by Emily Henry
“You could rent it out!” I suggest, and Alex gives me a look. “Right. You’re way too high-strung to be a landlord.”
“I believe you mean that everyone else is way too lax to be a tenant.”
“You could rent it to one of your brothers,” I say. “Or you can just keep it. I mean, your grandma owned it, right? Do you owe anything on it?”
“Just property taxes.” He pulls the computer away from me and exits out of the job posting. “But it’s not just the house. And it’s not just because of my dad and brothers either,” he adds when he sees my mouth opening. “I mean, obviously I’d miss my nieces and nephew a lot. But there are other things keeping me there. Or, I don’t know, there might be. I’m just kind of . . . waiting to see what happens.”
“Oh,” I say, realization dawning. “So, like . . . a woman.”
Again he holds my gaze, as if daring me to push the matter. But I don’t blink, and he cracks first. “We don’t have to talk about this.”
“Oh.” And now all that vibrating excited energy seems to be freezing over, sinking low in my stomach. “So it’s Sarah. You are getting back together.”
He bows his head, rubs at his brow. “I don’t know.”
“She wants to?” I say. “Or you do?”
“I don’t know,” he says again.
“Alex.”
“Don’t do that.” He looks up. “Don’t chastise me. It’s really grim out there, dating-wise, and Sarah and I have a lot of history.”
“Yeah, a sordid history,” I say. “There’s a reason you broke up. Twice.”
“And a reason we dated,” he fires back. “Not everyone can just not look back like you.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I demand.
“Nothing,” he says quickly. “We’re just different.”
“I know we’re different,” I say, defensive. “I also know it’s grim out there. I’m single too, Alex. I’m a card-carrying member of the Unsolicited Dick Pic Support Group. Doesn’t mean I’m running to get back with one of my exes.”
“It’s different,” he insists.
“How?” I snap.
“Because you don’t want the same things I want,” he says, half shouting, possibly the loudest I’ve ever heard him speak, and while his voice isn’t angry, it’s definitely frustrated.
When I rear back from him, I see him deflate a little, embarrassed.
He goes on, quiet and controlled once more. “I want all that stuff my brothers have,” he says. “I want to get married and have kids and grandkids and get really fucking old with my wife, and to live in our house for so long that it smells like us. Like, I want to pick out fucking furniture and paint colors and do all that Linfield stuff you think is so unbearable, okay? That’s what I want. And I don’t want to wait. No one knows how long they get, and I don’t want ten more years to go by and to find out I have fucking dick cancer or something and it’s too late for me. That stuff is what matters to me.”
Any remaining fire goes out of him, but I’m still quivering with nerves and hurt and shame, and most of all anger with myself for not understanding what was going on every time he defended our Podunk hometown, or changed the topic from Sarah, or anything else.
“Alex,” I say, on the verge of tears. I shake my head, trying to clear the storm clouds of gathering emotion. “I don’t think that stuff is unbearable. I don’t think any of it’s unbearable.”
His eyes lift heavily to mine, dart away again. Careful not to knock him, I shift closer and pull his hand into mine, fold my fingers through his. “Alex?”
He looks down at me. “Sorry,” he murmurs. “I’m sorry, Poppy.”
I shake my head. “I love Betty’s house,” I say. “And I love thinking about you having it, and as much as I hated school, I love thinking about you teaching there and how lucky those kids are. And I love what a good brother and son you are, and—” My words catch in my throat, and I have to stammer tearily through the rest of them. “And I don’t want you to marry Sarah, because she takes you for granted. She would never have broken up with you in the first place if she didn’t. And honestly, aside from that, I don’t want you to marry her, because she never liked me, and if you marry her . . .” I trail off before I can start sobbing.
If you marry her, I think, I will lose all of you forever.
And then, Probably no matter who you marry, I will have to lose you forever.
“I know that’s so selfish,” I say. “But it’s not just that. I really think you can do better. Sarah will be great for someone, but not for you. She doesn’t like karaoke, Alex.”
This last part comes out pathetically teary, and as he gazes down at me, he tries his best to hide the smile that pulls at his mouth. He frees his hand from mine and wraps his arm around me, pressing me lightly to him, but I don’t let myself sink into him like I want for fear of hurting him.
This injury, while miserable for him, is actually turning out to be a good buffer, because everywhere we’re touching has started to buzz, like my nerves are jockeying for more of him. He presses a kiss to the top of my head, and it feels like someone cracked an egg there, something warm and sultry dripping down over me.
I shove down the hazy memories of everything that mouth did in Croatia.
“I’m not sure I actually can do better,” Alex says, drawing me out of a blushworthy scene. “When I open Tinder, it just shows me a middle finger.”
“Seriously?” I sit up. “You have a Tinder account?”
He rolls his eyes. “Yes, Poppy. Grandpa has a Tinder.”
“Let me see it.”
His ears go red. “No, thanks. I’m not in the mood to get brutally heckled.”
“I can help you, Alex,” I say. “I’m a straight woman. I know how men’s Tinder profiles are received. I can figure out what you’re doing wrong.”
“What I’m doing wrong is trying to find a meaningful connection on a dating app.”
