Page 69 of The Heartbreak Hotel
“It was fine,” he says on an exhale. “A little too long.”
I nudge my chin into his chest so I can look up at him. “Why do you go this time of year? Why not for the holidays?”
Henry studies me, his hand moving over my hair before coming to rest at the base of my skull. I can see him deciding how much to tell me, weighing how far to let me in—and I’m relieved when he says, “It’s tough, doing the holidays with them.”
I brush my thumbs over his ribs. This moment feels tenuous—like this close, honest version of Henry is a firefly I’ve managed to catch open-palmed. “Tough how?”
He swallows. “It’s a nostalgic time of year. Sometimes they get—” He breaks off, eyes moving over mine like he could find the words there. “Sometimes it’s too much.”
“About Molly,” I say quietly, so he doesn’t have to. When he nods, his eyes flutter shut—like that hurt, even just hearing it.
“I love them,” he says. That word in his mouth hits me low and warm. “I want to be with them, and I want to help them, and it’s good for me to be there. But it’s better for all of us if I come back home before things get heavy.”
I nod, and his hands move to frame my face. “I understand.”
Henry’s leaning to kiss me when, over the speakers, I hear the opening notes of a song I’d be able to place anywhere. The guitar chords pluck right between my ribs.
“No,” I groan, wriggling out of his grip. All at once, I’m absolutely overstimulated. “Can you change the song?”
Henry blinks, confused. “I—yeah. Yes.”
But he’s slow to find his phone, rifling through a bowl on his coffee table, and Nate’s already singing: “She reads with her lip between her teeth; asleep, her breath falls slow and sweet; she always wakes up reaching for me.” It’s the acoustic version, of course. Nate last year, instead of at twenty: his voice a little huskier, rougher on the vowels. “Purple, like the lake before a storm, like the mountains in the morning—”
The music cuts, stuttering into the Beatles’ “Hey Jude.” I blink, hard, to clear my head. That song sounds like my old life, one that has no place in this kitchen with Henry and his parents and Molly. Henry’s still looking at his phone and I can picturethe album art, there in his palm: Nate’s dorm room at CU, a pair of girls’ sneakers lined up next to the bed, mine.Say It Now, below the photo.Purple Girl (Acoustic).
Henry’s voice is low. “I didn’t realize that would be on this playlist.”
“It’s fine,” I say. Like that article about Nate and Estelle inPeople, this kind of thing will find me. “It’s everywhere.”
Henry’s quiet. When he walks back over to the island, he doesn’t touch me. “Does it upset you? To hear it.”
“Not really.” I swirl my wine again just to have something to do with my hands. I look up at him and there’s something guarded in his eyes—this reminder of my past, of a person who loved me once, doesn’t mean something only to me. Nate’s the reason Henry and I know one another at all. “I’d just rather not think about him, you know?”
“Mmm.” Henry reaches over the counter, stilling my hand. I stare at our fingers, there on the granite: his knuckles curved over mine like shelter. He waits for me to look up at him to ask, “It’s about you, isn’t it?”
I feel heat building under the bones in my chest, grief or panic or fear. I don’t want Nate to take this moment from me. “Yes,” I say, turning back to watch Henry’s thumb trace a line over my wrist. “But it’s old. It was a lifetime ago.”
“You’ve never seemed purple, to me.” I look up at him, surprised. He keeps tracing my skin, watching his thumb move. “It’s a sad song. He makes you sound sad.”
“I was, a little.”
Henry nods, winding his fingers between my own. When our eyes meet, he says, “Me, too.”
“But I’m not so much,” I tell him, “anymore.”
Henry’s extraordinary eyes move over mine, searching. I stand, putting my hands on his face and bringing his lips down to mine. Against my mouth, between one kiss and the next, he says, “Me, too.”
Henry turns on his fireplaceafter dinner, gas flame clicking on to fill the living room with warm light. He carries our wineglasses to the coffee table and I pick up the apple pie, rummaging through his drawers until I find two forks. When I sink into the couch next to him, I hold one out.
“I do have plates,” he says, his arm following the line of my shoulders along the back of the couch.
“This is how we always did it,” I say, spearing my fork into one edge of the pie. “Growing up.”
“Your mom, too?” He follows my lead, digging in.
“Yeah, she loves the holidays. We’d always go to one of her friends’ houses but she’d make sure there was a pie just for the three of us—me and Goldie and her.”
Henry chews thoughtfully. “This is delicious.”
