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

sitting on the porch while they all smoke weed or clove cigarettes and talk about their dreams, it makes me so nostalgic I could cry from some mixture of sadness and happiness whose proportions I can never quite sort out.

Julian is rake-thin with hollowed-out cheekbones and alert eyes that can feel like they’re x-raying you. After our first kiss, outside his favorite bar, a grungy place downtown that has a bike repair shop in the back, he told me he didn’t ever want to get married or have kids.

“That’s okay,” I told him. “I don’t want to marry you either.”

He laughed gruffly and kissed me again. He always tastes like cigarettes or beer, and when he spends his days off work—he works in a UPS warehouse at the edge of town—painting at home, he gets so lost in his work that he forgets to eat or drink. When we meet up afterward, he’s usually in a foul mood but only for a few minutes, until he has a snack, at which point he melts back into a sweet, sensitive boyfriend who always kisses and touches me so sensually that I regularly find myself thinking, I bet this would look beautiful on film.

I consider saying it to him, asking if we should set up a camera and take some pictures, and I’m immediately embarrassed to have even considered it.

He’s the second person I’ve ever slept with, but he doesn’t know that. He didn’t ask. The first still comes into my bar every once in a while and flirts a little, but we can both tell that whatever mild attraction there was when he first started coming in fizzled after those two quick hookups. They were kind of awkward but fine, and in the end, I’m glad I got them out of the way because I have a sense that Julian would’ve been too freaked to come near me if he’d known how inexperienced I was. He would’ve been afraid I’d get too attached to him, and probably I have, but I think he has too, so for now, it’s okay that we spend every spare minute together.

Julian met Alex once when Alex was home for Christmas break at my bar, a second time during spring break at Julian’s grungy bike bar, and a third time for breakfast at Waffle House before Alex and I left for this trip.

I can tell Julian has very little opinion of Alex, which is mildly disappointing, and likewise I’m aware that Alex despises Julian, which probably shouldn’t have been a surprise.

He thinks Julian is reckless, careless. He doesn’t like that he always shows up late, or that sometimes I don’t hear from him for days, then spend weeks with him almost constantly, or that he hasn’t met my parents though they live in the same city.

“It’s okay,” I insisted when Alex shared these opinions with me on the flight to San Francisco a few days ago. “It works for us.” I don’t even want him to meet my family.

“I can just tell he doesn’t get it,” Alex said.

“Get what?” I asked.

“You,” he said. “He has no idea how lucky he is.”

It was both a sweet and a hurtful thing for him to say. Alex’s take on our relationship made me feel embarrassed, even if I wasn’t sure he was right.

“I’m lucky too,” I said. “He’s really special, Alex.”

He sighed. “Maybe I just need to get to know him better.” I knew from his voice he didn’t think that would fix the problem at all.

In my daydreams, I’d imagined the two of them becoming best friends, so close that it made sense for our summer trip to expand to include Julian, but after seeing how they interacted, I knew better than to even float the idea.

So Alex and I headed to San Francisco on our own. My credit card earned me enough points to get one of the round-trip plane tickets free, and Alex and I split the cost of the other.

We started with four days in wine country, staying at a new Sonoma bed-and-breakfast that comped two nights in exchange for the advertising they’d get to my twenty-five thousand followers. Alex good-naturedly agreed to take my photo doing all kinds of quaint things:

Sitting on one of the old-fashioned red bikes the B and B has for guests, wearing a giant straw sun hat, fresh flowers in the wicker basket fixed to the handlebars.

Walking on the nature trails through the scrubby meadows and their scraggly trees.

Sipping a cup of coffee on the patio, and a chilled old-fashioned in the sitting room.

We lucked out with the wine tastings too. The first winery we visited comped your tastings if you bought a bottle, and I researched the cheapest one online before we went. Alex took my picture posing in between rows of vines with a glimmering glass of rosé, one leg kicked out to the side to show off my ridiculous purple-and-yellow-striped vintage jumpsuit.

I was tipsy by then, and when he knelt, right in the dried-out dirt in his light gray pants, to take the photo, I almost fell over laughing at the bizarre angle he’d chosen for the picture. “Too many wine,” I said, gasping for breath.

“Too. Many. Wine?” he repeated, delighted and disbelieving, and as I fell into a crouch in the middle of the aisle, laughing my head off, he took a few more pictures from way down low, pictures that would make me look like a sassily dressed skin triangle.

He was being a horrible photographer on purpose, not out of protest but to crack me up.

It was the flip side of the Sad Puppy coin, another performance for me and me alone.

By the time we hit the second winery, we were already sleepy from the alcohol and sunshine, and I let my head droop against his shoulder. We were inside, on a technicality: the whole back of the building was a windowed garage door that pulled up so you could move freely from the patio,