girl a new tire, aren’t I?”
Alex sighs and rubs the bridge of his nose. “We’ll split it.”
“No, that’s not what I was . . . I wasn’t saying that.”
“I know,” Alex says, irritated. “But I’m not letting you pay for the whole thing.”
“What do we even do?”
“We call a towing company,” he says. “We Uber home, and we mess with it tomorrow.”
So that’s what we do: We call the towing company. Sit in silence on the tailgate while we wait for them to come. Ride back to the shop in the front of the tow truck with a man named Stan who has a naked lady tattooed on each arm. Sign some papers, call an Uber. Stand outside while we wait for the Uber to come.
Get into a car with a lady named Marla who Alex whispers under his breath “looks exactly like Delallo,” and at least that’s something to laugh about.
And then Marla’s app messes up and she gets lost.
And our seventeen-minute drive becomes a twenty-nine-minute drive before our eyes.
And neither of us is laughing. Neither of us is saying anything, making any sound.
Finally, we’re almost to the Desert Rose. It’s pretty much pitch-black outside, and I’m sure the stars overhead would be amazing if we weren’t trapped in the back of Marla’s Kia Rio inhaling lungful after lungful of the sugar cookie Bath & Body Works spray she seems to have doused the entire car in.
When traffic suddenly stops half a mile from the Desert Rose, I almost cry.
“Must be an accident blocking the road,” Marla says. “No reason on heaven or earth traffic should be this backed up.”
“Do you want to walk?” Alex asks me.
“Why the hell not,” I say, and we get out of Marla’s car, watch her turn the Kia around in a fifteen-point turn, and start down the dark shoulder of the road toward home.
“I’m getting in that pool tonight,” Alex says.
“It’s probably closed,” I grunt.
“I’ll climb the fence,” Alex says.
A fizzy, tired chuckle moves through my chest. “Okay, I’m in.”
OUR LAST NIGHT on Sanibel Island, I lie awake, listening to the rain thrum against the roof, replaying the week as if watching through a sheen that’s thick and hazy and ever rippling, trying to capture this one split second that seems to wink out of view every time I reach for it.
I see the stormy beaches. The Twilight Zone marathon Alex and I snooze through on the couch. The seafood place where he’d finally given me the grisly details of his and Sarah’s breakup—that she’d told him their relationship was about as exciting as the library where they’d met, before dumping him and leaving for a three-week yoga retreat. If she wants excitement, I’d said, I’m happy to key her car. My memory skips forward, to the bar called BAR, with its sticky floors and thatched fans, where I step out of the bathroom and see him at the bar, reading a book, and feel so much love I could split open, and how after I tried to jar him from his post-Sarah sadness with an over-the-top “Hey, tiger!”
Then there comes the moment that we ran through the downpour from BAR to our car, the ones spent listening to the windshield wipers squeak across the glass as we sliced through the torrential rain back to our rain-soaked bungalow.
I’m getting closer to that moment, that one I keep reaching for and coming up empty-handed, as if it were nothing but a bit of reflected light, dancing on the floor.
I see Alex asking to take a picture together, surprising me with the flash on the count of two instead of three. The both of us choking over laughter, moaning at the heinousness of our picture, arguing whether to delete it, Alex promising I don’t look anything like that, me telling him the same.
Then he says, “Next year let’s go somewhere cold.”
I say okay, that we will.
And here it comes, the moment that keeps slipping through my fingers, like it’s the game-changing detail in an instant replay I can’t seem to pause or slow down.
We are just looking at each other. There are no hard edges to grab hold of, no distinct markers on this moment’s beginning or end, nothing to separate it from the millions just like it.
But this, this is the moment I first think it.
I am in love with you.
The thought is terrifying, probably not even true. A dangerous idea to entertain. I release my hold on it, watch it slip away.
But there are points in the center of my palms that burn, scorched, proof I once held it there.
THE APARTMENT HAS become the seventh ring of hell, and there’s no sign Nikolai has been there. In the bathroom, I change into my bikini and an oversized T-shirt, then fire off another angry text demanding an update.
Alex knocks on the door when he’s finished changing in the living room, and we skulk down to the pool, towels in hand. We sneak over to check the gate first. “Locked,” Alex confirms, but I’ve just noticed the bigger problem.
“What. The. Hell.”
He looks up and sees it: the empty concrete basin of the pool.
Behind us, someone gasps. “Oh, hon, I told you it was them!”
Alex and I spin around as a middle-aged leathery-tanned couple comes bounding up. A redheaded woman in sparkly cork heels and white capris beside a thick-necked man with a shaved head and pair of sunglasses balanced on the back of his head.
“You called it, babe,” the man says.
“The Newwwwwlyweds!” the woman sings, and grabs me in a hug. “Why didn’t y’all tell us you were headed to the Springs?”
That’s when it clicks. Hubby and Wifey from the cab ride out of LAX.
“Wow,” Alex says. “Hi. How’s it going?”
The woman’s neon-orange fingernails release me, and she waves a hand. “Oh, you know.
Was going good until this nonsense. With the pool.”
Hubby grunts agreement.
“What happened?” I ask.
“Some kid went and diarrhea’d in it! A lot, I guess, because they had to go and drain the whole thing. They say it should be up and running again tomorrow!” She frowns. “Of course, tomorrow, we’re off to Joshua Tree.”
“Oh, cool!” I say. It’s a strain to sound bright and chipper when really, my soul is quietly shriveling within the empty shell of my body.
“Won a free stay there.” She winks at me. “I’m good luck.”
“Sure are,” Hubby says.
“I’m not just saying that!” she goes on. “We won the lottery a few years back—not one of those quadrillion-dollar ones but a nice little chunk, and I swear, ever since then it’s like I win every raffle, sweepstakes, and contest I so much as look at!”
“Amazing,” Alex says. His soul, it sounds like, has also shriveled.
“Anyway! We’ll leave you two lovebirds to do your bidding.” She winks again. Or maybe her false eyelashes are just sticking together. Hard to say. “Just couldn’t believe what weird luck it was that we were staying in the same place!”
“Luck,” Alex says. He sounds like he’s in a bad-luck-induced trance. “Yeah.”
“It’s a tiny world, ain’t it?” Wifey says.
“It is,” I agree.
“Anyway, y’all enjoy the rest of your trip!” She squeezes one of each of our shoulders and Hubby nods, and then they’re off and we’re left standing in front of the empty pool.
After three silent seconds, I say, “I’ll try to call Nikolai again.”
Alex says nothing. We go back upstairs. It’s ninety degrees. Not metaphorically. It’s literally ninety degrees. We don’t turn on any lights except the one in the bathroom, like even one more illuminated bulb could get us to an even hundred degrees.
Alex stands in the middle of the room, looking miserable. It’s too hot to sit on anything, to touch anything. The air feels different, stiff as a board. I dial Nikolai repeatedly as I pace.
The fourth time he rejects the call, I let out a scream and stomp back to the kitchenette for the scissors.
“What are you doing?” Alex asks. I just storm past to the balcony and stab the plastic sheeting. “That’s not going to help,” he says. “It’s as hot out there as it is in here tonight.”
But I can’t be reasoned with. I’m hacking away at the plastic, cutting down giant strip after giant, tattered strip and tossing them onto the ground. Finally half of the balcony is open to the night air, but Alex was right. It doesn’t matter.
It is so hot I could melt. I march back inside and splash my face with cold water.
“Poppy,” Alex says, “I think we should check into a hotel.”
I shake my head, too frustrated to speak.
“We have to,” he says.
“That’s not how this is supposed to go,” I bite out, a sudden throb going through my eye.
“What are you talking about?” he says.
“We’re supposed to do this how we used to!” I say. “We’re supposed to be keeping things cheap and—and rolling with the punches.”
“We have rolled with a lot of punches,” Alex insists.
“Hotels cost money!” I say. “And we’re already going to have to drop two hundred to get that horrible car a new tire!”
“You know what costs money?” he says. “Hospitals! We’re gonna die if we stay here.”
“This isn’t how it’s supposed to go!” I half shout, a broken record.
“It’s how it’s going!” he fires back.
“I just wanted it to be how it used to be!” I say.
“It’s never going to be like that!” he snaps. “We can’t go back to that, okay? Things are different, and we can’t change that, so just stop! Stop trying to force this friendship back to what it used to be—it’s not going to happen! We’re different now, and you have to stop pretending we aren’t!”
