“That was amazing,” I say. “I mean, for me. It’s never been like that for me before.”
He props himself up and looks down at me. “It’s never been like that for me either.”
I turn my face into his skin and kiss his rib cage. “Just making sure.”
After a few seconds, he says, “I want to do it again.”
“Me too,” I say. “I think we should.”
“Just making sure,” he parrots. I draw lazy patterns over his chest, and the arm he has slung low across my back squeezes tight. “We really can’t stay here tonight.”
I sigh. “I know. I just don’t want to move. Ever again.”
He flips my hair behind my shoulder, then kisses the skin left exposed there.
“Do you think that would’ve happened if Nikolai’s AC hadn’t gone out?” I ask.
Now Alex leans to kiss me right over the heart, sending chills down my stomach and up my legs that his fingers trace over. “That would’ve happened if Nikolai had never been born. It just might not have happened on this balcony.”
I sit up and swing one knee over his waist, settling onto his lap. “I’m glad it did.”
His hands run up my thighs, and heat gathers anew between my legs.
That’s when we hear the pounding on the door.
“ANYONE HOME?” a man shouts. “IT’S NIKOLAI. I’M GONNA LET MYSELF—”
“Hold on a sec!” I yell, and scramble off Alex, snatching the wet T-shirt up.
“Shit,” Alex says, searching for his swim trunks in the jumble of plastic sheeting.
I find the wad of black fabric and shove it toward him, then pull the hem of my shirt down over my thighs just as the door’s starting to unlock. “Heyyyyy, Nikolai!” I call way too loudly, heading him off before he can see either Literally Naked Alex or the shredded plastic.
Nikolai is short and balding, dressed in an entirely maroon outfit—seventies-style golf shirt, pleated pants, loafers. He sticks one meaty hand out. “You must be Poppy.”
“Yes, hi.” I shake his hand and hold intense eye contact, hoping to give Alex a chance to discreetly get dressed out on the mostly dark balcony.
“Look, I’m afraid it’s bad news,” he says. “The AC’s out.”
No shit, I just barely keep myself from saying.
“Not just for this unit, but this whole wing,” he says. “We’ve got someone coming out first thing in the morning, but I feel real bad about the delay.”
Alex appears at my shoulder. At this point, Nikolai seems to clock that we’re both soaking wet and rumpled, but luckily, he says nothing about it. “Anyway, I feel real, real bad,” he repeats. “I thought you two were just being difficult, to be quite frank, but when I got here . . .” He tugs on the collar of his shirt and shudders.
“Anyway, I’m refunding you for the last three days, and . . . well, I hesitate to tell you to come back tomorrow, in case things don’t get sorted out.”
“That’s fine!” I say. “If you refund the whole trip, we’ll find someplace else to stay.”
“You sure?” he says. “Things can get pretty pricey when you book last minute like that.”
“We’ll figure something out,” I insist.
Alex bumps an arm against my back. “Poppy’s an expert on traveling on the cheap.”
“That so?” Nikolai couldn’t sound less interested. He pulls out his phone and types with one finger. “Refund’s issued. Not sure how long it’ll take, so lemme know if there’s a problem.”
Nikolai turns to go but swivels back. “Almost forgot—found this on the welcome mat outside.” He hands us a piece of paper folded in half. In looping cursive, it says on the front THE NEWLYWEDS with, like, twenty-five little hearts drawn around it.
“Congrats on the nuptials,” Nikolai says, and lets himself out.
“What is it?” Alex asks.
I unfold the piece of paper. It’s a Groupon printed in shoddy black ink. At the top, scrawled in the margin in the same handwriting as on the front, is a note.
Hope y’all don’t think it’s creepy we figured out what apartment you were in! We thought we might’ve heard the sounds of passion coming from this one. ;) Also Bob said he saw you leaving this morning (we are three doors down). Anyway! We have to take off bright and early for the next stage of our vacation (Joshua Tree!!! Yay! I feel like a celebrity just writing that!) and unfortunately we never got a chance to use this. (Barely made it out of our bedroom—you two will know how it is, LOL.) Hope y’all have a great rest of your trip!
Xoxo, your fairy godparents, Stacey & Bob
I blink at the voucher, stunned. “It’s a one-hundred-dollar gift certificate,” I say. “For a spa. I think I read about this place. It’s supposed to be amazing.”
“Wow,” Alex says. “Feeling kind of bad that I didn’t even remember their names.”
“They didn’t address it to us directly,” I point out. “I doubt they know ours either.”
“And yet they gave us this anyway,” Alex says.
“I wonder if there’s a way we could create a long-lasting friendship with them, get super close, take trips together, all of it, and keep them from ever finding out our names. Just for fun.”
“We absolutely could,” Alex says. “You just have to make it long enough that it’s too awkward to ask. I had so many ‘friends’ like that in college.”
