by Emily Henry
“Really?” You’d think he just recited a love poem to me by the sound of my voice.
He presses me back onto the edge of the sink as he kisses me once, slow and heavy, his hands circling my neck to find the clasp of the jumpsuit’s halter. It falls loose, and I arch back as he slides the fabric down to my waist. He cups my jaw and draws my mouth back to his, and I wrap my legs around him as our kisses deepen, his free hand moving down my bare chest.
“Do you remember when I was sick?” I whisper against his ear.
His hips grind against mine, and his voice comes out low and husky: “Of course.”
“I wanted you so badly that night,” I admit, untucking his shirt.
“That whole week,” he says, “I kept waking up on the verge of coming. If you hadn’t been sick . . .”
I lift myself against him, and his mouth sinks into the side of my neck as I work at the buttons on his shirt. “In Vail when you carried me down that mountain . . .”
“God, Poppy,” he says. “I spent so much time trying not to want you.” He lifts me off the sink and carries me to the bed.
“And not nearly enough time kissing me,” I say, his laugh rattling against my ear as he lays us down. “How long do we have?”
He kisses the very center of my chest. “We can be late.”
“How late?”
“As late as it takes.”
* * *
• • •
“OH. MY. GOD,” I say as we step out onto the driveway of the midcentury mansion, with its Googie-style swooped roof. “This is amazing. He has this whole place rented out?”
“Did I forget to mention that Tham is Very Fancy?”
“May have,” I say. “Is it too late for me to marry him?”
“Well, there are two days until the wedding and he’s gay,” he says. “So I really don’t see why not.”
I laugh, and he catches my hand, slips it into his own. Somehow walking into a bachelor party holding Alex Nilsen’s hand is more surreal than every surreal thing that just happened at the hotel. It makes me feel buzzy and giddy and intoxicated in the best possible way.
We follow the music up the driveway, each holding one of the bottles of wine we picked out on the way here, and step into the cool dark of the foyer.
Alex said there’d be fifty people. Making our way through the house, I’d guess there are at least a hundred, leaning on walls and sitting on the backs of fabulously gilded furniture. The back wall of the house is entirely glass and overlooks a massive pool, lit up purple and green, with a waterfall flowing into it on one side. People lounge on inflatable flamingos and swans in various states of undress: women and drag queens in full-length, sparkly gowns; men in swim trunks and thongs; people in angel wings and mermaid costumes alongside Assumed Linfield People in suits and peplum dresses.
“Wow,” Alex says. “I haven’t been to a party this out of control since, like, high school.”
“You and I had very different high school experiences,” I say.
Just then an Adonis of a man with a charmingly boyish grin and a mop of golden waves spots us and springs out of the egg-shaped hanging chair where he was sitting.
“Alex! Poppy!” David comes toward us with arms open and a lightly drunk sheen in his hazel eyes. He hugs Alex first, then grabs the sides of my face and plants sloppy kisses on both my cheeks. “I’m so happy you’re—” His eyes fall to our clasped hands and he claps his together. “Holding hands!”
“You’re welcome,” I say, and he chortles, clamps a hand on each of our shoulders.
“You need some water?” Alex asks him, big-brother mode activated.
“No, Dad,” he says. “You need some booze?”
“Yes!” I say, and David waves his hand to a server I had not noticed in the corner largely because she’s spray-painted gold.
“Wow,” Alex says, accepting two flutes of champagne from the faux statue’s tray. “Thanks for . . . Wow.”
She retreats, goes stone-still again.
“So what’s Tham doing tonight?” I ask. “A bonfire of dollar bills on a solid-gold yacht?”
“I really hate to tell you this, Pop,” David says, “but a golden yacht would sink. Trust me. We tried. Do you two want shots?”
“Yes,” I say at the same time Alex says, “No.”
As if by magic, shots are already being handed to us, vodka and Goldschläger, with its little gold shavings floating in the glasses. The three of us clink them together and down the spicy-sweet liquid in one gulp.
Alex coughs. “I hate that.”
David slaps him on the back. “I’m so glad you’re here, dude.”
“Of course I am. Your little brothers only get married . . . three times.”
“And your favorite one only gets married once,” David says. “Fingers crossed.”
“I hear you and Tham are amazing together,” I say. “And that he is Very Fancy.”
“The fanciest,” David agrees. “He’s a director. We met on set.”
“On set!” I cry. “Listen to you!”
“I know,” he says. “I’m an insufferable L.A. person.”
“No, no, definitely not.”
Someone shouts for David then from the pool, and he gives her a one minute signal, then faces us again. “Make yourselves at home—not our home, obviously,” he adds to Alex, “but, like, a super-loud, super-fun, super-gay home with a dance floor out back—which I expect to see you both on shortly.”
“Stop trying to make Poppy fall in love with you,” Alex says.
“Yeah, you really don’t need to waste your time,” I say. “I’m already sold.”
David grabs my head and smooches the side of it again, then does the same thing to Alex and dances over to the girl in the pool pretending to reel him in with an invisible fishing rod.
