People We Meet on Vacation

HEY, ALEX TEXTS me the night before we leave for Tuscany.

Hey yourself, I write back.

Can you talk for a sec? Just want to finalize some stuff.

Immediately, I think he’s calling to cancel. Which doesn’t make sense.

For the first time in years we’re set to have a tension-free trip. We’re both in committed relationships, our friendship is better than ever, and I have never been so happy in my life.

Three weeks after my pneumonia debacle, I met Trey. A month after that, Alex and Sarah were back together—he says it’s better this time, that they’re on the same page. Nearly as important, this time around she seems to have finally started warming to me, and the few times that Alex and Trey have met, they’ve gotten along too. So once again, as always, I’ve come to the place of being so, so ecstatically happy that Alex and I never let anything happen between us.Content property of NôvelDra/ma.Org.

I start to text him back, then decide to just call him from the folding chair on my balcony instead since I’m home alone. Trey’s still at Good Boy Bar, up the street from my new apartment, but I came home early after a bout of nausea, a warning sign of an oncoming migraine I need to fight off before our flight.

Alex answers on the second ring, and I say, “Everything okay?”

I can hear his turn signal going. Okay, so maybe we’re back to him calling me from the car, on his way home from the gym, but things really do seem better. For one thing, they sent me a joint birthday card. And Christmas card. She not only followed me back on Instagram but she likes my photos—even comments little hearts and smiley faces on some of them.

So I thought things were good, but now Alex skips right over hello and goes straight to, “We’re not making a mistake, are we?”

“Um,” I say, “what?”

“I mean, a couples’ trip. That’s sort of intense.”

I sigh. “How so?”

“I don’t know.” I can hear the anxiety in his voice, imagine him grimacing, tugging at his hair. “Trey and Sarah have only met once.”

In the spring, Trey and I flew to Linfield so he could meet my parents. Dad wasn’t impressed by the tattoos or the holes in Trey’s ears from the gauges he got when he was seventeen, or that he turns Dad’s questions around on him, or that he doesn’t have a degree.

But Mom was impressed by his manners, which really are top-notch. Although I think for her, it had more to do with the juxtaposition of his appearance with his easy, warm way of saying things like, “Excellent s’mores cake, Ms. Wright!” and “Can I help you with the dishes?”

By the end of the weekend, she’d decided he was a very nice young man, and when I sneaked out onto the deck to get Dad’s opinion while Trey and Mom were inside dishing up homemade Funfetti cake, Dad looked me in the eye with a solemn nod and said, “I suppose he seems right for you. And he obviously makes you happy, Pop. That’s all that matters to me.”

He does make me happy. So happy. And he is right for me. Freakily so. I mean, we work together. We get to spend pretty much every day together, either in the office or halfway around the world, but we’re also both independent, like having our own apartments, our own friends. He and Rachel get along, but when Trey and I are in the city, he’s mostly hanging with his skateboarding friends while Rachel and I are trying a new brunch place or reading in the park or having our whole bodies scrubbed raw in our favorite Korean spa.

Two days home in Linfield and both of us were already a little restless, but he didn’t mind the mess and he liked the menagerie of dying animals and he joined right in when we did a New Talent Show over Skype with Parker and Prince.

Still, after how everything went down with Guillermo—and pretty much everyone else in the entire world—I was restless, eager to get out of Linfield before something scared Trey off, so we probably would’ve headed back early if not for the fact that it was Mr. Nilsen’s sixtieth birthday, and Alex and Sarah were coming down to surprise him with a visit. We’d decided the four of us should grab dinner before the party.

“I’m so excited to meet this guy,” Trey kept saying whenever a new text came in from Alex, and every time, it made my nerves inch closer to the surface. I felt fiercely protective—I just wasn’t sure over whom.

“Just give him a chance,” I kept saying. “He takes a while to open up.”

“I know, I know,” Trey insisted. “But I know how much he means to you, so I’m going to like him, P. I promise.”

