People We Meet on Vacation

by Emily Henry

  “Nothing?” he says. “Shit, Poppy, you were supposed to go to the doctor.”

  “I didn’t know how to.” It sounds so pathetic. I’m twenty-six years old with a full-time job and health insurance, and an apartment and student loan bills, and I live alone in New York City, but there are just some things you don’t want to have to do on your own.

  “It’s okay,” Alex says, pulling me gently into him. “Let’s get you back in bed and see if we can get rid of the fever.”

  “I have to pee,” I say tearfully, then admit, “I may have already peed myself.”

  “Okay,” he says. “Go pee. I’ll find you some clean clothes.”

  “Should I shower?” I ask, because apparently I’m helpless. I need someone to tell me exactly what to do like my mom used to do when I stayed home from middle school watching Cartoon Network all day long, doing nothing for myself until she told me to.

  “I’m not sure,” he says. “I’ll Google it. For now just pee.”

  It takes way too much effort to get into the bathroom. I drop the blankets just outside it and pee with the door open, shivering the whole time but comforted by the sound of Alex moving around in my apartment. Quietly opening drawers. Clicking on the gas stove top, moving the teakettle onto it.

  He comes to check on me when he’s finished with whatever he’s doing, and I’m still sitting on the toilet with my sleep shorts around my ankles.

  “I think you’re okay to shower if you want to,” he says, and starts the water up. “Maybe don’t wash your hair. I don’t know if that’s a real thing, but Grandma Betty swears that wet hair makes you sick. Are you sure you won’t fall down or anything?”

  “If it’s fast I’ll be okay,” I say, suddenly aware of how sticky I feel. I am almost positive I wet myself. Later this will probably be humiliating, but right now I don’t think anything could embarrass me. I’m just so relieved to have him here.

  He looks uncertain for a second. “Just go ahead and get in. I’ll stay close by, and if you feel like it’s getting to be too much, just tell me, okay?” He turns away from me while I force myself onto my feet and strip out of my pajamas. I climb into the hot water and pull the curtain closed, shuddering as the water hits me.

  “You okay?” he asks immediately.

  “Mm-hm.”

  “I’m going to stay here, okay?” he says. “If you need anything, just tell me.”

  “Mm-hm.”

  After only a couple minutes, I’ve had enough. I turn off the water and Alex passes me a towel. I’m colder than ever now that I’m all wet, and I step out with teeth chattering.

  “Here.” He wraps another towel around my shoulders like a cape, tries to rub heat into them. “Come sit in the room while I change your bedding, okay?”

  I nod, and he leads me to the antique rattan peacock chair in the corner of my bedroom. “Spare bedding?” he asks.

  I point to the closet. “Top shelf.”

  He gets it out, and hands me a folded pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt. Since I don’t have a habit of folding my clothes, he must’ve instinctively folded them when he got them out of the dresser. When I take them from him, he turns pointedly away from me to work on making the bed and I drop the towels onto the floor and dress.

  When he’s finished making the bed, Alex pulls back a corner of the bedding and I slide in, letting him tuck me in. In the kitchen, the kettle starts whistling. He turns to go for it, but I grab on to his arm, half-drunk on the feeling of being warm and clean. “I don’t want you to go.”

  “I’ll be right back, Poppy,” he says. “I need to get you some medicine.”

  I nod, release him. When he comes back, he’s carrying a glass of water and his laptop bag. He sits on the edge of the bed and pulls out pill bottles and boxes of Mucinex, lining them up on the side table. “I wasn’t sure what your symptoms were,” he says.

  I touch my chest, trying to explain how tight and awful it feels. “Got it,” he says, and he chooses a box, peels two pills out, and hands them to me with the glass of water.

  “Have you eaten?” he asks when I’ve taken them.

  “I don’t think so.”

  He gives a faint smile. “I grabbed some stuff on the way here so I wouldn’t have to go back out. Does soup sound okay?”

  “Why are you so nice?” I whisper.