“Well, obviously,” I say. “But let’s see what else.”
He sighs. “Fine.” He pulls his phone out of his pocket and hands it to me. “But go easy on me, Poppy. I’m fragile right now.”
And then he makes the face.
17
Seven Summers Ago
NEW ORLEANS.
Alex is curious about the architecture—all those old Crayola-colored buildings with their wrought-iron balconies and the ancient trees writhing up right through the sidewalks, roots sprawling out for yards in every direction, breaking up cement like it’s nothing. The trees predate it, and they’ll outlast it.
I’m excited for alcohol in slushy form and kitschy supernatural shops.
Luckily there is no shortage of any of it.
I’m thrilled to find a large studio apartment not far from Bourbon Street. The floors are stained dark, and the furniture is heavy wood, and colorful paintings of jazz musicians hang on exposed brick walls. The beds are cheap looking, as is the bedding, but they’re queens, and the place is clean, and the air-conditioning game is so strong we have to crank it down so that every time we come in after a day in the heat, our teeth don’t chatter.
All there really is to do in New Orleans, it seems, is walk, eat, drink, look, and listen. This is basically what we do on every trip, but the fact is underscored here by the hundreds of restaurants and bars sitting shoulder to shoulder on every slender street. And the thousands of people milling through the city with tall neon novelty cups and mismatched straws. Every block or so the smells of the city switch from fried and delicious to stinking and rotten, the humidity trapping the sewage and putting it on display.
Compared to most American cities, everything looks so old that I imagine we’re smelling waste from the 1700s, which miraculously makes it more bearable.
“It feels like we’re walking around inside someone’s mouth,” Alex says more tha
n once about the humidity, and from then on, whenever the smell hits, I think of food trapped between molars.
But the thing is, it never lasts. A breeze sweeps through to clear it out, or we wander past another restaurant with all its doors propped open, or we round the corner and stumble onto some beautiful side street where every balcony overhead is dripping with purple flowers.
Besides, I’ve been in New York for five months now, and during the last two months of summer, it’s not like my subway stop has smelled like roses. I’ve seen three different people peeing on the steps inside, and watched one of those people do it a second time a week later.
I love New York, but, wandering New Orleans, I wonder if I could be just as happy here. If maybe I could be happier. If maybe Alex would visit me more often.
So far he’s visited New York once, a few weeks after his first year of grad school ended. He brought a carload of my stuff from my parents’ house to my apartment in Brooklyn, and on the last day of his trip, we compared calendars, talked about when we’d next see each other.
The Summer Trip, obviously. Possibly (but probably not) Thanksgiving. Christmas if I could get time off work at the restaurant where I’m serving. But everyone wants off for Christmas, so instead I floated the idea of New Year’s Eve and we agreed to figure it out later.
So far we haven’t talked about any of that on this trip. I haven’t wanted to think about missing Alex while I’m with him. It seems like a waste.
“If nothing else,” he joked, “we’ll always have the Summer Trip.”
I had to actively decide to see that as comforting.
From morning until hours after dark, we wander. Bourbon Street and Frenchmen, and Canal and Esplanade (Alex is particularly enamored of the stately old houses on this street, with their overflowing flower beds and sun-blanched palms rising up alongside craggy oaks).
We eat fluffy, sugar-dusted beignets in an open-air café and spend hours picking our way through the knickknacks being sold outside the French Market (alligator-head key chains and silver rings set with moonstones), the freshly baked breads and chilled local produce and dense little cakes topped with kiwi and strawberries and bourbon-soaked cherries and pralines (in every imaginable manner) being sold in the booths inside.
We drink Sazeracs and hurricanes and daiquiris everywhere we go, because “Staying on theme matters,” as Alex says dramatically when I try to order a gin and tonic, and from there, we have both our mantra and our alter egos for the week.
Gladys and Keith Vivant are a Broadway power couple, we decide. True performers, to their very cores, and as their matching tattoos read, All the world’s a stage!
They start every day with some acting exercises, stick to one prompt for a whole week at a time, letting it guide their every interaction so as to better inhabit the Character.
And theme, of course, is vital.
Or, you could say, it matters.
“Theme matters!” we scream back and forth, stomping our feet whenever we want each other to do something the other isn’t thrilled about.
There are a whole lot of vintage stores that seem to have never been cleaned before, and Alex is not thrilled about trying on the suede leather pants I pick out for him in one of these, just as I am not thrilled when he wants to spend six hours in an art museum.
“Theme matters!” I shout when he refuses to enter a bar with an—no joke—all-saxophone band playing in the middle of the day.
“Theme matters!” he cries when I say I don’t want to buy shirts that say Drunk Bitch 1 and Drunk Bitch 2 like those Thing 1 and Thing 2 shirts they sell at theme parks, and we leave the shop wearing the shirts over our clothes.
“I love when you get weird,” I tell him.
He squints tipsily at me as we walk. “You make me weird. I’m not like this with anyone else.”
“You make me weird too,” I say; then, “Should we get real tattoos that say ‘All the world’s a stage’?”
“Gladys and Keith would,” Alex says, taking a long drink from his water bottle. He passes it to me afterward, and I greedily chug half of it.
