Beach Read

by Emily Henry

  “Yeah, I know.” An unconvincing smile flitted across one corner of his mouth. “But I’m also not the bright light.”

  Sure, he wasn’t a bright light, but he wasn’t the cynic I’d thought either. He was a realist who was a little too afraid of hope to see things clearly when it came to his own life. But he was also exceptionally good at sitting with people through their shit, making them feel less alone without promises or empty platitudes. Me. Dave. Grace.

  He wasn’t afraid for things to get ugly, to see someone at their weakest, and he didn’t fall over himself trying to talk me out of my own feelings. He just witnessed them, and somehow, that let them finally get out of my body after years of imprisonment.

  “Whatever you are,” I said, “it’s better than a night-light. And for what it’s worth, as a former fairy princess and the ultimate secret soft-girl, I think you’re plenty gentle.”

  His eyes were so warm and intense on me that I was sure he could read all my thoughts, everything I felt and thought about him, written on my pupils. The heat in my face rushed through my whole body, and I focused on his tattoo again, nudging it with my hand. “And also, for what it’s worth, I think the giant black blob suits you. Not because you’re a black hole. But because it’s funny, and weird.”

  “If you think so, then I have no regrets,” he murmured.

  “You got a tattoo,” I said, still a little amazed.

  “I have several, but if you want to see the others, you have to buy me dinner.”

  “No, I mean, you got a marriage tattoo.” I chanced a glance at him and found him staring at me, as if waiting for some big reveal about my meaning. “That’s some Cary Grant–level romance shit.”

  “Humiliating.” He went to rub it again, but found my fingers resting there.

  “Impressive,” I countered.

  His calloused palm slid on top of mine, dwarfing it. Instantly, I thought of that hand touching me through my shirt, gliding over the bare skin of my stomach. His gravelly voice dragged me out of the memory: “What about the Golden Boy?”

  I balked. “Jacques?”

  “Sorry,” Gus said. “The Jacques. Six years is a long time. You must have thought you’d wind up with matching tattoos and a gaggle of children.”

  “I thought . . .” I trailed off as I sorted through the alphabet soup in my brain. Gus’s fingers were warm and rough, careful and light over mine, and I had to swim through a resistance pool full of thoughts like I bet scientists could exactly reconstruct him from this hand alone to get to any memory of Jacques. “He was a leading man. You know?”

  “Should I?” Gus teased.

  “If you’re taking our challenge seriously,” I countered. “I mean that he was romantic. Dramatic. He lit up every room and had an incredible story for any occasion. And I fell in love with him in all these amazing moments we had.

  “But then, whenever we were just sitting together—like eating breakfast in a filthy apartment, knowing we’d have to clean up after a big party . . . I don’t know, when we weren’t gleaming for each other, I sort of felt like we just worked okay together. Like we were costars in a movie and when the cameras weren’t on, we didn’t have all that much to talk about. But we wanted the same life, you know?”

  Gus nodded thoughtfully. “I never thought about how Naomi’s and my lives would work together, but I knew that’s what it would be: two lives. You chose someone who wanted a relationship. That makes sense for you.”

  “Yeah, but that’s not enough.” I shook my head. “You know that feeling, when you’re watching someone sleep and you feel overwhelmed with joy that they exist?”

  A faint smile appeared in the corner of his mouth, and he just barely nodded.

  “Well, I loved Jacques,” I said. “And I loved his family and our life and his cooking, and that he was passionate about the ER and read a lot of nonfiction like my dad and—well, my mom was sick. You knew that, right?”

  Gus’s mouth pressed into a thin, serious line and his brow furrowed. “From our nonfiction class,” he said. “But she was in remission.”

  I nodded. “Only, after I graduated, it came back. And I’d convinced myself she was going to beat it again. But a part of me was really comforted by the fact that, if she died, she would have at least met the man I was going to marry. She thought Jacques was so handsome and amazing, and Dad trusted him to give me the life I wanted. And I loved all that. But whenever I watched Jacques sleep, I felt nothing.”

