Page 25 of The Heartbreak Hotel
Henry’s quiet for what feels like a lifetime. When he says, “Ah,” it sounds clipped. Like he’s that stranger again, walking through my house with a mug of coffee he’s too scared to drink. I remember, hazy, what he said the last time we spoke—Comestay here to get over your ex-boyfriend?How he made it sound so petty. And I have the desperate urge, consuming, to make him understand.
“I’m not hungupon him,” I say, reaching out both hands to plant them on Henry’s shoulders. He’s tall enough that it makes my own shoulder joints twinge. “Did you know he cheated on me with her?”
Henry goes very still under my hands.
“After six years together,” I say. “He couldn’t justtellme, like a courtesy. It would’ve been decent. But no.” My fingertips dig into the ridge of muscle that races from Henry’s shoulders up his neck, and I realize that I’m using him for balance. “It’s so annoying not to be rid of him, that he’s always going tobe therein the press. Because honestly, it’s been done. We should’ve broken up years ago.”
“Why?” Henry asks quietly. At some point while I was talking his free hand rose to my waist to keep me steady. With the other one, he’s got his flashlight pointed up at the ceiling so it illuminates the basement.
“We didn’t even know each other anymore,” I say. I rub my thumbs into Henry’s collarbone, studying the way it peeks from beneath his shirt, dips at the base of his throat. “We didn’t even try to. We didn’tcareto try to. Which should have been enough of a sign, but I was stupid.”
“You aren’t stupid,” he says softly.
“No,” I agree. Our bodies are very close. I’ve had more tequila than I can remember and I want to make him smile again; I wantthatHenry, the soft one, the one that opened up for Custard like a flower after rain. “I just didn’t want to lose the house.”
Henry laughs, then. It’s breathy, a great gust, moving throughhis entire body so spectacularly that I step back from him to watch it happen. My hands drop from his shoulders; his hand drops from my waist. All the tension he carries, every bit of him he zips away—all if it changes when he laughs.
“What?” I ask, grinning. Henry shakes his head, smiling like he’s trying to swallow it.
“You stayed with someone for six years just to keep living in this house?”
“Maybe not all six,” I say. There was a time, once, when I loved Nate in every real way. “But definitely the last few.”
“Why?” Henry watches me like I’m a science experiment, like a model volcano, like he’s trying to figure out how I work. “That’s a high price to pay.”
I shrug, and catch myself before stumbling backward. “I’d pay any price for this place.”
Henry pulls his lip into his mouth again, tongue running over it like he’s thinking, like he’s not even aware of it. “Louisa—”
“Why do youcallme that?” I tip my chin up to the ceiling. His formality, his stoicism, I don’t want it—I want him laughing, loose, like he was just a minute ago. “Louisa. Always Louisa.”
“Is that not your name?”
“Itis,” I say, driving one fingertip into his chest. Right over his heart, warm and firm. I’m fascinated by how he feels; I spread my entire palm over his T-shirt, tucking my fingers under the lapel of his coat, and Henry watches me do it. “But so formal. Everyone else calls me Lou.”
When he’s quiet, I pull my eyes up to his. Blue, blue, blue. Unbelievable.
Henry’s voice comes softly. “Maybe I don’t want to call you what everyone else calls you.”
“Any luck?” Mei shouts down the stairs. I yank my hand out from under Henry’s coat like I’ve been caught shoplifting. “I’d love to get this blender going again before I hit old age.”
“Blender,” Henry says, looking at me. “You were using a blender when the power went out?”
“Frozen margs,” I confirm, with a little shimmy that pulls Henry’s gaze from my eyes to my hips. “Want one?”
“No,” he says, and then he takes my elbow in one hand to guide me up the stairs. “But the kitchen outlets are all GFCI—if you tripped it, it would’ve taken the power out.”
“What’s GFCI?” I ask, and from the top of the stairs, Mei calls, “Is that related to the kitchen apples?”
Henry ignores us both as we collide into breathless laughter at the top of the staircase, arms coming around one another. Across the kitchen, he fiddles with an outlet and all the lights come back on. The music starts up immediately, blasting through the house. I wince at Henry, blinking as my eyes readjust to the light.
“Ta-da!” Mei shrieks, and then she whirls across the room, hip-checking Henry out of the way so she can get back to the blender. “Our hero.”
“You should stay,” I say, still holding Henry’s eyes from across the room. It feels very important, suddenly, that this moment doesn’t slip through my fingers. That this new version of Henry—the one who laughs, the one whose warm hand holds me steady—doesn’t disappear.
“Should I,” he says, his voice low. Not quite a question.I don’t want to call you what everyone else calls you.
“I think so.” I come closer as the blender starts up, closingthe distance so we can hear each other over the ice and the music. “I think you should have a margarita.”
