by Emily Henry
“A perfect trip.”
“It’s not over yet,” I say. “One more night.”
When Buck’s water taxi delivers us safely into harbor that night, we huddle into the little time-warped shack the company uses as an office to pay.
“Where you guys staying?” Buck asks as he takes the coupons I printed out and manually punches their code into a computer.
“Other side of the island,” Alex says. “Outside Nanoose Bay.”
Buck’s blue eyes come up, cut between Alex and me appraisingly. “My grandparents live in Nanoose Bay.”
“It kind of seems like every grandparent in British Columbia might live in Nanoose Bay,” I say, and Buck lets out a bark of laughter.
“What are you doing there?” he asks. “Not a great spot for a young couple.”
“Oh, we’re not . . .” Alex shifts uncomfortably from one foot to the other.
“We’re like nonbiological, nonlegal siblings,” I say.
“Just friends,” Alex translates, seeming embarrassed for me, which is understandable because I can feel my cheeks go lobster red and my stomach flip when Buck’s eyes settle on me.
They shift back to Alex, and he smiles. “If you don’t want to drive back to the old folks’ home tonight, my housemates and I have got a yard and a spare tent. You’re welcome to crash there. We’ve always got people staying with us.”
I’m fairly sure Alex does not want to sleep on the ground, but he takes one look at me and must see how into this idea I am—this is exactly the kind of spur-of-the-moment, out-of-nowhere surprise turn I’ve been hoping this trip would take—because he lets out an almost imperceptible sigh, then turns back to Buck with a fixed smile. “Yeah. That’d be great. Thanks.”
“Cool, you all were my last trip, so let me close up and we can head out.”
As we’re walking back down the dock afterward, Alex asks for the address so we can plug it into the GPS. “Nah, man,” Buck says. “You don’t need to drive.”
It turns out Buck’s house is just up a short, steep driveway a half block from the dock. A droopy, graying two-story house with a second-floor balcony covered in drying towels and bathing suits and shitty folding furniture. There’s a bonfire burning in the front yard, and even though it’s only six p.m., there are dozens of grungy Buck-types gathered in sandals and hiking boots or dirt-crusted bare feet, drinking beer and doing acro-yoga in the grass while trance music plays over a pair of duct-tape-ridden speakers on the porch. The whole place smells like weed, like this is some kind of low-rent, miniature Burning Man.
“Everyone,” Buck calls as he leads us up the hillside, “this is Poppy and Alex. They’re from . . .” He looks over his shoulder at me, waiting.
“Chicago,” I say as Alex says, “Ohio.”
“Ohio and Chicago,” Buck repeats. People call out greetings and tip their beers, and a lean, muscly girl in a woven crop top brings me and Alex each a bottle, and Alex tries very hard not to look at her stomach as Buck disappears into the circle of people around the fire, doing that backslapping hug with a handful of people.
“Welcome to Tofino,” she says. “I’m Daisy.”
“Another flower!” I say. “But at least they don’t use yours to make opium.”
“I haven’t tried opium,” Daisy says thoughtfully. “I pretty much stick to LSD and shrooms. Well, and weed, obviously.”
“Have you tried those sleep gummies?” I ask. “Those things are fucking amazing.”
Alex coughs. “Thanks for the beer, Daisy.”
She winks. “My pleasure. I’m the welcome committee. And the tour guide.”
“Oh, do you live here too?” I ask.
“Sometimes,” she says.
“Who else does?” Alex says.
“Hmm.” Daisy turns, scouring the crowd and vaguely pointing. “Michael, Chip, Tara, Kabir, Lou.” She gathers her dark hair off her back and pulls it to one side of her neck as she continues. “Mo, Quincy sometimes; Lita’s been here for a month, but I think she’s leaving soon. She got a job as a rafting guide in Colorado—how far is Chicago from there? You should look her up if you’re ever visiting.”
“Cool,” Alex says. “Maybe so.”
Buck reappears between me and Alex, with a joint tucked in his mouth, and slings a casual arm around each of us. “Has Daisy given you the tour yet?”
