by Emily Henry
“You were never a Jessica,” he says confidently.
I arch an eyebrow. “How do you know?”
“Because.” His eyes hold fast to the sun-bleached road. “You’ve always been Poppy.”
* * *
• • •
THE DESERT ROSE apartment complex is a stucco building painted bubblegum pink, its name embossed in curling midcentury letters. A garden full of scrubby cacti and massive succulents winds around it, and through a white picket fence, we spot a sparkling teal pool, dotted with sun-browned bodies and ringed in palm trees and chaise lounges.
Alex turns the car off. “Looks nice,” he says, sounding relieved.
I step out of the car, and the asphalt’s hot even through my sandals.
I thought from summers in New York, trapped between skyscrapers with the sun pinballing back and forth ad infinitum—and all those earlier ones in the Ohio River Valley’s natural humidity trap—that I knew what hot was.
I did not.
My skin tingles under the merciless desert sun, my feet burning just from standing still.
“Shit,” Alex pants, sweeping his hair off his forehead.
“I guess this is why it’s the off-season.”
“How do David and Tham live here?” he says, sounding disgusted.
“The same way you live in Ohio,” I say. “Sadly, and with heavy drinking.”
I mean it as a joke, but Alex’s expression flattens out, and he heads to the back of the car without acknowledging what I said.
I clear my throat. “Kidding. Plus, they mostly live in L.A., right? It was nowhere near this hot back there.”
“Here.” He passes me the first bag, and I take it, feeling chastened.
Note to self: no more shitting on Ohio.
By the time we get out our luggage—and the two paper bags of groceries we grabbed during a CVS pit stop—and wrestle it up three flights of stairs to our unit, we’re sweat drenched.
“I feel like I’m melting,” Alex says as I punch the code into the key box beside the door. “I need a shower.”
The box pops open, and I stick the key into the doorknob, jiggling and twisting it per the very specific instructions the host sent me.
“As soon as we go outside, we’re gonna be melting again,” I point out. “You might want to save the showering for right before bed.”
The key finally catches, and I bump the door open, shuffling inside, stopping short as two simultaneous warning bells start shrieking through my body.
Alex walks into me, a solid wall of sweat-dampened heat. “What’s—”
His voice drops off. I’m not sure which horrible fact he’s registering. That it’s disgustingly hot in here or that . . .
In the middle of this (otherwise perfect) studio apartment, there sits one bed.
“No,” he says quietly, as if he didn’t mean to say it aloud. I’m sure he didn’t.
“It said two beds,” I blurt out, frantically trying to pull up the reservation. “It definitely did.”
Because there’s no way I could have possibly screwed up this badly. I couldn’t have.
There was a time when it might not have seemed like a huge deal for us to share a bed, but it is not this trip. Not when things are fragile and awkward. We have one chance to fix what broke between us.
“You’re sure?” Alex says, and I hate that note of annoyance in his voice even more than the suspicious one riding alongside it. “You saw pictures? With two beds?”
I look up from my inbox. “Of course!”
But did I? This unit had been ridiculously cheap, in large part because a reservation had canceled last minute. I knew it was a studio, but I saw pictures of the sparkly turquoise pool and the happy, dancing palm trees and the reviews said it was clean, and the kitchenette looked small but chic and—
Did I actually see two beds?
“This guy owns a bunch of apartments here,” I say, head swimming. “He probably sent us the wrong unit number.”
I find the right email and click through the pictures. “Here!” I cry. “Look!”
Alex steps in close, looking over my shoulder at the pictures—a bright white and gray apartment with a couple of thriving potted fiddle-leaf figs in one corner and a vast white bed in the middle of the room, a slightly smaller one beside it.
Okay, so there might have been some artful angling to these photographs, because in the shot the bigger bed looks like it’s king-sized when it’s actually a queen, which means the other couldn’t be bigger than a double, but it definitely should exist.