  He studies me for a moment, then bends and presses a kiss to my forehead. “Think the tea will be ready by now.”

  Alex brings me chicken noodle soup and water and tea. He sets timers for when I’m able to take more medicine, checks my temperature every couple hours throughout the night.

  When I sleep, it’s dreamless, and every time I stir awake, he’s there, half snoozing on the bed beside me. He yawns himself awake, looks over at me. “How you doing?”

  “Better,” I answer, and I’m not sure if it’s true in a physical sense, but at least mentally, emotionally, I do feel better having him here, and I can only manage a word or two at a time, so there’s no use explaining that.

  In the morning, he helps me down the stairs to a cab and we go to the doctor.

  Pneumonia. I have pneumonia. Not the kind, though, that’s so bad I need to be in the hospital.

  “As long as you keep an eye on her and she sticks to the antibiotics, she should be fine,” the doctor tells Alex, more than me, I guess because I don’t really look like the kind of person who can make sense of words right now.

  When Alex gets me home afterward, he tells me he has to go back out, and I want so badly to beg him to stay, but I’m just too tired. Besides, I’m sure he needs a break from my apartment and me after a whole night of playing nurse.

  He comes back half an hour later with Jell-O and ice cream and eggs and more soup, and all kinds of vitamins and spices I’ve never even considered keeping in my apartment before now.

  “Betty swears by zinc,” he tells me when he brings me a handful of vitamins with a cup of red Jell-O and another glass of water. “She also told me to put cinnamon in your soup, so if it tasted bad, blame her.”

  “How are you here?” I struggle to get out.

  “The first leg of my flight to Norway was through New York,” he says.

  “So, what,” I say. “You panicked and left the airport instead of boarding the next plane?”

  “No, Poppy,” he says. “I came here to be with you.”

  Immediately, tears spring into my eyes. “I was going to take you to a hotel made of ice.”

  A quick smile flits across his mouth. “I honestly don’t know if that’s the fever talking.”

  “No.” I scrunch my eyes shut, feeling the tears cutting trails down my cheeks. “It’s real. I’m so sorry.”

  “Hey.” He brushes the hair out of my face. “You know I don’t care about that, right? I only care about getting to spend time with you.” His thumb lightly traces the wet streak making its way down the side of my nose, heading it off just before it reaches my top lip. “I’m sorry you don’t feel well, and that you’re missing the ice hotel, but I’m okay right here.”

  Every ounce of dignity obliterated by having had this man change my pee-drenched bedding, I reach up for his neck and pull him toward me, and he shifts onto the bed beside me, maneuvering close at the beckoning of my hands. He wraps an arm around my back and draws me into his chest and I slip an arm around his waist too, and we lie there tangled together.

  “I can feel your heartbeat,” I tell him.

  “I can feel yours,” he says.

  “I’m sorry I peed the bed.”

  He laughs, squeezes me to him, and right then, my chest aches with how much I love him. I guess I must say something like this aloud, because he murmurs, “That’s probably the fever talking.”

  I shake my head, nestle closer, until there are no spaces left between us. His hand moves lightly up into my hair, and
a shiver runs down my spine from where his fingers trail along my neck. It feels so good, in a sea of bad feelings, that it makes me arch a little, my hand tightening on his back, and I feel the way his heartbeat speeds, which only makes mine skyrocket to match it. His hand moves to my thigh, wrapping it around his hip, and my fingers twist against him as I bury my mouth against the side of his neck where I feel his pulse thudding urgently beneath it.

  “Are you comfortable?” he asks thickly, like our lying like this could just be a matter of alignment, like we’re building up a narrative that protects us from the truth of what’s happening. That even through the fog of being sick, I can feel him wanting me like I want him.

  “Mm-hm,” I murmur. “Are you?”

  His hand tightens on my thigh, and he nods.

  “Yeah,” he says, and we both go very still.

  I don’t know how long we lie there, but eventually, the cold medicine wins out over the sparking, alert nerve endings in my body and I fall asleep, only to find him safely on the other side of the bed the next time I wake up.

