Alex reaches out for me, and I go to him, let him catch my hips and pull me in. I press myself against his damp T-shirt as he wraps his arms around me and lifts me up and into him. I push up onto tiptoes and he holds me there, his face buried into my neck, and my oversized T-shirt soaking through. I thread my arms around his waist and shiver as his hands slide up my back, catching on the lump where my bathing suit ties are knotted under my shirt.
Even after a full day of sweating, he smells so good, feels so good against me and underneath my hands. Combined with the intense relief of the desert rain, this has me feeling light-headed, spinny, uninhibited. My hands skim up his neck and slip into his hair, and he draws back enough to look me in the face, but neither of us lets go, and all the stress and worry has left his brow and jaw just as it’s lifted from my body like steam.
“You won’t lose me,” he says, voice dimmed by the rain. “As long as you want me, I’m here.”
I swallow down the lump in my throat, but it keeps rising. Trying to keep the words inside. It would be a mistake to say them, right? We tell each other everything, but there are some things that can’t be unsaid, just like there are things that couldn’t be undone.
His hand rises to sweep a damp curl out of my eyes, tucking it behind my ear. The lump seems to melt, and the truth slips out of me like a breath I’ve been holding all this time.
“I always want you, Alex,” I whisper. “Always.”
In this dim light, his eyes look almost sparkly, and his mouth goes soft. When he bends to press his forehead to mine, my whole body feels heavy, like my want is a weighted blanket pushing on me from every side, while his hands brush over my skin as softly as sunlight. His nose slides down the side of mine, the inch between our reaching, unsure mouths pulsing.
There is still a kind of plausible deniability to this, a chance we’ll let this moment pass without ever closing that final distance. But, as I listen to his unsteady breath, feel the way it tugs against me as his lips part, come closer, hesitate, I forget every reason I was trying to put this off.
We’re magnets, trying to draw together even as we cradle the careful distance between us. His hand skims over my jaw, gingerly angles it so that our noses graze against each other, testing this small gap between us, our open mouths tasting the air between us.
Every breath he takes now whispers against my bottom lip. Each of my shaky inhalations tries to draw him closer. This wasn’t supposed to happen, I think foggily.
Then, and more loudly, This had to happen.
This has to happen.
This is happening.
25
Four Summers Ago
THIS YEAR IS going to be different. I’ve been working for Rest + Relaxation magazine for six months. In that time, I’ve already been to:
Marrakech and Casablanca.
Martinborough and Queenstown.
Santiago and Easter Island.
Not to mention all the cities in the United States they’ve sent me to.
These trips are nothing like the ones Alex and I used to take, but I may have downplayed that when I pitched combining our summer trip with a work trip, because I want to see his reaction when we show up to our first resort with our ratty T.J. Maxx luggage only to be greeted with champagne.
Four days in Sweden. Four in Norway.
Not cold, exactly, but cool at least, and since I reached out to Lita the River Raft Guide’s expatriate sister-in-law, she’s been emailing me weekly with suggestions for things to do in Oslo. Unlike Lita, Dani has a steel-trap memory: she seems to recall every amazing restaurant she’s eaten at and knows precisely what to tell us to order. In one email, she ranks various fjords by a slew of criteria (beauty, crowdedness, size, convenience of location, beauty of the drive to the convenient/inconvenient location).
When Lita passed along her contact information, I was expecting to get a list with a specific national park and a couple of bars, maybe. And Dani did do that—in her first email. But the messages kept coming whenever she thought of something else we “absolutely could not leave without experiencing!”
She uses a lot of exclamation points, and while usually I think people fall back on this in an attempt to seem friendly and definitely-not-at-all-angry, each one of her sentences reads as a command.
“You must drink aquavit!”
“Be sure to drink it at room temperature, perhaps alongside a beer!”
“Have your room-temperature aquavit on the way to the Viking Ship Museum! DO NOT MISS THIS!”
Each new email burns its exclamation points into my mind, and I would be afraid to meet Dani, if not for the fact that she signs every email with xoxo, which I find so endearing that I’m confident we’ll like her a lot. Or I’ll like her a lot and Alex will be terrified.