“I don’t understand.” Alex looks from the photo to where the second bed should be.
“Oh,” he and I say in unison as it clicks.
He crosses to the wide, armless chair, in coral imitation suede, and yanks off the decorative pillows, reaching into the seam of the chair. He folds the bottom out, the back pressing down so that the whole thing flattens into a long, skinny pad with sagging seams between its three sections. “A pullout . . . chair.”
“I’ll take that!” I volunteer.
Alex shoots me a look. “You can’t, Poppy.”
“Why, because I’m a woman, and they’ll take your Midwestern masculinity away if you don’t fall on the sword of every gender norm presented to you?”
“No,” he says. “Because if you sleep on that, you’ll wake up with a migraine.”
“That happened once,” I say, “and we don’t know it was from sleeping on the air mattress. It could’ve been the red wine.” But even as I say it, I’m searching for the thermostat, because if anything’s going to make my head throb, it’s sleeping in this heat. I find the controls inside the kitchenette. “Oh my gosh, he has it set to eighty degrees in here.”
“Seriously?” Alex scrubs a hand through his hair, catching the sweat beading on his forehead. “And to think, it doesn’t feel a degree over two hundred.”
I crank the thermostat down to seventy, and the fans kick on loudly, but without any instant relief. “At least we have a view of the pool,” I say, crossing to the back doors. I throw the blackout curtains back and balk, the remnants of my optimism fizzling out.
The balcony is way bigger than mine at home, with a cute red café table and two matching chairs. The problem is, three-quarters of it is walled off with plastic sheeting as, somewhere overhead, a horrible melee of mechanical rattles and screeches sound off.
Alex steps out beside me. “Construction?”
“I feel like I’m inside a ziplock bag, inside of someone’s body.”
“Someone with a fever,” he says.
“Who’s also on fire.”
He laughs a little. A miserable sound he tries to play off as lighthearted. But Alex isn’t lighthearted. He’s Alex. He’s high-stress and he likes to be clean and have his space and he packs his own pillow in his luggage, because his “neck is used to this one”—even though it means he can’t bring as many clothes as he’d like—and the last thing this trip needs is any unnecessary pushing on our pressure points.
Suddenly, the six days ahead of us seem impossibly long. We should have taken a three-day trip. Just the length of the wedding festivities, when there’d be buffers galore and free booze and time blocked out that Alex would be busy with his brother’s bachelor party and whatever else.
“Should we go down to the pool?” I say, a little too loud, because by now my heart is racing and I have to yell to hear myself over it.
“Sure,” Alex says, then turns back to the door and freezes. His mouth hangs open as he considers his words. “I’ll change in the bathroom, and you can just shout when you’re finished?”
Right. It’s a studio. One open room with no doors except the one to the bathroom.
Which wouldn’t have been awkward, if we weren’t both being so freaking awkward.
“Mm
-hm,” I say. “Sure.”
10
Ten Summers Ago
WE WANDER THE city of Victoria until our feet hurt, our backs ache, and all that sleep we didn’t get on the flights makes our bodies feel heavy and our brains light and floaty. Then we stop for dumplings in a tiny nook of a place whose windows are tinted and whose red-painted walls are elaborately looped in gold mountainscapes and forests and flowing rivers that serpentine through low, rounded hills.
We’re the only people inside—it’s three p.m., not quite late enough for dinner, but the air-conditioning is powerful and the food is divine, and we’re so exhausted we can’t stop laughing about every little thing.
The hoarse, voice-cracking yelp Alex let out when the plane touched down this morning.
The suit-wearing man who sprints past the restaurant at top speed, his arms held flat to his sides.
The gallery girl in the Empress Hotel who spent thirty minutes trying to sell us a six-inch, twenty-one-thousand-dollar bear sculpture while we dragged our tattered luggage around behind us.
“We don’t really . . . have money for . . . that,” Alex said, sounding diplomatic.