Dinner was okay. I mean, the food was great (Mediterranean), but the conversation could’ve been better. Trey, I couldn’t help but think, came off a little show-offy when Alex asked him what he’d studied, but I knew his lack of formal education was something of a chip on his shoulder, and I wished there was some easy way for me to signal that to Alex as Trey launched into the story of how it all happened.

How he’d been in a metal band all through high school back in Pittsburgh. How they’d taken off when he was eighteen, gotten offered an opening slot on the tour of a much bigger band. Trey was an amazing drummer, but what he really loved was photography. When his band broke up after four years of near-constant touring, he took a job taking pictures on another band’s tour. He loved traveling, meeting people, seeing new cities. And as those connections built up, other job offers rolled in. He went freelance, eventually started working with R+R, and then came on as a staff photographer.

He finished his monologue by putting an arm around my shoulders and saying, “And then I met P.”

The flicker on Alex’s expression was so subtle I was sure Trey didn’t notice it. Maybe Sarah hadn’t either, but to me, it felt like a pocketknife plunging into my belly button and dragging upward five or six inches.

“Sooo sweet,” Sarah said in her saccharine voice, and probably my face made a much bigger twitch.

“The funny thing is,” Trey said then, “we were supposed to meet sooner. I was scheduled to go on that Norway trip with you two. Before she got sick.”

“Wow.” Alex’s eyes flicked to mine, then dipped to the glass of water in front of him. It was sweating as badly as I was. He picked it up, slowly sipped, set it down. “That is funny.”

“Anyway,” Trey said awkwardly. “What about you? What did you study?”

Trey knew exactly what Alex had gone to school for (was still going to school for), but I figured that by phrasing it as a question, he was giving Alex a chance to talk more about himself.

Instead, Alex took another sip and said only, “Creative writing, then literature.”

I had to sit and watch my boyfriend struggle to find an appropriate follow-up question, give up, and go back to studying the menu.

“He’s an amazing writer,” I said awkwardly, and Sarah shifted in her seat.

“He is,” she said, her tone so acidic you’d think I’d just said Alex Nilsen has an incredibly sexy body!

After dinner, we went to the party at Grandma Betty’s house and things improved a bit. Alex’s goofy brothers were all clamoring to meet Trey, bombarding him with all kinds of questions about the band and R+R and whether I snored.

“Alex would never tell us,” the youngest, David, said, “but I assume Poppy sounds like a machine gun when she sleeps.”

Trey laughed, took it all in stride. He’s never jealous. Neither of us can afford to be: we are both relentless flirts. It sounds strange, but I love that about him. I love watching him go up to the bar to order me a drink and seeing how the bartenders smile and laugh, lean across the bar to bat their eyelashes at him. I love watching him charm his way through every city we go to, and that whenever he’s next to me, he’s touching me: an arm around the shoulders, a hand on my low back, or pulling me into his lap like we’re home alone rather than dining at a five-star restaurant.

I’ve never felt so secure, so sure that I’m on the same page as someone.

At the party, he kept his hands on me at all times, and David teased us about it.

“You don’t think she’s going to make a run for it if you let go, do you?” he joked.

“Oh, she’ll definitely make a run for it,” Trey said. “This girl can’t sit still for longer than five minutes. That’s one thing I love about her.”

The party was the first time all of Alex’s brothers had been in the same place in a long time, and they were as rowdy and sweet as I remembered them being when Alex and I were nineteen, home from college and charged with driving them around in Alex’s car, since none of them had their own yet and their dad was a sweet man but also a forgetful, flaky one who was incapable of keeping track of who needed to be where and when.

While Alex had always been calm and still by default, his brothers were the kind of boys who never stopped wrestling or giving one another wet willies. Even though some of them have kids now, they were still like that at the party.

Mr. and Mrs. Nilsen had named them in alphabetical order. Alex first, then Bryce, then Cameron, then David, and weirdly they’re mostly sized like that too. With Alex the tallest and broadest, Bryce just as tall but lanky and narrow shouldered, Cameron a few inches shorter and thick. Then there’s David, who’s an inch taller than Alex with the build of a professional athlete.

