People We Meet on Vacation

by Emily Henry

  So at least I’ll have something to do while lying on the chair bed, wide awake.

  Headache still building, I tug my hair into my go-to stubby ponytail and cross the scuffed wooden floors to the space-age bathroom. In its strange blue light, I wash my face, but rather than applying any of the fancy moisturizers or serums that Rachel is constantly offloading on me, I splash my face with cold water when I’m done, rub some on my temples and my neck.

  In the mirror, my reflection looks as wretchedly stressed as I feel. I need to turn this around and remind Alex how things used to be, and I only have five days left to do it, the last three of which will be peppered with wedding festivities.

  Tomorrow has to be amazing. I need to be Fun Poppy, not Weird, Hurt Poppy. Then Alex will loosen up, and everything will smooth out. I change into a pair of silky pajama shorts and a tank top, brush my teeth, then step back into the living space to find that Alex has turned off all the lights except the lamp beside the bed, and he’s lying on the chair mattress in a pair of exercise shorts and a T-shirt, his same book from earlier in hand.

  I happen to know that Alex Nilsen has always slept shirtless, even when the temperatures are not this absurdly high, but that’s neither here nor there because the point is, I’m supposed to take the foldout chair.

  “Get out of my bed!” I say.

  “You paid,” he says. “You get the bed.”

  “R+R paid.” Just like that, I’m deeper into the lie. It’s not like it’s a harmful one, but still.

  “I want the chair,” Alex says. “How often does a grown man get to sleep on a fuzzy foldout chair, Poppy?”

  I sit beside him and make a big show of trying to push him off, but he’s too solid for me to budge him. I twist around, bracing my feet against the floor, my knees against the edge of the bed thing, and my hands against his right hip, as I grit my teeth and try to push him off of it.

  “Stop it, you weirdo,” he says.

  “I’m not the weirdo.” I turn sideways, try to use my hip and side body to force him off. “You’re the one who’s trying to steal my one joy in life, this weird bed.”

  In that moment, when all my weight is pretty much focused in my hip, he stops resisting and scoots sideways a little, and somehow I tumble halfway onto the chair bed and halfway onto his chest, forcefully knocking his book onto the floor in the process. He laughs, and I laugh too, but I’m also feeling kind of tingly and heavy and, frankly, turned on, lying on him like this.

  Worst of all, I can’t seem to make myself move. His arm has come around my back, loose over the curve at its base, and when his laughter settles, I look up into his eyes, my chin resting on his chest. “You tricked me,” I hum. “I bet you didn’t even have emails to respond to.”

  “For all you know, I don’t even have an email account,” he teases. “Are you mad?”

  “Furious.”

  His laugh shivers through me, goose bumps chasing it down my spine, and the heat of the apartment sinks into my skin, gathers between my legs.

  “I’d forgive you eventually,” I say. “I’m very forgiving.”

  “You are,” he agrees. “I’ve always liked that about you.”

  His hand just barely brushes the skin between the bottom of my tank top and the top of my shorts, and I shift against him, feeling as if we could melt into each other.

  What am I doing?

  I sit up suddenly and take my hair down just to put it back up. “You’re sure you’re cool to sleep on the chair bed?” My voice comes out too high.

  “Of course. Yeah.”

  I stand and pad over to the bed. “Okay, cool, then . . . good night.”

  I turn off the light and climb onto bed. Onto, not into, because it’s way too hot for blankets.

  14

  This Summer

  WHEN I STARTLE awake, it’s still dark out, and I’m sure we’re being robbed.

  “Shit, shit, shit,” the robber is saying for some reason, and it sounds like he’s in pain.

  “The police are on their way!” I yelp—which is neither a true statement nor a premeditated one—and scramble to the edge of the bed to snap on the light.

  “What?” Alex hisses, eyes squinting against the sudden brightness.

  He’s standing in the dark in the same black shorts he went to sleep in and no shirt. He’s bent slightly at the waist and gripping his lower back with both hands, and as the sleep clears from my brain, I realize he’s not just squinting against the light.

