by Emily Henry
Taller than most, stiller than all, his shirtsleeves rolled to the elbows and boots resting on the metal rung of his chair, his shoulders hunched forward and his phone out, thumb slowly scrolling up his screen. My heart rises into my throat until I can taste it, all metallic and hot and pulsing too hard.
There’s a part of me—fine, a majority—that wants to bolt, even after flying all the way here, but right then the door squeals open and Alex glances up, his eyes locking onto me.
We’re looking at each other, and I imagine I look nearly as shocked as he does, like I didn’t arrive specifically on a hot tip that he was here. I force myself to take a few steps toward him, then stop at the end of the table, where, gradually, the other teachers look up from their beers and white wines and vodka tonics to process the fact of me.
“Hi,” Alex says, little more than a whisper.
“Hi,” I say.
I wait for the rest to pour out. Nothing does.
“Who’s your friend?” an old lady in a maroon turtleneck asks. I clock her for Delallo, even before I see the ELHS name badge she’s still wearing around her neck.
“She’s . . .” Alex’s voice drops off. He stands from his chair. “Hi,” he says again.
The rest of the table are exchanging uncomfortable looks, kind of scooting their chairs in, angling their backs away in an attempt to give us a level of privacy that’s impossible at this point. Delallo, I notice, keeps one ear tilted almost precisely toward us.
“I came to the school,” I manage.
“Oh,” Alex says. “Okay.”
“I had this plan.” I rub my sweaty palms against my orange polyester bell-bottoms, wishing I wasn’t dressed like a traffic cone. “I was going to show up to the school, because I wanted you to know that if there’s one thing in this world that could get me to go there, it’s you.”
His eyes briefly pass over the table of teachers again. So far, my speech doesn’t seem to be comforting him. His eyes cut to mine, then drop to a vague point on my left. “Yeah, I know you really hate it there,” he murmurs.
“I do,” I agree. “I have a lot of bad memories there, and I wanted to show up there, and just, like, tell you, that . . . that I would go anywhere for you, Alex.”
“Poppy,” he says, the word half sigh, half plea.
“No, wait,” I say. “I know I have a fifty-fifty chance here, and there’s so much of me that wants to not even say the rest of this, Alex, but I need to, so please, don’t tell me yet if you need to break my heart. Okay? Let me say this before I lose the nerve.”
His lips part for a moment, his green-gold eyes like storm-flooded rivers, brutal and rushing. He presses his mouth closed again and nods.
Feeling like I’m jumping off a cliff, unable to see what lies through the fog beneath me, I go on.
“I loved running my blog,” I tell him. “I loved it so much, and I thought it was because I loved traveling—which I do. But in the last few years, everything changed. I wasn’t happy. Traveling felt different. And maybe you were sort of right that I came at you like you were a Band-Aid that could fix everything. Or whatever—a fun destination to give me a dopamine rush and a new perspective.”
His eyes drop. He won’t look at me, and I feel like even if he was the one who said it first, my confirmation is eating him alive.
“I started therapy,” I blurt out, trying to keep things moving. “And I was trying to figure out why it feels so different now, and I was listing all the differences between my life then and now, and it wasn’t just you. I mean, you’re the biggest one. You were on those trips, and then you weren’t, but that wasn’t the only change. All those trips we took, the best thing about them—other than doing it all with you—was the people.”
His gaze lifts, narrowed in thought.
“I loved meeting new people,” I explain. “I loved . . . feeling connected. Feeling interesting. Growing up here, I was so fucking lonely, and I always felt like there was something wrong with me. But I told myself if I went somewhere else, it would be different. There’d be other people like me.”
“I know that,” he says. “I know you hate it here, Poppy.”