  “You were asking for your mom,” he tells me.

  “Whenever I’m sick, I miss her,” I say.

  He nods, tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “Sometimes I do too.”

  “Tell me about her?” I ask.

  He shifts, lifting himself higher against the headboard. “What do you want to know?”

  “Anything,” I whisper. “What you think about when you think about her.”

  “Well, I was only six when she died,” he says, smoothing my hair again. I don’t argue or press for more, but eventually, he goes on. “She used to sing to us when she tucked us in at night. And I thought she had a beautiful voice. I mean, like, I would tell kids in my class that she was a singer. Or she would’ve been if she wasn’t a stay-at-home mom or whatever. And you know . . .” His hand stills in my hair. “My dad couldn’t talk about her. Like, at all. I mean, he still can’t really without breaking down. So growing up my brothers and I didn’t talk about her either. And when I was probably fourteen, fifteen, I went over to Grandma Betty’s house to clean her gutters and mow her lawn and stuff, and she was watching these old home movies of my mom.”

  I study his face, the way his full lips curl and his eyes catch the streaks of streetlight coming through my window so that he almost looks lit from within. “We never did that at my house,” he says. “I couldn’t even remember what she sounded like. But we watched this video of her holding me as a baby. Singing this old Amy Grant song.” His eyes cut to me, his smile deepening in one corner. “And her voice was horrible.”

  “How horrible are we talking here?” I ask.

  “Bad enough that Betty had to turn it off so she didn’t have a heart attack from laughing,” he says. “And you could tell Mom knew she was bad. I mean, you could hear Betty laughing while she filmed, and my mom kept looking over her shoulder with this grin, but she didn’t stop singing. I guess I think about that a lot.”

  “She sounds like my kind of lady,” I say.

  “For most of my life,” he says, “she’s kind of felt like this boogeyman, you know? Like the biggest part she’s played in my life is just how wrecked my dad was from losing her. How scared he was to have to raise us on his own?”

  I nod; makes sense.

  “A lot of times, when I think about her, it’s like . . .” He pauses. “She’s more a cautionary tale than a person. But when I think about that video, I think about why my dad loved her so much. And that feels better. To think about her as a person.”

  For a while, we’re quiet. I reach over and fold Alex’s hand in mine. “She must’ve been pretty amazing,” I say, “to make a person like you.”

  He squeezes my hand but doesn’t say another word, and eventually I drift back to sleep.

  The next two days are a blur, and then I’m on the rise. Not healthy but more awake, lighter, clearer headed.

  There’s no more intense cuddling, just a lot of watching old cartoons together on the bed, sitting out on the fire escape in the morning while we eat breakfast, taking pills whenever the alarms go off on Alex’s phone, drinking tea on the sofa at night with a playlist of “traditional Norwegian folk music” playing in the background.

  Four days pass. Then five. And then I’m doing well enough that I could theoretically leave the country, but it’s too late, and there’s no more talk of it. There’s no more touching either, except the occasional bump of the arm or leg, or the compulsive reach across the table to stop me from spilling on my chin. At night, though, when Alex is lying on the far side of my bed, I stay awake for hours listening to his uneven breath, feeling like we’re two magnets trying desperately to draw together.

  I know deep down that it’s not a good idea. The fever lowered my defenses, and his too, but when it comes down to it, Alex and I are not for each other. There might be love and attraction and history, but that just means there’s more to lose if we try to take this friendship into a place it doesn’t belong.

  Alex wants marriage and kids and a home in one place, and he wants it all with someone like Sarah. Someone who can help him build the life that he lost when he was six years old.

  And I want a tetherless life of spontaneous trips and exciting new relationships, different seasons with different people, and quite possibly to never settle down. Our only hope of maintaining this relationship is through the platonic friendship we’ve always had. That five percent has been creeping up for years, but it’s time to tamp it back down. To squash the what-if.