They’re all handsome, with varying shades of blond hair and matching hazel eyes, but David looks like a movie star (which lately, Alex said at dinner, he’s been talking about moving to L.A. to become), with his thick, wavy hair and wide, thoughtful eyes, and his excitability, the way he lights up whenever he starts talking. He starts fifty percent of his sentences with the name of whoever he’s addressing, or whoever he thinks will be most interested.

“Poppy, Alex brought a bunch of issues of R+R home so I could read your articles,” he said at one point at Betty’s house, and that was the first time I found out Alex even read my articles. “They’re really good. They make me feel like I’m there.”

“I wish you were,” I told him. “Sometime we should all take a trip together.”

“Hell yeah,” David said, then looked over his shoulder, grinning as he checked whether his dad had heard him swear. He’s a twenty-one-year-old baby, and I love him.

At some point, Betty asked for my help in the kitchen, and I followed her in to put candles in the German chocolate cake she had baked for her son-in-law. “Your young man Trey seems like a nice one,” she told me without looking up from what she was doing.

“He’s great,” I said.

“And I like his tattoos,” she added. “They’re just beautiful!”

She wasn’t being an asshole. Betty could be sarcastic, but she could also catch you off guard with her opinions on certain things. She was changeable. I liked that about her. Even at her age, she asked questions in conversation like she didn’t already have all the answers.

“I like them too,” I said.

I was attracted to Trey’s energy more than his appearance during our first work trip together (Hong Kong), and I liked that he waited to ask me out until we were home because he didn’t want to make anything weird for me if I said no.

I’d be lying, though, if I said Alex played no part in my saying yes.

He’d just told me that he and Sarah had been talking a lot more at work, that things seemed okay between them. At that point, I was still regularly waking up from dreams about him showing up at my door, looking sleepy and worried and too comforting, while I was in the throes of a fever.

It didn’t matter that he’d said nothing about getting back together with Sarah.

He would or he wouldn’t, but in the end, there would be someone, and I didn’t think my heart could take it. So I said yes to Trey that night and we went to a bar with free Skee-Ball and hot dogs, and by the end of that night, I knew I could fall in love with him.

Trey was to me what Sarah Torval was to Alex. Someone who fit.

So I kept saying yes.

“Do you love him?” Betty asked me, still not looking up from the task at hand.

I had the sense that she was giving me a level of privacy. The option to lie, without her looking straight into my eyes, if that was what I needed. But I didn’t need to lie. “I do.”

“Good, honey. That’s great.” Her hands stilled, holding two thin silver candles into the frosting like they might try to jump out. “Do you love him like you love Alex?”

I remember with vivid clarity the feeling of my heart stumbling over its next several beats. That question was more complicated, but I couldn’t lie to her.

“I don’t think I’ll ever love anyone the way I love Alex,” I said, and then I thought, But maybe I won’t ever love anyone like I love Trey either.

I should’ve said it, but I didn’t. Betty shook her head and looked me in the eye. “Wish he knew that.”

Then she walked out of the kitchen, leaving me to follow. Alex and Sarah had brought Flannery O’Connor with them, and she chose that moment to make her dramatic entrance, walking up to me with her spine arched up and eyes wide, staring into my face and meowing loudly, in a full-body expression that Alex and I call Halloween Kitty.

“Hi,” I said, and she rubbed against my legs, so I reached to pick her up, and she hissed and swung a handful of claws toward me just as Sarah walked into the kitchen with a stack of dirty dishes. She laughed and said in that sweet voice of hers, “Wow! She does not like you!”

So yes, I see where Alex is coming from with his nerves about this couples trip, but we’re making progress. With the Instagram likes and the perfectly pleasant time Trey, Alex, and I had at an arcade bar the last time Alex visited. And besides, being in the Tuscan countryside with an IV drip of incredible wine is not going to be the same as one awkward dinner in Ohio followed by a sixty-year-old teetotaler’s birthday party.

