by Emily Henry
At night, we go out for late dinners—and wine—then come back to our villa’s patio and talk and drink until it’s nearly morning.
We play every game we recognize from the closet full of them. Lawn games like bocce and badminton, and board games like Clue and Scrabble and Monopoly (which I happen to know Alex hates, though he doesn’t admit that when Trey suggests we play).
We stay up later and later each night. We scribble celebrities’ names onto pieces of paper, mix them up, and stick them to our foreheads for a game of twenty questions in which we guess who’s on our heads, with the added obstacle of every question asked requiring another drink.
It quickly becomes obvious that none of us has the same celebrity references, which makes the game two hundred times harder, but also funnier. When I ask if my celebrity is a reality TV star, Sarah pretends to gag.
“Really?” I say. “I love reality TV.”
It’s not like I’m unused to this reaction. But part of me feels like her disapproval equals Alex’s disapproval, and a sore spot appears along with an urge to press on it.
“I don’t know how you can watch that stuff,” Sarah says.
“I know,” Trey says lightly. “I’ve never understood her interest either. It’s at odds with every other thing about her, but P’s all about The Bachelor.”
“Not all about it,” I say, defensive. I started watching a couple seasons ago with Rachel when a girl from her art program was a contestant, and within three or four episodes, I was hooked. “I just think it’s, like, this incredible experiment,” I explain. “And you get to watch hours of the footage compiled in it. You learn so much about people.”
Sarah’s eyebrows flick up. “Like what narcissists are willing to do for fame?”
Trey laughs. “Dead-on.”
I force out a laugh, take another sip of my wine. “Not what I was talking about.” I shift uncomfortably, trying to figure out how to explain myself. “I mean, there’s a lot that I like. But one thing . . . I like how in the end, it seems like it’s actually a hard decision for some people. There will be two or three contestants they feel a strong connection with, and it doesn’t just come down to choosing the strongest one. Instead, it’s like . . . you’re watching them choose a life.”
And that’s how it is in real life too. You can love someone and still know the future you’d have with them wouldn’t work for you, or for them, or maybe even for both of you.
“But do any of those relationships really work out?” Sarah asks.
“Most don’t,” I admit. “But that’s not the point. You watch someone date all these people, and you see how different they are with each of them, and then you watch them choose. Some people choose the person they have the best chemistry with, or that they have the most fun with, and some choose the one they think will make an amazing father, or who they’ve felt the safest opening up to. It’s fascinating. How so much of love is about who you are with someone.”
I love who I am with Trey. I’m confident and independent, flexible and coolheaded. I’m at ease. I’m the person I always dreamed I would be.
“Fair,” Sarah allows. “It’s the part about making out with, like, thirty guys then getting engaged to someone you’ve met five times that’s harder for me to swallow.”
Trey tips his head back, laughing. “You’d totally sign up for that show if we broke up. Wouldn’t you, P?”
“Now, that I would watch,” Sarah says, giggling.
I know he’s joking around, but it irks me, feeling like they’re united against me.
I think about saying, Why do you think that? Because I’m a narcissist who’s willing to do anything to get famous?
Alex bumps his leg into mine under the table, and when I glance at him, he’s not even looking my way. He’s just reminding me that he’s here, that nothing can really hurt me.
I bite down on my words and let it go. “More wine?”
The next night, we eat a long, late dinner out on the terrace. When I go inside to dish up gelato for dessert, I find Alex standing in the kitchen, reading an email.
He has just gotten word that Tin House accepted one of his stories. He looks so happy, so brilliantly himself, that I sneak a picture of him. I love it so much I would probably set it as my background if both of us were single and that wasn’t extremely weird for both Sarah and Trey.
We decide we have to celebrate (as if that isn’t what this whole trip has been), and Trey makes us mojitos and we sit out on the chaise lounges overlooking the valley, listening to the soft, twinkly sounds of nighttime in the countryside.
I barely sip on my drink. I’ve been nauseated all night, and for the first time, I excuse myself to go to sleep long before the others. Trey climbs into bed hours later, tipsy and kissing on my neck, pulling on me, and after we have sex, he falls asleep immediately, and my nausea comes back.
That’s when it occurs to me.
I was supposed to start my period at some point on this trip.
Probably it’s a fluke. There are a lot of reasons to wind up nauseated while traveling internationally. And Trey and I are fairly careful.
Still, I get out of bed, stomach roiling, and tiptoe downstairs, opening my notes app to see when I was expecting my period. Rachel’s constantly telling me to get this period tracker app, but until now I haven’t really seen the point.
My ears are pounding. My heart is racing. My tongue feels too big for my mouth.
I was supposed to start yesterday. A two-day delay isn’t unheard-of. Nausea after drinking buckets of red wine isn’t either. Especially for a migraineur. But still, I’m freaking out.
