People We Meet on Vacation

by Emily Henry

  “Tell me,” I beg, and he just stares at me, the silence of the room adding to the buzz inside my skull.

  Finally, he shakes his head. “Of course it’s because of you.”

  I take a step back, like his words might burn me.

  “She broke up with me before we went to Sanibel, and I felt so guilty that whole trip because all I could think was, I hope Poppy doesn’t think I’m boring too. I didn’t even remember to miss her until I got home. That’s how it always is when I’m with you. No one else matters. And then you’re gone again, and life goes back to normal and . . . when Sarah and I got back together, I thought things were so different, so much better, but the truth is, she didn’t want to go to Tuscany and I told her I needed her to, so she agreed. Because I wasn’t willing to give you up and I thought if you two were friends, it would be easier,” he says, so intensely still now he rivals the faux-statue servers at the party.

  “Then you thought you were pregnant and it scared me so much I got a fucking vasectomy. And it didn’t even occur to me to ask Sarah what she thought. I just made the appointment, and a few days after, I was walking past this antique store and I saw this ring. An old, yellow-gold art deco thing with a pearl. I saw it and thought, That would be a perfect engagement ring. Maybe I should buy it. And my very next thought after that was, What the fuck am I doing? Not just the ring––which Sarah would’ve hated, by the way––but the vasectomy, all of it. I was doing it all for you, and I know that’s not normal, and it definitely wasn’t fair to her, so I ended things. That day.”

  He shakes his head. “I scared myself so much that I couldn’t tell you what had happened. It was terrifying to realize how much I loved you. And then you and Trey broke up, and––God, Poppy, of course all of it was because of you. Everything is because of you. Everything.”

  His eyes are wet now, shimmering in the dim light over the sink, and his shoulders are rigid, and my gut feels like there’s a knife twisting into it.

  Alex shakes his head, a small, restrained gesture, little more than a twitch. “It’s not something you’ve done to me,” he says. “I kept hoping things would change for me, but they never have.”

  He takes a step toward me, and I fight to maintain my composure.

  A breath slips out of me, my shoulders relaxing, and Alex takes another step toward me, his eyes heavy, mouth twisted. “And I doubted myself for a long time before I ended things, because I did love her,” he says, “and I wanted to make it work because she’s amazing, and we’re good together, and we want all the same things, and I loved her in this way that feels . . . so clear and easy to understand, and manageable.”

  He breaks off, shaking his head again. The tears in his eyes make them look like the surface of some river, dangerous and wild and gorgeous. “I don’t know how to love someone as much as I love you,” he says. “It’s terrifying. And I get these bursts of thinking I can handle it and then I think about what it will do to me if I lose you, and I panic and pull away, and—I’ve never known if I’ll be able to make you happy. But the other night—it sounds so ridiculous, but we were looking at Tinder, and you said you’d swipe right on me—and that’s the kind of tiny thing that feels so huge when it’s you. I lay awake trying to figure out what you meant for hours that night. I’m broken, and, yeah, probably repressed, and I know I’m not who you’ve ever pictured yourself with. I know it doesn’t seem like we make any sense, and we probably don’t, and maybe I could never make you happy—”

  “Alex.” I reach out for him with both hands, pull him in against me. His arms come around me, and his head bows until he’s a giant question mark, hanging over me. “It’s not your job to make me happy, okay? You can’t make anyone happy. I’m happy just because you exist, and that’s as much of my happiness as you have control over.”

  His hands curve in against my spine, and I twine my fingers into his shirt.

  “I don’t know exactly what it all means, but I know I love you the same way you love me, and you’re not the only one that scares.” I scrunch my eyes shut, gathering the courage to go on.

  “I feel broken too,” I tell him, my voice cracking into something thin and hoarse. “I’ve always felt like once someone sees me deep down, that’s it. There’s something ugly in there, or unlovable, and you’re the only person who’s ever made me feel like I’m okay.” His hand sweeps gently across my face, and I open my eyes, meet his head-on. “There’s nothing scarier than the chance that, once you really have all of me, that changes. But I want all of you, so I’m trying to be brave.”

