People We Meet on Vacation

by Emily Henry

  There’s that Poppy, who’s experiencing it all and having the most magical night of her life. And then there’s the one who’s already missing it, who’s watching this all happen from some point in the distance, knowing I can never go back and do it all over again.

  I’m too afraid to ask Alex what comes next. I’m too afraid to ask myself that. We love each other. We want each other.

  But that hasn’t changed the rest of our situation.

  So I just keep holding on to him and tell myself that, for now, I should enjoy this moment. I’m on vacation. Vacations always end.

  It’s the very fact that it’s finite that makes traveling special. You could move to any one of those destinations you loved in small doses, and it wouldn’t be the spellbinding, life-altering seven days you spent there as a guest, letting a place into your heart fully, letting it change you.

  The song ends.

  The dance ends.

  Not long after that, there are sparklers being lit in a long tunnel of people who love David and Tham, and then they’re running through it, their faces awash in warm light and deep love, and then, as if it’s a person drifting off to sleep, the night ends.

  Alex and I say our goodbyes, loose enough from a night of drinking and dancing to hug dozens of people who were perfect strangers hours ago. We drive home in silence, and when we get there, Alex doesn’t shower, doesn’t even undress. We just get into bed and hold on to each other until we fall asleep.

  * * *

  • • •

  THE MORNING IS better.

  For one thing, we both forgot to set alarms, and we were up late enough that even Alex’s internal alarm clock doesn’t wake us in time to laze around the hotel. We’re running late from the moment we open our eyes, and there’s nothing to do but throw clothes into bags, check under the beds for dropped socks and bras and whatever else.

  “We still have to take the Aspire back!” Alex realizes aloud as he’s zipping his luggage closed.

  “On it!” I say. “If I can get ahold of the girl who owns it, maybe she’ll let us leave it at the airport and pay her an extra fifty bucks or something.”

  But we don’t get ahold of her, so instead we’re screaming down the highway, crossing our fingers we make it to the airport in time.

  “Really regretting not showering now,” Alex says as he rolls his window down and rakes a hand through his dirty hair.

  “Showering?” I say. “When I was falling asleep, I had the thought, I have to pee, but I’ll hold it until morning.”

  Alex glances over his shoulder. “I’m sure you left an empty cup in here at some point this week, if things get desperate.”

  “Rude!” I say, but he’s right. There’s one under my foot and another in the back seat’s cup holder. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that. I’m not a famously good shot.”

  He laughs, but it’s wooden. “This is not how I imagined this day going.”

  “Me neither,” I say. “But then again, the whole trip was sort of surprising.”

  At that, he smiles, grips my hand against the gearshift, and lifts it to his lips a few seconds later, holding it there but not quite kissing it.

  “What, am I sticky?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “Just want to remember what your skin feels like.”

  “That’s really sweet, Alex,” I say, “and not at all something a serial killer would say.”

  I’m deflecting, but I’m not sure how else to handle this. A mad dash, together, to the airport. A hasty goodbye at our gates—or maybe just splitting off and running in opposite directions. It’s the exact antithesis of every rom-com movie I’ve ever loved, and if I let myself think about it, I think I might have a full-blown panic attack.

  By a miracle and a fair amount of speeding (and yes, bribing an Uber driver to skim through a few late-yellow lights after dropping off the Aspire), we make it to the airport and get checked into our flights. Mine leaves fifteen minutes after Alex’s, so we head to his gate first, detouring to buy a couple granola bars and the latest issue of R+R from a bookstore in the terminal.

  We get to his gate just as boarding begins, but we have a few minutes until his group is called, so we stand there, panting, sweaty, shoulders sore from carrying our bags, my ankle scuffed from accidentally whacking it into my hard-shell carry-on bag every few steps.

  “Why are airports so hot?” Alex says.

  “Is this the set-up for a joke?” I ask.

  “No, I genuinely want to know.”

  “Compared to Nikolai’s apartment, this is arctic, Alex.”

  His smile is tense. Neither one of us is handling this well.

  “So,” he says.

  “So.”

  “How do you think this article is going to go over with Swapna? Gardens that close in the middle of the day, and carousels so hot they’re unsafe to ride?”

  “Oh. Right.” I cough. I’m less embarrassed that I lied to Alex about this trip than at the fact that I forgot to mention it until now, and am forced to use several of our last precious moments together explaining it. “So R+R might not have technically approved this trip.”

  He arches an eyebrow. “Might not have?”

  “Or might have outright rejected it.”

  “What, seriously? Then why were they paying for—” He cuts himself short as he reads the answer on my face. “Poppy. You shouldn’t have done that. Or you should have told me.”

  “Would you have taken this trip if you knew I was paying for it?”

  “Of course not,” he says.

  “Exactly,” I say. “And I needed to talk to you. I mean, obviously we needed to talk.”

  “You could have called me,” he reasons. “We were texting again. We were . . . I don’t know, working on it.”