Either way, I’ve never been more excited for a trip in my life.
In Sweden, there’s a hotel made entirely of ice, called (for some mysterious reason) Icehotel. It’s the kind of place Alex and I could never have afforded on our own, and all morning leading up to the pitch meeting with Swapna, I was sweating profusely at my desk—not normal sweat, but the horrible reeking kind that comes with anxiety. It’s not like Alex wouldn’t have gone along with another hot beachside vacation, but ever since I found out about Icehotel, I knew it would be the absolute perfect surprise for him.
I pitch the article as a “Cool Down for Summer” feature, and Swapna’s eyes light up approvingly.
“Inspired,” she says, and I see a few of the other, more established writers mouthing the word to one another. I haven’t been there long enough to notice her using that word, but I know how she is about trends, so I figure inspired is diametrically opposed to trendy in her mind.
She is fully on board. Just like that, I am cleared to spend way too much money. I can’t technically buy Alex meals or plane tickets or even admission to the Viking museum, but when you’re traveling with R+R, doors open for you, bottles of champagne you didn’t order float out to your table, chefs drop by with something “a little extra,” and life gets a bit shinier.
There’s also the matter of the photographer who will be traveling with us, but so far everyone I’ve worked with has been pleasant, if not fun, and every bit as independent as I am. We meet up, we plan shots, we part ways, and though I haven’t worked with the new photographer I’m paired with—we’ve been caught on opposite schedules of in-office days—Garrett, the other new staff writer, says Photographer Trey’s great, so I’m not worried.
Alex and I text incessantly in the weeks leading up to the trip, but never about the trip itself. I tell him I’m taking care of everything, that it’s all a surprise, and even if the lack of control is killing him, he doesn’t complain.
Instead he texts about his little black cat, Flannery O’Connor. Shots of her in shoes and cupboards and sprawled on the top of bookshelves.
She reminds me of you, he says sometimes.
Because of the claws? I ask. Or because of the teeth or because of the fleas, and every time, no matter what comparison I try to draw, he just writes back tiny fighter.
It makes me feel fluttery and warm. It makes me think about him pulling the hood of my sweatshirt tight around my face and grinning at me through the chilly dark, murmuring under his breath: cutie.
In the last week before we leave, I get either a horrible cold or the worst bout of summer allergies I can remember. My nose is constantly stuffed up and/or dripping; my throat feels scratchy and tastes sour; my whole head feels clogged with pressure; and every morning, I’m wiped out before the day even begins. But I have no fever, and a quick trip to urgent care informs me that I don’t have strep throat, so I do my best not to slow down. There is a lot to get done before the trip, and I do it all while coughing profusely.
Three days before we leave, I have a dream that Alex tells me he got back together with Sarah, that he can’t take the trip anymore.
I wake up feeling sick to my stomach. All day I try to get the dream out of my head. At two thirty, he sends me a picture of Flannery.
Do you ever miss Sarah? I write back.
Sometimes, he says. But not too much.
Please don’t cancel our trip, I say, because this dream is really, really messing with me.
Why would I cancel our trip? he asks.
I don’t know, I say. I just keep getting nervous that you’re going to.
The Summer Trip is the highlight of my year, he says.
Mine too, I tell him.
Even now that you get to travel all the time? You’re not sick of it?
I could never get sick of it, I say. Don’t cancel.
He sends me another picture of Flannery O’Connor sitting in his already packed suitcase.
Tiny fighter, I write.
I love her, he says, and I know he’s talking about the cat, obviously, but even that makes that fluttery, warm feeling come alive under my skin.
I can’t wait to see you, I say, feeling suddenly like saying this very normal thing is bold, risky even.
I know, he writes back, it’s all I can think about.
It takes me hours to fall asleep that night. I just lie in bed with those words running through my mind on repeat, making me feel like I have a fever.
When I wake up, I realize that I actually did. That I still do. That my throat feels more swollen and raw than before, and my head is pounding, and my chest is heavy, and my legs ache, and I can’t get warm no matter how many blankets I’m under.