  “Nothing will change how I feel about you,” he murmurs. “I’ve been trying to stop loving you since that night you went inside to make out with the pothead water taxi driver.”

  I laugh, and he smiles just a little. I take his jaw in my hands and kiss him softly on the mouth, and after a second, he starts to kiss me back, and it’s damp from tears and urgent and powerful, sending shock waves through me.

  “Can you just do me one favor?” I ask.

  He knots his hands against my spine. “Hm?”

  “Only hold my hand when you want to.”

  “Poppy,” he says, “there may come a day when I no longer need to be touching you at all times, but that day is not today.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE REHEARSAL DINNER is at a bistro that Tham invested in during its early days, a place ablaze in candlelight and dripping with bespoke crystal chandeliers. There’s no wedding party, just the grooms and their officiant, thus the lack of a true rehearsal, but Tham’s whole extended family lives in northern California and have shown up, along with a lot of David’s friends who were at the party last night.

  “Woooow,” I say as we walk inside. “This is the sexiest place I’ve ever been.”

  “Nikolai’s fumigation-tent balcony is deeply offended,” Alex says.

  “That fumigation tent will always be in my heart,” I promise, and squeeze his hand, which emphasizes our size difference in a way that makes my spine tingle. “Hey, do you remember when I melted down about having slow loris hands? In Colorado? After I rolled my ankle?”

  “Poppy,” he says pointedly, “I remember everything.”

  I narrow my eyes at him. “But you said—”

  He sighs. “I know what I said. But I’m telling you now, I remember it all.”

  “Some would say that makes you a liar.”

  “No,” he says, “what it makes me is someone who was embarrassed to still remember exactly what you were wearing the first time I saw you, and what you ordered once at McDonald’s in Tennessee, and who needed to preserve some small measure of dignity.”

  “Aw, Alex,” I coo, teasing even as my heart flutters happily. “You forfeited your dignity when you showed up to O-Week in khakis.”

  “Hey!” he says, tone chiding. “Don’t forget that you love me.”

  My cheeks flush warm without any hint of embarrassment. “I could never forget that.”

  I love him, and he remembers everything, because he loves me too. My insides feel like an explosion of gold confetti.

  Someone calls from the far side of the restaurant then. “Is that Miss Poppy Wright?”

  Mr. Nilsen strides toward us in a baggy gray suit, his blond mustache the exact size and shape as the day I met him. Alex’s hand frees itself from mine. For whatever reason, he obviously does not want to hold my hand in front of his father, and I feel a rush of happiness that he felt comfortable doing what he needed to.

  “Hi, Mr. Nilsen!” I say, and he stops abruptly a few feet in front of me, kindly smiling and definitely not planning to hug me. He’s wearing a comically large rainbow pin on his lapel. It looks like, with one wrong move, it could tip him over.

  “Oh, please,” he says. “You’re not a kid anymore. You can call me Ed.”

  “What the hell, you can call me Ed too,” I say
.

  “Uh,” he says.

  “She’s joking,” Alex supplies.

  “Oh,” Ed Nilsen says uncertainly. Alex goes red. I go red.

  Now is not the time to embarrass him. “I was so sorry to hear about Betty,” I recover. “She was an amazing woman.”

  His shoulders slump. “She was a rock to our family,” he says. “Just like her daughter.” At that, he starts to tear up, pulls off his wire-frame glasses, and blows a breath out as he wipes at his eyes. “Not sure how we’re going to get by without her this weekend.”

  And I feel sympathy for him, of course. He’s lost someone he loved. Again.

  But so have his sons, and standing here with him, while he tears up freely, grieves like every person deserves to, there’s also something like anger building up in me.

  Because next to me, Alex ironed out all his own emotion as soon as he saw his father approaching, and I know that’s no coincidence.

  I don’t mean to say it aloud, but that’s how it comes out, with the subtlety of a battering ram: “But you will get through it. Because your son’s getting married, and he needs you.”

  Ed Nilsen gives me an unironic Sad Puppy Face. “Well, of course,” he says, sounding mildly stunned. “If you’ll excuse me, I have to . . .” He never finishes the sentence, just looks at Alex with a rather blank confusion and squeezes his son’s shoulder before drifting away.