“They’re going to get along great,” I tell him now, propping my legs up on the balcony railing and adjusting the phone between my face and shoulder.

I hear his turn signal click off, and he sighs. “How can you be sure?”

“Because we love them,” I reason. “And we love each other. So they’ll love each other. And we’ll just all love each other. You and Trey. Me and Sarah.”

He laughs. “I wish you could hear how much your voice changed for that last part. It sounded like you were inhaling helium.”

“Look, I’m still working on forgiving her for dumping you the last time,” I say. “It seems like she’s figured out that was the biggest mistake of her life, though, so I’m giving her a chance.”

“Poppy,” he says. “It wasn’t like that. Things were complicated, but they’re better now.”

“I know, I know,” I say, even though, really, I don’t. He insists there are no hard feelings between them about their last breakup, but whenever I think about what she said—that their relationship was about as exciting as the school library where they’d met—I still see red for a second.

Another wave of nausea hits me, and I groan. “I’m sorry,” I say. “I really need to go to bed so I can be flight-ready tomorrow, but I’m telling you. This trip is going to be amazing.”

“Yeah,” he says stiffly. “I’m sure I’m worrying for nothing.”

Mostly, it turns out that’s true.

We’re staying in a villa. It’s hard to be in a bad mood when you’re staying in a villa, with a gleaming pool and old stone patio, an outdoor kitchen with bougainvillea dripping all over everything in soft pinks and purples.

“Wow, okay,” Sarah says when we walk in. “I’m never missing one of these trips again.”

I flash Alex a look that’s the facial equivalent of a thumbs-up, and he smiles faintly back.

“I know, right?” Trey says. “We should’ve thought to take a group trip sooner.”

“Definitely,” Sarah says, though obviously with her schedule at a high school and Alex’s teaching course load at the university, it’s not like they’ve got much time to jet-set around, even for steeply discounted Tuscan villas.

“There are, like, ten Michelin-starred restaurants within twenty miles of here—and I figured Alex would want to cook one night at least.”

“That’d be amazing,” Alex agrees.

Sure, it’s a little stiff and awkward that first day at the villa, as the four of us meander around between jet-lagged naps in our rooms and quick dips in the pool. Trey shoots some test photos, and I go into town to grab snacks: aged cheeses and meats, fresh bread, and a variety of jams in tiny jars. And wine, plenty of wine.

By the end of the first night sitting outside on the terrace, and drinking the first two bottles of wine, everyone has softened, loosened. Sarah’s become downright chatty, telling stories about her students, about Flannery O’Connor and life in Indiana, and Alex offers quiet, dry asides that make me laugh so hard wine spews out of my nose, twice.

It feels like the four of us are friends, real friends.

When Trey pulls me into his lap and rests his chin on my shoulder, Sarah touches her chest and awws. “You two are so sweet,” she says, looking to Alex. “Aren’t they sweet?”

“And buttery,” Alex says, just barely glancing my way.

“What?” Sarah says. “What’s that supposed to mean?” He shrugs, and she goes on: “I wish Alex liked PDA. We barely even hug in public.”

“I’m not a big hugger,” Alex says, embarrassed. “I didn’t grow up hugging.”

“Yeah, but it’s me,” Sarah says. “I’m not some girl you met at a bar, babe.”

Now that I think of it, I’m not sure I’ve seen him and Sarah touch. But it’s not like he’s touched me all that much in public either, unless you count dancing in the streets of New Orleans, or that time in Vail (and there was a fair amount of alcohol involved in both).

“It just feels . . . rude or something,” Alex tries to explain.

“Rude?” Trey lights a cigarette. “We’re all adults, man. Hold on to your girl if you want.”

Sarah snorts. “Don’t bother. This has been a years-long conversation. I’ve accepted my lot. I’m going to marry a man who hates holding hands.”