I grab my jacket off the coatrack, stuff my feet into sandals, and take the rental car keys. The nearest twenty-four-hour grocery store is thirty-eight minutes away. I make it back to the villa with three different pregnancy tests before the sun has even started to rise.
By then I’m in a full-blown panic. All I can do is pace back and forth on the terrace, gripping the most expensive pregnancy test in one hand and reminding myself to inhale, exhale, inhale. My lungs feel worse than they did when I had pneumonia.
“Couldn’t sleep?” A quiet voice startles me. Alex is leaned against the open door in a pair of black shorts and running shoes, his pale body cast blue by the predawn.
A laugh dies in my throat. I’m not sure why. “Are you getting up to run?”
“It’s cooler before the sun’s up.”
I nod, wrap my arms around myself, and turn back to gaze over the valley. Alex comes to stand beside me, and without looking over at him, I start to cry. He reaches out for my hand and unfurls it to see the pregnancy test clenched there.
For ten seconds, he is silent. We are both silent.
“Have you taken one yet?” he asks softly.
I shake my head and start to cry harder. He pulls me in, wraps his arms around my back as I let my breath out in a few rushes of quiet sobs. It eases some of the pressure, and I draw back from him, wiping my eyes with the heels of my hands.
“What am I going to do, Alex?” I ask him. “If I’m . . . What the hell am I supposed to do?”
He studies my face for a long time. “What do you want to do?”
I wipe at my eyes again. “I don’t think Trey wants to have kids.”
“That’s not what I asked,” Alex murmurs.
“I have no idea what I want,” I admit. “I mean, I want to be with him. And maybe someday . . . I don’t know. I don’t know.” I bury my face in my hands as a few more ugly, soundless sobs work out of me. “I’m not strong enough to do that on my own. I can’t. I couldn’t even handle being sick by myself, Alex. How am I supposed to . . .”
He takes my wrists gently and pulls them away from my face, ducking his head to peer into my eyes. “Poppy,” he says. “You won’t be alone, okay? I’m here.”
“So, what?
” I say. “I’d, like, move to Indiana? Get an apartment next door to you and Sarah? How’s that going to work, Alex?”
“I don’t know,” he admits. “It doesn’t matter how. I’m here. Just go take the test, and then we’ll figure it out, okay? You’ll figure out what you want to do, and we’ll do it.”
I take a deep breath, nod, go inside with the bag of tests I’ve set down on the ground and the one I’m still gripping like a life raft.
I pee on three at once, then take them all back outside to wait. We line them up on the low stone wall surrounding the terrace. Alex sets a timer on his watch, and we stand there together, saying nothing until it beeps.
One by one the results come in.
Negative.
Negative.
Negative.
I start to cry again. I’m not sure if it’s relief or something more complicated than that. Alex pulls me into his chest, rocks me soothingly side to side as I regain composure.
“I can’t keep doing this to you,” I say when I’m finally out of tears.
“Doing what?” he asks in a whisper.
“I don’t know. Needing you.”
He shakes his head against the side of mine. “I need you too, Poppy.” It’s then that I realize how thick and wet and trembling his voice is. When I pull back from him, I realize that he’s crying. I touch the side of his face. “Sorry,” he says, closing his eyes. “I just . . . I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to you.”
And then I understand.
To someone like Alex, who lost his mother how he did, pregnancy isn’t just a life-changing possibility. It’s a potential death sentence.
“I’m sorry,” he says again. “God, I don’t know why I’m crying.”
I pull his face down into my shoulder, and he cries some more, his huge shoulders heaving with it. In all the years we’ve been friends, he has probably seen me cry hundreds of times, but this is the first time he’s ever cried in front of me.
“It’s okay,” I whisper to him, and then, as many times as it takes, “It’s okay. You’re okay. We’re okay, Alex.”
He buries his damp face in the side of my neck, his hands curling in tight against the small of my back as I run my fingers through his hair, his damp lips warm against my skin.
I know the feeling will pass, but right then I wish so badly that we were here alone. That we had yet to even meet Sarah and Trey. That we could hold on to each other as long and tight as I think we might need to.
We’ve always existed in a kind of world for two, but that’s not the case anymore.
“I’m sorry,” he says one last time as he unwinds himself from me, straightening up, looking out over the valley as the first rays of light splash across it. “I shouldn’t have . . .”
I touch his arm. “Please don’t say that.”
He nods, steps back, putting more distance between us, and I know, with every fiber of my being, that it’s the right thing to do, but it still hurts.
“Trey seems like a great guy,” he says.
“He is,” I promise.
Alex nods a few more times. “Good.” And that’s it. He leaves for his morning run, and I’m alone again on the still terrace, watching morning chase the shadows across the valley.
My period arrives twenty-five minutes later, while I’m scrambling eggs for breakfast, and the rest of our trip is a fantastically normal couples’ trip.
Except that, deep down, I am completely heartbroken.
It hurts to want it all, so many things that can’t coexist within the same life.
