People We Meet on Vacation

AS I’M DIGGING through my purse for the hotel key, Alex leans into me, his hands heavy on my waist, his lips soft against the side of my neck, and it would be unwinding me if not for the buzzing in my skull, the steady throbs of alternating guilt and panic low in my stomach.

I press the keycard to the lock, then nudge the door open, and Alex releases me, stepping into the room after me. I beeline for the sink, slipping the backs off my oversized plastic earrings and setting them on the counter. Alex goes still and anxious just inside the door.

“Did I do something?” he asks.

I shake my head, grab a cotton swab and the blue bottle of eye makeup remover. I know I need to say something, but I don’t want to cry, because if I cry, this becomes about me, and the whole point of it is lost. Alex will bend over backward to make me feel safe, when really what I need is for him to be honest. I swipe the cotton over my lids, loosening the black liquid eyeliner until I look like Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road, gunpowder smeared across my face like war paint.

“Poppy,” Alex says. “Just tell me what I did.”

I spin toward him, and he doesn’t even crack a smile about my makeup. That’s how worried he is, and I hate myself for making him feel like that. “You didn’t do anything,” I say. “You’re perfect.”

His two expressions now are surprised and offended. “I’m not perfect.”

I need to do this quick, rip it off like a Band-Aid. “Were you going to propose to Sarah?”

His lips part. But his shock quickly melts into hurt. “What are you talking about?”

“I just . . .” I close my eyes, press the back of my hand to my head as if that can stop the buzzing. I open my eyes again and his expression has barely shrunk. He’s not reeling in his emotions: I’m going to get Naked Alex for this conversation. “David said you had a ring.”

He jams his mouth shut and swallows hard, looks toward the sliding balcony doors, then back to me. “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”

“It’s not that.” I force the rising tears back down. “I just . . . I didn’t realize how much you loved her.”

He half laughs, but there’s no humor in his tense face. “Of course I loved her. I was with her on and off for years, Poppy. You loved the guys you were with too.”

“I know. I’m not accusing you of anything. Just . . .” I shake my head, trying to organize my thoughts into something shorter than an hour-long monologue. “I mean, you bought a ring.”

“I know that,” he says, “but why are you mad at me for that, Poppy? You were with Trey, fucking jet-setting around the world, sitting in his lap in all four corners of the world—was I supposed to think you weren’t happy? To just wait for you?”

“I’m not mad at you, Alex!” I cry. “I’m mad at myself! For not caring that I was getting in the way. For asking so much of you and—and keeping you from what you want.”

He scoffs. “What is it I want?”

“Why did she break up with you?” I bite back. “Tell me it had nothing to do with me. That Sarah didn’t end things because of this—this thing between us. That since I’ve been out of your life, she hasn’t been reconsidering everything. Just tell me that, if that’s the truth, Alex. Tell me I’m not the reason you’re not married with kids right now, and everything else you wanted.”

He stares at me, face terse, eyes dark and cloudy.

“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.”Nôvel(D)ra/ma.Org exclusive © material.

“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.”