  He’s gasping for breath like he’s in pain.

  “What happened?” I cry, half tumbling off the bed toward him. “Are you okay?”

  “Back spasm,” he says.

  “What?”

  “I’m having a back spasm,” he gets out.

  I’m still not sure what he’s talking about, but I can tell he’s in horrible pain, so I don’t press for more information aside from asking, “Do you need to sit down?”

  He nods, and I guide him toward the bed. He slowly lowers onto it, wincing until he’s finally sitting, at which point some of the pain seems to ease up.

  “Do you want to lie down?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “Getting up and down is the hardest part when this happens.”

  When this happens? I think but don’t say, and guilt stabs through my chest. Apparently this is another one of those Poppy-less developments from the last two years.

  “Here,” I say. “Let me prop some pillows up behind you.”

  He nods, which I take as confirmation that this won’t make things worse. I puff up the pillows, stacking them against the headboard, and he slowly reclines, his face contorted in pain.

  “Alex, what happened?” I glance at the alarm clock on the bedside table. It’s five thirty in the morning.

  “I was getting up to run,” he says. “But I guess I sat up weird? Or too fast or something, because my back spasmed and—” He tips his head back against the pillows, eyes scrunching closed. “Shit, Poppy, I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry?” I say. “Why are you sorry?”

  “It’s my fault,” he says. “I didn’t think about how low to the ground that cot thing is. I should’ve known popping out of bed like that would do this.”

  “How could you have possibly known that?” I say, disbelieving.

  He massages his forehead. “I should have,” he repeats. “This has been happening for, like, a year now. I can’t even bend over to pick up my shoes until I’ve been awake and moving around for at least half an hour. It just didn’t occur to me. And I didn’t want you to get a migraine from the chair, and—”

  “And that’s why you should never be a hero,” I say gently, teasing, but his expression of misery doesn’t so much as waver.

  “I wasn’t thinking,” he says. “I didn’t mean to mess up your trip.”

  “Alex, hey.” I touch his arm lightly so it won’t disturb the rest of his body. “You didn’t mess up this trip, okay? Nikolai did.”

  The corners of his mouth twist into an unconvinced smile.

  “What do you need?” I ask. “How can I help you?”

  He sighs. If there’s one thing Alex Nilsen hates, it’s being helpless. Which goes hand in hand with being waited on. In college, when he had strep throat, he ghosted me for a week (the first time I was truly mad at him). When his roommate told me Alex was laid up with a fever, I made very bad chicken noodle soup in our dorm kitchen and brought it to his room.

  He locked the door and wouldn’t let me in for fear of passing the strep along, so I started yelling, “I’m keeping the baby, okay?” through the doorway and he relented.

  It makes him uncomfortable to be fussed over. Thinking about that has a similar, if distilled, effect on me as looking at the formidable Sad Puppy Face. It overwhelms. The love rises less like a wave and more like an instantaneously erected steel s
kyscraper, shooting up through my center and knocking everything else out of its way.

  “Alex,” I say. “Please let me help.”

  He sighs, defeated. “There are muscle relaxants in the front pocket of my laptop bag.”

  “On it.” I retrieve the bottle, fill a glass of water in the kitchenette, and bring him both.

  “Thanks,” he says apologetically, then takes the pill.

  “No problem,” I say. “What else?”

  “You don’t have to do anything,” he says.

  “Look.” I take a deep breath. “The sooner you tell me how I can help you, the sooner you get better, and the sooner this is over, okay?”

  His teeth skim over his full bottom lip, and I’m mesmerized by the sight. I startle when his gaze cuts back to me. “If there’s an ice pack here, that would help,” he admits. “Usually I alternate between cold compresses and heating pads, but the important thing is just sitting still.”

  He says this with disdain.

  “Got it.” I slip my sandals on and grab my purse.

  “What are you doing?” he asks.