My chest jolts at the word marry. Is it really that serious between them? I mean, obviously it’s serious, but they haven’t been back together that long. Trey and I talk about marriage occasionally, but in a lofty, far-off, maybe-who-knows-let’s-not-put-pressure-on-this way.

“Now, that I can understand,” Trey says, blowing his cigarette smoke away from us. “Hand-holding sucks. It’s not comfortable, and it limits movement, and in a crowd it’s inconvenient. Like, you might as well just handcuff your ankles together.”

“Not to mention your hands get all sweaty,” Alex says. “It’s all-around uncomfortable.”

“I love holding hands!” I chime in, tucking the word marry deep inside my brain to puzzle over later. “Especially in a crowd. It makes me feel safe.”

“Well, it looks like if we go into Florence before this trip is over,” Sarah says, “it’s gonna be me and Poppy holding hands, and you two lone wolves getting utterly lost in the masses.”

Sarah holds her wineglass out to me and I clink mine to hers, and we both laugh, and that might be the first moment that I like her. That I realize maybe I could’ve liked her all along, if I hadn’t been holding so tight to Alex that there was no room for her.

I have to stop doing that. I decide I will, and from then on, the wine takes over, and all four of us are talking, joking, laughing, and this night sets the tone for the rest of the trip.

Long, sunny days wandering every old town spread out around us. Driving to vineyards and swirling glasses of wine with our mouths held ajar to inhale their deep, fruity scent. Late lunches in ancient stone buildings with world-renowned chefs. Alex leaving bright and early each morning to run, Trey dipping out not much later to scout locations or capture photos he’s already planned. Sarah and I sleeping in most days, then meeting for a long swim (or to float on rafts with plastic cups full of limoncello and vodka), talking about nothing too important but with far more ease than that day at Linfield’s lone Mediterranean restaurant.

At night, we go out for late dinners—and wine—then come back to our villa’s patio and talk and drink until it’s nearly morning.

We play every game we recognize from the closet full of them. Lawn games like bocce and badminton, and board games like Clue and Scrabble and Monopoly (which I happen to know Alex hates, though he doesn’t admit that when Trey suggests we play).

We stay up later and later each night. We scribble celebrities’ names onto pieces of paper, mix them up, and stick them to our foreheads for a game of twenty questions in which we guess who’s on our heads, with the added obstacle of every question asked requiring another drink.

It quickly becomes obvious that none of us has the same celebrity references, which makes the game two hundred times harder, but also funnier. When I ask if my celebrity is a reality TV star, Sarah pretends to gag.

“Really?” I say. “I love reality TV.”

It’s not like I’m unused to this reaction. But part of me feels like her disapproval equals Alex’s disapproval, and a sore spot appears along with an urge to press on it.

“I don’t know how you can watch that stuff,” Sarah says.

“I know,” Trey says lightly. “I’ve never understood her interest either. It’s at odds with every other thing about her, but P’s all about The Bachelor.”

“Not all about it,” I say, defensive. I started watching a couple seasons ago with Rachel when a girl from her art program was a contestant, and within three or four episodes, I was hooked. “I just think it’s, like, this incredible experiment,” I explain. “And you get to watch hours of the footage compiled in it. You learn so much about people.”

Sarah’s eyebrows flick up. “Like what narcissists are willing to do for fame?”

Trey laughs. “Dead-on.”

I force out a laugh, take another sip of my wine. “Not what I was talking about.” I shift uncomfortably, trying to figure out how to explain myself. “I mean, there’s a lot that I like. But one thing . . . I like how in the end, it seems like it’s actually a hard decision for some people. There will be two or three contestants they feel a strong connection with, and it doesn’t just come down to choosing the strongest one. Instead, it’s like . . . you’re watching them choose a life.”

And that’s how it is in real life too. You can love someone and still know the future you’d have with them wouldn’t work for you, or for them, or maybe even for both of you.

“But do any of those relationships really work out?” Sarah asks.

