Page 39 of People We Meet on Vacation

Laughing, I give his leg a shove with my foot. “I didn’t tell you so you could mock me.”

“Did he tell you what he was saying that whole time on the water taxi?” Alex asks through another rattle of laughter. “How many people were in the hammock with you?”

I start to laugh so hard there are tears leaking from the corners of my eyes. “He... kicked...” It’s hard to get words out between wheezes of laughter, but eventually I manage, “... kicked me out when I told him I didn’t want to have sex.”

“Oh my god,” Alex says, sitting up on his elbow, the sleeping bag falling down from his bare chest and his hair dancing with static. “What a dick.”

“No,” I say. “It was fine. He just wanted to get some, and if not from me, there are easily four hundred more girls on this half acre of sinking woods.”

Alex flops back down on his pillow. “Yeah, well, I still think that’s kind of shitty.”

“Speaking of girls,” I say, smirking.

“We... weren’t?” Alex says.

“Did you hook up with Daisy?”

He rolls his eyes. “Do youthinkI hooked up with Daisy?”

“Until you said it like that, yes.”

Alex adjusts his arm under his pillow. “Daisy isn’t my type.”

“True,” I say. “She’s nothing like Sarah Torval.”

Alex rolls his eyes again then closes them entirely. “Go to sleep, weirdo.”

Through a yawn, I say, “Sleep speaks to me.”

11

This Summer

THERE ARE PLENTYof empty chaise lounges available at the Desert Rose complex pool—everyone’s in the water—so Alex and I take our towels over to two in the corner.

He winces as he lowers himself to sitting. “The plastic’s hot.”

“Everything’s hot.” I plop down beside him and peel off my cover-up. “What percentage of that pool do you think is pee by now?” I ask, tipping my head to the gaggle of sunhat-wearing babies splashing on the steps with their parents.

Alex grimaces. “Don’t say that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s so hot I’m going to get in the water anyway, and I don’t want to think about it.” He glances away as he draws his white T-shirt over his head, then folds it and twists to set it on the ground behind him, the muscles pulling taut along his chest and stomach in the process.

“How have you gotten more ripped?” I ask.

“I haven’t.” He pulls the sunblock from my beach bag and pumps some into his hand.

I look down at my own stomach, hanging over the tight highlighter orange of my bikini bottoms. In the last few years my lifestyle of airplane cocktails and late-night burritos, gyros, and noodles has started to fill me out and soften me. “Fine,” I say to Alex, “then you look exactly the same, while the rest of us are starting to droop in the eyes and the boobs and the neck, and get more and more stretch marks and pockmarks and scars.”

“Do you really want to look like your eighteen-year-old self?” he asks, and starts to smear big globs of sunblock onto his arms and chest.

“Yes.” I pick up the bottle of Banana Boat and work some of it onto my shoulders. “But I’d settle for twenty-five.”

Alex shakes his head, then bows it as he slathers more sunblock onto his neck. “You look better than you did back then, Poppy.”

“Really? Because the comments section on my Instagram would disagree,” I say.

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