  At the end of the week, when I drop him off at the airport, I give him the most chaste hug I can muster, despite the way that his lifting me against him sends that same spine-arching shiver down my back and heat pooling in all the places he’s never touched me.

  “I’ll miss you,” he says in a low growl against the side of my ear, and I force myself to step back a sensible distance.

  “You too.”

  I think about him all night, and when I dream, he’s pulling my thigh over his leg, rolling his hips against mine. Every time he’s about to kiss me, I wake up.

  We don’t talk for four days, and when he finally texts me it’s just a picture of his tiny black cat sitting on an open copy of Wise Blood by Flannery O’Connor.

  Fate, he writes.

  26

  This Summer

  STANDING ON THE balcony, our rain-drenched bodies flush, his gaze soft, I feel my last vestige of self-control washing off me, rinsed clear along with the desert heat and grime of the day. There’s nothing left but Alex and me.

  His lips press closed then part, and mine mirror them, his breath warm against my mouth. Every shallow inhale I take draws us a little closer until my tongue just barely grazes his rain-dampened bottom lip, and then he adjusts to catch my mouth just a little more with his.

  A fraction of a kiss. And then another one, a bit fuller. A twist of my hands in his hair, the hiss of breath between his teeth, and then another brush of his lips, deeper, slower, careful and intent, and I’m melting against him. Shivering and terrified and exhilarated and every shade between as our mouths sink together and pull apart, his tongue sliding over mine for a second, then a little deeper, my teeth catching on the fullest part of his bottom lip, his hands moving down over my hips, my chest arching up into his as my hands glide down his wet neck.

  We come together and apart, the little gaps and short breathless inhalations nearly as intoxicating as each taste, test, scrape of his rain-slicked mouth moving over mine. He draws back, leaves his mouth just hovering over mine, where I can still feel his breath. “Is this okay?” he asks me in a hush.

  If I could speak, I’d tell him this is the best kiss I’ve had in my entire life. That I didn’t know just kissing could feel this good. That I could just make out with him for hours and it would be better than the best sex I’ve ever had.

  But I can’
t think clearly enough to say any of this. My mind is too busy with the grip of his hands on my ass and the feel of his chest flattening mine out, his wet skin and the thin, drenched clothes between us, so I just nod and catch his bottom lip between my teeth again, and he turns me against the stucco wall, presses me back into it as he kisses me more urgently.

  One of his hands twists into the hem of my T-shirt where it hangs against my thigh, and the other grazes up my stomach beneath it. “What about this?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I breathe.

  His hand lifts higher, slips under my bathing suit top, making me shiver. “This?” he says.

  My breath catches, heart stumbles over a beat as his fingers lightly circle. I nod, pull his hips back to mine. He’s hard between my legs, and instantly I feel a little light-headed. “I think about you all the time,” he says, and kisses me slowly, drags his mouth down my neck, goose bumps fluttering out in his wake. “I think about this.”

  “I do too,” I admit in a whisper. His mouth moves over my chest, kissing me through my wet T-shirt even as his hands work the fabric up over my hips, my ribs, and then my shoulders. He pulls away long enough to peel it over my head and discard it among the plastic sheeting.

  “Yours too,” I say, heart leaping. I reach for the hem of his shirt, pull it over his head. When I toss it aside, he tries to move toward me, but I hold him back for a second.

  “Do you want to stop?” he asks, his eyes dark.

  I shake my head. “I just . . . never get to look at you like this.”

  The corner of his mouth twitches into a smile. “You could have always looked,” he says in a low voice. “Just so you know.”

  “Well, you could’ve too,” I say.

  “Trust me,” he says. “I did.”

  And then I’m dragging him in against me, and he’s roughly lifting my thigh against his hip, and I’m sinking my fingers into his wide back, my teeth into his neck, and his hands are massaging my chest, my ass. His mouth moves down my collarbones, sliding under my bikini, teeth careful on my nipple, and I’m feeling him through his shorts, then reaching into them, loving how he tenses and shifts. I push his shorts down over his hip bones, my mouth going dry at the feeling of him against me.