  “Going to the pharmacy. That freezer doesn’t even have an ice cube tray, let alone an ice pack, and I doubt Nicky has a heating pad either.”

  “You don’t have to do that,” Alex says. “Really, if I sit still, I’m fine. Go back to sleep.”

  “While you sit upright in the dark? No way. For one thing, that’s extremely creepy, and for another, I’m up, so I might as well be of use.”

  “This is your vacation.”

  I walk toward the door, because there’s nothing he can do to stop me. “No,” I say. “It’s our summer trip. Don’t dance around naked until I get back, okay?”

  He heaves a sigh. “Thanks, Poppy. Seriously.”

  “Stop thanking me. I’m already drafting an absurd list of ways for you to repay me.”

  That finally wins a faint smile. “Good. I like to be useful.”

  “I know,” I say. “I’ve always liked that about you.”

  15

  Eight Summers Ago

  WE GET BACK to our downtown hotel room at two thirty in the morning, a little bit hammered. Usually, we don’t drink so much, but this whole trip has been a celebration.

  We are celebrating the fact that Alex has graduated from college, and that soon he’ll be leaving to get his MFA in creative writing from Indiana University.

  I tell myself it’s not that far away. In fact, we’ll be living closer to each other than we have been since I dropped out.

  But the truth is, even with all the traveling I’ve been doing, I’m itching to get out of my parents’ house in Linfield. I’ve started looking for apartments in other cities, flexible jobs bartending and serving where I can work myself to exhaustion, then take weeks off to travel.

  Spending time with my parents has been great, but everything else about being home makes me feel claustrophobic, like the suburbs are a net pulling tighter and tighter around me as I struggle against it.

  I run into my old teachers, and when they ask what I’m doing, their mouths twist judgmentally at the answer. I see classmates who used to bully me, and some that were friendly enough, and I hide. I work at an upscale bar forty minutes south, in Cincinnati, and when Jason Stanley, my first kiss, came in with his orthodontist-perfected smile and the kind of clothes full-time white-collar jobs require, I dove into the bathroom. Told my boss I had vomited.

  For weeks after that, she kept asking how I was doing in a voice that made it perfectly clear she thought I was pregnant.

  I was not pregnant. Julian and I are always careful about that. Or at least I am. Julian, in general, is not careful by nature. He is a person who says yes to the world, almost regardless of what it asks. When he visits me at work, he finishes drinks that get left on the bar, and he’s tried most drugs (heroin excluded) once. He’s always up for weekend trips to Red River Gorge or Hocking Hills—or slightly longer trips to New York, on the overnight bus that’s only sixty dollars round trip but often has no bathroom. He has the same kind of flexible schedule I do—he’s a college dropout too, but he left the University of Cincinnati after only one year.

  He was studying architectural design, but really, he wants to be a working artist. He shows his paintings at DIY spots around the city, and he lives with three other painters in an old white house that makes me think of Buck and the transients of Tofino. Sometimes, after one too many beers, sitting on the porch while they all smoke weed or clove cigarettes and talk about their dreams, it makes me so nostalgic I could cry from some mixture of sadness and happiness whose proportions I can never quite sort out.

  Julian is rake-thin with hollowed-out cheekbones and alert eyes that can feel like they’re x-raying you. After our first kiss, outside his favorite bar, a grungy place downtown that has a bike repair shop in the back, he told me he didn’t ever want to get married or have kids.

  “That’s okay,” I told him. “I don’t want to marry you either.”

  He laughed gruffly and kissed me again. He always tastes like cigarettes or beer, and when he spends his days off work—he works in a UPS warehouse at the edge of town—painting at home, he gets so lost in his work that he forgets to eat or drink. When we meet up afterward, he’s usually in a foul mood but only for a few minutes, until he has a snack, at which point he melts back into a sweet, sensitive boyfriend who always kisses and touches me so sensually that I regularly find myself thinking, I bet this would look beautiful on film.

  I consider saying it to him, asking if we should set up a camera and take some pictures, and I’m immediately embarrassed to have even considered it.