“Most don’t,” I admit. “But that’s not the point. You watch someone date all these people, and you see how different they are with each of them, and then you watch them choose. Some people choose the person they have the best chemistry with, or that they have the most fun with, and some choose the one they think will make an amazing father, or who they’ve felt the safest opening up to. It’s fascinating. How so much of love is about who you are with someone.”

I love who I am with Trey. I’m confident and independent, flexible and coolheaded. I’m at ease. I’m the person I always dreamed I would be.

“Fair,” Sarah allows. “It’s the part about making out with, like, thirty guys then getting engaged to someone you’ve met five times that’s harder for me to swallow.”

Trey tips his head back, laughing. “You’d totally sign up for that show if we broke up. Wouldn’t you, P?”

“Now, that I would watch,” Sarah says, giggling.

I know he’s joking around, but it irks me, feeling like they’re united against me.

I think about saying, Why do you think that? Because I’m a narcissist who’s willing to do anything to get famous?

Alex bumps his leg into mine under the table, and when I glance at him, he’s not even looking my way. He’s just reminding me that he’s here, that nothing can really hurt me.

I bite down on my words and let it go. “More wine?”

The next night, we eat a long, late dinner out on the terrace. When I go inside to dish up gelato for dessert, I find Alex standing in the kitchen, reading an email.

He has just gotten word that Tin House accepted one of his stories. He looks so happy, so brilliantly himself, that I sneak a picture of him. I love it so much I would probably set it as my background if both of us were single and that wasn’t extremely weird for both Sarah and Trey.

We decide we have to celebrate (as if that isn’t what this whole trip has been), and Trey makes us mojitos and we sit out on the chaise lounges overlooking the valley, listening to the soft, twinkly sounds of nighttime in the countryside.

I barely sip on my drink. I’ve been nauseated all night, and for the first time, I excuse myself to go to sleep long before the others. Trey climbs into bed hours later, tipsy and kissing on my neck, pulling on me, and after we have sex, he falls asleep immediately, and my nausea comes back.

That’s when it occurs to me.

I was supposed to start my period at some point on this trip.

Probably it’s a fluke. There are a lot of reasons to wind up nauseated while traveling internationally. And Trey and I are fairly careful.

Still, I get out of bed, stomach roiling, and tiptoe downstairs, opening my notes app to see when I was expecting my period. Rachel’s constantly telling me to get this period tracker app, but until now I haven’t really seen the point.

My ears are pounding. My heart is racing. My tongue feels too big for my mouth.

I was supposed to start yesterday. A two-day delay isn’t unheard-of. Nausea after drinking buckets of red wine isn’t either. Especially for a migraineur. But still, I’m freaking out.

I grab my jacket off the coatrack, stuff my feet into sandals, and take the rental car keys. The nearest twenty-four-hour grocery store is thirty-eight minutes away. I make it back to the villa with three different pregnancy tests before the sun has even started to rise.

By then I’m in a full-blown panic. All I can do is pace back and forth on the terrace, gripping the most expensive pregnancy test in one hand and reminding myself to inhale, exhale, inhale. My lungs feel worse than they did when I had pneumonia.

“Couldn’t sleep?” A quiet voice startles me. Alex is leaned against the open door in a pair of black shorts and running shoes, his pale body cast blue by the predawn.

A laugh dies in my throat. I’m not sure why. “Are you getting up to run?”

“It’s cooler before the sun’s up.”

I nod, wrap my arms around myself, and turn back to gaze over the valley. Alex comes to stand beside me, and without looking over at him, I start to cry. He reaches out for my hand and unfurls it to see the pregnancy test clenched there.

For ten seconds, he is silent. We are both silent.

“Have you taken one yet?” he asks softly.

I shake my head and start to cry harder. He pulls me in, wraps his arms around my back as I let my breath out in a few rushes of quiet sobs. It eases some of the pressure, and I draw back from him, wiping my eyes with the heels of my hands.