I call in sick hoping to sleep it off before my flight the next afternoon, but by late that night, I know there’s no way I’m getting on that airplane. I have a fever of one hundred and two.
Most of the things we have booked are now close enough that they’re nonrefundable. Wrapped in blankets and shivering in my bed, I draft an email on my phone to Swapna, explaining the situation.
I’m unsure what to do. Unsure if this will somehow get me fired.
If I didn’t feel so horrible, I’d probably be crying.
Go back to the doctor first thing in the morning, Alex tells me.
Maybe it’s just peaking, I write. Maybe you can fly out on time and I can meet you in a couple days.
You shouldn’t be feeling worse this late into a cold, he says. Please go to the doctor, Poppy.
I will, I write. I’m so sorry.
Then I do cry. Because if I don’t make it on this trip, there’s a good chance I won’t see Alex for a year. He’s so busy with his MFA and teaching, and I’m rarely home now that I’m working for R+R, and in Linfield even less. This Christmas, Mom was excited to tell me, she convinced Dad to come to the city. My brothers even agreed to come for a day or two, something they insisted they would never do once they moved to California (Parker to pursue writing for TV in L.A. and Prince to work for a video game developer in San Francisco), as if upon signing their leases they’d also committed to a die-hard rivalry between the two states.
Whenever I’m sick, I just wish I were in Linfield. Lying in my childhood bedroom, its walls papered in vintage travel posters, the pale pink quilt Mom made while she was pregnant with me pulled up tight around my chin. I wish she were bringing me soup and a thermometer, and checking that I was drinking water, keeping up on ibuprofen to lower my fever.
For once, I hate my minimalist apartment. I hate the city sounds bouncing off my windows at all hours. I hate the soft gray linen bedding I picked out and the streamlined imitation Danish furniture I’ve started to accumulate since landing my Big-Girl Job, as Dad calls it.
I want to be surrounded in knickknacks. I want floral-patterned lampshades and mismatched throw pillows on a plaid couch, its back draped in a scratchy afghan blanket. I want to shuffle up to an old off-white fridge covered in hideous magnets from Gatlinburg and Kings Island and the Beach Waterpark, with drawings I made as a kid and flash-blanched family photos, and to see a cat in a diaper stalk past only to bump into a wall it did not see.
I want not to be alone, and for every breath not to take an immense effort.
At five in the morning, Swapna replies to my email.
This sort of thing happens. Don’t beat yourself up about it. You’re right about the refunds, though—if you’d like to let your friend use the accommodations you’ve booked, feel free. Forward me what you had in the way of itinerary again, and we’ll go ahead and send Trey to shoot. You can follow when you’re well again.
And, Poppy, when this happens again (which it will), do not go in so hard on the apology. You are not the master of your immune system and I can assure you that when your male colleagues have to cancel a trip, they show no indication that they feel they have personally wronged me. Don’t encourage people to blame you for something beyond your control. You are a fantastic writer, and we are lucky to have you.
Now get yourself to a doctor and enjoy some true R&R. We’ll speak about next steps when you’re on the mend.
I’d probably be more relieved if not for the haze superimposed over my entire apartment and the extreme discomfort of simply existing.
I screenshot the email and text it to Alex. Go have fun!!! I write. I’ll try to meet you for the second half!
By then, the very thought of getting out of bed makes me feel dizzy. I set my phone aside and close my eyes, letting sleep rush up to swallow me like a well reaching up, up, up around me as I drop through it.
It’s not a peaceful sleep, but a cold, glitching kind, where dreams and sentences start over, again and again, interrupting themselves before they can get off the ground. I toss in bed, waking long enough to register how cold I am, how uncomfortable both the bed and my body have become, only to tumble back into restless dreams.
I dream about a giant black cat with hungry eyes. It chases me in circles until it’s too hard to breathe, too hard to keep going, and then it pounces, jolting me awake for a few fitful seconds, only to start again the moment I shut my eyes.
I should go to the doctor, I think on occasion, but I’m sure I’m unable to sit up.