by Emily Henry
“So you must see each other a lot,” I say. “Is that awkward?”
“Nah, not really,” he offers.
“You don’t really see each other a lot or it’s not really awkward?”
He buys some time with a long chug on the water bottle. “Uhh, I guess either.”
“Is . . . she seeing anyone?” I ask.
“Why?” Alex says. “I didn’t think you even liked her.”
“Yeah,” I say, embarrassment coursing through my veins like a quick-hitting drug. “But you did, so I want to make sure you’re okay.”
“I’m okay,” he says, but he sounds uncomfortable so I drop it.
No shitting on Ohio, no talking about Alex’s ridiculously fit body, no looking him deep in the eyes from fewer than six inches away, and no bringing up Sarah Torval.
I can do that. Probably.
“Should we get in the water?” I ask.
“Sure.”
But as we pick our way through the herd of babies to move down the whitewashed pool steps, it rapidly becomes clear that this isn’t the solution to the touch-and-go awkwardness between us. For one thing, the water, with all the many bodies standing (and potentially peeing) in it, feels nearly as hot as the air and somehow even more unpleasant.
For another thing, it’s so crowded that we have to stand so close that the upper two-thirds of our bodies are almost touching. When a stocky man in a camo hat pushes past me, I collide with Alex and a lightning bolt of panic sizzles through me at the feeling of his slick stomach against mine. He catches me by the hips, at once steadying me and easing me away, back to my rightful place two inches away from him.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Mm-hm,” I say, because all I can really focus on is the way his hands spread over my hip bones. I expect there to be a lot of that on this trip. The mm-hming, not the gigantic Alex-hands on my hips.
He lets go of me and cranes his neck over his shoulder, looking back to our lounges. “Maybe we should just read until it’s less crowded,” he suggests.
“Good idea.” I follow him in a zigzagging path back to the pool steps, to the burning-hot cement, to the too-short towels spread on the chaises, where we lie down to wait. He pulls out a Sarah Waters novel, which he finishes, then follows with an Augustus Everett book. I take out the latest issue of R+R, planning to skim everything I didn’t write. Maybe I’ll find a spark of inspiration I can take back to Swapna so she won’t be mad at me.
I pretend to read for two sweaty hours and the pool never empties out.
* * *
• • •
AS SOON AS we open the door to the apartment, I know things are going to get worse.
“What the hell,” Alex says, following me inside. “Did it get hotter?”
I hurry to the thermostat and read the numbers illuminated there. “Eighty-two?!”
“Maybe we’re pushing it too hard?” Alex suggests, coming to stand beside me. “Let’s see if we can get it back down to eighty at least.”
“I know eighty is, technically speaking, better than eighty-two, Alex,” I say, “but we’re still going to murder each other if we have to sleep in eighty-degree heat.”
“Should we call someone?” Alex asks.
“Yes! We should definitely call someone! Good thinking!” I rifle through the beach bag for my phone and search my email for the host’s phone number. I hit call, and it rings three times before a gruff, smoky voice comes over the line. “Yeah?”
“Nikolai?”
Two seconds of silence. “Who is this?”
“This is Poppy Wright. I’m staying in 4B?”
“Okay.”
“We’re having some trouble with the thermostat.”
Three seconds of silence this time. “Did you try Googling it?”
I ignore the question and forge ahead. “It was set to eighty degrees when we got here. We tried to turn it down to seventy two hours ago and now it’s eighty-two.”
“Oh, yeah,” Nikolai says. “You’re pushing it too hard.”
I guess Alex can hear what Nikolai’s saying, because he nods, like, Told you.
“So . . . it can’t handle . . . going colder than seventy-eight?” I say. “Because that wasn’t in the posting, and neither was the construction outside the—”
“It can only do a degree at a time, honey,” Nikolai says with a beleaguered sigh. “You can’t just push a thermostat down to seventy degrees! And who keeps an apartment seventy degrees anyway?”