“Oh, god, yeah, and then you have to use that trick where you ask two people if they’ve been introduced, and wait for them to say their names.”
“Except sometimes, they just say yes,” Alex points out. “Or they say no, but just keep waiting for you to introduce them.”
“Maybe they’re doing the exact same thing,” I say. “Maybe those people don’t even remember their names.”
“Well, I doubt I’ll ever forget Stacey and Bob now,” Alex says.
“I doubt I’ll forget much about this trip,” I say. “Except the gift shop in the dinosaur. That can go, if I need to make room for more important things.”
Alex smiles down at me. “Agreed.”
After an awkward beat of silence, I say, “So. Should we find a hotel?”
28
This Summer
THE LARREA PALM Springs Hotel is seventy dollars a night in the summer, and even in the dark, it looks like a kid’s Magic Marker drawing. In a good way.
The outside is an explosion of colors—banana-yellow pool cabanas, hot-sauce-red chaises lined up around the water, each block of the three-story building painted a different shade of pink, red, purple, yellow, green.
The room we check into is every bit as lively: orange walls and drapes and furniture, green carpet, striped bedding matched to the building’s exterior. Most important, it’s very cold.
“You want to shower first?” Alex asks as soon as we’re inside. I realize then that the whole drive over—and before that, when we were packing our stuff up, tidying Nikolai’s apartment—he’s been waiting to be clean, suppressing a desire to say over and over again, God, I need a shower, while all I was doing was thinking about what happened on the balcony and going hot all over.
I don’t want Alex to go take a shower right now. I want to get in the shower together and make out some more.
But I also remember him confiding once that he hated shower sex (worse than outdoor sex) because when he was in the shower, he just wanted to be clean, and that was hard to do with someone else’s hair and dirt pouring down you, while the sex part was just as challenging because there was constantly soap in your eyes or you were brushing up against the wall and thinking about the last time the tiles were cleaned, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So I just say, “Go for it!” and Alex nods but hesitates, like maybe he’s going to say something, but ultimately decides not to and disappears into the bathroom for a long, hot shower.
My T-shirt and hair have both dried out, and when I go to sit out on the (non-plastic-wrapped) balcony of our new room, I realize that’s already mostly dry too.
Any sign of the rain that broke the heat has burned off, like it never happened.
Except that my lips feel bruised and my body is more relaxed than I’ve been all week. And the air is lighter too, breezy even.
“All yours,” Alex says behind me.
When I turn, he’s standing there in his towel looking shiny-clean and perfect. My pulse quickens at the sight of him, but I’m aware of how filthy I am, so I swallow my want, stand up, and say, “Cool!” too loudly.
To put it lightly, I don’t enjoy showering.
Being clean, yes. The act of being in the shower, also yes. But everything about having to brush out my tangled hair beforehand, stepping out onto a ratty bath mat or tile floors, getting dry, combing my hair out again—I hate all of that, which means I’m a three-shower-a-week person to Alex’s one to two showers a day.
But taking this shower, after the week we’ve had so far, is absolutely luxurious.
Standing in hot, hot water within a cold, cold bathroom, watching legitimate dirt and grime drip off me and swirl around the drain in shimmery gray spirals, is life giving. Massaging coconut-scented shampoo into my scalp and green-tea-scented cleanser onto my face, and running a cheapo razor up my legs, feels divine.
It’s the longest shower I’ve taken in months, and when I finally emerge from the bathroom feeling like a new woman, Alex is fast asleep in one of the beds, on top of the bedding with all the lights still on.
For a second, I debate which bed to climb into. In general, I love being able to sprawl out in a queen bed on these trips, but there’s a big portion of me that wants to curl up next to Alex, fall asleep with my head in the crook of his shoulder where I can smell his clean, bergamot smell, maybe conjure up a dream about him.
In the end, though, I decide it’s too creepy to assume he wants to share a bed with me just because we hooked up.
The last time anything happened between us, there certainly wasn’t any bed sharing afterward. There was just chaos.
I’m determined that this won’t end up like that. No matter what happened or happens between us on this trip, I won’t let it ruin our friendship. I won’t make assumptions about what any of this means or foist any expectations onto Alex.
I pull the striped comforter up over him, flick off the lights, and climb into the empty bed across from his.
29
Three Summers Ago
HEY, ALEX TEXTS me the night before we leave for Tuscany.
Hey yourself, I write back.
Can you talk for a sec? Just want to finalize some stuff.
Immediately, I think he’s calling to cancel. Which doesn’t make sense.
For the first time in years we’re set to have a tension-free trip. We’re both in committed relationships, our friendship is better than ever, and I have never been so happy in my life.
