Page 2 of The Heartbreak Hotel
When Nate and I were students in that dorm room, imagining our life together, I had the future mapped out exactly as Goldie wanted it. I was going to be a therapist. I was going to have the steady job, the reliable income, the health insurance. Nate was going to play guitar. But before we even graduated that all changed—Nate was touring and then I was in grad school and now we’re here: in a packed stadium, together in the same room for the first time in months with a sea of people separating us. Nate’s given me the exact thing Goldie hates most: a safety net. An excuse not to stand on my own two feet.
With Nate paying for our lives, I can keep putting off the inevitable for a little longer, and then a little longer after that.
I don’t need Goldie’s approval, I remind myself. The band transitions into “Louder,” and everyone in the pit starts jumping. I watch Nate’s face on the big screen—his full lips, the dimple in his right cheek, the jut of his nose where he broke it rock climbing at sixteen.I have my own life, I remind myself. And then, even though it grates—even though it hasn’t felt true in a long while—I think,I have Nate.
Frieda follows me backstage whenthe set’s done, finally dropping her phone into her shoulder bag and giving me a thin-lipped smile that doesn’t touch her eyes. I’ve had two hard seltzers—those giant-barreled cans they only sell at stadiums—and I’m feeling a little fizzy. I tell myself I didn’t think of Goldie when I ordered the second one. Didn’t think about how she’d neverdrink on a school night, because she always has work in the morning. Certainly didn’t think about the fact that I have no plans tomorrow—or any other day, really.
“Flooooooo!” Kenji bounds down the hallway toward us, his voice bouncing from the concrete walls. It’s Florence, then. When he scoops her into his arms and spins her around, she looks genuinely repulsed. In her defense, Kenji’s pretty sweaty. “What’d you think, baby?”
“It was great,” Florence says, adjusting her hair as he puts her back down. “You ready to go?”
“Where’s Nate?” I ask, and Kenji notices me for what seems like the first time. A weird look storms over his eyes, there and then gone. “Uh, he’s…”
“Dressing room?” I prompt.
“Yeah,” Kenji says slowly. His hand’s wrapped around Florence’s waist, rucking up her shirt. “But look, Lou, he’s not—” Kenji breaks off, swallows. Kenji’s a lot of things, buttaciturnis not one of them. I hike my eyebrows.
“I don’t know if you want to go back there,” Kenji says. There’s a flush spreading over his cheeks. I feel it start to mirror in my own.
“Why not?”
Kenji’s eyes flicker down the hall, back to me, down the hall.
“Kenji.”
“Ah, Lou, it’s really not my place—” He breaks off again, grimacing. And I know, fully and all at once, like a shoe dropping. A door slamming shut.
I start to walk, autopiloting my body down the concrete hallway even as he calls after me. Kenji’s been my friend for years—but he’s Nate’s friend first. It’s not me he’s trying to protect.
“…Abe always gets so pitchy on ‘In Flux,’ but he’s insistent on that solo.” I hear Nate before I see him, his voice carrying through the cracked door of a room with his name on it.
When I push it open and step inside, he’s standing next to a girl.A woman, Goldie would chide me. She’s tall and curvy, with tumbling red hair and a shirt that dips low enough for me to see that her breasts have significantly morepresencethan mine. His hand is on her ass, all four fingers tucked into the back pocket of her jeans, and in the same moment it registers that I recognize her, she reaches to unwrap Nate’s earplugs from around his neck.
The photo, I think. That damn photo, from the spring.
She’s nobody, Nate had said.Nobody.
But here she is.
Three
I get home past twoo’clock and don’t turn any lights on. Nate stayed downtown—whether with his bandmates or that woman, I don’t know—and I went home to the house we’ve shared for the last four years. A historic wood-and-stone cabin in the mountains (if you can call something acabinat five thousand square feet and six bedrooms). With its wraparound porch and stained-glass windows and vaulted, gnarled-beam ceilings, it’s my happiest place. A home that Nate’s almost never in, that feels like it’s mine as much as my own face, my own fingernails.
It was nearly ninety degrees in Denver, where August’s always sticky and sweltering. But up in Estes Park the evenings are cool all summer long, and when I step out of my car in our smooth driveway it’s clear and breezy. It smells like pine trees. The stars are otherworldly bright.
I kick off my sandals inside the front door and walk through every room of the house: moonlight coming in through the tall windows, whispers of wallpaper and doorframes under myfingertips. Trying to memorize every piece of it. Trying to imagine my life anywhere else.
Seriously?Nate had said, when I told him I wanted the house.That’s really all you have to say?Not an answer to whether I could keep it, and itwasall I’d had to say, at least right then. His words from the stadium are still swirling through me:What did you honestly expect? We’ve been so scared to call this what it is.
I would never have admitted it to him, that he was right. That it’s been at least a year—longer, probably—since Nate and me have beenNate and me.We settled so invisibly into our shared but separate lives that I can’t see the seam, looking back. The line where things changed. I only know that they did: that Nate had become my long-term plan by default, not choice, and that there was a part of me—not insignificant—that stayed with him only to prove something to myself. That I’m capable of an everlasting relationship. That I’m settled and grown-up and taken care of. That I’m, maybe most of all, not like my mother.
It was unfair to him, to hold on for reasons like that. But now we’re here, more than even in our unfairness. I’m insulted and humiliated and relieved.
The house had been Nate’s idea, out of college. The front door alone looked like it cost more than my entire Boulder apartment—all burled wood and brass hardware. There was one of those copper, wall-mount thermometers on the porch, and a cluster of aspens in the front yard, and a storybook gate that led around back to the flower garden. It was gorgeous: stone paths winding between rows of mountain lupine and purple columbines. You could see clear to Longs Peak from anywhere youstood. The house belonged inArchitectural Digest, not in my life.
Nate grew up in a low-slung suburb of Denver, in a small brick bungalow with two brothers. Every summer his family drove up to Estes Park and camped for a full week: the only vacation they could afford. The house was down the street from the ice cream shop he’d go to with his brothers, the three of them tumbling over each other on the weed-cracked sidewalk. It was lodged in Nate like an old splinter—the way only things from our childhood get stuck in us. It was more than a house, to him; it was an idea. One that, after a record deal and a national tour, he could afford to rent for himself.
It didn’t make much difference to me, where we landed. The splinters of my own childhood had only ever pushed me in one direction: away. I’d never go back to Ohio, but pretty much anywhere else seemed fine. I was two days past graduation and starting an online master’s program in the fall. I had an empty summer spread before me, a plan for the future, a twenty-two-year-old boy holding my hand. When he tugged me through the front door of his dream house, I went willingly.