  Gus shifted on the sofa beside me, his gaze dropping. “And when your dad died? Didn’t you want to marry Jacques then? Since your dad had known him?”

  I took a deep breath. I hadn’t admitted this to anyone. It all felt too complicated, too hard to explain until now. “In a way, I think that almost set me free. I mean, firstly, my dad wasn’t who I thought he was, so his opinion of Jacques meant less.

  “But more than that, when I lost my dad . . . I mean, my dad was a liar, but I loved him. Really loved him, so much that just knowing he isn’t on this planet still tears me in half whenever I think about it.” Even as I said it, the pain pressed into me, a crushing but familiar weight on every square inch of my body.

  “And with Jacques,” I went on, “we loved the best versions of each other, inside our picturesque life, but once things got ugly, there was just . . . nothing left between us. He didn’t love me when I wasn’t the fairy princess, you know? And I didn’t love him anymore either. There were thousands of times I’d thought, He is the perfect boyfriend. But once my dad was gone, and I was furious with him but also couldn’t stop missing him, I realized I’d never thought, Jacques is so perfectly my favorite person.”

  Gus nodded. “It didn’t overwhelm you to watch him sleep.”

  It was the kind of thing that, if he’d said it even a few weeks ago, I might’ve taken as mockery. But I knew Gus now. I knew that head tilt, that serious expression that meant he was in the process of puzzling something out about me.

  I’d seen it on his face that day on campus when he pointed out that I gave everyone happy endings. I’d seen it again in Pete’s bookstore when I made a jab about him writing Hemingway circle-jerk fiction.

  That day, in class, he’d been working something out about who I was and how I saw the world. That day at Pete’s he’d been realizing I loathed him.

  I wanted to take it back, show him that I understood him now, that I trusted him. I wanted to give him something secret, like what he’d given me when he talked about Naomi. I wanted to tell him another true story, instead of a beautiful lie.

  So I said, “Once, for my birthday, Jacques took me to New Orleans. We went to all these amazing jazz bars and Cajun restaurants and witchy shops. And the whole time, I was texting Shadi about how badly I wished we could be together, drinking martinis and watching The Witches of Eastwick.”

  Gus laughed. “Shadi,” he said ruefully. “I remember Shadi.”

  “Yeah, well, she remembers you,” I said.

  “So you talk about me.” Gus’s smile inched higher and his eyes flashed. “To your perfectly favorite person, Shadi?”

  “You talk about me to Pete,” I challenged.

  He gave one nod, confirming. “And what do you say?”

  “You’re the one who said I could ask anything,” I shot back. “What do you say?”

  “It’s strictly need to know,” he said. “The last thing I told her must’ve been that we got caught making out at a drive-in theater.”

  I laughed and pushed him away, covering my burning face with my hands. “Now I’ll never be able to order another pink eye!”

  Gus laughed and caught my wrists, tugging them from my face. “Did she call it that again?”

  “Of course she did!”

  He shook his head, grinning. “I’m beginning to suspect her coffee expertise is not what keeps her in business.”

  W
hen we finally stood to go to bed that night, Gus didn’t say good night. He said, “Tomorrow.” And that became our nightly ritual.

  Sometimes he came to my house. Sometimes I went to his. The wall between him and the rest of the world wasn’t gone, but it was lower, at least between us.

  On Thursday night, while sitting on Sonya’s couch and waiting for our pad thai to be delivered, he finally told me about Pete. Not just that she was his aunt—and had been his coach for soccer, which he assured me he was terrible at—but also that she’d been the reason he’d moved here when Naomi left him. “Pete lived near me when I was a kid, back in Ann Arbor. She never came over—didn’t get along with my dad—but she was always in my life. Anyway, when I was in high school, Maggie got the job teaching geology at the school here, so they moved out this way and they’ve been here ever since. She begged me to come. She knew the guy who was selling this house and went so far as to lend me a down payment. Just let me know I could pay her back whenever.”

  “Wow,” I said. “I’m still caught on the fact that Maggie’s a geology professor.”

  He nodded. “Never mention a rock in front of her. I mean it. Never.”