  Beside me, Alex lets out an anxious breath, and I wheel toward him. “I’m sorry! I just made that weird. Sorry.”

  “No.” He slips his hand back into mine. “Actually, I think I just developed a fetish that’s specifically you delivering hard truths to my father.”

  “In that case,” I say, “let’s go have some words with him about that mustache.”

  I start to walk away, and Alex pulls me back to him, his hands light on my waist, voice low beside my ear. “In case I don’t kiss you as pornographically as I want to for the rest of the night, please know that after this trip, I’ll be investing in therapy to understand why I feel incapable of expressing happiness in front of my family.”

  “And thus my fetish of Alex Nilsen Exhibiting Self-Care was born,” I say, and he sneaks a quick kiss on the side of my head.

  Just then, a wash of squeals and shrieks floats through the front doors of the bistro, and Alex steps back from me. “And that will be the nieces and nephew.”

  32

  This Summer

  BRYCE’S KIDS ARE six and four years old, both girls, and Cameron’s son is just over two. Tham’s sister has a six-year-old daughter too, and together, the four of them run wild through the restaurant, giggles ricocheting off the chandeliers.

  Alex is happy to chase after them, to fling himself onto the floor when they try to knock him over, and to hoist them, happily shrieking, into the air when he catches them.

  He is the Alex I know with them, funny and open and playful, and even if I’m not sure how to interact with kids, when he pulls me into the game, I try my best.

  “We’re princesses,” Tham’s niece, Kat, tells me, taking my hand. “But we’re also warriors so we have to kill the dragon!”

  “And Uncle Alex is the dragon?” I confirm, and she nods, wide-eyed and solemn.

  “But we don’t have to kill him,” she explains breathlessly. “If we can tame him, he can be our pet.”

  From halfway under a table where he’s fending off the Nilsen brood one at a time, he shoots me an abbreviated Sad Puppy look.

  “Okay,” I say to Kat. “What’s the plan?”

  The night moves in ebbs and flows. Cocktail hour first, then dinner, a myriad of tiny gourmet pizzas all decked out in goat cheese and arugula, summer squash and balsamic drizzle, pickled red onion and grilled brussels sprouts, and all kinds of things that would make pizza purists like Rachel Krohn scoff.

  We take seats at the kids’ table, which Bryce’s wife, Angela, thanks me tipsily for about a hundred times after the meal is over. “I love my kids, but sometimes I just want to sit down to dinner and talk about something other than Peppa Pig.”

  “Huh,” I say, “we mostly talked about Russian literature.”

  She slaps my arm harder than she means to when she laughs, then grabs Bryce by the arm and pulls him over. “Honey, you have to hear what Poppy just said.”

  She hangs on him, and he’s a little stiff—a Nilsen deep down—but he also keeps a hand on her low back. He doesn’t laugh when Angela makes me repeat myself, but says in his flat, sincere, Nilsen way, “That’s funny. Russian literature.”

  Before dessert and coffee are served, Tham’s sister (hugely pregnant, with twins) stands and clinks a fork to her water glass, calling attention at the head of the arrangement of tables. “Our parents aren’t much for public speaking, so I agreed to give a little toast tonight.”

  Already teary-eyed, she takes a deep breath. “Who would’ve thought my annoying little brother would turn out to be my best friend?” She talks about her and Tham’s childhood in northern California, their screaming fights, the time he took her car without asking and crashed it into a telephone pole. And then the turning point, when she and her first husband divorced, and Tham asked her to move in with him. When she caught him crying while watching Sweet Home Alabama and, after teasing him appropriately, sunk down onto the couch to watch the rest with him, until they were both crying while laughing at themselves and decided they needed to go out in the middle of the night to get ice cream.

  “When I got married again,” she says, “the hardest thing was knowing I’d probably never get to live with you again. And when you started talking about David, I could tell how smitten you were, and I was scared I was going to lose even more of you. Then I met David.”

  She makes a face that elicits laughter, relaxed on Tham’s side of the family and restrained on David’s. “Right away I knew I was getting another best friend. There’s no such thing as a perfect marriage, but everything you two touch becomes beautiful and this will be no different.”