Three weeks after my pneumonia debacle, I met Trey. A month after that, Alex and Sarah were back together—he says it’s better this time, that they’re on the same page. Nearly as important, this time around she seems to have finally started warming to me, and the few times that Alex and Trey have met, they’ve gotten along too. So once again, as always, I’ve come to the place of being so, so ecstatically happy that Alex and I never let anything happen between us.
I start to text him back, then decide to just call him from the folding chair on my balcony instead since I’m home alone. Trey’s still at Good Boy Bar, up the street from my new apartment, but I came home early after a bout of nausea, a warning sign of an oncoming migraine I need to fight off before our flight.
Alex answers on the second ring, and I say, “Everything okay?”
I can hear his turn signal going. Okay, so maybe we’re back to him calling me from the car, on his way home from the gym, but things really do seem better. For one thing, they sent me a joint birthday card. And Christmas card. She not only followed me back on Instagram but she likes my photos—even comments little hearts and smiley faces on some of them.
So I thought things were good, but now Alex skips right over hello and goes straight to, “We’re not making a mistake, are we?”
“Um,” I say, “what?”
“I mean, a couples’ trip. That’s sort of intense.”
I sigh. “How so?”
“I don’t know.” I can hear the anxiety in his voice, imagine him grimacing, tugging at his hair. “Trey and Sarah have only met once.”
In the spring, Trey and I flew to Linfield so he could meet my parents. Dad wasn’t impressed by the tattoos or the holes in Trey’s ears from the gauges he got when he was seventeen, or that he turns Dad’s questions around on him, or that he doesn’t have a degree.
But Mom was impressed by his manners, which really are top-notch. Although I think for her, it had more to do with the juxtaposition of his appearance with his easy, warm way of saying things like, “Excellent s’mores cake, Ms. Wright!” and “Can I help you with the dishes?”
By the end of the weekend, she’d decided he was a very nice young man, and when I sneaked out onto the deck to get Dad’s opinion while Trey and Mom were inside dishing up homemade Funfetti cake, Dad looked me in the eye with a solemn nod and said, “I suppose he seems right for you. And he obviously makes you happy, Pop. That’s all that matters to me.”
He does make me happy. So happy. And he is right for me. Freakily so. I mean, we work together. We get to spend pretty much every day together, either in the office or halfway around the world, but we’re also both independent, like having our own apartments, our own friends. He and Rachel get along, but when Trey and I are in the city, he’s mostly hanging with his skateboarding friends while Rachel and I are trying a new brunch place or reading in the park or having our whole bodies scrubbed raw in our favorite Korean spa.
Two days home in Linfield and both of us were already a little restless, but he didn’t mind the mess and he liked the menagerie of dying animals and he joined right in when we did a New Talent Show over Skype with Parker and Prince.
Still, after how everything went down with Guillermo—and pretty much everyone else in the entire world—I was restless, eager to get out of Linfield before something scared Trey off, so we probably would’ve headed back early if not for the fact that it was Mr. Nilsen’s sixtieth birthday, and Alex and Sarah were coming down to surprise him with a visit. We’d decided the four of us should grab dinner before the party.
“I’m so excited to meet this guy,” Trey kept saying whenever a new text came in from Alex, and every time, it made my nerves inch closer to the surface. I felt fiercely protective—I just wasn’t sure over whom.
“Just give him a chance,” I kept saying. “He takes a while to open up.”
“I know, I know,” Trey insisted. “But I know how much he means to you, so I’m going to like him, P. I promise.”
Dinner was okay. I mean, the food was great (Mediterranean), but the conversation could’ve been better. Trey, I couldn’t help but think, came off a little show-offy when Alex asked him what he’d studied, but I knew his lack of formal education was something of a chip on his shoulder, and I wished there was some easy way for me to signal that to Alex as Trey launched into the story of how it all happened.
How he’d been in a metal band all through high school back in Pittsburgh. How they’d taken off when he was eighteen, gotten offered an opening slot on the tour of a much bigger band. Trey was an amazing drummer, but what he really loved was photography. When his band broke up after four years of near-constant touring, he took a job taking pictures on another band’s tour. He loved traveling, meeting people, seeing new cities. And as those connections built up, other job offers rolled in. He went freelance, eventually started working with R+R, and then came on as a staff photographer.
He finished his monologue by putting an arm around my shoulders and saying, “And then I met P.”
The flicker on Alex’s expression was so subtle I was sure Trey didn’t notice it. Maybe Sarah hadn’t either, but to me, it felt like a pocketknife plunging into my belly button and dragging upward five or six inches.
“Sooo sweet,” Sarah said in her saccharine voice, and probably my face made a much bigger twitch.
“The funny thing is,” Trey said then, “we were supposed to meet sooner. I was scheduled to go on that Norway trip with you two. Before she got sick.”
“Wow.” Alex’s eyes flicked to mine, then dipped to the glass of water in front of him. It was sweating as badly as I was. He picked it up, slowly sipped, set it down. “That is funny.”
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