  “I’ll try,” I said. “But that’s going to be extremely hard, what with how often rocks come up in everyday conversation.”

  “You’d be shocked,” he promised. “Shocked and appalled and, more importantly, bored to the brink of death.”

  “Someone should invent a boredom EpiPen.”

  “I think that’s essentially what drugs are,” Gus said. “Anyway, January. Enough about rocks. Tell me why you moved here, really.”

  The words tangled in my throat. I could only get out a few at a time. “My dad.”

  Gus nodded, as if that were enough of an explanation if I couldn’t force myself to go on. “He died, and you wanted to get away?”

  I shifted forward, leaning my elbows on my knees. “He grew up here,” I said. “And when he passed, I—I found out he’d been back here. Kind of a lot.”

  Gus’s eyebrows pinched in the middle. He ran his hand back through his hair, which was, as usual, pushed messily off his forehead. “‘Found out’?”

  “This was his house,” I said. “His second house. With . . . the woman.” I couldn’t bring myself to say her name. I didn’t want Gus to know her, to have an opinion on her either way, and it was a small enough town that he probably did.

  “Oh.” He ran his hand through his hair again. “You mentioned her, kind of.” He sat back into the couch, the beer bottle in his hand hanging along the inside of his thigh.

  “Did you ever meet him?” I blurted, before I’d decided whether I even wanted the answer, and my heart began to race as I waited for him to respond. “You’ve been here five years. You must’ve seen . . . them.”

  Gus studied me with liquidy, dark eyes, his brow tense. He shook his head. “Honestly, I’m not really into the neighbor thing. Most of the houses on this block are rentals. If I saw him, I would’ve assumed he was on vacation. I wouldn’t remember.”

  I looked away quickly and nodded. On the one hand, it was a relief, knowing Gus had never watched the two of them barbecuing on the deck, or pulling weeds side by side in the garden, or doing any other normal couple things they might’ve done here—and that he didn’t seem to know who That Woman was. But on the other, I felt a sinking in my stomach and realized a part of me had been hoping, all this time, that Gus had known him. That he’d have some story to tell that I’d never heard, a new piece of my father right here, and the miserably thin envelope taunting me from the gin box wasn’t really all I had to look forward to of him.

  “January,” Gus said gently. “I’m so sorry.”

  I had begun to cry without giving myself permission to. I pressed my face into my hands to hide it, and Gus shifted closer, put an arm around my shoulders, and gathered me to him. Gently, he pulled me across his lap and held me there, one hand knotted into my hair, cradling the back of my head, as the other curled around my waist.

  Once the tears had started, I couldn’t stop them. The anger and frustration. The hurt and betrayal. The confusion that had been clogging my brain ever since I found out the truth. It all heaved out of me.

  Gus’s hand moved softly through my hair, turning slow circles against the back of my neck, and his mouth pressed into my cheek, my chin, my eye, catching tears as they fell until, gradually, I settled. Or maybe just ran out of tears. Maybe realized I was sitting in Gus’s lap like a toddler, having my tears kissed away. Or that his mouth had paused, pressed into my forehead, his full lips slightly parted.

  I turned my face into his chest and breathed him in, the smell of his sweat and the incense I now knew he burned when he first started writing each day, his lone prework ritual, and the occasional stress cigarette (though he’d largely quit smoking). He crushed me to him, arms tightening, fingers curling against the back of my head.

  My whole body heated until I felt like lava, burning and liquid. Gus pulled me closer, and I molded to him, poured myself into every line of him. Each of his breaths brought us closer until finally he straightened, pulling me over him so my knees straddled his hips, his arm tight across my back. The feeling of him underneath me sent a fresh rush of heat up my thighs. His hand grazed along my waist as we stared at each other.

  It was that night at the drive-in times ten. Because now I knew how he felt on top of me. Now I knew what the scrape of his jaw against my skin did to me, how his tongue would test the gaps between our mouths, taste the soft skin at the top of my chest. I was jealous he’d had more of me than I’d had of him. I wanted to kiss his stomach, sink my teeth into his hips, dig my fingers into his back and drag them down the length of him.