  He’s the second person I’ve ever slept with, but he doesn’t know that. He didn’t ask. The first still comes into my bar every once in a while and flirts a little, but we can both tell that whatever mild attraction there was when he first started coming in fizzled after those two quick hookups. They were kind of awkward but fine, and in the end, I’m glad I got them out of the way because I have a sense that Julian would’ve been too freaked to come near me if he’d known how inexperienced I was. He would’ve been afraid I’d get too attached to him, and probably I have, but I think he has too, so for now, it’s okay that we spend every spare minute together.

  Julian met Alex once when Alex was home for Christmas break at my bar, a second time during spring break at Julian’s grungy bike bar, and a third time for breakfast at Waffle House before Alex and I left for this trip.

  I can tell Julian has very little opinion of Alex, which is mildly disappointing, and likewise I’m aware that Alex despises Julian, which probably shouldn’t have been a surprise.

  He thinks Julian is reckless, careless. He doesn’t like that he always shows up late, or that sometimes I don’t hear from him for days, then spend weeks with him almost constantly, or that he hasn’t met my parents though they live in the same city.

  “It’s okay,” I insisted when Alex shared these opinions with me on the flight to San Francisco a few days ago. “It works for us.” I don’t even want him to meet my family.

  “I can just tell he doesn’t get it,” Alex said.

  “Get what?” I asked.

  “You,” he said. “He has no idea how lucky he is.”

  It was both a sweet and a hurtful thing for him to say. Alex’s take on our relationship made me feel embarrassed, even if I wasn’t sure he was right.

  “I’m lucky too,” I said. “He’s really special, Alex.”

  He sighed. “Maybe I just need to get to know him better.” I knew from his voice he didn’t think that would fix the problem at all.

  In my daydreams, I’d imagined the two of them becoming best friends, so close that it made sense for our summer trip to expand to include Julian, but after seeing how they interacted, I knew better than to even float the idea.

  So Alex and I headed
to San Francisco on our own. My credit card earned me enough points to get one of the round-trip plane tickets free, and Alex and I split the cost of the other.

  We started with four days in wine country, staying at a new Sonoma bed-and-breakfast that comped two nights in exchange for the advertising they’d get to my twenty-five thousand followers. Alex good-naturedly agreed to take my photo doing all kinds of quaint things:

  Sitting on one of the old-fashioned red bikes the B and B has for guests, wearing a giant straw sun hat, fresh flowers in the wicker basket fixed to the handlebars.

  Walking on the nature trails through the scrubby meadows and their scraggly trees.

  Sipping a cup of coffee on the patio, and a chilled old-fashioned in the sitting room.

  We lucked out with the wine tastings too. The first winery we visited comped your tastings if you bought a bottle, and I researched the cheapest one online before we went. Alex took my picture posing in between rows of vines with a glimmering glass of rosé, one leg kicked out to the side to show off my ridiculous purple-and-yellow-striped vintage jumpsuit.

  I was tipsy by then, and when he knelt, right in the dried-out dirt in his light gray pants, to take the photo, I almost fell over laughing at the bizarre angle he’d chosen for the picture. “Too many wine,” I said, gasping for breath.

  “Too. Many. Wine?” he repeated, delighted and disbelieving, and as I fell into a crouch in the middle of the aisle, laughing my head off, he took a few more pictures from way down low, pictures that would make me look like a sassily dressed skin triangle.

  He was being a horrible photographer on purpose, not out of protest but to crack me up.

  It was the flip side of the Sad Puppy coin, another performance for me and me alone.

  By the time we hit the second winery, we were already sleepy from the alcohol and sunshine, and I let my head droop against his shoulder. We were inside, on a technicality: the whole back of the building was a windowed garage door that pulled up so you could move freely from the patio, with its bougainvillea-encroached lattice, to the light, airy bar with its twenty-foot ceilings, big-ass fans spinning lazily overhead, their rhythm like a lullaby.