Page 26 of The Heartbreak Hotel
Henry reaches out, unsticking a piece of hair from my cheek. “I think you should have some water.”
I cross my arms. I feel feisty. I feel free. I feel like I’m on fire. “I think you should stay and make me.”
Henry’s eyebrows rise. At the corner of his jaw, a muscle twitches.
He says, “Okay, Louisa.”
Twelve
There is no shame likea hangover. This one lasts nearly all of the next day, as Mei and I moan through our headaches on the couch. I’m sick with nerves. My first guest, Grace—the divorcée—is checking in tomorrow, but it’s not her sending me into a tailspin. It’s Henry. Henry, who wasn’t here when I woke up. Who left at some point last night, though neither Mei nor I can remember when. Who I’m pretty sure I said things to that no professional adult should ever, ever say to another.
“You were on him like a monkey up a tree,” Mei says unhelpfully. She’s nursing a coconut water and wearing gold eye masks. “I don’t know that I’ve ever watched a rebound unfold in real time like that.”
I groan, thunking my head back against the couch. “Henry’s not a rebound.”
“No?” Mei looks over at me. “Sure seemed like you wanted him to be.”
“Mei.” I press the heels of my hands into my eyes. I don’t say what I’m thinking, which is that even through all the tequila,the way I felt last night wasn’t fleeting. I didn’t wake up horrified that I’d come on to Henry because I don’t feel the same way sober; I woke up horrified to find myself feeling the exact same way. “What am I going to do? He’s my landlord. He must think I’m a disaster—what if he backs out of the rentals?”
“He won’t,” Mei says, gripping my forearm and shaking it. “You were cute. From what I remember. Just text him and say sorry.”
But the thought of texting Henry paralyzes me. A texted apology isn’t enough, not for the broken moments I remember from last night: touching his mouth with my fingertips, bracing myself on his shoulders, challenging him to stay over. I need to either apologize in person or never, ever see him again. And I’m too ashamed to apologize in person.
Mei intercepts me at thetop of the staircase, gesturing wildly down the hall at the Spruce Room’s bathroom. She’s got headphones in, and when I say, “What?” she points at them before darting another pointed look at the bathroom. Then she lifts her shirt so I can see her stomach and grins.
“Yes, Ma,” she says, skirting past me to get down the stairs. “I’m drinking enough water. Heaps and heaps, I promise.”
I glance down the hall to the bathroom, where Henry’s been for the last twenty minutes. Grace arrived last night, and her shower isn’t working. So when I finally texted Henry after the unforgivable show I put on the other night, it was just a cowardly request for his plumber’s contact information. He’d responded:Kitchen apple clogging the drain? I’ll come take a look this afternoon.
I’m so embarrassed that I made Mei answer the door when he arrived. Then I hid in my room like a hermit until I knew he was safely tucked away in the bathroom.
Now I stare at the door I know I’ll find him behind. Wonder if whatever Mei’s on about is worth the risk of seeing Henry’s face. Or worse, him seeing mine. Something clunks from inside Grace’s room, startling me.
In her first day at the Comeback Inn, Grace has kept to herself. She showed up in a Subaru just as the sun was starting to set, looking weary and overheated. I put together a check-in guest survey to gauge how interactive people want to be:Would you like company at breakfast, or to eat in your room? Would you like to join me (Louisa) and other guests for a group discussion in the afternoons? Please check which of these programs appeal to you: Movie nights. Group hikes. Crafts. Gardening.
Grace had elected to eat in her room, and apparently none of the programs appeal to her. I’m not hurt,exactly. It was one of the first things I learned about counseling, about supporting other people at all: you can’t make people want to be supported in the way thatyouwant to support them. The inn is for everyone—even the people who want nothing to do with me. Who come here for silence and mountains. Never mind all the thought I put into supporting everyone in the softest, warmest ways. It’s fine.I’mfine.
The most Grace has said to me was when I picked up her breakfast tray from the hall floor this morning. She opened her door at the sound of my footsteps, tired-eyed in one of the matching waffle robes I ordered. Over her shoulder, I could see a framed photo of her children that she’d added to the nightstand.
“Um,” she said. I’d thought,This is it. She wants to talk about her heartbreak.“There’s a problem with my shower?”
And now, Henry in the bathroom.
I edge down the hallway as quietly as I can, craning around the bathroom’s doorframe to catch a peek at whatever Mei was flailing about. Immediately, I jerk back around the corner. Henry’s flat on his back on the bathroom floor, half in the shower stall and half out of it, a wide strip of his stomach exposed as he reaches upward to fiddle with the shower handle. This bathroom is the smallest in the house, but my favorite: Its original copper faucets are mixed with new, moss-green subway tile and LED-outfitted light fixtures. And, now, Henry.
I swallow, looking down at my hands. One of them is clenched around my grocery list—I came up here to find a pen—and the other is holding a glass of water that I’ve managed to dribble all over my arm.
The hot flare of longing that licks along my pelvis is like an old friend, home from a long trip. Nate was always gone—and when he was home, there was no more of this. Of the way it feels to see the muscles move on Henry’s stomach—or the dark hair that curls there, disappearing into the blue cut of his jeans.You’re confused, I tell myself.You drank too many margaritas and touched his mouth like some kind of horny goblin and now your body’s all mixed up.
“Louisa?”
I jump. “Yes?”
“Can I get a hand?”
I press my lips together and turn back into the doorframe, wondering what of that he saw—me glimpsing his torso and promptly spilling all over myself? When our eyes meet, it comesback to me in a sickening flash: my finger on his lips, his hands bracketing my rib cage, the way I ran my palm along the line of his jaw sometime after the lights came back on and said,I like your baby face.
“Will you pass me that screwdriver, please?” Henry looks up at me from the floor. There’s a towel spread beneath him on the shower tile, a small pile of tools next to his head. “On the sink?”