Alex and I exchange a look. “Sixty-seven,” he whispers.
Sixty-five, I mouth, gesturing to myself. “Well—”
“Look, look, look, honey.” Nikolai cuts me off again. “Turn it down to eighty-one. When it gets down to eighty-one, turn it down to eighty. Then turn it down to seventy-nine, and when it gets down to seventy-nine, you set it to seventy-eight. And once it’s seventy-eight—”
“—go ahead and just cut off your own head,” Alex whispers, and I pull the phone away from me before Nikolai can hear me laugh.
I drag it back to my cheek, and Nikolai’s still explaining how to count backward from eighty-two. “Got it,” I say. “Thanks.”
“No prob,” Nikolai says with another sigh. “Have a good stay, honey.”
As I hang up, Alex crosses back to the thermostat and turns it back up to eighty-one. “Here goes literally nothing.”
“If we can’t get it to work . . .” I trail off as the full force of our situation hits me. I was going to say that, if we couldn’t get it to work, I’d just book us a hotel room with the R+R card.
But of course we can’t.
I could put it on my own credit card, but, living in New York, in a too-nice-for-me apartment, I don’t actually have a ton of expendable income. The perks of my job are arguably the biggest form of income. I could try to score us a room through an advertising trade, but I’ve been slacking on my social media and blogging, and I’m not sure I still have enough clout. Besides, a lot of places won’t do that with influencers. Some will even screenshot your email requests and post them online to shame you. It’s not like I’m George Clooney. I’m just some girl who takes pretty pictures—I might be able to land us a discount; a free room’s unlikely.
“We’ll figure something out,” Alex says. “Do you want to shower first, or should I?”
I can tell from the way he’s holding his arms slightly away from his body that he’s desperate to be clean. And if he hops in the shower now, maybe I’ll even manage to get the temperature down a few degrees in the meantime.
“Go ahead,” I tell him, and he slips away.
The whole time I can hear the water running, I’m pacing. From the foldout pseudo bed to the plastic-wrapped balcony to the thermostat. Finally, it drops down to eighty-one, and I reset the goal temperature to eighty and keep pacing.
After deciding to document this so I can report it to Airbnb and try to get some money back, I take pictures of the chair bed and the porch—the construction upstairs has mercifully ceased for the day so at least it’s quiet, the hum of conversation and splash of water drifting up from the pool—then head back to the thermostat, down to eighty now, to take a picture of that too.
Just as I’m resetting the temperature for seventy-nine, the shower turns off, so I swing my suitcase up onto the foldout chair, unzip the bag, and start rooting through it for something lightweight to wear to dinner.
Alex steps out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam with a towel wrapped around his waist, one hand securing it at the hip as the other swipes through his wet hair, leaving it sticking up and out messily. “Your turn,” he says, but it takes me a second to compute through the haze of his long, lean torso and the sharp jut of his left hip bone.
Why is it so different seeing someone in a towel than in a bathing suit? Thirty minutes ago, Alex was technicall
y more naked than this, but now, the smooth lines of his body feel more scandalous. I feel like all the blood in my body is just bobbing to the surface, pressing against my skin so that every inch of me is more alert.
It never used to be like this.
This is all because of Croatia.
Damn you and your gorgeous islands, Croatia!
“Poppy?” Alex prompts.
“Mm-hm,” I say, then remember to at least add, “Yeah.” I spin back to my bag and grab a dress, bra, and underwear at random. “Okay. Bedroom’s all yours.”
I hurry into the steamy bathroom and shut the door as I’m stripping off my bikini top only to freeze, stunned at the sight of a huge blue-tinted glass capsule that occupies the entirety of one wall, complete with a reclined seat on either side, like it’s some kind of group shower from The Jetsons.
“Oh my god.” This, I’m sure, was not in the photographs. In fact, this whole room is unrecognizable from the one on the website, transformed from the subtle, beachy grays of its former self into the glowing blue and sterile whites of the hypermodern sight before me.