“I did,” I say. “I hated it, so I escaped. And when Chicago didn’t fix everything for me, I left there too. Once I started traveling, though, things finally felt better. I met people, and—I don’t know, without the baggage of history or the fear of what would happen, it felt so much easier to open up to people. To make friends. I know it sounds pathetic, but all those little chance encounters we had—those made me less lonely. Those made me feel like I was someone people could love. And then I got the R+R job, and the trips changed; the people changed. I only met chefs and hotel managers, people wanting write-ups. I’d go on amazing trips, but I’d come home feeling empty. And now I realize it’s because I wasn’t connecting to anyone.”
“I’m glad you figured it out,” Alex says. “I want you to be happy.”
“But here’s the thing,” I say. “Even if I quit my job and started taking the blog seriously again, went back to meeting all the Bucks and Litas and Mathildes of the world—it’s not going to make me happy.
“I needed those people, because I felt alone. I thought I had to run hundreds of miles away from here to find some place to belong. I spent my whole life thinking anyone outside my family who got too close, saw too much, wouldn’t want me anymore. The safest thing was those quick, serendipitous moments with strangers. That’s all I thought I could have.
“And then there was you.” My voice wobbles dangerously. I steel myself, straighten my spine. “I love you so much that I’ve spent twelve years putting as much distance between us as I could. I moved. I traveled. I dated other people. I talked about Sarah all the fucking time because I knew you had a crush on her, and it felt safer that way. Because the last person I could take being rejected by was you.
“And now I know that. I know it’s not traveling that’s gonna get me out of this slump and it’s not a new job and it’s sure as hell not chance encounters with water taxi drivers. All of that, every minute of it, has been running away from you, and I don’t want to do that anymore.
“I love you, Alex Nilsen. Even if you don’t give me a real chance, I’m always going to love you. And I’m scared to move back to Linfield because I don’t know if I’d like it here, or if I’d be bored, or if I’d make any friends, and because I’m terrified to run into the people who made me feel like I didn’t matter and for them to decide they were right about me.
“I want to stay in New York,” I say. “I like it there, and I think you would too, but you asked me what I’d be willing to give up for you, and now I know the answer is: everything. There’s nothing in this whole world that I’ve built in my head that I’m not prepared to let go of to build a new one with you. I’ll go into East Linfield High—I don’t just mean today. I mean if you want to stay here, I’ll go to fucking high school basketball games with you. I’ll wear hand-painted T-shirts with players’ names on them—I’ll learn the players’ names! I won’t just make them up! I’ll go to your dad’s house and drink diet soda and try my hardest not to cuss or talk about our sex life, and I’ll babysit your nieces and nephew with you in Betty’s house—I’ll help you take down wallpaper! I hate taking down wallpaper!
“You’re not a vacation, and you’re not the answer to my career crisis, but when I’m in a crisis or I’m sick or I’m sad, you’re the only thing I want. And when I’m happy, you make me so much happier. I still have a lot to figure out, but the one thing I know is, wherever you are, that’s where I belong. I’ll never belong anywhere like I belong with you. No matter what I’m feeling, I want you next to me. You’re home to me, Alex. And I think I’m that for you too.”
By the time I finish, I’m breathing hard. Alex’s face is torqued with worry, but beyond that I can’t read too many specifics. He doesn’t say anything right away, and
the silence—or lack of it (Pink Floyd has started to play over the speakers and a sports announcer is jabbering on one of the TVs overhead)—unfurls like a rug, stretching longer and longer between us until I feel like I’m on the opposite side of a very dark, beer-sticky mansion.
“And one more thing.” I fish my phone out of my bag, open to the correct photo, and hold it out to him. He doesn’t take the phone, just looks at the image on-screen without touching.
“What’s this?” he says softly.
“That,” I say, “is a houseplant I’ve kept alive since I got back from Palm Springs.”
A quiet laugh leaks out of him.
“It’s a snake plant,” I say. “And apparently they’re extremely hard to kill. Like, I could probably take a chainsaw to it and it would survive. But it’s the longest I’ve kept anything alive, and I wanted you to see it. So you’d know. I’m serious.”
