Page 49 of The Heartbreak Hotel
“Let me.” Henry reaches pastme, arching onto his tiptoes. When he lowers a pot from the high cabinet and hands it to me, I force myself to look away from the exposed strip of his stomach.
“Is all this stuff where you left it?” Mei asks from the island. She’s putting in her earrings. “Back when you lived here?”
“Not quite,” Henry says, leaning his hip into the counter. “I didn’t keep my heaviest pots on the top shelf, but”—he raises his hands—“it’s Louisa’s kitchen now.”
Mei barks out a laugh. “Yeah, she’s not exactly Michelin-chef material, if you hadn’t picked up on that yet.”
“Weren’t you leaving?” I ask, shooting her a frozen smile.
“I was.” She smiles sweetly. “I’ll see you tomorrow; give Quinn a hug for me when he wakes up.”
Mei’s spending the night with some work friends in Denver—a girls’ night designed to get her over Andy that she’s been dreading ever since it was proposed.Go, I’d told her.Forgetabout them for one night. And her miserable, whispered reply:I’m not ready to forget about them.
But now I watch her go, in a maroon corduroy dress and platform boots that I could never in one hundred lifetimes pull off. Kim and Bea are having dinner in town, and Nan’s been upstairs with a set of paperback romance novels all evening. It’s just Henry and me in my quiet kitchen, the setting sun casting us multicolored through the stained glass.
When I open the pantry for a box of Quinn’s favorite mac and cheese, I ask, “WhereshouldI keep my pots?”
“It’s your kitchen,” he repeats. But when I hike my eyebrows at him, he points to the cabinet next to the sink, where a pair of low drawers house my cutting boards. “I kept them here.”
When I sidestep him to fill the pot with water from the sink, Henry doesn’t move: his body is warm and solid, brushing against mine. I glance up at him and quickly away, whisking the pot to the stovetop.
“How long did you live here, on your own? Like, not as your parents’ house?”
“Five years,” he says. I twist the burner and look back at him as the gas hisses on. He’s watching me carefully, a glass of my best red wine ($17) in one hand, and doesn’t offer anything more. I wish I didn’t have to drag it out of him, all the details I’m ravenous to know—if he was here alone, and why he left when he did, and whether he likes what I’ve done with the house. Whether he still pictures his life here, when he steps inside.
“Why’d you leave?”
He takes a sip of wine, and I watch the movement of his throat as he swallows. “It was time to move on.”
I roll my eyes, and he takes a step closer to me. “Why are you rolling your eyes at me?”
“Because you’re impossible.”
His eyebrows twitch. “How so?”
“You want to stay for dinner,” I say, “which I assume means you want to talk to me.” I wait for him to nod his acknowledgment. “But you refuse to answer any of my questions directly.”
Henry points to the cabinet. “I told you where I kept my pots.”
I roll my eyes again, and he breathes a low laugh. “Fine. You answer one question for me, and I’ll answer one for you.”
I bite my lip. He tracks the movement with his eyes. There’s so much I don’t want Henry to know, so many avenues for this deal to go sideways: the status of my counseling license, the shameful way Nate left me, the precarious mess of my mother—always teetering in the background.
But Henry’s eyes are dark and liquid in the sunset through the kitchen windows. His fingers are curled just so around the edge of the counter. His mouth is wet and red with wine. I think of him remodeling this kitchen for me—without knowing it—and find, terrifyingly and all at once, that I’d give nearly anything to learn just one concrete thing about him. The family he doesn’t want to talk about, the life that took him away from this house.How do you know, Rashad asked me that blue-dark morning,that you aren’t ready?
“Deal,” I say softly.
Henry tips his head to the pot, which has started to boil. As I dump in enough macaroni for all three of us, he says, “How did you wind up with Nate?”
I make an involuntary noise, a cross between a squeal and alaugh. “Wow.” I shoot Henry a look over one shoulder, then reach for a spoon to stir the noodles. “Straight to the point.”
“Well, if I only get one question.”
I turn to him. “I thought we were just going back and forth until one of us refuses to answer.”
Henry studies me, the ghost of a smile on his lips. “If that’s how you want to play.”
“It is.”