  “I know,” I say. “But it wasn’t that simple. I was having a hard time at work, just feeling over the whole thing, and lost and bored, and like—like I don’t even know what I want next in my life, and then I talked to Rachel, and she pointed out that I’d sort of . . . gotten everything I wanted professionally, and maybe I just needed to find something new to want, and then I thought back to when I was last happy and—”

  “What are you talking about?” Alex says, shaking his head. “Rachel told you to . . . trick me into going on a trip with you?”

  “No!” I say, panic wriggling in my gut. How is this going off the rails so quickly? “Not that! Her mom’s a therapist, and according to her, it’s common to be depressed when you’ve met all your long-term goals. Because we need purpose. And then Rachel suggested maybe I just needed to take a break from life and let myself figure out what I want.”

  “A break from life,” Alex says quietly, his mouth going slack, his eyes dark and stormy.

  It’s immediately obvious that I’ve said the wrong thing. This is all coming out so wrong. I have to fix it. “I just mean, I hadn’t really been happy since our last trip.”

  “So you lied to me so I’d take a trip with you, and then you had sex with me, and you told me you loved me and came to my brother’s wedding, because you needed a break from your real life.”

  “Alex, of course not,” I say, reaching for him.

  He steps back from me, eyes low. “Please don’t touch me right now, Poppy. I’m trying to think, okay?”

  “Think about what?” I ask, emotion thickening my voice. I don’t understand what’s happening, how I’ve hurt him or how to fix it. “Why are you so upset right now?”

  “Because I meant it!” he says, finally meeting my eyes.

  A pulse of pain shoots through my stomach. “So did I!” I cry.

  “I meant it, and I knew I meant it,” he says. “It wasn’t an impulse. I knew for years that I loved you, and I thought about it from every single angle and knew what I wanted before I ever kissed you. We went two years with
out talking, and I thought about you every day and I gave you the space I thought you wanted, and that whole time I asked myself what I’d be willing to do, to give up, if you decided you wanted to be with me too. I spent that whole time alternating between trying to move on and let you go, so you could be happy, and looking at job postings and apartments near you, just in case.”

  “Alex.” I shake my head, force the words past the knot in my throat. “I had no idea.”

  “I know.” He rubs at his forehead as he closes his eyes. “I know that. And maybe I should have told you. But, fuck, Poppy, I’m not some water taxi driver you met on vacation.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” I demand. When he opens his eyes, they’re so teary I start to reach for him again until I remember what he said: please don’t touch me right now.

  “I’m not a vacation from your real life,” he says. “I’m not a novelty experience. I’m someone who’s been in love with you for a decade, and you should never have kissed me if you didn’t know that you wanted this, all the way. It wasn’t fair.”

  “I want this,” I say, but even as I say it, a part of me has no idea what that means.

  Do I want marriage?

  Do I want to have kids?

  Do I want to live in a seventies quad-level in Linfield, Ohio?

  Do I want any of the things that Alex craves for his life?

  I haven’t thought any of that through, and Alex can tell.

  “You don’t know that,” Alex says. “You just said you don’t know, Poppy. I can’t leave my job and my house and my family just to see if that cures your boredom.”

  “I didn’t ask you to do that, Alex,” I say, feeling desperate, like I’m grappling for purchase and realizing everything under me is made of sand. He’s slipping through my grip for the last time, and there will be no packing this all back into form.

  “I know,” he says, rubbing the lines in his forehead, wincing. “God, I know that. It’s my fault. I should’ve known this was a bad idea.”

  “Stop,” I say, wanting so badly to touch him, aching at having to settle for clenching my hands into fists. “Don’t say that. I’m figuring things out, okay? I just . . . I need to figure some things out.”

  The gate agent calls for group six to start boarding and the last few stragglers line up.

  “I have to go,” he says, without looking at me.

  My eyes cloud up with tears, my skin hot and itchy like my body’s shrinking around my bones, becoming too tight to bear. “I love you, Alex,” I get out. “Doesn’t that matter?”

  His eyes cut toward me, dark, fathomless, full of hurt and want. “I love you too, Poppy,” he says. “That’s never been our problem.” He glances over his shoulder. The line has almost disappeared.

  “We can talk about this when we’re home,” I say. “We can figure it out.”

  When Alex looks back at me, his face is anguished, his eyes red ringed. “Look,” he says gently. “I don’t think we should talk for a while.”

  I shake my head. “That’s the last thing we should do, Alex. We have to figure this out.”

  “Poppy.” He reaches for my hand, takes it lightly in his. “I know what I want. You need to figure this out. I’d do anything for you, but—please don’t ask me to if you’re not sure. I really—” He swallows hard. The line is gone. It’s time for him to go. He forces out the rest in a hoarse murmur. “I can’t be a break from your real life, and I won’t be the thing that keeps you from having what you want.”

  His name catches in my throat. He bends a little, resting his forehead against mine, and I close my eyes. When I open them, he’s walking onto the jet bridge without looking back.