“Sometimes I worry he takes himself too seriously,” Alex says flatly, and when a laugh rockets out of me, the corner of his mouth twitches in and out of a smile. We stand there grinning for a few more seconds, our locked hands swinging back and forth between us.
“I thought you didn’t like holding hands,” I say.
“And you said you did,” he says.
“So, what? I just get whatever I want now?” I tease.
His smile flickers back into place, calm and restrained. “Yes, Poppy,” he says. “You get whatever you want now. Is that a problem?”
“What if I want you to have what you want?”
He arches an eyebrow. “Are you just saying that because you know what I’m going to say, and you want to make fun of me for it?”
“No?” I say. “Why? What are you going to say?”
Our hands go still between us. “I have what I want, Poppy.”
My heart flutters, and I pull my hand from his, coil it around his waist, and tip my head back to peer into his face. “I am resisting the urge to PDA all over you right now, Alex Nilsen.”
He bends his neck and kisses me so long that a few people start cheering. When we pull apart, he’s pink cheeked and bashful. “Damn,” he says. “I feel like a horny teenager.”
“Maybe if we utilize the Jäger Bomb station in the backyard,” I say, “we’ll go back to feeling like demure, mature thirty-year-olds.”
“That sounds realistic,” Alex says, tugging me toward the back patio. “I’m in.”
There’s a bar out back and a food truck serving fish tacos parked on the grass. Behind that, a garden stretches out like something from a Jane Austen novel, right here in the middle of the desert.
“Probably not great for conservation,” Alex remarks in true grandpa form.
“Probably not,” I agree. “But possibly great for conversation.”
“True,” he says. “When all else fails, you can always engage a stranger in thoughtful small talk about the dy
ing earth.”
At some point we find ourselves sitting on the edge of the pool, pants and jumpsuit legs rolled up and legs dangling in the warm water, and that’s when we hear David shouting excitedly from within a crowd, “Where’s my brother? He’s got to be part of this.”
“Sounds like you’re needed.”
Alex sighs. David spots him and jogs over. “I need you to do this game.”
“Drinking game?” I guess.
“Not for Alex,” David says. “I bet he won’t have to drink one single time. It’s a David Trivia game. You in?”
Alex winces. “Do you want me to be?”
David crosses his arms. “As the groom, I demand it.”
“You really are never allowed to divorce Tham,” Alex says, lumbering to his feet.
“For a multitude of reasons,” David says, “I agree.”
Alex walks over to the long, candlelit table where the game is starting up, but David lingers by me, watching him go. “He seems good,” he says.
“Yeah,” I agree. “I think he is.”
David’s gaze drops to me, and he lowers himself onto the slick side of the pool, slipping his legs into the water. “So,” he says. “How did this happen?”
“This?”
He lifts his brow skeptically. “This.”
“Um.” I try to think of how to explain it. Years of undying love, occasional jealousy, missed opportunities, bad timing, other relationships, building sexual tension, a fight and the silence afterward, and the pain of living life without him. “Our Airbnb’s air-conditioning broke.”
David stares at me for a few seconds, then drops his face into his hands, chuckling. “Damn,” he says, straightening up. “I have to say I’m relieved.”
“Relieved?”
“Yeah.” David shrugs. “You know. It’s like . . . now that I’m getting married—now that I know I’m staying in L.A.—I guess I’ve just been worried about him. Back in Ohio. On his own.”
“I think he likes Linfield,” I say. “I don’t think he’s there out of necessity. Besides, I wouldn’t say he’s on his own. Your whole family’s there. All the nieces and nephew.”
“That’s my point.” David looks toward the trivia game at the table, watches as the three other contestants down shots of something caramel colored and Alex sips on a cup of water victoriously. “He’s kind of an empty nester now.” His mouth twists into a frown that’s so like his brother’s that I feel a quick, painful impulse to kiss it away.
When I think about what David’s actually saying, the pain gets worse, harboring itself behind my rib cage like a little red knot. “You think he feels like that?”
“Like he raised us? Put all his emotional energy into making sure the three of us were okay? Driving Betty around to doctor appointments, packing our fucking school lunches and getting Dad out of bed when he had one of his episodes, and then, all of a sudden, we all went off and got married and started having kids of our own, while he’s left to make sure Dad’s all right?” Stony serious, David looks back at me. “No. Alex would never think like that. But I think he’s been lonely. I mean . . . we all thought he was going to marry Sarah, and then . . .”
“Yeah.” I lift my legs out of the pool and cross them in front of me.
“I mean, he had the ring and everything,” David goes on, and my stomach drops. “He was supposed to propose, and then—she was just gone, and . . .” He trails off when he sees the look on my face.
“Don’t get me wrong, Poppy.” He sets his hand on mine. “I always thought it should be you two. But Sarah was great, and they loved each other, and—I just want him to be happy. I want him to stop worrying about other people and have something that’s just his, you know?”
“Yeah.” I can barely get the word out. I’m still sweating, but my insides have swiftly gone cold, because all I can think is, He was going to marry her.
She said it in Tuscany, and after a few weeks, I brushed it off as an offhand comment, but now I can’t help but see everything that happened on that trip in a different light.