The girl nodded enthusiastically. “Hardly anyone does. But when art speaks to you, you find a way to make it work.”
Somehow, neither of us could bring ourselves to tell the girl that the twenty-one-thousand-dollar bear was not speaking to us, but we’d spent all day, since then, picking things up—a signed Backstreet Boys album in the used record shop, a copy of a novel called What My G-Spot Is Telling You in a squat little bookstore off a cobbled street, a pleather catsuit in a fetish shop I led Alex into primarily to embarrass him—and asking, Does this speak to you?
Yes, Poppy, it’s saying, Bye-Bye-Bye.
No, Alex, tell your G-spot to speak up.
Yes, I’ll take it for twenty-one thousand dollars and not a penny less!
We took turns asking and answering, and now, slumped over our black lacquered table, we can’t stop half-deliriously picking up spoons and napkins, making them talk to one another.
Our server is around our age, heavily pierced with a soft lisp and a good sense of humor. “If that soy says anything saucy, let me know,” she says. “It’s got a reputation around here.”
Alex tips her 30 percent, and the whole walk to the bus stop, I tease him for blushing whenever she looked at him, and he teases me for making eyes at the cashier in the record shop, which is fair, because I definitely did.
“I’ve never seen a city this flowery,” I say.
“I’ve never seen a city this clean,” he says.
“Should we move to Canada?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he says. “Does Canada speak to you?”
With the buses, and the walking between stops, it takes two hours total to get the car I informally rented online through WWT, Women Who Travel.
I’m so relieved it actually exists—and that the keys are under the floor mat in the back seat, just like the car’s owner, Esmeralda, said they would be—that I start clapping at the sight of it.
“Wow,” Alex says, “this car is really speaking to you.”
“Yes,” I say, “it’s saying, Don’t let Alex drive.”
His mouth droops open, eyes going wide and glossy with feigned hurt.
“Stop!” I yelp, diving away from him and into the driver’s seat like he’s a live grenade.
“Stop what?” He bends to insert his Sad Puppy Face in front of me.
“No!” I screech, shoving him away and writhing sideways in the seat as if trying to escape a swarm of ants pouring off him. I fling myself into the passenger seat, and he calmly climbs into the driver’s seat.
“I hate that face,” I say.
“Untrue,” Alex says.
He’s right.
I love that ridiculous face.
Also, I hate driving.
“When you find out about reverse psychology, I’m screwed,” I say.
“Hm?” he says, glancing sidelong as he starts up the car.
“Nothing.”
We drive two hours north to the motel I found on the eastern side of the island. It’s a misty wonderland, wide uncluttered roads lined in forests as ancient as they are dense. There’s not a ton to do in town, but there are redwoods and hiking trails to waterfalls and a Tim Hortons just a few miles down the road from our motel, a low, lodge-like place with a gravel parking lot out front and a wall of fog-cloaked foliage behind it.
“I sort of love it here,” Alex says.
“I sort of do too,” I agree.
And it doesn’t matter that it rains all week and we finish every hike soaked to the bone, or that we can only find two affordable restaurants and have to eat at each of them thrice, or that we slowly start to realize nearly everyone else we cross paths with is in the upper-sixties-and-older set and that we’re definitely staying in a retirement village. Or that our motel room is always damp, or that there’s so little to do we have time to kill one full day in a nearby Chapters bookstore (where we eat both breakfast and lunch in their café in silence while Alex reads Murakami and I take notes for future reference from a stack of Lonely Planet guides).
None of it matters. I spend the whole week thinking, This speaks to me.
This is what I want for the rest of my life. To see new places. To meet new people. To try new things. I don’t feel lost or out of place here. There’s no Linfield to escape or long, boring classes to dread going back to. I’m anchored only in this moment.
“Don’t you wish we could always be doing this?” I ask Alex.
He looks up over his book at me, one corner of his mouth curling. “Wouldn’t leave a lot of time for reading.”