“So that’s a yes?”
“Please don’t make me,” he says.
“But, Alex,” I cry. “Theme matt—”
He pops the water bottle back into my mouth. “Once you’re sober, I promise you won’t think it’s funny anymore.”
“I will always think every joke I make is hilarious,” I say, “but point taken.”
We hit happy hour after happy hour, with varying results. Sometimes the drinks are weak and bad, sometimes they’re stiff and good, often they’re stiff and bad. We go to a hotel bar that’s mounted to a carousel and each buy one fifteen-dollar cocktail. We go to, allegedly, the second-oldest continuously operating bar in Louisiana. It’s an old blacksmith shop with sticky floors that looks like a half-assed living museum, except for the gigantic trivia machine set up in the corner.
Alex and I sip slowly on one shared drink while we wait our turn. We don’t break the record, but we make the scoreboard.
The fifth night, we wind up at a fratty karaoke bar with an over-the-top stage and laser-lights show. After two shots of Fireball, Alex agrees to sing Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” onstage in character as the Vivants.
Halfway through the song, we get into a miked fight about the fact that I know he’s sleeping with Shelly from makeup. “It doesn’t take an hour to put on a freaking fake beard, Keith!” I shout.
The applause at the end is muted and uncomfortable. We take another shot and head to a place Guillermo told me about that serves a frozen coffee cocktail.
Half the places we’ve gone have been places Guillermo recommended, and I’ve loved all of them, especially the hole-in-the-wall po’boy shop. Having a chef for a boyfriend has perks.
When I told him where Alex and I were going, he got out a piece of paper and started writing down everything he could remember from his last trip, along with notes about pricing and what to order. He starred all his must-eats, but there’s no way we’ll get to all of them.
I met Guillermo a couple months after moving to New York. My new (first New York) friend Rachel got a request to eat at his new restaurant for free, in exchange for posting a few pictures of it on her social media. She does that kind of thing a lot, and since I’m a fellow Internet Person, we do these sorts of things together.
“Less embarrassing,” she insists. “Plus cross-promotion.”
Every time she posts a picture with me, my subscriber count goes up by hundreds. I’d been hanging around thirty-six thousand for six months, but have ballooned to fifty-five thousand through sheer association with Her Brand.
So I went with her to this restaurant, and after the meal, the chef came out to talk to us, and he was gorgeous and sweet, with soft brown eyes, dark hair swept back off his forehead. His laugh was soft and unassuming, and by that night, he’d messaged me on Instagram, before I could even post the pictures I’d taken to my account.
He found me through Rachel, and I liked the way he told me that right up front, without embarrassment. He works most nights, so on our first date, we went for breakfast instead, and he kissed me when he picked me up rather than waiting until he dropped me off afterward.
At first, I was seeing a few other people and he was too, but several weeks into it, we decided neither of us wanted to see anyone else. He laughed when he told me, and I laughed too, just because I’d gotten in the habit of giving encouraging laughter from being around him.
It’s not like it was with Julian, not all-consuming and unpredictable. We see each other two or three times a week, and it’s nice, the way this leaves space in my life for other things.
Spin classes with Rachel and long walks down the mall of Central Park with a dripping ice cream cone in hand, gallery openings and special movie nights at neighborhood bars. People in New York are fr
iendlier than the rest of the world warned me they would be.
When I tell Rachel this, she says, “Most people here aren’t assholes. They’re just busy.”
But when I say the same thing to Guillermo, he gently cups my jaw, laughs, and says, “You are so sweet. I hope you don’t let this place change you.”
It’s sweet, but it also worries me. Like maybe the thing Gui loves best about me isn’t some essential part, but something changeable, something that could be stripped away by a few years in the right climate.
As we wander the streets of New Orleans, I think multiple times of telling Alex about what Guillermo said, but every time I catch myself. I want Alex to like Guillermo, and I worry he’d be offended on my behalf.
So I tell him other things. Like how calm Guillermo is, that he laughs easily, how passionate he is about his job, and food in general.
“You’ll like him,” I say, and I really believe it.
“I’m sure I will,” Alex insists. “If you like him, I’ll like him.”
“Good,” I say.
And then he tells me about Sarah, his unrequited college crush. He ran into her when he was up in Chicago visiting friends a few weeks ago. They grabbed a drink.
“And?”
“And nothing,” he says. “She lives in Chicago.”
“It’s not Mars,” I say. “It’s not even that far from Indiana University.”
“She’s been texting me a little,” he admits.
“Of course she is,” I say. “You’re a catch.”
His smile is bashful and adorable. “I don’t know,” he says. “Maybe next time I’m in town we’ll meet up again.”
“You should,” I press.
I’m happy with Guillermo, and Alex deserves to be happy too. Any tension that five percent of our relationship—the what-if—let in seems to have been resolved.
While staying in the French Quarter had seemed ideal when I booked our Airbnb, it turns out the nights are pretty loud. The music goes on until three or four and starts up surprisingly early in the morning. We find ourselves venturing to the rooftop pool at the Ace Hotel, which is free on weekdays, and napping on a couple of chaise lounges in the sun.