His voice breaks off, eyes dark, jaw taut.
There are tears blurring my vision, and my chest feels like it’s being sawed in half as we stand there in the half dark, facing off in silence, breathing hard.
Something disrupts the silence. A low, distant rumble, and then, a quiet tap-tap-tap ping.
“Do you hear that?” Alex’s voice is a dim rasp.
I give one uncertain nod, and then another rumble shivers out. Our eyes find each other’s, wide and desperate. We run to the edge of the balcony.
“Holy shit.” I throw my arms out to catch the falling rain. I start to laugh. Alex joins in.
“Here.” He grabs the remainder of the plastic sheeting and starts to tear into it. I retrieve the scissors from the café table and we hack away the rest of the plastic, tossing it over our shoulders, the rain pouring in freely, until finally, it’s all out of our way. We stand back with our faces tilted up and let the rain wash over us. Another laugh bubbles up in me, and when I look over at Alex, he’s watching me, his smile wide for two beats before it disintegrates into concern.
“I’m sorry,” he says, voice quiet under the rain. “I just meant . . .”
“I know what you meant,” I say. “You were right. We can’t go back.”
His teeth skim over his bottom lip. “I mean . . . would you really want to?”
“I just want . . .” I shrug.
You, I think.
You.
You.
You. Say it.
I shake my head. “I don’t want to lose you again.”
Alex reaches out for me, and I go to him, let him catch my hips and pull me in. I press myself against his damp T-shirt as he wraps his arms around me and lifts me up and into him. I push up onto tiptoes and he holds me there, his face buried into my neck, and my oversized T-shirt soaking through. I thread my arms around his waist and shiver as his hands slide up my back, catching on the lump where my bathing suit ties are knotted under my shirt.
Even after a full day of sweating, he smells so good, feels so good against me and underneath my hands. Combined with the intense relief of the desert rain, this has me feeling light-headed, spinny, uninhibited. My hands skim up his neck and slip into his hair, and he draws back enough to look me in the face, but neither of us lets go, and all the stress and worry has left his brow and jaw just as it’s lifted from my body like steam.
“You won’t lose me,” he says, voice dimmed by the rain. “As long as you want me, I’m here.”
I swallow down the lump in my throat, but it keeps rising. Trying to keep the words inside. It would be a mistake to say them, right? We tell each other everything, but there are some things that can’t be unsaid, just like there are things that couldn’t be undone.
His hand rises to sweep a damp curl out of my eyes, tucking it behind my ear. The lump seems to melt, and the truth slips out of me like a breath I’ve been holding all this time.
“I always want you, Alex,” I whisper. “Always.”
In this dim light, his eyes look almost sparkly, and his mouth goes soft. When he bends to press his forehead to mine, my whole body feels heavy, like my want is a weighted blanket pushing on me from every side, while his hands brush over my skin as softly as sunlight. His nose slides down the side of mine, the inch between our reaching, unsure mouths pulsing.
There is still a kind of plausible deniability to this, a chance we’ll let this moment pass without ever closing that final distance. But, as I listen to his unsteady breath, feel the way it tugs against me as his lips part, come closer, hesitate, I forget every reason I was trying to put this off.
We’re magnets, trying to draw together even as we cradle the careful distance between us.
His hand skims over my jaw, gingerly angles it so that our noses graze against each other, testing this small gap between us, our open mouths tasting the air between us.
Every breath he takes now whispers against my bottom lip. Each of my shaky inhalations tries to draw him closer. This wasn’t supposed to happen, I think foggily.
Then, and more loudly, This had to happen.
This has to happen.
This is happening.
THIS YEAR IS going to be different. I’ve been working for Rest + Relaxation magazine for six months. In that time, I’ve already been to:
Marrakech and Casablanca.
Martinborough and Queenstown.
Santiago and Easter Island.
Not to mention all the cities in the United States they’ve sent me to.
These trips are nothing like the ones Alex and I used to take, but I may have downplayed that when I pitched combining our summer trip with a work trip, because I want to see his reaction when we show up to our first resort with our ratty T.J. Maxx luggage only to be greeted with champagne.
Four days in Sweden. Four in Norway.
Not cold, exactly, but cool at least, and since I reached out to Lita the River Raft Guide’s expatriate sister-in-law, she’s been emailing me weekly with suggestions for things to do in Oslo. Unlike Lita, Dani has a steel-trap memory: she seems to recall every amazing restaurant she’s eaten at and knows precisely what to tell us to order. In one email, she ranks various fjords by a slew of criteria (beauty, crowdedness, size, convenience of location, beauty of the drive to the convenient/inconvenient location).
When Lita passed along her contact information, I was expecting to get a list with a specific national park and a couple of bars, maybe. And Dani did do that—in her first email.
But the messages kept coming whenever she thought of something else we “absolutely could not leave without experiencing!”
She uses a lot of exclamation points, and while usually I think people fall back on this in an attempt to seem friendly and definitely-not-at-all-angry, each one of her sentences reads as a command.
“You must drink aquavit!”
“Be sure to drink it at room temperature, perhaps alongside a beer!”
“Have your room-temperature aquavit on the way to the Viking Ship Museum! DO NOT
MISS THIS!”
Each new email burns its exclamation points into my mind, and I would be afraid to meet Dani, if not for the fact that she signs every email with xoxo, which I find so endearing that I’m confident we’ll like her a lot. Or I’ll like her a lot and Alex will be terrified.
Either way, I’ve never been more excited for a trip in my life.
In Sweden, there’s a hotel made entirely of ice, called (for some mysterious reason) Icehotel. It’s the kind of place Alex and I could never have afforded on our own, and all morning leading up to the pitch meeting with Swapna, I was sweating profusely at my desk
—not normal sweat, but the horrible reeking kind that comes with anxiety. It’s not like Alex wouldn’t have gone along with another hot beachside vacation, but ever since I found out about Icehotel, I knew it would be the absolute perfect surprise for him.
I pitch the article as a “Cool Down for Summer” feature, and Swapna’s eyes light up approvingly.
“Inspired,” she says, and I see a few of the other, more established writers mouthing the word to one another. I haven’t been there long enough to notice her using that word, but I know how she is about trends, so I figure inspired is diametrically opposed to trendy in her mind.
She is fully on board. Just like that, I am cleared to spend way too much money. I can’t technically buy Alex meals or plane tickets or even admission to the Viking museum, but when you’re traveling with R+R, doors open for you, bottles of champagne you didn’t order float out to your table, chefs drop by with something “a little extra,” and life gets a bit shinier.
There’s also the matter of the photographer who will be traveling with us, but so far everyone I’ve worked with has been pleasant, if not fun, and every bit as independent as I am. We meet up, we plan shots, we part ways, and though I haven’t worked with the new photographer I’m paired with—we’ve been caught on opposite schedules of in-office days—
Garrett, the other new staff writer, says Photographer Trey’s great, so I’m not worried.
Alex and I text incessantly in the weeks leading up to the trip, but never about the trip itself. I tell him I’m taking care of everything, that it’s all a surprise, and even if the lack of control is killing him, he doesn’t complain.
Instead he texts about his little black cat, Flannery O’Connor. Shots of her in shoes and cupboards and sprawled on the top of bookshelves.
She reminds me of you, he says sometimes.
Because of the claws? I ask. Or because of the teeth or because of the fleas, and every time, no matter what comparison I try to draw, he just writes back tiny fighter.
It makes me feel fluttery and warm. It makes me think about him pulling the hood of my sweatshirt tight around my face and grinning at me through the chilly dark, murmuring under his breath: cutie.
In the last week before we leave, I get either a horrible cold or the worst bout of summer allergies I can remember. My nose is constantly stuffed up and/or dripping; my throat feels scratchy and tastes sour; my whole head feels clogged with pressure; and every morning, I’m wiped out before the day even begins. But I have no fever, and a quick trip to urgent care informs me that I don’t have strep throat, so I do my best not to slow down. There is a lot to get done before the trip, and I do it all while coughing profusely.
Three days before we leave, I have a dream that Alex tells me he got back together with Sarah, that he can’t take the trip anymore.
I wake up feeling sick to my stomach. All day I try to get the dream out of my head. At two thirty, he sends me a picture of Flannery.