“What if I promise to take you to a bookstore in every city?” I ask. “Then will you quit school and live in a van with me?”
His head tilts to one side as he thinks. “Probably not,” he says, which is no surprise for a variety of reasons, including the fact that Alex loves his classes so much he’s already researching English grad programs, whereas I’m muscling through with straight Cs.
“Well, I had to try,” I say with a sigh.
Alex sets his book down. “I tell you what. You can have my summer breaks. I’ll keep those wide open for you, and we’ll go anywhere you want, that we can afford.”
“Really?” I say, dubious.
“Promise.” He holds out his hand, and we shake on it, then sit there grinning for a few seconds, feeling like we’ve just signed some life-alteringly significant contract.
Our second-to-last day, we hike through the quiet of Cathedral Grove just as the sun is coming up, spilling golden light over the forest in little droplets, and when we leave, we drive straight to a town called Coombs, whose main attraction is a handful of cottages with grass roofs and a herd of goats grazing over them. We take pictures of them, stick our heads through photo-op cutouts that put our faces on crudely painted goat bodies, and spend a luxurious two hours wandering a market stuffed with samples of cookies, candies, and jams.
On the last full day of our trip, we drive across the island to Tofino, the peninsula we would have stayed on if we weren’t trying to save every possible penny. I surprise Alex with (perhaps worryingly cheap) tickets for a water taxi that takes us to the island I read about, with the trail through the rain forest to the hot spring.
Our water taxi driver is named Buck, and he’s not much older than us, with a tangle of sun-bleached yellow hair sticking out from under his mesh-backed hat. He’s handsome in an utterly filthy way, with that specifically beachy kind of body odor mixed with patchouli. It should be repulsive, but he makes it work.
The ride itself is a violent affair, the taxi’s motor so loud I have to scream into Alex’s ear, my hair slapping against his face from the wind, to say, “THIS MUST BE WHAT A ROCK FEELS LIKE WHEN YOU SKIP IT OVER WATE
R,” my voice thunking in and out with each rhythmic hit of the little vessel against the top of the dark, choppy waves.
Buck waves his hands like he’s talking to us for the whole length of the (much-too-long) ride, but we can’t hear him, which makes both Alex and me semihysterical with laughter after the first twenty minutes of inaudible monologue.
“WHAT IF HE’S CONFESSING TO A CRIME RIGHT NOW?” Alex yells.
“RECITING THE DICTIONARY. FROM BACK TO FRONT,” I suggest.
“SOLVING COMPLEX MATH EQUATIONS,” Alex says.
“COMMUNING WITH THE DEAD,” I say.
“THIS IS WORSE THAN—”
Buck cuts the engine, and Alex’s voice far overshoots it. He drops his voice into a whisper against my ear: “Worse than flying.”
“Is he stopping to kill us?” I whisper back.
“Was that what he was saying?” Alex hisses. “Is it time to panic?”
“Look out that way,” Buck says, spinning leftward in his chair and pointing ahead.
“Where he’s going to kill us?” Alex murmurs, and I turn my laugh into a cough.
Buck turns back with a wide, crooked, but admittedly handsome grin. “Family of otters.”
A very high-pitched and one-hundred-percent genuine squeal rockets out of me as I lurch to my feet and lean over to see the fuzzy little lumps of fur floating over the waves, paws folded together so that they drift as one, a net made of adorable sea creatures. Alex comes to stand behind me, his hands light on my arms as he leans over me to see.
“Okay,” he says. “Time to panic. That’s fucking adorable.”
“Can we take one home?” I ask him. “They speak to me!”
After that, the hike through the lush ferns of the rain forest, and the hot, earthy waters of the spring—though amazing—can’t quite compare to that spine-compressing water taxi ride.
When we strip down to our bathing suits and slip into the warm, cloudy pool within the rocks, Alex says, “We saw otters holding hands.”
“The universe likes us,” I say. “This has been a perfect day.”