Page 52 of People We Meet on Vacation

“I can just tell he doesn’t get it,” Alex said.

“Get what?” I asked.

“You,” he said. “He has no idea how lucky he is.”

It was both a sweet and a hurtful thing for him to say. Alex’s take on our relationship made me feel embarrassed, even if I wasn’t sure he was right.

“I’m lucky too,” I said. “He’s really special, Alex.”

He sighed. “Maybe I just need to get to know him better.” I knew from his voice he didn’t think that would fix the problem at all.

In my daydreams, I’d imagined the two of them becoming best friends, so close that it made sense for our summer trip to expand to include Julian, but after seeing how they interacted, I knew better than to even float the idea.

So Alex and I headed to San Francisco on our own. My credit card earned me enough points to get one of the round-trip plane tickets free, and Alex and I split the cost of the other.

We started with four days in wine country, staying at a new Sonoma bed-and-breakfast that comped two nights in exchange for the advertising they’d get to my twenty-five thousand followers. Alex good-naturedly agreed to take my photo doing all kinds of quaint things:

Sitting on one of the old-fashioned red bikes the B and B has for guests, wearing a giant straw sun hat, fresh flowers in the wicker basket fixed to the handlebars.

Walking on the nature trails through the scrubby meadows and their scraggly trees.

Sipping a cup of coffee on the patio, and a chilled old-fashioned in the sitting room.

We lucked out with the wine tastings too. The first winery we visited comped your tastings if you bought a bottle, and I researched the cheapest one online before we went. Alex took my picture posing in between rows of vines with a glimmering glass of rosé, one leg kicked out to the side to show off my ridiculous purple-and-yellow-striped vintage jumpsuit.

I was tipsy by then, and when he knelt, right in the dried-out dirt in his light gray pants, to take the photo, I almost fell over laughing at the bizarre angle he’d chosen for the picture. “Too many wine,” I said, gasping for breath.

“Too. Many. Wine?” he repeated, delighted and disbelieving, and as I fell into a crouch in the middle of the aisle, laughing my head off, he took a few more pictures from way down low, pictures that would make me look like a sassily dressed skin triangle.

He was being a horrible photographer on purpose, not out of protest but to crack me up.

It was the flip side of the Sad Puppy coin, another performance for me and me alone.

By the time we hit the second winery, we were already sleepy from the alcohol and sunshine, and I let my head droop against his shoulder. We were inside, on a technicality: the whole back of the building was a windowed garage door that pulled up so you could move freely from the patio, with its bougainvillea-encroached lattice, to the light, airy bar with its twenty-foot ceilings, big-ass fans spinning lazily overhead, their rhythm like a lullaby.

“How long have you two been together?” the sweet, middle-aged woman running the tasting asked as she returned with our next pour, a light and crisp Chardonnay.

“Oh,” Alex said.

Midyawn, I squeezed his biceps and said, “Newlyweds.”

The bartender was tickled. “In that case,” she said with a wink, “this one’s on me.”

Her name was Mathilde, and she was originally from France but moved to the United States after meeting her wife online. They lived in Sonoma but had honeymooned just outside San Francisco. “It’s called the Blue Heron Inn,” she told me. “It’s the most idyllic place I’ve ever seen. Romantic and cozy, with this roaring fire and lovely patio—just a few minutes from Muir Beach. You twomustsee it. It isperfectfor newlyweds. Tell them Mathilde sent you.”

Before we left, we tipped Mathilde for the cost of the free tasting and then some.

For the next couple days, I deployed the newlyweds card regularly. Sometimes we got a discount or a free glass; sometimes we got nothing but a smile, but even those felt genuine and meaningful.

“I feel kind of bad,” Alex told me as we were walking it off in one vineyard.

“If you want to go get married,” I said, “we can.”

“Somehow, I don’t think Julian would take that too well.”

“He won’t care,” I said. “Julian doesn’t want to get married.”

Alex stopped and looked down at me, and then, entirely because of the wine, I started crying. He cupped my face and angled it up to his. “Hey,” he said. “It’s all right, Poppy. You don’t really want to marry Julian, do you? You’re way too good for that guy. He doesn’t deserve you.”

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