Do you ever miss Sarah? I write back.
Sometimes, he says. But not too much.
Please don’t cancel our trip, I say, because this dream is really, really messing with me.
Why would I cancel our trip? he asks.
I don’t know, I say. I just keep getting nervous that you’re going to.
The Summer Trip is the highlight of my year, he says.
Mine too, I tell him.
Even now that you get to travel all the time? You’re not sick of it?
I could never get sick of it, I say. Don’t cancel.
He sends me another picture of Flannery O’Connor sitting in his already packed suitcase.
I love her, he says, and I know he’s talking about the cat, obviously, but even that makes that fluttery, warm feeling come alive under my skin.
I can’t wait to see you, I say, feeling suddenly like saying this very normal thing is bold, risky even.
I know, he writes back, it’s all I can think about.
It takes me hours to fall asleep that night. I just lie in bed with those words running through my mind on repeat, making me feel like I have a fever.
When I wake up, I realize that I actually did. That I still do. That my throat feels more swollen and raw than before, and my head is pounding, and my chest is heavy, and my legs ache, and I can’t get warm no matter how many blankets I’m under.
I call in sick hoping to sleep it off before my flight the next afternoon, but by late that night, I know there’s no way I’m getting on that airplane. I have a fever of one hundred and two.
Most of the things we have booked are now close enough that they’re nonrefundable.
Wrapped in blankets and shivering in my bed, I draft an email on my phone to Swapna, explaining the situation.
I’m unsure what to do. Unsure if this will somehow get me fired.
If I didn’t feel so horrible, I’d probably be crying.
Go back to the doctor first thing in the morning, Alex tells me.
Maybe it’s just peaking, I write. Maybe you can fly out on time and I can meet you in a couple days.
You shouldn’t be feeling worse this late into a cold, he says. Please go to the doctor, Poppy.
I will, I write. I’m so sorry.
Then I do cry. Because if I don’t make it on this trip, there’s a good chance I won’t see Alex for a year. He’s so busy with his MFA and teaching, and I’m rarely home now that I’m working for R+R, and in Linfield even less. This Christmas, Mom was excited to tell me, she convinced Dad to come to the city. My brothers even agreed to come for a day or two, something they insisted they would never do once they moved to California (Parker to pursue writing for TV in L.A. and Prince to work for a video game developer in San Francisco), as if upon signing their leases they’d also committed to a die-hard rivalry between the two states.
Whenever I’m sick, I just wish I were in Linfield. Lying in my childhood bedroom, its walls papered in vintage travel posters, the pale pink quilt Mom made while she was pregnant with me pulled up tight around my chin. I wish she were bringing me soup and a thermometer, and checking that I was drinking water, keeping up on ibuprofen to lower my fever.
For once, I hate my minimalist apartment. I hate the city sounds bouncing off my windows at all hours. I hate the soft gray linen bedding I picked out and the streamlined imitation Danish furniture I’ve started to accumulate since landing my Big-Girl Job, as Dad calls it.
I want to be surrounded in knickknacks. I want floral-patterned lampshades and mismatched throw pillows on a plaid couch, its back draped in a scratchy afghan blanket. I want to shuffle up to an old off-white fridge covered in hideous magnets from Gatlinburg
and Kings Island and the Beach Waterpark, with drawings I made as a kid and flash-blanched family photos, and to see a cat in a diaper stalk past only to bump into a wall it did not see.
I want not to be alone, and for every breath not to take an immense effort.
At five in the morning, Swapna replies to my email.
This sort of thing happens. Don’t beat yourself up about it. You’re right about the refunds, though—if you’d like to let your friend use the accommodations you’ve booked, feel free. Forward me what you had in the way of itinerary again, and we’ll go ahead and send Trey to shoot. You can follow when you’re well again.
And, Poppy, when this happens again (which it will), do not go in so hard on the apology. You are not the master of your immune system and I can assure you that when your male colleagues have to cancel a trip, they show no indication that they feel they have personally wronged me. Don’t encourage people to blame you for something beyond your control. You are a fantastic writer, and we are lucky to have you.
Now get yourself to a doctor and enjoy some true R&R. We’ll speak about next steps when you’re on the mend.
I’d probably be more relieved if not for the haze superimposed over my entire apartment and the extreme discomfort of simply existing.
I screenshot the email and text it to Alex. Go have fun!!! I write. I’ll try to meet you for the second half!
By then, the very thought of getting out of bed makes me feel dizzy. I set my phone aside and close my eyes, letting sleep rush up to swallow me like a well reaching up, up, up around me as I drop through it.
It’s not a peaceful sleep, but a cold, glitching kind, where dreams and sentences start over, again and again, interrupting themselves before they can get off the ground. I toss in bed, waking long enough to register how cold I am, how uncomfortable both the bed and my body have become, only to tumble back into restless dreams.
I dream about a giant black cat with hungry eyes. It chases me in circles until it’s too hard to breathe, too hard to keep going, and then it pounces, jolting me awake for a few fitful seconds, only to start again the moment I shut my eyes.
I should go to the doctor, I think on occasion, but I’m sure I’m unable to sit up.
I don’t eat. I don’t drink. I don’t even get up to pee.
The day spins past until I open my eyes to the yellowy-gold light of sunset glaring off my bedroom window, and when I blink, it’s changed to a deep periwinkle, and there’s a pounding in my head so real it makes a thumping sound that sends shock waves through my body.
I roll over, pull a pillow over my face, but that doesn’t stop it.
It’s getting louder. It starts to sound like my name, the way that sounds sometimes transform into music when you’re so tired you’re half dreaming.
Poppy! Poppy! Poppy, are you home?
My phone clatters on the bedside table, vibrating. I ignore it, let it ring out. It starts again, and after that, a third time, so I roll over and try to read the screen despite the way the world
seems to be melting, like a swirl of duo-toned ice creams twirling around each other.
There are dozens of messages from ALEXANDER THE GREATEST, but the last one reads, I’m here! Let me in!
The words have no meaning. I’m too confused to build a context for them, too cold to care. He’s calling me again, but I’m not sure I can speak. My throat feels too tight.
The pounding starts again, the voice calling my name, and the fog lifts just enough for all the pieces to snap together into perfect clarity.
“Alex,” I mumble.
“Poppy! Are you in there?” he’s shouting on the other side of the door.
I’m dreaming again, which is the only reason I think I can make it to the door. I’m dreaming again, which means that probably, when I do get to the door and pull it open, that huge black cat will be there waiting, Sarah Torval riding it like a horse.
But maybe not. Maybe it will just be Alex, and I can pull him inside and—
“Poppy, please let me know you’re okay!” he says on the other side of the door, and I slide off the bed, taking the linen-covered duvet with me. I sweep it around my shoulders and drag myself to the door on legs that feel weak and watery.
I fumble over the lock, finally get it switched, and the door swings open as if by magic, because that’s how dreams work.
Only when I see him standing on the other side of the door, hand still resting on its knob, beat-up suitcase behind him, I’m not so sure it’s a dream anymore.
“Oh, god, Poppy,” he says, stepping in and examining me, the cool back of his hand pressing to my clammy forehead. “You’re burning up.”
“You’re in Norway,” I manage in a raspy whisper.
“I’m definitely not.” He drags his bag inside and closes the door. “When was the last time you took ibuprofen?”
I shake my head.
“Nothing?” he says. “Shit, Poppy, you were supposed to go to the doctor.”
“I didn’t know how to.” It sounds so pathetic. I’m twenty-six years old with a full-time job and health insurance, and an apartment and student loan bills, and I live alone in New York City, but there are just some things you don’t want to have to do on your own.
“It’s okay,” Alex says, pulling me gently into him. “Let’s get you back in bed and see if we can get rid of the fever.”
“I have to pee,” I say tearfully, then admit, “I may have already peed myself.”
“Okay,” he says. “Go pee. I’ll find you some clean clothes.”
“Should I shower?” I ask, because apparently I’m helpless. I need someone to tell me exactly what to do like my mom used to do when I stayed home from middle school watching Cartoon Network all day long, doing nothing for myself until she told me to.
“I’m not sure,” he says. “I’ll Google it. For now just pee.”