  His hands slid toward my spine, skidding up it as I folded over him. My nose skated down his. I could almost taste his cinnamon breath from his open mouth. His right hand came back to the side of my face, roaming lightly down to my collarbone, then back to my mouth, where his tense fingers pressed into my bottom lip.

  I had no thoughts of caution or wisdom. I had thoughts of him on top of me, under me, behind me. His hands setting fire to my skin. I was breathing hard. So was he.

  The tip of my tongue brushed his finger, which curled reflexively into my mouth, tugging me closer until our lips were separated only by an inch of electric, buzzing air.

  His chin tipped up, the edge of his mouth brushing mine infuriatingly lightly. His eyes were as dark as oil, slick and hot as they poured down me. His hands skated down my sides, out along my calves, and back up my thighs to cup my butt, grip tightening.

  I drew a shuddering breath as his fingers climbed beneath the hem of my shorts, burning into my skin. “Fuck, January,” he whispered, shaking his head. “You feel so good.”

  The doorbell rang and all the motion, the momentum, crashed into a wall of reality.

  We stared at each other, frozen for a moment. Gus’s eyes dipped down me and back up again, and his throat pulsed. “Takeout,” he said thickly.

  I jumped up, the fuzz clearing from my head, and smoothed my hair, wiping my teary face as I crossed to the front door. I signed the credit card slip, accepted the bag full of foam containers, and thanked the delivery guy in a voice as thick and muddled as Gus’s had been.

  When I closed the door and turned back, Gus was standing uneasily, his hair messy and his shirt sticking to him where I’d cried on it. He scratched the crown of his head and his gaze flicked tentatively toward mine. “Sorry.”

  I shrugged. “You don’t need to be.”

  “I should be,” he said. We left it at that.

  19

  The Beach

  On Friday, we drove to Dave’s house for the second part of the interview. The first had been so thorough Gus hadn’t planned to have a second, but Dave had called him that morning. After thinking it over, his mother had things to say about New Eden.


  The house was a small split-level, probably built in the late sixties, and it smelled like someone had been chain-smoking inside it ever since. Despite that, and its shabby decor, it was extremely tidy: blankets folded on couch arms, potted plants in a neat line by the door, pots hanging from hooks on the wall, and the sink scrubbed to sparkling.

  Dave Schmidt had to be right around our age, give or take a few years, but Julie-Ann Schmidt looked a good ten years older than my mother. She was tiny, her face round and soft with wrinkles. I wondered if it was a lifetime of being treated as if she were sweet, because of her figure and face, that had given her the almost toothy handshake she offered.

  She lived there with Dave. “I own the house, but he makes the payments.” She guffawed at that and patted his back. “He’s a good boy.” I watched Gus’s eyes narrow, appraising the situation. I thought he might be looking for hints of violence somewhere in their interactions, but Dave was mostly hunched and smiling in embarrassment. “He was always a good boy. And you should hear him on the piano.”

  “Can I get you anything to drink?” Dave hurried to ask.

  “Water would be great,” I answered, more to give Dave an excuse to hide than because I was actually thirsty. As he disappeared into the kitchen, I ambled around the living room, studying all the walnut picture frames mounted to the wall. It was like Dave had been frozen at about eight years old, in a V-neck sweater vest and dull green T-shirt. His father was in most of the shots, but even in the ones he didn’t inhabit, it was easy to imagine he’d been behind the camera, snapping the tiny smiling woman and the baby on her hip, the toddler holding her hand, the gawky child sticking his tongue out next to the gorilla exhibit at the zoo.

  Dave’s dad had been lanky and brown-haired with bushy eyebrows and a receding chin. Dave looked just like him.

  “So I understand you had more to say,” Gus began. “Things you thought Dave couldn’t offer.”

  “Of course I do.” Julie-Ann took a seat on the blue plaid love seat, and Gus and I perched beside each other on the roughly woven tan couch. “I’ve got a well-rounded look. Dave only saw what we let him, and then when we left like we did—well, I’m afraid his opinion of the place probably swung from one extreme to the other.”