Page 88 of People We Meet on Vacation

You.

You. Say it.

I shake my head. “I don’t want to lose you again.”

Alex reaches out for me, and I go to him, let him catch my hips and pull me in. I press myself against his damp T-shirt as he wraps his arms around me and lifts me up and into him. I push up onto tiptoes and he holds me there, his face buried into my neck, and my oversized T-shirt soaking through. I thread my arms around his waist and shiver as his hands slide up my back, catching on the lump where my bathing suit ties are knotted under my shirt.

Even after a full day of sweating, he smells so good, feels so good against me and underneath my hands. Combined with the intense relief of the desert rain, this has me feeling light-headed, spinny, uninhibited. My hands skim up his neck and slip into his hair, and he draws back enough to look me in the face, but neither of us lets go, and all the stress and worry has left his brow and jaw just as it’s lifted from my body like steam.

“You won’t lose me,” he says, voice dimmed by the rain. “As long as you want me, I’m here.”

I swallow down the lump in my throat, but it keeps rising. Trying to keep the words inside. It would be a mistake to say them, right? We tell each other everything, but there are some things that can’t be unsaid, just like there are things that couldn’t be undone.

His hand rises to sweep a damp curl out of my eyes, tucking it behind my ear. The lump seems to melt, and the truth slips out of me like a breath I’ve been holding all this time.

“I always want you, Alex,” I whisper. “Always.”

In this dim light, his eyes look almost sparkly, and his mouth goes soft. When he bends to press his forehead to mine, my whole body feels heavy, like my want is a weighted blanket pushing on me from every side, while his hands brush over my skin as softly as sunlight. His nose slides down the side of mine, the inch between our reaching, unsure mouths pulsing.

There is still a kind of plausible deniability to this, a chance we’ll let this moment pass without ever closing that final distance. But, as I listen to his unsteady breath, feel the way it tugs against me as his lips part, come closer, hesitate, I forget every reason I was trying to put this off.

We’re magnets, trying to draw together even as we cradle the careful distance between us. His hand skims over my jaw, gingerly angles it so that our noses graze against each other, testing this small gap between us, our open mouths tasting the air between us.

Every breath he takes now whispers against my bottom lip. Each of my shaky inhalations tries to draw him closer.This wasn’t supposed to happen, I think foggily.

Then, and more loudly,Thishadto happen.

Thishasto happen.

Thisishappening.

25

Four Summers Ago

THIS YEAR ISgoing to be different. I’ve been working forRest + Relaxationmagazine for six months. In that time, I’ve already been to:

Marrakech and Casablanca.

Martinborough and Queenstown.

Santiago and Easter Island.

Not to mention all the cities in the United States they’ve sent me to.

These trips are nothing like the ones Alex and I used to take, but I may have downplayed that when I pitched combining our summer trip with a work trip, because I want to see his reaction when we show up to our first resort with our ratty T.J. Maxx luggage only to be greeted with champagne.

Four days in Sweden. Four in Norway.

Not cold, exactly, butcoolat least, and since I reached out to Lita the River Raft Guide’s expatriate sister-in-law, she’s been emailing me weekly with suggestions for things to do in Oslo. Unlike Lita,Dani has a steel-trap memory: she seems to recall every amazing restaurant she’s eaten at and knows precisely what to tell us to order. In one email, she ranks various fjords by a slew of criteria (beauty, crowdedness, size, convenience of location, beauty of the drivetothe convenient/inconvenient location).

When Lita passed along her contact information, I was expecting to get a list with a specific national park and a couple of bars, maybe. And Danididdo that—in her first email. But the messages kept coming whenever she thought of something else we “absolutely could not leave without experiencing!”

She uses a lot of exclamation points, and while usually I think people fall back on this in an attempt to seem friendly and definitely-not-at-all-angry, each one of her sentences reads as a command.

“You must drink aquavit!”

“Be sure to drink it at room temperature, perhaps alongside a beer!”

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