It takes way too much effort to get into the bathroom. I drop the blankets just outside it and pee with the door open, shivering the whole time but comforted by the sound of Alex moving around in my apartment. Quietly opening drawers. Clicking on the gas stove top, moving the teakettle onto it.
He comes to check on me when he’s finished with whatever he’s doing, and I’m still sitting on the toilet with my sleep shorts around my ankles.
“I think you’re okay to shower if you want to,” he says, and starts the water up. “Maybe don’t wash your hair. I don’t know if that’s a real thing, but Grandma Betty swears that wet hair makes you sick. Are you sure you won’t fall down or anything?”
“If it’s fast I’ll be okay,” I say, suddenly aware of how sticky I feel. I am almost positive I wet myself. Later this will probably be humiliating, but right now I don’t think anything could embarrass me. I’m just so relieved to have him here.
He looks uncertain for a second. “Just go ahead and get in. I’ll stay close by, and if you feel like it’s getting to be too much, just tell me, okay?” He turns away from me while I force myself onto my feet and strip out of my pajamas. I climb into the hot water and pull the curtain closed, shuddering as the water hits me.
“You okay?” he asks immediately.
“Mm-hm.”
“I’m going to stay here, okay?” he says. “If you need anything, just tell me.”
“Mm-hm.”
After only a couple minutes, I’ve had enough. I turn off the water and Alex passes me a towel. I’m colder than ever now that I’m all wet, and I step out with teeth chattering.
“Here.” He wraps another towel around my shoulders like a cape, tries to rub heat into them. “Come sit in the room while I change your bedding, okay?”
I nod, and he leads me to the antique rattan peacock chair in the corner of my bedroom.
“Spare bedding?” he asks.
I point to the closet. “Top shelf.”
He gets it out, and hands me a folded pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt. Since I don’t have a habit of folding my clothes, he must’ve instinctively folded them when he got them out of the dresser. When I take them from him, he turns pointedly away from me to work on making the bed and I drop the towels onto the floor and dress.
When he’s finished making the bed, Alex pulls back a corner of the bedding and I slide in, letting him tuck me in. In the kitchen, the kettle starts whistling. He turns to go for it, but I grab on to his arm, half-drunk on the feeling of being warm and clean. “I don’t want you to go.”
“I’ll be right back, Poppy,” he says. “I need to get you some medicine.”
I nod, release him. When he comes back, he’s carrying a glass of water and his laptop bag.
He sits on the edge of the bed and pulls out pill bottles and boxes of Mucinex, lining them up on the side table. “I wasn’t sure what your symptoms were,” he says.
I touch my chest, trying to explain how tight and awful it feels. “Got it,” he says, and he chooses a box, peels two pills out, and hands them to me with the glass of water.
“Have you eaten?” he asks when I’ve taken them.
“I don’t think so.”
He gives a faint smile. “I grabbed some stuff on the way here so I wouldn’t have to go back out. Does soup sound okay?”
“Why are you so nice?” I whisper.
He studies me for a moment, then bends and presses a kiss to my forehead. “Think the tea will be ready by now.”
Alex brings me chicken noodle soup and water and tea. He sets timers for when I’m able to take more medicine, checks my temperature every couple hours throughout the night.
When I sleep, it’s dreamless, and every time I stir awake, he’s there, half snoozing on the bed beside me. He yawns himself awake, looks over at me. “How you doing?”
“Better,” I answer, and I’m not sure if it’s true in a physical sense, but at least mentally, emotionally, I do feel better having him here, and I can only manage a word or two at a time, so there’s no use explaining that.
In the morning, he helps me down the stairs to a cab and we go to the doctor.
Pneumonia. I have pneumonia. Not the kind, though, that’s so bad I need to be in the hospital.
“As long as you keep an eye on her and she sticks to the antibiotics, she should be fine,”
the doctor tells Alex, more than me, I guess because I don’t really look like the kind of person who can make sense of words right now.
When Alex gets me home afterward, he tells me he has to go back out, and I want so badly to beg him to stay, but I’m just too tired. Besides, I’m sure he needs a break from my apartment and me after a whole night of playing nurse.
He comes back half an hour later with Jell-O and ice cream and eggs and more soup, and all kinds of vitamins and spices I’ve never even considered keeping in my apartment before now.
“Betty swears by zinc,” he tells me when he brings me a handful of vitamins with a cup of red Jell-O and another glass of water. “She also told me to put cinnamon in your soup, so if it tasted bad, blame her.”
“How are you here?” I struggle to get out.
“The first leg of my flight to Norway was through New York,” he says.
“So, what,” I say. “You panicked and left the airport instead of boarding the next plane?”
“No, Poppy,” he says. “I came here to be with you.”
Immediately, tears spring into my eyes. “I was going to take you to a hotel made of ice.”
A quick smile flits across his mouth. “I honestly don’t know if that’s the fever talking.”
“No.” I scrunch my eyes shut, feeling the tears cutting trails down my cheeks. “It’s real.
I’m so sorry.”
“Hey.” He brushes the hair out of my face. “You know I don’t care about that, right? I only care about getting to spend time with you.” His thumb lightly traces the wet streak making its way down the side of my nose, heading it off just before it reaches my top lip.
“I’m sorry you don’t feel well, and that you’re missing the ice hotel, but I’m okay right here.”
Every ounce of dignity obliterated by having had this man change my pee-drenched bedding, I reach up for his neck and pull him toward me, and he shifts onto the bed beside me, maneuvering close at the beckoning of my hands. He wraps an arm around my back and draws me into his chest and I slip an arm around his waist too, and we lie there tangled together.
“I can feel your heartbeat,” I tell him.
“I can feel yours,” he says.
“I’m sorry I peed the bed.”
He laughs, squeezes me to him, and right then, my chest aches with how much I love him.
I guess I must say something like this aloud, because he murmurs, “That’s probably the fever talking.”
I shake my head, nestle closer, until there are no spaces left between us. His hand moves lightly up into my hair, and a shiver runs down my spine from where his fingers trail along my neck. It feels so good, in a sea of bad feelings, that it makes me arch a little, my hand tightening on his back, and I feel the way his heartbeat speeds, which only makes mine skyrocket to match it. His hand moves to my thigh, wrapping it around his hip, and my fingers twist against him as I bury my mouth against the side of his neck where I feel his pulse thudding urgently beneath it.
“Are you comfortable?” he asks thickly, like our lying like this could just be a matter of alignment, like we’re building up a narrative that protects us from the truth of what’s happening. That even through the fog of being sick, I can feel him wanting me like I want him.
“Mm-hm,” I murmur. “Are you?”
His hand tightens on my thigh, and he nods.
“Yeah,” he says, and we both go very still.
I don’t know how long we lie there, but eventually, the cold medicine wins out over the sparking, alert nerve endings in my body and I fall asleep, only to find him safely on the other side of the bed the next time I wake up.
“You were asking for your mom,” he tells me.
“Whenever I’m sick, I miss her,” I say.
He nods, tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “Sometimes I do too.”
“Tell me about her?” I ask.
He shifts, lifting himself higher against the headboard. “What do you want to know?”
“Anything,” I whisper. “What you think about when you think about her.”
“Well, I was only six when she died,” he says, smoothing my hair again. I don’t argue or press for more, but eventually, he goes on. “She used to sing to us when she tucked us in at night. And I thought she had a beautiful voice. I mean, like, I would tell kids in my class that she was a singer. Or she would’ve been if she wasn’t a stay-at-home mom or whatever. And you know . . .” His hand stills in my hair. “My dad couldn’t talk about her. Like, at all. I mean, he still can’t really without breaking down. So growing up my brothers and I didn’t talk about her either. And when I was probably fourteen, fifteen, I went over to Grandma Betty’s house to clean her gutters and mow her lawn and stuff, and she was watching these old home movies of my mom.”
I study his face, the way his full lips curl and his eyes catch the streaks of streetlight coming through my window so that he almost looks lit from within. “We never did that at my house,” he says. “I couldn’t even remember what she sounded like. But we watched this video of her holding me as a baby. Singing this old Amy Grant song.” His eyes cut to me, his smile deepening in one corner. “And her voice was horrible.”
“How horrible are we talking here?” I ask.
“Bad enough that Betty had to turn it off so she didn’t have a heart attack from laughing,”
he says. “And you could tell Mom knew she was bad. I mean, you could hear Betty laughing while she filmed, and my mom kept looking over her shoulder with this grin, but she didn’t stop singing. I guess I think about that a lot.”