“Was just about to,” she says.
But somehow, I don’t wind up on a tour of this soggy house. I wind up sitting in a cracked plastic Adirondack chair by the fire with Buck and—I think?—Chip and Lita-the-soon-to-be-rafting-guide, ranking Nicolas Cage movies by various criteria as the deep blues and purples of twilight melt into the deeper blues and blacks of night, the starry sky seeming to unfurl over us like a great, light-pricked blanket.
Lita is an easy laugher, which I’ve always thought was a criminally underappreciated trait, and Buck is so laid-back I start to get a secondhand high just from sharing a chair with him, and then I get my first firsthand high when I share his joint with him.
“Don’t you love it?” he asks eagerly when I’m a few puffs in.
“Love it,” I say. Truthfully, I think it’s just okay, and moreover, if I were anywhere else, I think I might even hate it, but tonight it’s perfect because today is perfect, this trip is perfect.
Alex checks back in on me after his “tour,” by which point, yes, I’m sitting curled up in Buck’s lap with his sweatshirt draped around my chilly shoulders.
You okay? Alex mouths from the far side of the fire.
I nod. You?
He nods back, and then Daisy asks him something and he turns away, falling into conversation with her. I tip my head back and stare up past Buck’s unshaven jawline to the stars high above us.
I think I could stand it if this night lasted three more days, but eventually the sky is changing color again, the morning mist hissing off the damp grass as the sun peeks over a horizon somewhere in the distance. Most of the crowd has drifted off, Alex included, and the fire has burned down to embers when Buck asks me if I want to come inside, and I tell him yes, I do.
I almost tell him that going inside speaks to me, then remember that’s not a worldwide joke, it’s just one of mine and Alex’s, and I don’t really want to say it to Buck after all.
I’m relieved to discover that he has a room of his own, even if it is closet sized with a mattress on the floor dressed in nothing but two unzipped sleeping bags rather than bedding. When he kisses me, it’s rough and scratchy and tastes like weed and beer, but I’ve only kissed two people before this and one of those was Jason Stanley, so this is still going great in my book. His hands are confident if a little lazy, to match the rest of him, and soon we’re climbing onto the mattress, hands catching in each other’s seawater-tangled hair, hips locking together.
He has a nice body, I think, the kind that’s mostly taut from an active lifestyle with a little pudge from indulging in his various vices. Not like Alex’s, which has been made in the gym over years with discipline and care. Not that Alex’s body isn’t great. It is great.
And not that there’s any reason to compare the two, or any two bodies, really. It’s sort of messed up that the thought even popped into my head.
But it’s just because Alex’s is the man-body I’m most used to being around and it’s also the kind I expect I won’t ever touch. People like Alex—careful, conscientious, gym-fit, reserved people—tend to go for people like Sarah Torval—Alex’s careful, conscientious, yoga-bunny crush from the library.
Whereas people like me are more likely to wind up making out with people like Buck on their floor mattresses on top of their unzipped sleeping bags.
He’s all tongue and hands, but even so it’s fun, to kiss this near-stranger, to have fervent, appreciative permission to touch him. It’s like practice. Perfect, fun practice with some g
uy I met on vacation, who holds no bearing on my real life. Who knows only Poppy Right Now, and doesn’t need any more than that.
We kiss until my lips feel bruised and our shirts have come off and then I sit up in the dawn-dark, catching my breath. “I don’t want to have sex, okay?”
“Oh, right on,” he says lightly, sitting up against the wall. “That’s cool. No pressure.”
And he doesn’t seem to feel any hint of awkwardness about this, but he also doesn’t pull me back to him, kiss me again. He just sits there for a minute, like he’s waiting for something.
“What?” I say.
“Oh.” He glances toward the door then back to me. “I just thought, if you don’t want to hook up . . .”
And then I understand. “You want me to leave?”
“Well . . .” He gives a sheepish (or sheepish for him, anyway) half laugh that still sounds kind of barky. “I mean, if we’re not going to have sex, then I might . . .”