More than anything, though, I want Alex to be happy. To have everything he’s always wanted. I have to stop getting in the way, to give him the chance to have all of that.
We don’t so much as brush against each other until we hug goodbye. We never speak about what happened again.
I go on loving him.
30
This Summer
SO I GUESS we’re not talking about what happened on Nikolai’s balcony, and that needs to be fine. When I wake up in our Technicolor hotel room of the Larrea Palm Springs, Alex’s bed is empty and made, and a handwritten note on the desk reads, RUNNING—BE BACK SOON. P.S. ALREADY PICKED UP THE CAR FROM THE SHOP.
It’s not like I expected a bunch of hugs and kisses and pledges of love, but he could’ve spared a Last night was great. Or maybe a cheery exclamation point.
Also, how is he running in this heat? There’s just a lot going on in that very short note and my paranoia helpfully suggests that he’s running to clear his head after what happened.
In Croatia, he’d freaked out. We both had. But that had happened at the tail end of the trip, when we could retreat to our separate corners of the country afterward. This time, we’ve got a bachelor party, rehearsal dinner, and wedding to get through.
Still, I promised I wasn’t going to let this mess us up, and I meant it.
I need to keep things light, to do my part in preventing a postcoital freak-out.
I think about texting Rachel for advice, or just to have someone to squeal with, but the truth is, I don’t want to tell anyone about this. I want it to be something only between Alex and me, like so much of the world is when we’re together. I toss my phone back onto the bed, grab a pen from my purse, and add to the bottom of Alex’s note, At pool—meet me there?
When he shows up, he’s still dressed in his running clothes and carrying a small brown bag and a paper coffee cup, and the sight of all this combined makes me feel tingly and eager.
“Cinnamon roll,” he says, passing me the bag, then the cup. “Latte. And the Aspire’s out in the lot with its flashy new tire.”
I wave my coffee cup in a vague circle in front of him. “Angel. How much was the tire?”
“Don’t remember,” he says. “I’m gonna go shower.”
“Before you . . . come sweat by the pool?”
“Before I come sit in that pool for the entire day.”
It’s not much of an exaggeration. We lounge to our hearts’ content. We relax. We alternate between sun and shade. We order drinks and nachos from the poolside bar and reapply sunblock every hour, and still make it back to the room with plenty of time to get ready for David’s bachelor party. He and Tham decided to do separate ones (though both are coed), and Alex jokes that David chose this plan to force a popularity contest.
“No one is more popular than your brother,” I say.
“You haven’t met Tham yet,” he says, then walks into the bathroom and starts the water.
“Are you seriously showering again?”
“Rinsing,” he says.
“Remember in elementary school how kids used to stand behind you in line for the water fountain and say ‘Save some for the whales’?”
“Yes,” he says.
“Well, save some for the whales, buddy!”
“You have to be nice to me,” he says. “I brought you a cinnamon roll.”
“Buttery and warm and perfect,” I say, and he blushes as he shuts the bathroom door.
I really have no idea what’s going on. For example: why didn’t we just stay in the room and make out all day?
I slip into a seventies lime-green halter jumpsuit and start working on my hair at the mirror outside the bathroom, and a few minutes later, Alex emerges already dressed and almost ready to go.
“How long do you need?” he asks, looking over my shoulder to meet my eyes in the mirror, his wet hair sticking up in every direction.
I shrug. “Just long enough to spray myself with adhesive and roll in a vat of glitter.”
“So ten minutes?” he guesses.
I nod, set my curling wand down. “Are you sure you want me to come?”
“Why wouldn’t I?”
“Because it’s your brother’s bachelor party,” I say.
“And?”
“And you haven’t seen him in months, and maybe you don’t want me tagging along.”
“You’re not tagging along,” he says. “You’re invited. Also there will probably be male strippers and I know how you love a man in uniform.”
“I was invited by David,” I say. “If you wanted alone time with him . . .”
“There are, like, fifty people coming tonight,” he says. “I’ll be lucky if I make eye contact with David.”
“But your other brothers will be there too, right?”
“They’re not coming,” he says. “They’re not even flying out until tomorrow.”
“Okay, but what about all the hot desert broads?” I say.
“Hot desert broads,” he repeats.
“You’re going to be the straight-man belle of the ball.”
His head tilts. “So you want me to go make out with some hot desert broads.”
“Not particularly, but I figure you should know that you still have that option. I mean, just because we . . .”
His brow crinkles. “What are you doing, Poppy?”
I absently touch my hair. “I was trying for a beehive, but I think I’m going to have to settle for a bouffant.”
“No, I mean . . .” He trails off. “Do you regret last night?”
“No!” I say, my face going red-hot. “Do you?”
“Not at all,” he says.
I turn to face him head-on instead of through the mirror. “Are you sure? Because you’ve barely looked at me today.”
He laughs, touches my waist. “Because looking at you makes me think about last night, and call me old-fashioned, but I didn’t want to lie by the hotel pool with a raging hard-on all day.”
