Page 23 of The Heartbreak Hotel
“Tell him it was a typo!” she counters, pouring us two more shots. “Calm thineself.”
Sory!I send, closing one eye to focus and still managing to misspell it.Power out an can fix with braker
Three dots appear, then disappear. It happens twice more in the time it takes for Mei to pass me a shot that I knock back without thinking. Then my phone starts buzzing in earnest—Henry’s calling me.
“Shit!” I say, dropping the phone like it burned me. “He’s calling.”
“So answer.” Mei rolls her eyes. “And he can tell us what to do.”
“Okay,” I say, picturing the flush of his cheeks in my kitchen last week. The shredded quality to his voice as he thrust the article at me across the counter. “Okay. Okay, okay.”
“Henry!” I cry when I pick up, both too loud and too enthusiastic. I wince, and he pauses on the other end of the line.
“Louisa,” he says finally. His voice is soft and close, and I press the phone to my ear until it hurts my cartilage. “What’s going on?”
“The power’s out. And we tried to flip the breakers but none of them did anything and it’s so dark in here and I’m not sure if—”
“We?” Henry says. I hesitate, my brain lagging three steps behind me.Nate, I remember. He thinks I mean Nate.
“My friend Mei,” I say, and she lifts another shot glass in the air as if cheersing me. “You met Mei, she was here that day when Nate—with the espresso—I mean—” I bite my lip, squeezing my eyes shut. Why did I drink all that tequila?
“I remember,” Henry says. “You tried all of the breakers?”
“All of them,” I confirm. A laugh chortles out of me, obscene. “Even the kitchen apples.”
Mei cackles, and Henry says, “The what?”
“The appliances for the kitchen—the breaker is labeled, like, A-P-P-L, and Mei thought it was apples—” My voice dissolves into a gasping laugh. Across the kitchen, Mei’s clutching her abs, tears in her eyes. Kitchen apples.
“I’m going to come over there,” Henry says, and it shuts me right up.
“Oh, you don’t have to—”
“Hold still.” Then he hangs up, the call clicking off in my ear.
I look up at Mei, then back down to my phone. “He’s coming here.”
“Party!” Mei cries. She shimmies her hips in the dark. “Think he’ll want a shot?”
By the time Henry arrives,I’ve been slapping my own cheeks for five minutes. I was trying to sober myself up, but all I’ve managed to do is make my face even redder than it was before. When I open the front door Henry’s eyes sweep from my hairline to my toes, and I feel every centimeter of his gaze as it moves over me. I lean against the door, trying to appear casual.
“Thank you for coming,” I say. He’s holding two giant flashlights and his car keys, black SUV parked behind him in the driveway. It registers somewhere in the very back of my brain that Bill and Martina’s lights are on across the street. I hear Henry’s voice from that day in their yard, his fingers moving rhythmically through Custard’s fur.Easy, now.
“It’s no problem,” Henry says, and I blink the memory away. He’s wearing a utility jacket and jeans, his face clean-shaven. It’s the first time I’ve seen him without the ghost of a beard—it softens him in a way that I feel right at the center of my pelvis. “You sounded…”
I bubble up a laugh. “Like a mess?”
His eyebrows tic. “Like you could use a hand. Can I come in?”
I make a grand gesture of sweeping my arm into the house and it sends me off-balance so that I stumble backward into the door and smack the edge of the handle with my funny bone.
“Ow,” I yelp, clenching it in my other hand. “Damn.”
“She is beauty,” Mei sings from the kitchen, where her phone flashlight is face-up on the counter. “She is grace…”
“Come in,” I manage, motioning Henry around me so I can close the front door. Immediately, we’re swallowed by darkness. Henry clicks on his flashlights and hands one to me.
“Are you okay?”
