People We Meet on Vacation Emily Henry (unputdownable books txt) 📖

“And that’s why you should never be a hero,” I say gently, teasing, but his expression of misery doesn’t so much as waver.

“I wasn’t thinking,” he says. “I didn’t mean to mess up your trip.”

“Alex, hey.” I touch his arm lightly so it won’t disturb the rest of his body. “You didn’t mess up this trip, okay? Nikolai did.”

The corners of his mouth twist into an unconvinced smile.

“What do you need?” I ask. “How can I help you?”

He sighs. If there’s one thing Alex Nilsen hates, it’s being helpless. Which goes hand in hand with being waited on. In college, when he had strep throat, he ghosted me for a week (the first time I was truly mad at him). When his roommate told me Alex was laid up with a fever, I made very bad chicken noodle soup in our dorm kitchen and brought it to his room.

He locked the door and wouldn’t let me in for fear of passing the strep along, so I started yelling, “I’m keeping the baby, okay?” through the doorway and he relented.

It makes him uncomfortable to be fussed over. Thinking about that has a similar, if distilled, effect on me as looking at the formidable Sad Puppy Face. It overwhelms. The love rises less like a wave and more like an instantaneously erected steel skyscraper, shooting up through my center and knocking everything else out of its way.

“Alex,” I say. “Please let me help.”

He sighs, defeated. “There are muscle relaxants in the front pocket of my laptop bag.”

“On it.” I retrieve the bottle, fill a glass of water in the kitchenette, and bring him both.

“Thanks,” he says apologetically, then takes the pill.

“No problem,” I say. “What else?”

“You don’t have to do anything,” he says.

“Look.” I take a deep breath. “The sooner you tell me how I can help you, the sooner you get better, and the sooner this is over, okay?”

His teeth skim over his full bottom lip, and I’m mesmerized by the sight. I startle when his gaze cuts back to me. “If there’s an ice pack here, that would help,” he admits. “Usually I alternate between cold compresses and heating pads, but the important thing is just sitting still.”

He says this with disdain.

“Got it.” I slip my sandals on and grab my purse.

“What are you doing?” he asks.

“Going to the pharmacy. That freezer doesn’t even have an ice cube tray, let alone an ice pack, and I doubt Nicky has a heating pad either.”

“You don’t have to do that,” Alex says. “Really, if I sit still, I’m fine. Go back to sleep.”

“While you sit upright in the dark? No way. For one thing, that’s extremely creepy, and for another, I’m up, so I might as well be of use.”

“This is your vacation.”

I walk toward the door, because there’s nothing he can do to stop me. “No,” I say. “It’s our summer trip. Don’t dance around naked until I get back, okay?”

He heaves a sigh. “Thanks, Poppy. Seriously.”

“Stop thanking me. I’m already drafting an absurd list of ways for you to repay me.”

That finally wins a faint smile. “Good. I like to be useful.”

“I know,” I say. “I’ve always liked that about you.”

15

Eight Summers Ago

WE GET BACK to our downtown hotel room at two thirty in the morning, a little bit hammered. Usually, we don’t drink so much, but this whole trip has been a celebration.

We are celebrating the fact that Alex has graduated from college, and that soon he’ll be leaving to get his MFA in creative writing from Indiana University.

I tell myself it’s not that far away. In fact, we’ll be living closer to each other than we have been since I dropped out.

But the truth is, even with all the traveling I’ve been doing, I’m itching to get out of my parents’ house in Linfield. I’ve started looking for apartments in other cities, flexible jobs bartending and serving where I can work myself to exhaustion, then take weeks off to travel.

Spending time with my parents has been great, but everything else about being home makes me feel claustrophobic, like the suburbs are a net pulling tighter and tighter around me as I struggle against it.

I run into my old teachers, and when they ask what I’m doing, their mouths twist judgmentally at the answer. I see classmates who used to bully me, and some that were friendly enough, and I hide. I work at an upscale bar forty minutes south, in Cincinnati, and when Jason Stanley, my first kiss, came in with his orthodontist-perfected smile and the kind of clothes full-time white-collar jobs require, I dove into the bathroom. Told my boss I had vomited.

For weeks after that, she kept asking how I was doing in a voice that made it perfectly clear she thought I was pregnant.

I was not pregnant. Julian and I are always careful about that. Or at least I am. Julian, in general, is not careful by nature. He is a person who says yes to the world, almost regardless of what it asks. When he visits me at work, he finishes drinks that get left on the bar, and he’s tried most drugs (heroin excluded) once. He’s always up for weekend trips to Red River Gorge or Hocking Hills—or slightly longer trips to New York, on the overnight bus that’s only sixty dollars round trip but often has no bathroom. He has the same kind of flexible schedule I do—he’s a college dropout too, but he left the University of Cincinnati after only one year.

He was studying architectural design, but really, he wants to be a working artist. He shows his paintings at DIY spots around the city, and he lives with three other painters in an old white house that makes me think of Buck and the transients of Tofino. Sometimes, after one too many beers,