“She sounds like my kind of lady,” I say.
“For most of my life,” he says, “she’s kind of felt like this boogeyman, you know? Like the biggest part she’s played in my life is just how wrecked my dad was from losing her.
How scared he was to have to raise us on his own?”
I nod; makes sense.
“A lot of times, when I think about her, it’s like . . .” He pauses. “She’s more a cautionary tale than a person. But when I think about that video, I think about why my dad loved her so much. And that feels better. To think about her as a person.”
For a while, we’re quiet. I reach over and fold Alex’s hand in mine. “She must’ve been pretty amazing,” I say, “to make a person like you.”
He squeezes my hand but doesn’t say another word, and eventually I drift back to sleep.
The next two days are a blur, and then I’m on the rise. Not healthy but more awake, lighter, clearer headed.
There’s no more intense cuddling, just a lot of watching old cartoons together on the bed, sitting out on the fire escape in the morning while we eat breakfast, taking pills whenever the alarms go off on Alex’s phone, drinking tea on the sofa at night with a playlist of
“traditional Norwegian folk music” playing in the background.
Four days pass. Then five. And then I’m doing well enough that I could theoretically leave the country, but it’s too late, and there’s no more talk of it. There’s no more touching either, except the occasional bump of the arm or leg, or the compulsive reach across the table to stop me from spilling on my chin. At night, though, when Alex is lying on the far side of my bed, I stay awake for hours listening to his uneven breath, feeling like we’re two magnets trying desperately to draw together.
I know deep down that it’s not a good idea. The fever lowered my defenses, and his too, but when it comes down to it, Alex and I are not for each other. There might be love and attraction and history, but that just means there’s more to lose if we try to take this friendship into a place it doesn’t belong.
Alex wants marriage and kids and a home in one place, and he wants it all with someone like Sarah. Someone who can help him build the life that he lost when he was six years old.
And I want a tetherless life of spontaneous trips and exciting new relationships, different seasons with different people, and quite possibly to never settle down. Our only hope of maintaining this relationship is through the platonic friendship we’ve always had. That five percent has been creeping up for years, but it’s time to tamp it back down. To squash the what-if.
At the end of the week, when I drop him off at the airport, I give him the most chaste hug I can muster, despite the way that his lifting me against him sends that same spine-arching shiver down my back and heat pooling in all the places he’s never touched me.
“I’ll miss you,” he says in a low growl against the side of my ear, and I force myself to step back a sensible distance.
“You too.”
I think about him all night, and when I dream, he’s pulling my thigh over his leg, rolling his hips against mine. Every time he’s about to kiss me, I wake up.
We don’t talk for four days, and when he finally texts me it’s just a picture of his tiny black cat sitting on an open copy of Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor.
Fate, he writes.
STANDING ON THE balcony, our rain-drenched bodies flush, his gaze soft, I feel my last vestige of self-control washing off me, rinsed clear along with the desert heat and grime of the day. There’s nothing left but Alex and me.
His lips press closed then part, and mine mirror them, his breath warm against my mouth.
Every shallow inhale I take draws us a little closer until my tongue just barely grazes his rain-dampened bottom lip, and then he adjusts to catch my mouth just a little more with his.
A fraction of a kiss. And then another one, a bit fuller. A twist of my hands in his hair, the hiss of breath between his teeth, and then another brush of his lips, deeper, slower, careful and intent, and I’m melting against him. Shivering and terrified and exhilarated and every shade between as our mouths sink together and pull apart, his tongue sliding over mine for a second, then a little deeper, my teeth catching on the fullest part of his bottom lip, his hands moving down over my hips, my chest arching up into his as my hands glide down his wet neck.
We come together and apart, the little gaps and short breathless inhalations nearly as intoxicating as each taste, test, scrape of his rain-slicked mouth moving over mine. He draws back, leaves his mouth just hovering over mine, where I can still feel his breath. “Is this okay?” he asks me in a hush.
If I could speak, I’d tell him this is the best kiss I’ve had in my entire life. That I didn’t know just kissing could feel this good. That I could just make out with him for hours and it would be better than the best sex I’ve ever had.
But I can’t think clearly enough to say any of this. My mind is too busy with the grip of his hands on my ass and the feel of his chest flattening mine out, his wet skin and the thin, drenched clothes between us, so I just nod and catch his bottom lip between my teeth again, and he turns me against the stucco wall, presses me back into it as he kisses me more urgently.
One of his hands twists into the hem of my T-shirt where it hangs against my thigh, and the other grazes up my stomach beneath it. “What about this?” he asks.
“Yes,” I breathe.
His hand lifts higher, slips under my bathing suit top, making me shiver. “This?” he says.
My breath catches, heart stumbles over a beat as his fingers lightly circle. I nod, pull his hips back to mine. He’s hard between my legs, and instantly I feel a little light-headed. “I think about you all the time,” he says, and kisses me slowly, drags his mouth down my neck, goose bumps fluttering out in his wake. “I think about this.”
“I do too,” I admit in a whisper. His mouth moves over my chest, kissing me through my wet T-shirt even as his hands work the fabric up over my hips, my ribs, and then my shoulders. He pulls away long enough to peel it over my head and discard it among the plastic sheeting.
“Yours too,” I say, heart leaping. I reach for the hem of his shirt, pull it over his head.
When I toss it aside, he tries to move toward me, but I hold him back for a second.
“Do you want to stop?” he asks, his eyes dark.
I shake my head. “I just . . . never get to look at you like this.”
The corner of his mouth twitches into a smile. “You could have always looked,” he says in a low voice. “Just so you know.”
“Well, you could’ve too,” I say.
“Trust me,” he says. “I did.”
And then I’m dragging him in against me, and he’s roughly lifting my thigh against his hip, and I’m sinking my fingers into his wide back, my teeth into his neck, and his hands are massaging my chest, my ass. His mouth moves down my collarbones, sliding under my bikini, teeth careful on my nipple, and I’m feeling him through his shorts, then reaching into them, loving how he tenses and shifts. I push his shorts down over his hip bones, my mouth going dry at the feeling of him against me.
“Shit,” I say, a realization hitting me like a bucket of ice water, “I went off birth control.”
“If it helps,” he says, “I had a vasectomy.”
I draw back, shocked out of the moment. “You what?”
“They’re reversible,” he says, blushing for the first time since we started this. “And I took . . . precautions, in case I want kids and the reversal doesn’t work. They usually do, but . . . anyway, I just . . . didn’t want to accidentally get someone pregnant. I’m still always safe—it’s not like . . . Why are you looking at me like that?”
I knew Alex was a black-and-white thinker. I knew he was ultracautious, and I knew he was the most thoughtful, courteous person on the planet. But somehow I’m still surprised all of that added up to this big decision. It makes my heart feel like a sore muscle, all heat and achy tenderness, because it is just so him. I tighten my arms around his waist, squeeze him to me. “It’s just that of course you did that,” I say. “Above and beyond caution and consideration. You’re a prince, Alex Nilsen.”
“Uh-huh,” he says, his expression both amused and unconvinced.
“I’m serious,” I say, pressing closer. “You’re incredible.”
“We can find a condom if you want,” he says. “But I’m not—there’s no one else.”
I’m sure I’m blushing now and probably smiling ridiculously. “That’s okay,” I say. “It’s just us.”
What I mean to say is, if there’s anyone I would do this with, it would be him. If there’s one person I truly trust, want all of in this way, it’s him.
But that’s how I say it: It’s just us. And he says it back to me, like he knows exactly what I mean, and then we’re on the ground, in a sea of discarded plastic, and he’s tearing my top off, pulling my bottoms off too, pressing his mouth between my legs, clutching my ass in his hands, making me gasp and rise against him as his tongue moves over me. “Alex,” I plead, knotting my hands into his hair, “stop making me wait for you.”
“Stop being impatient,” he teases. “I’ve waited twelve years. I want this to last.”
A shiver races down my spine, and I arch into him. Finally, he crawls up the length of me, hands tangling in my hair, roaming over my skin, and he slowly pushes into me. We find our rhythm together, and it all feels so good, so electric, so right that I can’t believe all the time we wasted not doing this. Twelve years of subpar lovemaking when all along, this was how it was supposed to be.
