He looks over his shoulder at me, his profile cast in cool blue shadow as the sun beats down on him from the other side. For a millisecond, I feel fluttery from his closeness, from the feeling of his shoulder muscles under my hands and the way his cologne mixes with the coconut sweetness of the sunblock and the way his hazel eyes fix on me firmly.
It’s a millisecond that belongs to that other five percent—the what-if. If I leaned forward and kissed him over his shoulder, slipped his bottom lip between my teeth, twisted my hands into his hair until he turned himself around and pulled me into his chest.
But there’s no more room for that what-if, and I know that. I think he knows it too, because he clears his throat and glances away. “Want me to get your back too?”
“Mm-hm,” I manage, and we both turn again so that now he’s facing my back, and the whole time his hands are on me, I’m actively trying not to register (care) it.
Trying not to feel something hotter than the Palm Springs sun gathering behind my belly button as his palms gently scrape over me.
It doesn’t matter that there are babies squealing and people laughing and preteens cannonballing into far-too-small spaces in the pool.
There’s not enough stimuli(a thing or event that evokes a specific functional reaction) in this busy pool to distract (prevent (someone) from giving full attention to something) me, so I move on to a hastily formed plan B.
“Do you ever talk to Sarah?” I blurt out, my voice a full octave higher than usual.
“Um.” Alex’s hands lift off me. “Sometimes. You’re done, by the way.”
“Cool. Thanks.” I turn around and shift back onto my chaise, putting a good foot of space between us. “Is she still teaching at East Linfield?” With how competitive teaching jobs were these days, it seemed like a dream when they both found positions at the same school and moved back to Ohio.
Then they broke up.
“Yep.” He reaches into my bag and pulls out the water bottles we filled with the premade margarita slushies we got at CVS(a market).
He hands me one of them. “She’s still there.”
“So you must see each other a lot,” I say. “Is that awkward?”
“Nah, not really,” he offers.
“You don’t really see each other a lot or it’s not really awkward?”
He buys some time with a long chug on the water bottle. “Uhh, I guess either.”
“Is . . . she seeing anyone?” I ask.
“Why?” Alex says. “I didn’t think you even liked her.”
“Yeah,” I say, embarrassment coursing through my veins like a quick-hitting drug. “But you did, so I want to make sure you’re okay.”
“I’m okay,” he says, but he sounds uncomfortable so I drop it.
No shitting on Ohio, no talking about Alex’s ridiculously fit body, no looking him deep in the eyes from fewer than six inches away, and no bringing up Sarah Torval.
I can do that. Probably.
“Should we get in the water?” I ask.
“Sure.”
But as we pick our way through the herd of babies to move down the whitewashed pool steps, it rapidly becomes clear that this isn’t the solution to the touch-and-go awkwardness between us.
For one thing, the water, with all the many bodies standing (and potentially peeing) in it, feels nearly as hot as the air and somehow even more unpleasant.
For another thing, it’s so crowded that we have to stand so close that the upper two-thirds of our bodies are almost touching.
When a stocky man in a camo hat pushes past me, I collide with Alex and a lightning bolt of panic sizzles through me at the feeling of his slick stomach against mine.
He catches me by the hips, at once steadying me and easing me away, back to my rightful place two inches away from him.
“You okay?” he asks.
“Mm-hm,” I say, because all I can really focus on is the way his hands spread over my hip bones. I expect there to be a lot of that on this trip.
The mm-hming, not the gigantic Alex-hands on my hips.
He lets go of me and cranes his neck over his shoulder, looking back to our lounges.
“Maybe we should just read until it’s less crowded,” he suggests.
“Good idea.” I follow him in a zigzagging path back to the pool steps, to the burning-hot cement, to the too-short towels spread on the chaises, where we lie down to wait.
He pulls out a Sarah Waters novel, which he finishes, then follows with an Augustus Everett book.
I take out the latest issue of R+R, planning to skim everything I didn’t write.
Maybe I’ll find a spark of inspiration I can take back to Swapna so she won’t be mad at me.
I pretend to read for two sweaty hours and the pool never empties out.
* * *
• • •
AS SOON AS we open the door to the apartment, I know things are going to get worse.
“What the hell,” Alex says, following me inside. “Did it get hotter?”
I hurry to the thermostat and read the numbers illuminated there. “Eighty-two?!”
“Maybe we’re pushing it too hard?” Alex suggests, coming to stand beside me. “Let’s see if we can get it back down to eighty at least.”
“I know eighty is, technically speaking, better than eighty-two, Alex,” I say, “but we’re still going to murder each other if we have to sleep in eighty-degree heat.”
“Should we call someone?” Alex asks.
“Yes! We should definitely call someone! Good thinking!” I rifle through the beach bag for my phone and search my email for the host’s phone number.
I hit call, and it rings three times before a gruff, smoky voice comes over the line. “Yeah?”
“Nikolai?”
Two seconds of silence. “Who is this?”
“This is Poppy Wright. I’m staying in 4B?”
“Okay.”
“We’re having some trouble with the thermostat.”
Three seconds of silence this time. “Did you try Googling it?”
I ignore the question and forge ahead. “It was set to eighty degrees when we got here. We tried to turn it down to seventy two hours ago and now it’s eighty-two.”
“Oh, yeah,” Nikolai says. “You’re pushing it too hard.”
I guess Alex can hear what Nikolai’s saying, because he nods, like, Told you.
“So . . . it can’t handle . . . going colder than seventy-eight?” I say. “Because that wasn’t in the posting, and neither was the construction outside the—”
“It can only do a degree at a time, honey,” Nikolai says with a beleaguered (in a very difficult situation) sigh. “You can’t just push a thermostat down to seventy degrees! And who keeps an apartment seventy degrees anyway?”
Alex and I exchange a look. “Sixty-seven,” he whispers.
Sixty-five, I mouth, gesturing to myself. “Well—”
《People We Meet on Vacation》
by Emily Henry 从朋友到恋人
只是搬运工加个人笔记。
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