He nods without saying anything, and I tuck my phone back into my bag.
“That’s it,” I say, a little bewildered. “That’s the whole speech. You can talk now.”
The corner of his mouth quirks, but the smile doesn’t stay, and even while it’s there, it holds nothing like mirth in its tight curve.
“Poppy.” My name has never sounded quite so long or miserable.
“Alex,” I say.
His hands go to his hips. He glances sidelong, though there’s nothing there to look at, except an Astroturf wall and a faded photo of someone in a pom-pom-topped golf hat. When he looks back at me, there are tears in his eyes, but I know right away he won’t let them fall. That’s the kind of self-restraint Alex Nilsen has.
He could be starving in a desert, and if the wrong person held out a glass of water to him, he’d nod politely and say no, thanks.
I swallow the goiter in my throat. “You can say anything. Whatever you need to.”
He lets out a breath, checks the floor, meets my eyes for barely an instant. “You know how I feel about you,” he says softly, like even as he admits it, it’s still a sort of secret.
“Yes.” My heart has started racing. I think I do. At least I did. But I know how much I hurt him by not thinking through things. I don’t totally understand it, maybe, but I’ve barely started to understand myself, so that’s not all that surprising.
He swallows now, the muscles down the line of his jaw dancing with shadows. “I honestly don’t know what to say,” he replies. “You terrified me. It doesn’t make any sense how quick my mind works with you. One second we’re kissing and the next, I’m thinking about what our grandkids might be named. It doesn’t make sense. I mean, look at us. We don’t make sense. We’ve always known that, Poppy.”
My heart is icing over, veins of cold working their way into its center.
Splitting it in half and me with it.
Now it’s my turn to say his name like a plea, like a prayer. “Alex.” It comes out thick. “I don’t know what you’re saying.”
His eyes drop, his teeth worrying over his bottom lip. “I don’t want you to give anything up,” he says. “I want us to just make sense, and we don’t, Poppy. I can’t watch it fall apart again.”
I’m nodding now. For a long time. It’s like I can’t stop accepting it, over and over again. Because this is what it feels like: like I’ll have to spend the rest of my life accepting that Alex can’t love me the way I love him.
“Okay,” I whisper.
He says nothing.
“Okay,” one more time. I tear my eyes from him as I feel the tears encroaching. I don’t want to make him comfort me, not for this. I turn and barrel toward the door, forcing my feet forward, keeping my chin high and my backbone straight.
When I make it to the door, I can’t help myself. I look back.
Alex is still frozen where I left him, and even if it kills me, I have to be honest right now. I have to say something I can’t take back, to stop running and hiding myself from him.
“I don’t regret telling you,” I say. “I said I’d give anything up, risk anything for you, and I meant it.” Even my own heart.
“I love you all the way, Alex,” I say. “I couldn’t have lived with myself if I hadn’t at least told you.”
And then I turn and step out into the brightly shining sun of the parking lot.
Only then do I really start to cry.
36
This Summer
I’M HEAVING. WHEEZING. Splintering as I cross the parking lot.
One hand clamped over my mouth as sobs snap through me, slice and stab in every sharp little corner of my lungs.
It’s both hard to keep moving and impossible to stop. I’m power walking to my parents’ car, then leaning against it, head bowed, horrible sounds coming out of me, snot dripping down my face, the blue of the sky and its fluffy cumulous clouds and the rustling trees alongside the parking lot all turning into a summery blur, the whole world melting into a swirl of color.
And then there’s a voice, spread thin by the breeze and the distance. It’s coming from behind me, obviously it’s his, and I don’t want to look.
I think one more look at him might be the tipping point, the thing that breaks my heart forever, but he’s saying my name.
“Poppy!” Once. Then again. “Poppy, wait.”