“God, how are you so good at this,” I say, and his laugh grates against my ear as he kisses behind it.
“Because I know you,” he says tenderly, “and I remember what you sound like when you like something.”
Everything in me pulls taut in waves. Every move of his hands, every thrust threatens to unravel me.
“I could have sex with you until I die,” I pant.
“Good,” he says, and he moves a little faster, harder, the intense pleasure of it making me buck and swear and move to match him.
“I love you,” I hiss, by accident. I think I meant to say I love having sex with you or I love your amazing body, or maybe I did mean to say I love you, the same way I always say it to him when he does something thoughtful, but this is a little bit different because we’re having sex, and my face goes hot and I’m not sure how to fix it, but then Alex just sits up and draws me into his lap, holding me close as he pushes into me again slow, deep, hard, and says, “I love you too.”
And all at once, my chest loosens, my stomach unwinds, and any embarrassment and fear evaporates. There’s nothing left but Alex.
Alex’s rough hands moving gently through my hair.
Alex’s wide back rippling under my fingers.
Alex’s sharp hips working slowly, purposefully against mine.
Alex’s sweat and skin and raindrops on my tongue.
His perfect arms holding on to me, keeping me there, against him, as we rock and clutch.
His sensual lips tugging at my mouth, coaxing it open to taste me as we draw together and apart, finding new ways to touch and kiss each other every time we reunite.
He kisses my jaw, my throat, my shoulder, his tongue hot and careful against my skin. I touch and taste every hard line and soft curve of him I can get to and he shivers under my hands, my mouth.
He lies back and draws me on top of him, and this is the best yet, because I can see so much of him, get to every place I want.
“Alex Nilsen,” I say breathlessly. “You are the hottest man alive.”
He laughs, just as breathlessly, and kisses the side of my neck. “And you love me.”
My stomach flutters. “I love you,” I murmur, this time on purpose.
“I love you so much, Poppy,” he says, and somehow, just the sound of his voice tips me over the edge and I’m coming undone. We are, together.
And I don’t know what we’ve done, what chain reaction we might have just triggered, how this will all pan out, but right then I can’t think about anything else but the crush of love looping between us.
AFTERWARD, WE LIE on the plastic-strewn balcony, curled together and soaked to the bone, though already the storm is breaking up, the heat pushing in to burn the moisture off our skin.
“A long time ago you told me that outdoor sex wasn’t all it was cracked up to be,” I say, and Alex gives a hoarse laugh, his hand smoothing my hair.
“I hadn’t had outdoor sex with you,” he says.
“That was amazing,” I say. “I mean, for me. It’s never been like that for me before.”
He props himself up and looks down at me. “It’s never been like that for me either.”
I turn my face into his skin and kiss his rib cage. “Just making sure.”
After a few seconds, he says, “I want to do it again.”
“Me too,” I say. “I think we should.”
“Just making sure,” he parrots. I draw lazy patterns over his chest, and the arm he has slung low across my back squeezes tight. “We really can’t stay here tonight.”
I sigh. “I know. I just don’t want to move. Ever again.”
He flips my hair behind my shoulder, then kisses the skin left exposed there.
“Do you think that would’ve happened if Nikolai’s AC hadn’t gone out?” I ask.
Now Alex leans to kiss me right over the heart, sending chills down my stomach and up my legs that his fingers trace over. “That would’ve happened if Nikolai had never been born.
It just might not have happened on this balcony.”
I sit up and swing one knee over his waist, settling onto his lap. “I’m glad it did.”
His hands run up my thighs, and heat gathers anew between my legs.
That’s when we hear the pounding on the door.
“ANYONE HOME?” a man shouts. “IT’S NIKOLAI . I’M GONNA LET MYSELF—”
“Hold on a sec!” I yell, and scramble off Alex, snatching the wet T-shirt up.
“Shit,” Alex says, searching for his swim trunks in the jumble of plastic sheeting.
I find the wad of black fabric and shove it toward him, then pull the hem of my shirt down over my thighs just as the door’s starting to unlock. “Heyyyyy, Nikolai!” I call way too loudly, heading him off before he can see either Literally Naked Alex or the shredded plastic.
Nikolai is short and balding, dressed in an entirely maroon outfit—seventies-style golf shirt, pleated pants, loafers. He sticks one meaty hand out. “You must be Poppy.”
“Yes, hi.” I shake his hand and hold intense eye contact, hoping to give Alex a chance to discreetly get dressed out on the mostly dark balcony.
“Look, I’m afraid it’s bad news,” he says. “The AC’s out.”
No shit, I just barely keep myself from saying.
“Not just for this unit, but this whole wing,” he says. “We’ve got someone coming out first thing in the morning, but I feel real bad about the delay.”
Alex appears at my shoulder. At this point, Nikolai seems to clock that we’re both soaking wet and rumpled, but luckily, he says nothing about it. “Anyway, I feel real, real bad,” he repeats. “I thought you two were just being difficult, to be quite frank, but when I got here . . .” He tugs on the collar of his shirt and shudders.
“Anyway, I’m refunding you for the last three days, and . . . well, I hesitate to tell you to come back tomorrow, in case things don’t get sorted out.”
“That’s fine!” I say. “If you refund the whole trip, we’ll find someplace else to stay.”
“You sure?” he says. “Things can get pretty pricey when you book last minute like that.”
“We’ll figure something out,” I insist.
Alex bumps an arm against my back. “Poppy’s an expert on traveling on the cheap.”
“That so?” Nikolai couldn’t sound less interested. He pulls out his phone and types with one finger. “Refund’s issued. Not sure how long it’ll take, so lemme know if there’s a problem.”
Nikolai turns to go but swivels back. “Almost forgot—found this on the welcome mat outside.” He hands us a piece of paper folded in half. In looping cursive, it says on the front THE NEWLYWEDS with, like, twenty-five little hearts drawn around it.
“Congrats on the nuptials,” Nikolai says, and lets himself out.
“What is it?” Alex asks.
I unfold the piece of paper. It’s a Groupon printed in shoddy black ink. At the top, scrawled in the margin in the same handwriting as on the front, is a note.
Hope y’all don’t think it’s creepy we figured out what apartment you were in! We thought we might’ve heard the sounds of passion coming from this one. ;) Also Bob said he saw you leaving this morning (we are three doors down). Anyway! We have to take off bright and early for the next stage of our vacation (Joshua Tree!!! Yay! I feel like a celebrity just writing that!) and unfortunately we never got a chance to use this.
(Barely made it out of our bedroom—you two will know how it is, LOL.) Hope y’all have a great rest of your trip!
Xoxo, your fairy godparents, Stacey & Bob
I blink at the voucher, stunned. “It’s a one-hundred-dollar gift certificate,” I say. “For a spa. I think I read about this place. It’s supposed to be amazing.”
“Wow,” Alex says. “Feeling kind of bad that I didn’t even remember their names.”
“They didn’t address it to us directly,” I point out. “I doubt they know ours either.”
“And yet they gave us this anyway,” Alex says.
“I wonder if there’s a way we could create a long-lasting friendship with them, get super close, take trips together, all of it, and keep them from ever finding out our names. Just for fun.”
“We absolutely could,” Alex says. “You just have to make it long enough that it’s too awkward to ask. I had so many ‘friends’ like that in college.”
“Oh, god, yeah, and then you have to use that trick where you ask two people if they’ve been introduced, and wait for them to say their names.”
“Except sometimes, they just say yes,” Alex points out. “Or they say no, but just keep waiting for you to introduce them.”
“Maybe they’re doing the exact same thing,” I say. “Maybe those people don’t even remember their names.”
“Well, I doubt I’ll ever forget Stacey and Bob now,” Alex says.
“I doubt I’ll forget much about this trip,” I say. “Except the gift shop in the dinosaur. That can go, if I need to make room for more important things.”
Alex smiles down at me. “Agreed.”
After an awkward beat of silence, I say, “So. Should we find a hotel?”
THE LARREA PALM Springs Hotel is seventy dollars a night in the summer, and even in the dark, it looks like a kid’s Magic Marker drawing. In a good way.
The outside is an explosion of colors—banana-yellow pool cabanas, hot-sauce-red chaises lined up around the water, each block of the three-story building painted a different shade of pink, red, purple, yellow, green.