He trails off, and now my own laugh catches me by surprise. “Are you going to hook up with someone else?”
He seems genuinely concerned when he says, “Does that make you feel bad?”
I stare back at him for a three full seconds.
“Look, if you wanted to have sex, you’d be, like . . . I’d want to. Like, I definitely do. But since you don’t . . . Are you mad?”
I burst out laughing. “No,” I say, pulling my shirt back on. “I’m actually really, really not mad. I appreciate the honesty.”
And I mean it. Because this is just Buck, some guy I met on vacation, and all things considered, he has been something of a gentleman.
“Okay, cool,” he says, and flashes that laid-back grin of his, which almost glows in the dark. “I’m glad we’re cool.”
“We’re cool,” I agree. “But . . . you said something about a tent?”
“Oh, right.” He slaps his hand to his forehead. “The red-and-black one out front’s all you, girl.”
“Thanks, Buck,” I say, and stand. “For everything.”
“Hey, hold on a second.” He leans over and grabs a magazine off the floor beside his mattress, digs around for a marker, then scribbles something on the white edge of a page and tears it out. “If you’re ever back on the island,” he says, “don’t stay in my grandparents’ neighborhood, okay? Just come stay here. We’ve always got room.”
With that, I slip out of the house, past rooms that are already—or still—playing music and doors through which soft sighs and moans emanate.
Outside, I pick my way down the dewy porch steps and head to the red-and-black tent. I’m fairly sure I saw Alex disappear inside the house with Daisy hours ago, but when I unzip the tent, he’s fast asleep in it. I carefully crawl inside, and when I lie down beside him, he just barely opens his puffy-with-sleep eyes and rasps, “Hey.”
“Hey,” I say. “Sorry to wake you.”
“’S okay,” he says. “How was your night?”
“Okay,” I tell him. “I made out with Buck.”
His eyes widen for a second before shrinking back to sleepy slivers of hazel. “Wow,” he croaks, then tries to swallow down a spark of sleepy laughter. “Did the curtains match the very troubling drapes?”
Laughing, I give his leg a shove with my foot. “I didn’t tell you so you could mock me.”
“Did he tell you what he was saying that whole time on the water taxi?” Alex asks through another rattle of laughter. “How many people were in the hammock with you?”
I start to laugh so hard there are tears leaking from the corners of my eyes. “He . . . kicked . . .” It’s hard to get words out between wheezes of laughter, but eventually I manage, “. . . kicked me out when I told him I didn’t want to have sex.”
“Oh my god,” Alex says, sitting up on his elbow, the sleeping bag falling down from his bare chest and his hair dancing with static. “What a dick.”
“No,” I say. “It was fine. He just wanted to get some, and if not from me, there are easily four hundred more girls on this half acre of sinking woods.”
Alex flops back down on his pillow. “Yeah, well, I still think that’s kind of shitty.”
“Speaking of girls,” I say, smirking.
“We . . . weren’t?” Alex says.
“Did you hook up with Daisy?”
He rolls his eyes. “Do you think I hooked up with Daisy?”
“Until you said it like that, yes.”
Alex adjusts his arm under his pillow. “Daisy isn’t my type.”
“True,” I say. “She’s nothing like Sarah Torval.”
Alex rolls his eyes again then closes them entirely. “Go to sleep, weirdo.”
Through a yawn, I say, “Sleep speaks to me.”
11
This Summer
THERE ARE PLENTY of empty chaise lounges available at the Desert Rose complex pool—everyone’s in the water—so Alex and I take our towels over to two in the corner.
He winces as he lowers himself to sitting. “The plastic’s hot.”
“Everything’s hot.” I plop down beside him and peel off my cover-up. “What percentage of that pool do you think is pee by now?” I ask, tipping my head to the gaggle of sunhat-wearing babies splashing on the steps with their parents.