It was three years ago, but I still see it so vividly: Alex and me out on the terrace minutes before the sun rose, my arms crossed tight, nails bitten to the quick. Pregnancy tests lined up on the stone wall and Alex’s watch chirping at us that it was time to find out what the future held.
The way he’d broken down once I finally gathered myself, hunched his head, and cried against me.
I can’t keep doing this to you, I’d said. Needing you.
He’d told me he needed me too, but with Trey and Sarah there, the bubble that always seemed to envelop us, separate us from the world, had popped, and I’d felt so deeply ashamed for wanting so much of him, and I could tell he had too.
Trey seems like a great guy, he’d said, and that was as close to saying We have to stop this as we could get. Saying that would’ve been an admission of guilt. Even if we never kissed, never said the words outright, we were keeping whole parts of our hearts for each other only.
Alex had wanted to marry Sarah, and I know now that I’d kept him from being able to. She’d broken up with him a second time after Tuscany, and even if she never knew exactly what had transpired, I was sure it had left a mark on him, shifted things between them for the worse.
If I had been pregnant, if I’d decided to have the baby, I know beyond any doubt Alex would have been there for me, given up anything he had just to help.
Sarah, like always, would’ve had to deal with the reality of me or move on. I can’t help but wonder if I’d forced her to that point. If our friendship had cost him the woman he wanted to marry. I feel sick, ashamed by the thought. Guilty over how I ignored my more complicated feelings for him so I could justify staying in his life.
It’s one thing when your boyfriend’s rowdy brothers, or his widower father, need him.
But I was just some other woman, whose needs he’d always put first to the detriment of his own wants and happiness. And this week, I’d stumbled into this selfishly, because that was my default with him. To ask for what I wanted, to let him give it to me even if it wasn’t necessarily the best thing for him.
I’m no longer giddy or buzzy or anything but sick to my stomach.
David sets his hand on my shoulder and smiles at me, jarring me out of the kaleidoscope of complicated, painful feelings pinwheeling through me. “I’m glad he has you now.”
“Yeah,” I whisper, but a vicious little voice inside me says, No, you have him.
31
This Summer
AS I’M DIGGING through my purse for the hotel key, Alex leans into me, his hands heavy on my waist, his lips soft against the side of my neck, and it would be unwinding me if not for the buzzing in my skull, the steady throbs of alternating guilt and panic low in my stomach.
I press the keycard to the lock, then nudge the door open, and Alex releases me, stepping into the room after me. I beeline for the sink, slipping the backs off my oversized plastic earrings and setting them on the counter. Alex goes still and anxious just inside the door.
“Did I do something?” he asks.
I shake my head, grab a cotton swab and the blue bottle of eye makeup remover. I know I need to say something, but I don’t want to cry, because if I cry, this becomes about me, and the whole point of it is lost. Alex will bend over backward to make me feel safe, when really what I need is for him to be honest. I swipe the cotton over my lids, loosening the black liquid eyeliner until I look like Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road, gunpowder smeared across my face like war paint.
“Poppy,” Alex says. “Just tell me what I did.”
I spin toward him, and he doesn’t even crack a smile about my makeup. That’s how worried he is, and I hate myself for making him feel like that. “You didn’t do anything,” I say. “You’re perfect.”
His two expressions now are s
urprised and offended. “I’m not perfect.”
I need to do this quick, rip it off like a Band-Aid. “Were you going to propose to Sarah?”
His lips part. But his shock quickly melts into hurt. “What are you talking about?”
“I just . . .” I close my eyes, press the back of my hand to my head as if that can stop the buzzing. I open my eyes again and his expression has barely shrunk. He’s not reeling in his emotions: I’m going to get Naked Alex for this conversation. “David said you had a ring.”
He jams his mouth shut and swallows hard, looks toward the sliding balcony doors, then back to me. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
“It’s not that.” I force the rising tears back down. “I just . . . I didn’t realize how much you loved her.”
He half laughs, but there’s no humor in his tense face. “Of course I loved her. I was with her on and off for years, Poppy. You loved the guys you were with too.”
“I know. I’m not accusing you of anything. Just . . .” I shake my head, trying to organize my thoughts into something shorter than an hour-long monologue. “I mean, you bought a ring.”
“I know that,” he says, “but why are you mad at me for that, Poppy? You were with Trey, fucking jet-setting around the world, sitting in his lap in all four corners of the world—was I supposed to think you weren’t happy? To just wait for you?”
“I’m not mad at you, Alex!” I cry. “I’m mad at myself! For not caring that I was getting in the way. For asking so much of you and—and keeping you from what you want.”
He scoffs. “What is it I want?”
“Why did she break up with you?” I bite back. “Tell me it had nothing to do with me. That Sarah didn’t end things because of this—this thing between us. That since I’ve been out of your life, she hasn’t been reconsidering everything. Just tell me that, if that’s the truth, Alex. Tell me I’m not the reason you’re not married with kids right now, and everything else you wanted.”
He stares at me, face terse, eyes dark and cloudy.