The room we check into is every bit as lively: orange walls and drapes and furniture, green carpet, striped bedding matched to the building’s exterior. Most important, it’s very cold.
“You want to shower first?” Alex asks as soon as we’re inside. I realize then that the whole drive over—and before that, when we were packing our stuff up, tidying Nikolai’s apartment—he’s been waiting to be clean, suppressing a desire to say over and over again, God, I need a shower, while all I was doing was thinking about what happened on the balcony and going hot all over.
I don’t want Alex to go take a shower right now. I want to get in the shower together and make out some more.
But I also remember him confiding once that he hated shower sex (worse than outdoor sex) because when he was in the shower, he just wanted to be clean, and that was hard to do with someone else’s hair and dirt pouring down you, while the sex part was just as challenging because there was constantly soap in your eyes or you were brushing up against the wall and thinking about the last time the tiles were cleaned, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So I just say, “Go for it!” and Alex nods but hesitates, like maybe he’s going to say something, but ultimately decides not to and disappears into the bathroom for a long, hot shower.
My T-shirt and hair have both dried out, and when I go to sit out on the (non-plastic-wrapped) balcony of our new room, I realize that’s already mostly dry too.
Any sign of the rain that broke the heat has burned off, like it never happened.
Except that my lips feel bruised and my body is more relaxed than I’ve been all week.
And the air is lighter too, breezy even.
“All yours,” Alex says behind me.
When I turn, he’s standing there in his towel looking shiny-clean and perfect. My pulse quickens at the sight of him, but I’m aware of how filthy I am, so I swallow my want, stand up, and say, “Cool!” too loudly.
To put it lightly, I don’t enjoy showering.
Being clean, yes. The act of being in the shower, also yes. But everything about having to brush out my tangled hair beforehand, stepping out onto a ratty bath mat or tile floors, getting dry, combing my hair out again—I hate all of that, which means I’m a three-shower-a-week person to Alex’s one to two showers a day.
But taking this shower, after the week we’ve had so far, is absolutely luxurious.
Standing in hot, hot water within a cold, cold bathroom, watching legitimate dirt and grime drip off me and swirl around the drain in shimmery gray spirals, is life giving.
Massaging coconut-scented shampoo into my scalp and green-tea-scented cleanser onto my face, and running a cheapo razor up my legs, feels divine.
It’s the longest shower I’ve taken in months, and when I finally emerge from the bathroom feeling like a new woman, Alex is fast asleep in one of the beds, on top of the bedding with all the lights still on.
For a second, I debate which bed to climb into. In general, I love being able to sprawl out in a queen bed on these trips, but there’s a big portion of me that wants to curl up next to Alex, fall asleep with my head in the crook of his shoulder where I can smell his clean, bergamot smell, maybe conjure up a dream about him.
In the end, though, I decide it’s too creepy to assume he wants to share a bed with me just because we hooked up.
The last time anything happened between us, there certainly wasn’t any bed sharing afterward. There was just chaos.
I’m determined that this won’t end up like that. No matter what happened or happens between us on this trip, I won’t let it ruin our friendship. I won’t make assumptions about what any of this means or foist any expectations onto Alex.
I pull the striped comforter up over him, flick off the lights, and climb into the empty bed across from his.
HEY, ALEX TEXTS me the night before we leave for Tuscany.
Hey yourself, I write back.
Can you talk for a sec? Just want to finalize some stuff.
Immediately, I think he’s calling to cancel. Which doesn’t make sense.
For the first time in years we’re set to have a tension-free trip. We’re both in committed relationships, our friendship is better than ever, and I have never been so happy in my life.
Three weeks after my pneumonia debacle, I met Trey. A month after that, Alex and Sarah were back together—he says it’s better this time, that they’re on the same page. Nearly as important, this time around she seems to have finally started warming to me, and the few times that Alex and Trey have met, they’ve gotten along too. So once again, as always, I’ve come to the place of being so, so ecstatically happy that Alex and I never let anything happen between us.
I start to text him back, then decide to just call him from the folding chair on my balcony instead since I’m home alone. Trey’s still at Good Boy Bar, up the street from my new apartment, but I came home early after a bout of nausea, a warning sign of an oncoming migraine I need to fight off before our flight.
Alex answers on the second ring, and I say, “Everything okay?”
I can hear his turn signal going. Okay, so maybe we’re back to him calling me from the car, on his way home from the gym, but things really do seem better. For one thing, they sent me a joint birthday card. And Christmas card. She not only followed me back on Instagram but she likes my photos—even comments little hearts and smiley faces on some of them.
So I thought things were good, but now Alex skips right over hello and goes straight to,
“We’re not making a mistake, are we?”
“Um,” I say, “what?”
“I mean, a couples’ trip. That’s sort of intense.”
I sigh. “How so?”
“I don’t know.” I can hear the anxiety in his voice, imagine him grimacing, tugging at his hair. “Trey and Sarah have only met once.”
In the spring, Trey and I flew to Linfield so he could meet my parents. Dad wasn’t impressed by the tattoos or the holes in Trey’s ears from the gauges he got when he was seventeen, or that he turns Dad’s questions around on him, or that he doesn’t have a degree.
But Mom was impressed by his manners, which really are top-notch. Although I think for her, it had more to do with the juxtaposition of his appearance with his easy, warm way of saying things like, “Excellent s’mores cake, Ms. Wright!” and “Can I help you with the dishes?”
By the end of the weekend, she’d decided he was a very nice young man, and when I sneaked out onto the deck to get Dad’s opinion while Trey and Mom were inside dishing up homemade Funfetti cake, Dad looked me in the eye with a solemn nod and said, “I suppose he seems right for you. And he obviously makes you happy, Pop. That’s all that matters to me.”
He does make me happy. So happy. And he is right for me. Freakily so. I mean, we work together. We get to spend pretty much every day together, either in the office or halfway around the world, but we’re also both independent, like having our own apartments, our own friends. He and Rachel get along, but when Trey and I are in the city, he’s mostly hanging with his skateboarding friends while Rachel and I are trying a new brunch place or reading in the park or having our whole bodies scrubbed raw in our favorite Korean spa.
Two days home in Linfield and both of us were already a little restless, but he didn’t mind the mess and he liked the menagerie of dying animals and he joined right in when we did a New Talent Show over Skype with Parker and Prince.
Still, after how everything went down with Guillermo—and pretty much everyone else in the entire world—I was restless, eager to get out of Linfield before something scared Trey off, so we probably would’ve headed back early if not for the fact that it was Mr. Nilsen’s sixtieth birthday, and Alex and Sarah were coming down to surprise him with a visit. We’d decided the four of us should grab dinner before the party.
“I’m so excited to meet this guy,” Trey kept saying whenever a new text came in from Alex, and every time, it made my nerves inch closer to the surface. I felt fiercely protective
—I just wasn’t sure over whom.
“Just give him a chance,” I kept saying. “He takes a while to open up.”
“I know, I know,” Trey insisted. “But I know how much he means to you, so I’m going to like him, P. I promise.”
Dinner was okay. I mean, the food was great (Mediterranean), but the conversation could’ve been better. Trey, I couldn’t help but think, came off a little show-offy when Alex asked him what he’d studied, but I knew his lack of formal education was something of a chip on his shoulder, and I wished there was some easy way for me to signal that to Alex as Trey launched into the story of how it all happened.
How he’d been in a metal band all through high school back in Pittsburgh. How they’d taken off when he was eighteen, gotten offered an opening slot on the tour of a much bigger band. Trey was an amazing drummer, but what he really loved was photography. When his band broke up after four years of near-constant touring, he took a job taking pictures on another band’s tour. He loved traveling, meeting people, seeing new cities. And as those connections built up, other job offers rolled in. He went freelance, eventually started working with R+R, and then came on as a staff photographer.
He finished his monologue by putting an arm around my shoulders and saying, “And then I met P.”
The flicker on Alex’s expression was so subtle I was sure Trey didn’t notice it. Maybe Sarah hadn’t either, but to me, it felt like a pocketknife plunging into my belly button and dragging upward five or six inches.
“Sooo sweet,” Sarah said in her saccharine voice, and probably my face made a much bigger twitch.
“The funny thing is,” Trey said then, “we were supposed to meet sooner. I was scheduled to go on that Norway trip with you two. Before she got sick.”