Alex grimaces. “Don’t say that.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s so hot I’m going to get in the water anyway, and I don’t want to think about it.” He glances away as he draws his white T-shirt over his head, then folds it and twists to set it on the ground behind him, the muscles pulling taut along his chest and stomach in the process.
“How have you gotten more ripped?” I ask.
“I haven’t.” He pulls the sunblock from my beach bag and pumps some into his hand.
I look down at my own stomach, hanging over the tight highlighter orange of my bikini bottoms. In the last few years my lifestyle of airplane cocktails and late-night burritos, gyros, and noodles has started to fill me out and soften me. “Fine,” I say to Alex, “then you look exactly the same, while the rest of us are starting to droop in the eyes and the boobs and the neck, and get more and more stretch marks and pockmarks and scars.”
“Do you really want to look like your eighteen-year-old self?” he asks, and starts to smear big globs of sunblock onto his arms and chest.
“Yes.” I pick up the bottle of Banana Boat and work some of it onto my shoulders. “But I’d settle for twenty-five.”
Alex shakes his head, then bows it as he slathers more sunblock onto his neck. “You look better than you did back then, Poppy.”
“Really? Because the comments section on my Instagram would disagree,” I say.
“That’s all bullshit,” he says. “Half the people on Instagram have never lived in a world where every picture wasn’t edited. If they saw you in real life, they’d pass out. My students are all obsessed with this ‘Instagram model’ who’s completely CGI. This animated girl. Literally looks like a video game character and every time the account posts, they all freak out about how beautiful she is.”
“Oh, yeah, I know that girl,” I say. “I mean, I don’t know her. She’s not real. But I know the account. Sometimes I go down deep rabbit holes reading the comments. She has a rivalry with another CGI model—do you want me to get your back?”
“What?” He looks up, confused.
I lift the bottle of sunblock up. “Your back? It’s facing the sun right now.”
“Oh. Yeah. Thanks.” He turns around and ducks his head, but he’s still tall enough that I have to sit up on my knees to get the spot between his shoulder blades. “Anyway.” He clears his throat. “The kids know I get seriously repulsed by the uncanny valley so they always try to trick me into looking at pictures of that fake girl, just to watch me writhe. It kind of makes me feel bad for doing that Sad Puppy Face
at you all these years.”
My hands go still on his warm, sun-freckled shoulders, my stomach pinching. “I’d be sad if you stopped doing that.”
He looks over his shoulder at me, his profile cast in cool blue shadow as the sun beats down on him from the other side. For a millisecond, I feel fluttery from his closeness, from the feeling of his shoulder muscles under my hands and the way his cologne mixes with the coconut sweetness of the sunblock and the way his hazel eyes fix on me firmly.
It’s a millisecond that belongs to that other five percent—the what-if. If I leaned forward and kissed him over his shoulder, slipped his bottom lip between my teeth, twisted my hands into his hair until he turned himself around and pulled me into his chest.
But there’s no more room for that what-if, and I know that. I think he knows it too, because he clears his throat and glances away. “Want me to get your back too?”
“Mm-hm,” I manage, and we both turn again so that now he’s facing my back, and the whole time his hands are on me, I’m actively trying not to register it. Trying not to feel something hotter than the Palm Springs sun gathering behind my belly button as his palms gently scrape over me.
It doesn’t matter that there are babies squealing and people laughing and preteens cannonballing into far-too-small spaces in the pool. There’s not enough stimuli in this busy pool to distract me, so I move on to a hastily formed plan B.
“Do you ever talk to Sarah?” I blurt out, my voice a full octave higher than usual.
“Um.” Alex’s hands lift off me. “Sometimes. You’re done, by the way.”
“Cool. Thanks.” I turn around and shift back onto my chaise, putting a good foot of space between us. “Is she still teaching at East Linfield?” With how competitive teaching jobs were these days, it seemed like a dream when they both found positions at the same school and moved back to Ohio. Then they broke up.
“Yep.” He reaches into my bag and pulls out the water bottles we filled with the premade margarita slushies we got at CVS. He hands me one of them. “She’s still there.”