Page 53 of The Heartbreak Hotel
“Yes,” I say, and he dips his chin to press his lips to mine. Once, chaste.
“I don’t want the first time to be like this.” The words land like whispered breath, raising goose bumps.The first time.“Stolen.”
He’s right; I know he is. But I don’t want this to end—I’m desperate for it not to end.
“But you’ll stay?” I ask, running my hand along his jaw, down his neck, into the dark hair across his chest.
Henry pulls me toward him, sliding us in unison up the mattress to find the pillows, the edge of the blanket. He pushes hair from my face, runs the pad of one thumb along my eyebrow.
“I’ll stay,” he says.
But it’s two o’clock whenI wake up, and Henry’s gone. My mouth feels swollen and sore. I’m in my bra and underwear, my jeans and sweater in a hopeless pile on the floor next to the bed. Henry’s clothes were beside them, when we fell asleep. Now they’re alone.
I get dressed and steal into the hallway as quietly as I can—surely Bea and Kim are back by now, and Nan will be long asleep. The door to the Lupine Room is open a few, dark inches, and my heart surges painfully against my rib cage as I walk toward it—imagining Henry alone, in the dark, in his daughter’s bedroom. But it’s empty: the lights off, an imprint on the bedspread like someone was sitting there, not so long ago. I turn back around and stare down the length of the hallway. It feels bottomless, the thought of him leaving in the middle of the night.
I check on Quinn—fast asleep, mouth fallen open in the glow of his night-light—before creeping downstairs to find my phone. I left it on the coffee table, and it’s still there. I see it as soon as I hit the landing, right where I left it last night before going upstairs. But I don’t move toward it. I stand frozen in the foyer, staring at the hunched outline of Henry on the couch.
He’s leaned forward, elbows braced on his knees, light from the moon in the garden turning his skin silver-blue. He never put his shirt back on. Every muscle in his back is bunched up, straining, like he’s trying not to come out of his body. I watch his breath rise and fall.
“Henry,” I whisper, scared to startle him. He lifts his head, turning to look at me over one shoulder, and I move toward him in the darkness. When I put my palm on his back he flinches,and as I lower onto the couch beside him he looks back down at his hands, clenched together between his knees.
“I’m sorry,” he says, so soft they’re barely words at all.
I smooth my hand over his skin—he’s hot, nearly feverish. “What happened?”
Henry only shakes his head. I can tell he’s trying to steady his breathing, trying to calm himself down. “It’s all right,” I say. I run my hand along his spine, slow, at the steady pace I want his inhales. Just like Goldie did for me, in dark midnights just like this one, when we were kids and I was too scared to sleep. “Just breathe.”
He nods, and my hand moves, and the clock ticks on the mantel. Henry keeps his head ducked; I can’t see his face as he syncs his breath to my fingertips, as his muscles loosen under my palm. Eventually he lets go of his own hands and curls one arm around my leg, bracketing my knee with his fingers.
“I’m sorry,” he says again. I run my hand up the back of his neck, into his hair, and he finally looks up at me. The line between his eyebrows is deep and worried. I smooth it with my thumb, taking his face in both of my hands as he turns to me on the couch. I shake my head, brushing my thumbs over his cheekbones.
“Are you all right?”
Henry exhales, blinking so slowly I think he might leave his eyes shut. But he opens them, and they’re anguished in the thin, silvery light from the moon.
“I wanted to stay,” he whispers. “It’s hard for me to stay in this house.” He draws a shuddering breath, turning to look at the stairs. “You make me wish that weren’t true.”
“It’s okay.” I want to hide him against me; I want to take allof this away. I want my safe place to be safe for him, too. I think of that square of wallpaper upstairs—of how much Henry has given me, and how much more I’m terrified to find that I still want. “I understand.”
“I’m sorry.” Henry pulls me against him, his bare skin warm as he hooks his chin over my shoulder. Spreads all ten of his fingers over my back. “You have no idea how much—”
“Henry.” I pull away, needing him to see me as I say this. “You don’t need to be sorry for this.”
He swallows, nods, looks back at the staircase. “I didn’t want to just leave, but I couldn’t stay up there. I didn’t want to wake you.”
“You could have,” I say. His shoulders are rising again, tensing toward his ears. I reach forward and steady them with my hands. “This is okay.”
Henry’s eyes skate over mine, back and forth. “That night the power went out,” he says, his voice soft, “you said you thought I hated you. That was never true, Louisa, it’s this house. It’s so hard for me to be here—I can’t figure out—”
He breaks off and I feel it like the rip of a Band-Aid, the sharp sting of how he’s looking at me: like he’s desperate to fix something so understandably broken.
“You don’t have to figure it out tonight,” I tell him. He looks so young, and so scared. “You can go home, and rest, and everything will be okay.”
“I’m sorry,” he says again. “I want to be better at this.”
“Please stop apologizing.” It’s the wrong thing to do, maybe, but the thing I’m aching to do: I tip forward and frame his jaw, push my lips to his, hold him steady until his mouth opens under mine and his arms wrap around my rib cage.
“This doesn’t change anything for me,” I whisper, smoothing my thumb one last time between his eyebrows. “I wanted tonight so badly. I still want it so badly.”