“Wow.” Alex’s eyes flicked to mine, then dipped to the glass of water in front of him. It was sweating as badly as I was. He picked it up, slowly sipped, set it down. “That is funny.”
“Anyway,” Trey said awkwardly. “What about you? What did you study?”
Trey knew exactly what Alex had gone to school for (was still going to school for), but I figured that by phrasing it as a question, he was giving Alex a chance to talk more about himself.
Instead, Alex took another sip and said only, “Creative writing, then literature.”
I had to sit and watch my boyfriend struggle to find an appropriate follow-up question, give up, and go back to studying the menu.
“He’s an amazing writer,” I said awkwardly, and Sarah shifted in her seat.
“He is,” she said, her tone so acidic you’d think I’d just said Alex Nilsen has an incredibly sexy body!
After dinner, we went to the party at Grandma Betty’s house and things improved a bit.
Alex’s goofy brothers were all clamoring to meet Trey, bombarding him with all kinds of questions about the band and R+R and whether I snored.
“Alex would never tell us,” the youngest, David, said, “but I assume Poppy sounds like a machine gun when she sleeps.”
Trey laughed, took it all in stride. He’s never jealous. Neither of us can afford to be: we are both relentless flirts. It sounds strange, but I love that about him. I love watching him go up to the bar to order me a drink and seeing how the bartenders smile and laugh, lean across the bar to bat their eyelashes at him. I love watching him charm his way through every city we go to, and that whenever he’s next to me, he’s touching me: an arm around the shoulders, a hand on my low back, or pulling me into his lap like we’re home alone rather than dining at a five-star restaurant.
I’ve never felt so secure, so sure that I’m on the same page as someone.
At the party, he kept his hands on me at all times, and David teased us about it.
“You don’t think she’s going to make a run for it if you let go, do you?” he joked.
“Oh, she’ll definitely make a run for it,” Trey said. “This girl can’t sit still for longer than five minutes. That’s one thing I love about her.”
The party was the first time all of Alex’s brothers had been in the same place in a long time, and they were as rowdy and sweet as I remembered them being when Alex and I were nineteen, home from college and charged with driving them around in Alex’s car, since none of them had their own yet and their dad was a sweet man but also a forgetful, flaky one who was incapable of keeping track of who needed to be where and when.
While Alex had always been calm and still by default, his brothers were the kind of boys who never stopped wrestling or giving one another wet willies. Even though some of them have kids now, they were still like that at the party.
Mr. and Mrs. Nilsen had named them in alphabetical order. Alex first, then Bryce, then Cameron, then David, and weirdly they’re mostly sized like that too. With Alex the tallest and broadest, Bryce just as tall but lanky and narrow shouldered, Cameron a few inches shorter and thick. Then there’s David, who’s an inch taller than Alex with the build of a professional athlete.
They’re all handsome, with varying shades of blond hair and matching hazel eyes, but David looks like a movie star (which lately, Alex said at dinner, he’s been talking about moving to L.A. to become), with his thick, wavy hair and wide, thoughtful eyes, and his excitability, the way he lights up whenever he starts talking. He starts fifty percent of his sentences with the name of whoever he’s addressing, or whoever he thinks will be most interested.
“Poppy, Alex brought a bunch of issues of R+R home so I could read your articles,” he said at one point at Betty’s house, and that was the first time I found out Alex even read my articles. “They’re really good. They make me feel like I’m there.”
“I wish you were,” I told him. “Sometime we should all take a trip together.”
“Hell yeah,” David said, then looked over his shoulder, grinning as he checked whether his dad had heard him swear. He’s a twenty-one-year-old baby, and I love him.
At some point, Betty asked for my help in the kitchen, and I followed her in to put candles in the German chocolate cake she had baked for her son-in-law. “Your young man Trey seems like a nice one,” she told me without looking up from what she was doing.
“He’s great,” I said.
“And I like his tattoos,” she added. “They’re just beautiful!”
She wasn’t being an asshole. Betty could be sarcastic, but she could also catch you off guard with her opinions on certain things. She was changeable. I liked that about her. Even at her age, she asked questions in conversation like she didn’t already have all the answers.
“I like them too,” I said.
I was attracted to Trey’s energy more than his appearance during our first work trip together (Hong Kong), and I liked that he waited to ask me out until we were home because he didn’t want to make anything weird for me if I said no.
I’d be lying, though, if I said Alex played no part in my saying yes.
He’d just told me that he and Sarah had been talking a lot more at work, that things seemed okay between them. At that point, I was still regularly waking up from dreams about him showing up at my door, looking sleepy and worried and too comforting, while I was in the throes of a fever.
It didn’t matter that he’d said nothing about getting back together with Sarah.
He would or he wouldn’t, but in the end, there would be someone, and I didn’t think my heart could take it. So I said yes to Trey that night and we went to a bar with free Skee-Ball and hot dogs, and by the end of that night, I knew I could fall in love with him.
Trey was to me what Sarah Torval was to Alex. Someone who fit.
So I kept saying yes.
“Do you love him?” Betty asked me, still not looking up from the task at hand.
I had the sense that she was giving me a level of privacy. The option to lie, without her looking straight into my eyes, if that was what I needed. But I didn’t need to lie. “I do.”
“Good, honey. That’s great.” Her hands stilled, holding two thin silver candles into the frosting like they might try to jump out. “Do you love him like you love Alex?”
I remember with vivid clarity the feeling of my heart stumbling over its next several beats. That question was more complicated, but I couldn’t lie to her.
“I don’t think I’ll ever love anyone the way I love Alex,” I said, and then I thought, But maybe I won’t ever love anyone like I love Trey either.
I should’ve said it, but I didn’t. Betty shook her head and looked me in the eye. “Wish he knew that.”
Then she walked out of the kitchen, leaving me to follow. Alex and Sarah had brought Flannery O’Connor with them, and she chose that moment to make her dramatic entrance, walking up to me with her spine arched up and eyes wide, staring into my face and meowing loudly, in a full-body expression that Alex and I call Halloween Kitty.
“Hi,” I said, and she rubbed against my legs, so I reached to pick her up, and she hissed and swung a handful of claws toward me just as Sarah walked into the kitchen with a stack of dirty dishes. She laughed and said in that sweet voice of hers, “Wow! She does not like you!”
So yes, I see where Alex is coming from with his nerves about this couples trip, but we’re making progress. With the Instagram likes and the perfectly pleasant time Trey, Alex, and I had at an arcade bar the last time Alex visited. And besides, being in the Tuscan countryside with an IV drip of incredible wine is not going to be the same as one awkward dinner in Ohio followed by a sixty-year-old teetotaler’s birthday party.
“They’re going to get along great,” I tell him now, propping my legs up on the balcony railing and adjusting the phone between my face and shoulder.
I hear his turn signal click off, and he sighs. “How can you be sure?”
“Because we love them,” I reason. “And we love each other. So they’ll love each other.
And we’ll just all love each other. You and Trey. Me and Sarah.”
He laughs. “I wish you could hear how much your voice changed for that last part. It sounded like you were inhaling helium.”
“Look, I’m still working on forgiving her for dumping you the last time,” I say. “It seems like she’s figured out that was the biggest mistake of her life, though, so I’m giving her a chance.”
“Poppy,” he says. “It wasn’t like that. Things were complicated, but they’re better now.”
“I know, I know,” I say, even though, really, I don’t. He insists there are no hard feelings between them about their last breakup, but whenever I think about what she said—that their relationship was about as exciting as the school library where they’d met—I still see red for a second.
Another wave of nausea hits me, and I groan. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I really need to go to bed so I can be flight-ready tomorrow, but I’m telling you. This trip is going to be amazing.”
“Yeah,” he says stiffly. “I’m sure I’m worrying for nothing.”
Mostly, it turns out that’s true.
We’re staying in a villa. It’s hard to be in a bad mood when you’re staying in a villa, with a gleaming pool and old stone patio, an outdoor kitchen with bougainvillea dripping all over everything in soft pinks and purples.
“Wow, okay,” Sarah says when we walk in. “I’m never missing one of these trips again.”
I flash Alex a look that’s the facial equivalent of a thumbs-up, and he smiles faintly back.
“I know, right?” Trey says. “We should’ve thought to take a group trip sooner.”