Page 38 of The Heartbreak Hotel
“I’ll leave this out for other repairs,” I say, reaching into the kitchen’s junk drawer for a notepad. “And wait to text you until there are a few you can come take care of at once.” I glance up. “So you don’t have to keep stopping by.”
Henry holds my eyes, still working the rag between his fingers. Leaned into the doorframe, sleeves hiked up to his elbows, he looks like he lives here. It occurs to me that this is the first time he’s looked relaxed in the house.
I understand, he told me at Polliwog’s. Without knowing why, I believed him.
“If that’s what you want,” he says.
We stare at each other. “Isn’t that whatyouwant?”
Before Henry can respond, the garden door whines open.
“Hey.” Joss pokes her head into the kitchen, blond ponytail peeking from beneath a baseball cap. She shoots me a wave, then says, “Henry, I saw your car in the driveway. Can I talk to you for a minute outside?”
He looks at me again, righting his weight in the doorframe before nodding at Joss. The door closes behind her and Henrymoves toward me, the rag twisted in his fingers, his eyes flicking over mine.
When he speaks, his voice is so low I nearly miss it. So quiet I could have made it up. “Not necessarily,” he says.
He drops the greasy rag onto the kitchen island and steps around me, reaching for the screen door. I’ve been holding my breath for too long to say anything; when the door grouses open, Henry teeters it back and forth a few times. The familiar pitch of it—high but musical—fills the kitchen as he looks up at me.
“Add this to your list,” he says.
I swallow. I feel very, very warm. “I like it like that.”
Henry’s eyes hold mine, his fingers still bracketed around the doorframe. “You like it squeaky?”
I shrug, pulling the rag he dropped into my hands just for something to do. I twist it between my fingers. “I like it how I’m used to it.”
Henry’s lips twitch—not quite a smile, but something that wants to be. When he finally steps onto the porch and lets the door fall shut behind him, I let out a shuddering exhale that makes my throat hurt.
Through the window above the sink, I watch Joss lead Henry through the woven arbor toward our grove of yellowing aspens. Just far enough away to be completely out of my earshot before she turns to him, frustration on her face, and starts talking.
Henry’s back is to me—I can’t see his face, only the increasingly rigid set of his shoulders. He was different today: not the Henry who moved so woodenly through my house, but the one who smiled at Custard in that shady spot in the grass. The one who laughed when Rashad called himdelectable.But all thisway across the garden, through the kitchen window, I watch him start to change again.
When Joss glances up at the house, I look quickly away. Like I’ve been caught spying; like I’ve seen something private that I wasn’t meant to.
Like there’s something going on in this house that I don’t understand.
Seventeen
I don’t sleep that night.For the first time since the breakup, my bedroom feels the distinct lack of Nate. I turn fitfully until five o’clock, waking up from misty half dreams and reaching for his side of the bed like it’s where I’ll still find him.
It’s cruel, dreaming after a loss. I know this. Your sleeping brain forgets, puts you in dreams where things are as they were. I dream of being twenty, a college junior kissing Nate in some sweaty dive bar where he spent two hours performing on a sad excuse for a stage. Twenty-two, decorating the house for our first Christmas in it together. Twenty-three, ordering honey lavender ice cream while he stands next to me in line, laughing as someone behind us asks disgustedly whatElk Poopis.
I make coffee in the half dark, blue morning just starting to spill into the kitchen.Twenty-six, I remind myself. Nate’s second choice, and all alone now.
“Hey.”
I turn, blinking bleary-eyed down the front hallway. I haven’t turned any lights on, and Rashad emerges like a hologram fromthe shadows—pixelated and hazy until he gets close. “I thought I heard you down here.”
“Sorry,” I whisper. “I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
“Oh, babe.” He swats a hand as he lowers onto a barstool. “I don’t sleep anyway.”
“Still?” I pull down another mug and start making him a latte.
“It’s better,” he tells me. He’s wearing a giant fuzzy hoodie. “But nighttime is the hardest.”
“Yeah,” I say, pouring milk into the metal pitcher. “I feel that.”