I snatch a towel off the rack, wrapping it around myself, and throw the door open. “Alex, why didn’t you say anything about the—”
Alex grabs for his towel and pulls it around himself and I do my absolute best to pick up where my sentence stumbled off and pretend that didn’t happen. “—spaceship bathroom?”
“I figured you knew,” Alex says, his voice hoarse. “You booked this place.”
“They must’ve remodeled since the photos were taken,” I say. “How did you even figure out how to work that thing?”
“Honestly,” Alex says, “the hardest thing was just wresting control from the 2001: A Space Odyssey–style artificial intelligence system. After that, the biggest issue was just that I kept mixing up the controls for the sixth shower head with the ones for the foot massager.”
It’s enough to break the tension. I dissolve into laughter and he does too, and it stops mattering so much that we’re standing here in our towels.
“This place is purgatory,” I say. Everything is just nice enough to make the issues that much more glaring.
“Nikolai is a sadist,” Alex agrees.
“Yes, but he’s a sadist with a spaceship bathroom.” I lean back into the bathroom to study the many-headed, multiseated shower again.
I burst into another fit of laughter and lean back out to find Alex standing there, grinning. He’s pulled a T-shirt on over his damp upper body but hasn’t risked swapping the towel out.
I turn back to the bathroom. “Okay, I’ll leave you to dance naked around the apartment in privacy now. Use your time wisely.”
“Is that what you do?” Alex calls. “Dance around the apartment naked whenever I’m in the other room? You do, don’t you?”
I spin away as I’m pulling the door shut. “Wouldn’t you like to know, Porny Alex?”
12
Nine Summers Ago
DESPITE THE FACT that Alex spent every spare moment of junior year picking up shifts at the library (and thus I spent every spare moment sitting on the floor behind the reference desk eating Twizzlers and teasing him whenever Sarah Torval bashfully drifted by), there isn’t money for a big summer trip this year.
His younger brother is starting community college next year, without much financial aid, and Alex, being a saint among mere men, is funneling all his income into Bryce’s tuition.
When he broke the news to me, Alex said, “I understand if you want to go to Paris without me.”
My reply was instantaneous. “Paris can wait. Let’s visit the Paris of America instead.”
He arched a brow. “Which is?”
“Duh,” I said. “Nashville.”
He laughed, delighted. I loved to delight him, lived for it. I got such a rush from making that stoic face crack, and lately there hadn’t been enough of that.
Nashville is only a four-hour drive from Linfield, and miraculously, Alex’s station wagon is still kicking. So Nashville it is.
When he picks me up the morning of our trip, I’m still packing, and Dad makes him sit and answer a series of random questions while I finish. Meanwhile, Mom slips into my room with something hidden behind her back, singing, “Hiiii, sweetie.”
I look up from the Muppet-vomit explosion of colorful clothing in my bag. “Hiii?”
She perches on my bed, hands still hidden.
“What are you doing?” I say. “Are you handcuffed right now? Are we being burglarized? Blink twice if you can’t say anything.”
She brings the box forward. I immediately yelp and slap it out of her hand onto the floor.
“Poppy!” she cries.
“Poppy?!” I demand. “Not Poppy! Mom! Why are you carrying a bulk box of condoms around behind your back?”
She bends and scoops it up. It’s unopened (luckily?), so nothing spilled out. “I just figured it’s time we talked about this.”
“Uh-uh.” I shake my head. “It’s nine twenty a.m. Not the time to talk about this.”
She sighs and sets the box atop my overfilled duffle bag. “I just want you kids to be safe. You’ve got a lot to look forward to. We want all your wildest dreams to come true, honey!”
My heart stutters. Not because my mom is implying that Alex and I are having sex—now that it’s occurred to me, of course that’s what she thinks—but because I know she’s espousing the importance of finishing college, which I still haven’t told her I don’t plan to do.