“What am I going to do, Alex?” I ask him. “If I’m . . . What the hell am I supposed to do?”

He studies my face for a long time. “What do you want to do?”

I wipe at my eyes again. “I don’t think Trey wants to have kids.”

“That’s not what I asked,” Alex murmurs.

“I have no idea what I want,” I admit. “I mean, I want to be with him. And maybe someday . . . I don’t know. I don’t know.” I bury my face in my hands as a few more ugly, soundless sobs work out of me. “I’m not strong enough to do that on my own. I can’t. I couldn’t even handle being sick by myself, Alex. How am I supposed to . . .”

He takes my wrists gently and pulls them away from my face, ducking his head to peer into my eyes. “Poppy,” he says. “You won’t be alone, okay? I’m here.”

“So, what?” I say. “I’d, like, move to Indiana? Get an apartment next door to you and Sarah? How’s that going to work, Alex?”

“I don’t know,” he admits. “It doesn’t matter how. I’m here. Just go take the test, and then we’ll figure it out, okay? You’ll figure out what you want to do, and we’ll do it.”

I take a deep breath, nod, go inside with the bag of tests I’ve set down on the ground and the one I’m still gripping like a life raft.

I pee on three at once, then take them all back outside to wait. We line them up on the low stone wall surrounding the terrace. Alex sets a timer on his watch, and we stand there together, saying nothing until it beeps.

One by one the results come in.

Negative.

Negative.

Negative.

I start to cry again. I’m not sure if it’s relief or something more complicated than that. Alex pulls me into his chest, rocks me soothingly side to side as I regain composure.

“I can’t keep doing this to you,” I say when I’m finally out of tears.

“Doing what?” he asks in a whisper.

“I don’t know. Needing you.”

He shakes his head against the side of mine. “I need you too, Poppy.” It’s then that I realize how thick and wet and trembling his voice is. When I pull back from him, I realize that he’s crying. I touch the side of his face. “Sorry,” he says, closing his eyes. “I just . . . I don’t know what I’d do if something happened to you.”

And then I understand.

To someone like Alex, who lost his mother how he did, pregnancy isn’t just a life-changing possibility. It’s a potential death sentence.

“I’m sorry,” he says again. “God, I don’t know why I’m crying.”

I pull his face down into my shoulder, and he cries some more, his huge shoulders heaving with it. In all the years we’ve been friends, he has probably seen me cry hundreds of times, but this is the first time he’s ever cried in front of me.

“It’s okay,” I whisper to him, and then, as many times as it takes, “It’s okay. You’re okay. We’re okay, Alex.”

He buries his damp face in the side of my neck, his hands curling in tight against the small of my back as I run my fingers through his hair, his damp lips warm against my skin.

I know the feeling will pass, but right then I wish so badly that we were here alone. That we had yet to even meet Sarah and Trey. That we could hold on to each other as long and tight as I think we might need to.

We’ve always existed in a kind of world for two, but that’s not the case anymore.

“I’m sorry,” he says one last time as he unwinds himself from me, straightening up, looking out over the valley as the first rays of light splash across it. “I shouldn’t have . . .”

I touch his arm. “Please don’t say that.”

He nods, steps back, putting more distance between us, and I know, with every fiber of my being, that it’s the right thing to do, but it still hurts.

“Trey seems like a great guy,” he says.

“He is,” I promise.

Alex nods a few more times. “Good.” And that’s it. He leaves for his morning run, and I’m alone again on the still terrace, watching morning chase the shadows across the valley.

My period arrives twenty-five minutes later, while I’m scrambling eggs for breakfast, and the rest of our trip is a fantastically normal couples’ trip.

Except that, deep down, I am completely heartbroken.

It hurts to want it all, so many things that can’t coexist within the same life.

More than anything, though, I want Alex to be happy. To have everything he’s always wanted. I have to stop getting in the way, to give him the chance to have all of that.

We don’t so much as brush against each other until we hug goodbye. We never speak about what happened again.

I go on loving him.