  I take a deep breath, gather up my things, and head to my gate.

  When I sit down to wait and pull my knees into my chest, hiding my face against them, I finally let myself cry freely.

  For the first time in my life, the airport strikes me as the loneliest place in the world.

  All those people, parting ways, going off in their own directions, crossing paths with hundreds of people but never connecting.

  33

  Two Summers Ago

  AN OLDER GENTLEMAN travels with us to Croatia as the official R+R photographer.

  Bernard. He’s a loud talker, always wearing a fleece vest, often standing between Alex and me without noticing the funny looks we exchange over Bernard’s bald head. (He’s shorter than me, though throughout the trip, he often tells us he was five six back in his prime.)

  Together, the three of us see the ancient city of Dubrovnik, Old Town, with its high stone walls and winding streets, and further out, the rocky beaches and pristine turquoise water of the Adriatic.

  The other photographers I’ve traveled with have all been fairly independent, but Bernard’s a recent widower, unused to living alone. He’s a nice guy, but endlessly social and talkative, and throughout our time in the city, I watch him wear Alex down, until all Bernard’s questions are answered in monosyllables. Bernard doesn’t notice; usually his questions are mere springboards for stories he’d like to share.

  The stories involve a lot of names and dates, and he takes plenty of time ensuring he’s getting each right, sometimes going back and forth four or five times until he’s positive this event happened on a Wednesday and not, as he first thought, a Thursday.

  From the city, we take a crammed ferry to Korčula, an island off the coast. R+R has booked us two apartment-style hotel rooms overlooking the water. Somehow Bernard gets it in his head that he and Alex will be sharing one of these, which makes no sense since he is an R+R employee, who should obviously get his own accommodations, while Alex is my guest.

  We try to tell him this.

  “Oh, I don’t mind,” he says. “Besides, I got two bedrooms by accident.”

  It’s a lost cause trying to convince him that that room was supposed to be Alex’s and mine, thus the two bedrooms, and honestly, I think we both feel too much sympathy for Bernard to push the matter. The apartments themselves are sleek and modern, all whites and stainless steels with balconies overlooking the glittering water, but the walls are paper-thin, and I wake every morning to the sounds of three tiny children running around and screaming in the apartment above mine. Furthermore, something has died in the wall behind the dryer in the laundry closet, and every day that I call down to the desk to tell them this, they send up a teenage boy to do something about the smell while I’m out. I’m fairly sure he just opens all the windows and sprays Lysol all over the place, because the sweet lemony scent I return to fades each night as the dead animal smell swells back to replace it.

  I expected this to be the best vacation of any we’ve ever taken.

  But even aside from the death smell and the shrieking-at-dawn babies, there’s the fact of Bernard. After Tuscany, without talking about it, Alex and I both took a step back from our friendship. Instead of daily texts, we started catching up every couple weeks. It would’ve been too easy to go back to how things were then, but I couldn’t do that, to him or to Trey.

  Instead I threw myself into work, taking every trip that came up, sometimes back to back. At first Trey and I were happier than ever—this was where we thrived: on horseback and camelback, hiking volcanoes and cliff-jumping off waterfalls. But eventually our never-ending vacation started to feel like running, like we were two bank robbers making the best of a bad situation while we waited for the FBI to close in.

  We started arguing. He’d want to get up early, and I’d oversleep. I was walking too slowly, and he was laughing too loud. I was annoyed by how he flirted with our waitress, and he couldn’t stand how I had to browse every aisle of every identical shop we passed.

  We had a week left of a trip to New Zealand when we realized we’d run our course.

  “We’re just not having fun anymore,” Trey said.

  I started laughing fro
m relief. We parted ways as friends. I didn’t cry. The last six months had been a slow unbraiding of our lives. The breakup was just the snip of one last string.

  When I texted Alex to tell him, he said, What happened? Are you okay?

  It’ll be easier to explain in person, I wrote, heart trilling.

  Fair enough, he said.

  A few weeks later, also over text, he told me that he and Sarah had broken up again.

  I hadn’t seen that coming: They’d moved to Linfield together when he’d finished his doctorate, were even working at the same school—a miracle so profound it seemed like the universe’s express approval of their relationship—and from everything Alex had told me, they’d been better than ever. Happier. It was all so natural for them. Unless he was keeping their issues private, which would make perfect sense.

  You want to talk? I asked, feeling at once terrified and full of adrenaline.

  Like you said, he wrote back, probably easier to explain in person.

  I’d been waiting two and a half months to have that conversation. I missed Alex so badly, and finally there was nothing in the way of us speaking plainly, no reason to hold back or tiptoe around each other or try not to touch.

  Except for Bernard.

  He kayaks at sunset with us. Rides along on our tour of the family wineries gathered together a ways inland. Joins us for seafood dinners every night. Suggests a nightcap afterward. He never tires. Bernard, Alex whispers one night, might be God, and I snort into my white wine.