I’ve only told Alex that I’m not going back next year. I’ve been waiting to tell my parents until after the trip so no big blowup keeps it from happening.
My parents are ultrasupportive, but that’s partly because both of them wanted to go to college and neither of them had the support to do so. They’ve always assumed that any dream I could have would be aided by having a degree.
But throughout the school year, most of my dreaming and energy have been devoted to traveling: weekend trips and short stints over breaks from school—usually on my own, but sometimes with Alex (camping, because that’s what we can afford), or with my roommate, Clarissa, a rich hippie type I met in an informational meeting about study-abroad programs at the end of last year (visits to each of her parents’ separate lake houses). She’s starting next year—senior year—in Vienna, and getting art history credits for it, but the longer I considered any of those programs, the less interested I found myself.
I don’t want to go to Australia only to spend all day in a classroom, and I don’t want to rack up thousands more in debt just to have an Academic Experience in Berlin. For me, traveling is about wandering, meeting people you don’t expect, doing things you’ve never done. And aside from that, all those weekend trips have started to pay off. I’ve only been blogging for eight months, and already I have a few thousand followers on social media.
When I found out I failed my biological science general requirement, and thus it would take me an extra semester to graduate, that was the final straw.
And I’m going to tell my parents all this, and somehow, I’ll find a way to make them understand that school isn’t right for me the way it is for people like Alex. But today is not that day. Today, we’re going to Nashville, and after the last semester, all I want is to let loose.
Just not in the way my mother is implying.
“Mom,” I say. “I am not having sex with Alex.”
“You don’t have to tell me anything,” she replies with a cool, calm, and collected nod, though that manner goes completely out the window as she goes on: “I just need to know that you’re being responsible. Oh my goodness, I can’t believe how grown-up you are! It’s making me teary just thinking about it. But you still have to be responsible! I’m sure you are, though. You’re such a smart girl! And you’ve always known yourself. I’m so proud of you, honey.”
I’m being more responsible than she knows. While I’ve made out with a few different guys over the last year, and did more than that with one, I’ve still stayed pretty safely in the slow lane. When I tipsily admitted this to Clarissa during a trip to her mom’s lake house on the far shore of Lake Michigan, her eyes widened like she was gazing into a scrying pool, and she said in that airy way of hers, “What is it you’re waiting for?”
I just shrugged. The truth is, I’m not sure. I just figure I’ll know when I see it.
Sometimes I think I’m being too practical, which isn’t something I’ve ever been accused of, but with this, I feel at times like I’m waiting for the perfect circumstances for a First Time.
Other times I think it might have something to do with Porny Poppy. Like after all that, I’m incapable of losing myself in a moment, in a person.
Maybe I just need to make a decision, choose someone from a lineup of the loosely held crushes I’m harboring on some of the guys Alex and I run into regularly at parties. People in the English department with him, or communications department with me, or any of the other regularly occurring characters in our lives.
But for now, I’m holding out hope, waiting for that magical moment when it feels right with one person in particular.
That person is not going to be Alex.
Actually, if I were to just choose someone, it probably would be. I’d be straight-up with him, explain what I wanted to do and why, and probably insist both of us sign something in blood saying it would only happen once and we would never speak of it again.
But even if it comes to that, I make a silent and solemn vow right now, I will not be using a condom from the bulk box my mom just tucked into my suitcase.
“I really, really swear to you I don’t need these,” I say.
She stands and pats the box. “Maybe not now, but why not hold on to them? Just in case. Also, are you hungry? I’ve got cookies in the oven, and—shoot, I forgot to run the dishwasher.”
She hurries from the room, and I finish packing, then drag my bag downstairs. Mom’s at the island, chopping browned bananas for banana bread while the cookies cool, and Alex is sitting in that very rigid way beside my father. “Ready?” I say, and he springs off the stool like I was born ready to not be sitting next to your very intimidating father.
