Page 94 of People We Meet on Vacation

There’s no more intense cuddling, just a lot of watching old cartoons together on the bed, sitting out on the fire escape in the morning while we eat breakfast, taking pills whenever the alarms go off on Alex’s phone, drinking tea on the sofa at night with a playlist of “traditional Norwegian folk music” playing in the background.

Four days pass. Then five. And then I’m doing well enough that I could theoretically leave the country, but it’s too late, and there’s no more talk of it. There’s no more touching either, except the occasional bump of the arm or leg, or the compulsive reach across the table to stop me from spilling on my chin. At night, though, when Alex is lying on the far side of my bed, I stay awake for hours listening to his uneven breath, feeling like we’re two magnets trying desperately to draw together.

I know deep down that it’s not a good idea. The fever lowered my defenses, and his too, but when it comes down to it, Alex and I are not for each other. There might be love and attraction and history, but that just means there’s more to lose if we try to take this friendship into a place it doesn’t belong.

Alex wants marriage and kids and a home in one place, and hewants it all with someone like Sarah. Someone who can help him build the life that he lost when he was six years old.

And I want a tetherless life of spontaneous trips and exciting new relationships, different seasons with different people, and quite possibly to never settle down. Our only hope of maintaining this relationship is through the platonic friendship we’ve always had. That five percent has been creeping up for years, but it’s time to tamp it back down. To squash the what-if.

At the end of the week, when I drop him off at the airport, I give him the most chaste hug I can muster, despite the way that his lifting me against him sends that same spine-arching shiver down my back and heat pooling in all the places he’s never touched me.

“I’ll miss you,” he says in a low growl against the side of my ear, and I force myself to step back a sensible distance.

“You too.”

I think about him all night, and when I dream, he’s pulling my thigh over his leg, rolling his hips against mine. Every time he’s about to kiss me, I wake up.

We don’t talk for four days, and when he finally texts me it’s just a picture of his tiny black cat sitting on an open copy ofWise Bloodby Flannery O’Connor.

Fate, he writes.

26

This Summer

STANDING ON THEbalcony, our rain-drenched bodies flush, his gaze soft, I feel my last vestige of self-control washing off me, rinsed clear along with the desert heat and grime of the day. There’s nothing left but Alex and me.

His lips press closed then part, and mine mirror them, his breath warm against my mouth. Every shallow inhale I take draws us a little closer until my tongue just barely grazes his rain-dampened bottom lip, and then he adjusts to catch my mouth just a little more with his.

A fraction of a kiss. And then another one, a bit fuller. A twist of my hands in his hair, the hiss of breath between his teeth, and then another brush of his lips, deeper, slower, careful and intent, and I’m melting against him. Shivering and terrified and exhilarated and every shade between as our mouths sink together and pull apart, his tongue sliding over mine for a second, then a little deeper, my teeth catching on the fullest part of his bottom lip, his hands moving down over my hips, my chest arching up into his as my hands glide down his wet neck.

We come together and apart, the little gaps and short breathless inhalations nearly as intoxicating as each taste, test, scrape of his rain-slicked mouth moving over mine. He draws back, leaves his mouth just hovering over mine, where I can still feel his breath. “Is this okay?” he asks me in a hush.

If I could speak, I’d tell him this is the best kiss I’ve had in my entire life. That I didn’t know just kissing could feel this good. That I couldjustmake out with him for hours and it would be better than the best sex I’ve ever had.

But I can’t think clearly enough to say any of this. My mind is too busy with the grip of his hands on my ass and the feel of his chest flattening mine out, his wet skin and the thin, drenched clothes between us, so I just nod and catch his bottom lip between my teeth again, and he turns me against the stucco wall, presses me back into it as he kisses me more urgently.

One of his hands twists into the hem of my T-shirt where it hangs against my thigh, and the other grazes up my stomach beneath it. “What about this?” he asks.

“Yes,” I breathe.

His hand lifts higher, slips under my bathing suit top, making me shiver. “This?” he says.

My breath catches, heart stumbles over a beat as his fingers lightly circle. I nod, pull his hips back to mine. He’s hard between my legs, and instantly I feel a little light-headed. “I think about you all the time,” he says, and kisses me slowly, drags his mouth down my neck, goose bumps fluttering out in his wake. “I think about this.”

“I do too,” I admit in a whisper. His mouth moves over my chest, kissing me through my wet T-shirt even as his hands work the fabric up over my hips, my ribs, and then my shoulders. He pulls away long enough to peel it over my head and discard it among the plastic sheeting.

“Yours too,” I say, heart leaping. I reach for the hem of his shirt, pull it over his head. When I toss it aside, he tries to move toward me, but I hold him back for a second.

“Do you want to stop?” he asks, his eyes dark.

I shake my head. “I just... never get to look at you like this.”

The corner of his mouth twitches into a smile. “You could have always looked,” he says in a low voice. “Just so you know.”

“Well, you could’ve too,” I say.

“Trust me,” he says. “I did.”

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