  There’s applause and hugging and kissing of cheeks, and servers have started to come out of the kitchen with dessert when suddenly Mr. (Ed) Nilsen is on his feet, swaying awkwardly, tapping a knife to his water glass so lightly he might as well be pantomiming it.

  David shifts in his seat, and Alex’s shoulders rise protectively as attention settles on his father.

  “Yes,” Ed says.

  “Starting off strong,” Alex whispers tightly. I squeeze his knee beneath the table and fold my hand into his.

  Ed takes off his glasses, holds them at his side, and clears his throat. “David,” he says, turning toward the grooms. “My sweet boy. I know we haven’t always had it easy. I know you haven’t,” he adds more quietly. “But you’ve always been a ball of sunshine, and . . .” He blows out a breath. He swallows some rising emotion and continues. “I can’t take credit for how you’ve turned out. I wasn’t always there how I should’ve been. But your brothers did an amazing job raising you, and I’m proud to be your father.” He looks down at the floor, gathering himself. “I’m proud to see you marrying the man of your dreams. Tham, welcome to the family.”

  As the applause lifts around the room, David crosses to his father. He shakes his hand, then thinks better of it and pulls Ed into a hug. It’s brief and awkward, but it happens, and beside me Alex relaxes. Maybe when this wedding is over, everything will go back to how it was before, but maybe they’ll change too.

  After all, Mr. Nilsen is wearing a big-ass gay-pride pin. Maybe things can always get better between people who want to do a good job loving each other. Maybe that’s all it takes.

  That night, when we get back to the hotel, Alex takes a quick shower while I flip through channels on the TV, pausing on a rerun of Bachelor in Paradise. When Alex gets out of the bathroom, he climbs onto the bed and draws me into him, and I lift my arms over my head so he can take my bag
gy T-shirt off, his hands spanning wide across my ribs, his mouth dropping kisses down my stomach. “Tiny fighter,” he whispers against my skin.

  This time everything is different between us. Softer, gentler, slower. We take our time, say nothing that can’t be said with our hands and mouths and limbs.

  I love you, he tells me in a dozen different ways, and I say it back every time.

  When we’re finished, we lie together, tangled up and sheened in sweat, breathing deep and calm. If we talked, one of us would have to say Tomorrow is the last day of this trip. We’d have to say What next, and there’s no answer for that yet.

  So we don’t talk. We just fall asleep together, and in the morning, when Alex gets back from his run with two cups of coffee and a piece of coffee cake, we just kiss some more, furiously this time, like the room’s on fire and this is the best way to put it out. Then, when we have to, when we’re out of time, we unwind from each other to get ready for the wedding.

  The venue is a Spanish-style house with wrought-iron gates and a lush garden. Palm trees and columns and long, dark wooden tables with high-backed, hand-carved chairs. Their floral arrangements are all vibrant yellow, sunflowers and daisies and delicate sprigs of tiny wildflowers, and a white-clad string quartet plays something dreamy and romantic as guests are entering the grounds.

  More high-backed chairs are lined up on a stretch of uninterrupted lawn, a burst of yellow flowers lining the aisle between them. The ceremony is short and sweet because—in David’s words, as they’re walking back down the aisle to an upbeat, strings version of “Here Comes the Sun”—it’s time to party!

  The day is whooshing past, and an ache takes up residence beneath my clavicles that seems to deepen with the twilight. It’s like I’m experiencing the whole night twice over, two versions of the same film reel playing slightly overlapped.

  There’s the me who’s here now, eating an incredible seven-course Vietnamese meal. The same one who’s chasing kids around the legs of oblivious adults, playing hide-and-seek with them and Alex under tables. The same one who’s chugging margaritas on the dance floor with Alex while “Pour Some Sugar on Me” plays at top volume and drops of sweat and champagne sprinkle over the crowd. The same one who’s pulling him close when the Flamingos come on, playing “I Only Have Eyes for You,” and who buries my face in his neck, trying to memorize his smell more thoroughly than the last twelve years have allowed, so I can summon it at will, and everything about this night will come rushing back: his hand tight on my waist, his mouth ajar against my temple, his hips just barely swaying as we hold on to each other.