I shove all the emotions down. Not to ignore them. Not to deny them, because it almost feels good to feel something so purely, to know without question what it is my body’s experiencing. But because these are my feelings, not his. Not something for him to swoop in and shoulder, like he does almost compulsively.
I wipe my hands across my face and make myself breathe normally as I listen to his steps scuffing over asphalt. I turn as he’s slowing from a jog, taking his last steps at a determined but casual pace until he stops, closing me in between the van and himself.
There’s a lull before he speaks, a pause that’s just for our breathing.
After another second of silence, he says, “I started seeing a therapist too.”
Despite myself, I give a phlegmy laugh at the idea that he’s chased me down just to say this. “That’s good.” I wipe at my face with the heel of my hand.
“She says . . .” He rakes his hands through his hair. “She thinks I’m afraid to be happy.”
Why is he telling me this? one voice says in my head.
I hope he never stops talking, another says. Maybe we can keep talking forever. Maybe this conversation can span our entire lives, the way our text messages and phone calls seemed to for all those years.
I clear my throat. “Are you?”
He looks at me for a long moment, then gives the smallest shake of his head. “No,” he says. “I know if I got on a plane with you back to New York, I would be so fucking happy. For as long as you’d have me, I’d be happy.”
Again that kaleidoscopic swirl of colors blurs across my vision. I blink the tears back.
“And I want that so badly. I do regret every chance I missed to tell you how I felt, all the times I convinced myself I’d lose you if you really knew, or that we were too different. I want to just be happy with you. But I’m afraid of what comes after.” His voice cracks.
“I’m afraid of you realizing I bore you. Or meeting someone else. Or being unhappy and staying. And . . .” His voice catches. “I’m afraid of loving you for our entire lives, and then having to say goodbye. I’m afraid of you dying, and the world feeling useless. I’m afraid I won’t be able to keep getting out of bed if you’re gone, and if we had kids, they’d have these horrible lives where their amazing mom is gone, and their dad can’t look at them.”
His hand passes over his eyes, catching some of the moisture there.
“Alex,” I whisper. I don’t know how to comfort him. I can’t take any of his past pain away or promise it won’t happen again. All I can do is tell him the truth, as I’ve seen it. As I know it: �
��You already went through that. You lost someone you loved, and you kept getting out of bed. You were there for the people in your life, and you love them, and they love you back. You’ve got all of that in your life still. None of it went away. It didn’t end just because you lost one person.”
“I know,” he says. “I’m just . . .” His voice draws taut, and his huge shoulders shrug. “Scared.”
I reach out for his hands instinctively, and he lets me draw him closer, folding his fingers up between my palms. “Then we’ve found something else to agree on besides hating it when people call boats ‘she,’” I whisper. “It’s fucking terrifying to be in love with each other.”
He sniffs through a laugh, cups my jaw in his hands, and presses his forehead against mine, his eyes closing as his breath syncs with mine, our chests rising and falling like we’re two waves in the same body of water. “I never want to live without this,” he whispers, and I knot my fists into his shirt as if to keep him from slipping through my fingers.
The corners of his mouth twist as he breathes out, “Tiny fighter.”
His eyes slit open, and the flutter in my chest is so strong it almost hurts. I love him so much. I love him more than I did yesterday, and I already know tomorrow I’ll love him even more, because every piece of him he gives me is another to fall in love with.
He locks his arms tight around my back, his damp eyes so clear and open I feel like I could dive into him, swim through his thoughts, float in the brain I love more than any other on the planet.
His hands move into my hair, smoothing it against my neck, his eyes moving back and forth over my face with such beautifully calm Alexian purpose. “You are, you know.”
“A fighter?” I say.
“My home,” he says, and kisses me.
We are, I think. We’re home.
EPILOGUE
WE TAKE A bus tour of the city. We wear our matching I Heart New York sweatshirts and BeDazzled Big Apple hats. We carry a pair of binoculars and use them to lock onto anyone who bears even a passing resemblance to a celebrity.