Page 15 of The Heartbreak Hotel

“Hold still.” Then he hangs up, the call clicking off in my ear.

I look up at Mei, then back down to my phone. “He’s coming here.”

“Party!” Mei cries. She shimmies her hips in the dark. “Think he’ll want a shot?”

By the time Henry arrives, I’ve been slapping my own cheeks for five minutes.

I was trying to sober myself up, but all I’ve managed to do is make my face even redder than it was before.

When I open the front door Henry’s eyes sweep from my hairline to my toes, and I feel every centimeter of his gaze as it moves over me.

I lean against the door, trying to appear casual.

“Thank you for coming,” I say. He’s holding two giant flashlights and his car keys, black SUV parked behind him in the driveway.

It registers somewhere in the very back of my brain that Bill and Martina’s lights are on across the street.

I hear Henry’s voice from that day in their yard, his fingers moving rhythmically through Custard’s fur. Easy, now.

“It’s no problem,” Henry says, and I blink the memory away. He’s wearing a utility jacket and jeans, his face clean-shaven. It’s the first time I’ve seen him without the ghost of a beard—it softens him in a way that I feel right at the center of my pelvis. “You sounded…”

I bubble up a laugh. “Like a mess?”

His eyebrows tic. “Like you could use a hand. Can I come in?”

I make a grand gesture of sweeping my arm into the house and it sends me off-balance so that I stumble backward into the door and smack the edge of the handle with my funny bone.

“Ow,” I yelp, clenching it in my other hand. “Damn.”

“ She is beauty ,” Mei sings from the kitchen, where her phone flashlight is face-up on the counter. “ She is grace… ”

“Come in,” I manage, motioning Henry around me so I can close the front door. Immediately, we’re swallowed by darkness. Henry clicks on his flashlights and hands one to me.

“Are you okay?”

“Stellar,” I squeak, taking the flashlight. “Thanks.”

Henry toes off his boots and waits for me to lead him into the kitchen, where Mei stands with three shots lined up in front of her. “Henry,” she says grandly, taking a deep bow, “welcome to the Power’s-Out Party. May I offer you a beverage?”

In the dark, I can just see one corner of Henry’s mouth start to hitch up. I jerk my flashlight around to get a better look at it—a smile!—and he winces, reaching out to angle the light away from his face. His hand covers mine on the flashlight. I choke a little on my own spit.

“I’m good,” Henry says, his fingertips sliding off the backs of my knuckles. “But thank you.”

“Should I show you the breakers?” I say, tipping into his space. “They’re in the murder basement.”

“I know where they are,” Henry says, and just as I feel my center of gravity start to slip, his hand comes to my waist. It’s light, his grip—open palmed, gentle through the thick fabric of my sweatshirt.

Once I’m righted, he lets go. “Let me take a look”—his eyes connect briefly with mine—“in the murder basement.”

Henry makes for the basement door, and I look at Mei.

She’s swiping the back of her hand over her forehead, and when she whispers, “He is hot ,” I’m not fully convinced it’s quiet enough for Henry to miss it.

I shush her so violently it makes my head pound, and she erupts into a loose guffaw of laughter as I spin in my socked feet to follow Henry down the stairs.

I feel fizzy and light, like Nate’s a world away, like all I need is in this house with me—Mei, laughing in my kitchen.

Henry with his flashlights. The foreign feeling that ached through my belly when his hand landed on my hip.

“See anything?” I ask, lumbering down the stairs with all the grace of a newborn elephant. Henry’s bent over the panel, flashlight trained on the breakers. He swings the light over to me and, just as I hit the last step, says, “Be careful.”

I make a noise like Pffft and swat my hand at him. When I come to peer around his arm at the panel, hooking one hand on his shoulder, he looks straight at me. Our faces are very, very close. “Well?” I say, and his eyes track back and forth over mine.

Henry blinks, and when he stands up my hand slides off of him. “There’s nothing flipped here. Were you running power to anything upstairs that you don’t normally use?”

I shake my head, rocking back and forth on my heels. “TV, lights, fridge. Were you running power to anything you don’t normally use?”

Henry’s mouth twitches, and I lean in close, pointing to his lips. “Ha!” I cry. “Smile.”

Now he smiles in earnest—but it’s bewildered, unsure. “Smile?” he repeats.

“You never do.” When I tap his mouth with my outstretched fingertip, his pupils blow wide in the dark. “But you just did.”

“I smile,” Henry says quietly, and my hand drops.

“Not around me,” I say. “You hate me.”

The line forms, severe, between Henry’s eyebrows. “Why would you say that? I don’t hate you.”

I frown right back at him, yanking my own eyebrows together. “You tell me.”

“I don’t hate you,” he says again, firmly.

“But you hate being here.” I wave my arms around the basement. “With me.”

Henry’s eyes flicker over my face. He doesn’t answer me, not really. “Are you okay, Louisa?”

I spin like a ballerina, arms arched above my head. “Of course!” When I stumble out of the pose his arms jerk out to steady me, flashlight beam arcing across the room. My ribs are framed between his hands. “Why?”

He shakes his head, drops his hands. “You just seem…”

“Drunk?”

He tips his head back and forth, lips twitching like he’s embarrassed. Like he doesn’t want to call this what it is. “Is there a reason?”

“That I’m drunk?”

His lips pull between his teeth when he nods.

I watch him press them together, watch his tongue scrape over his bottom lip as he waits for me to respond.

His mouth is full and soft; with his cheeks shaved clean he looks young and gentle—like that angry person from my kitchen isn’t here at all; like he’s someone I know.

“Just this dumb article,” I say directly to Henry’s mouth. His hand lifts, his fingers angling my chin so I’m looking up at him. He drops his hand as soon as our eyes meet.

“The Denver Post article?” he asks. I see him across the kitchen island: sweaty T-shirt, angry eyes. Hot flush breaking over his cheekbones.

“ People ,” I say. I’m suddenly having trouble getting his face in focus. I blink once, hard. “About Nate and his new girlfriend.”

Henry’s quiet for what feels like a lifetime.

When he says, “Ah,” it sounds clipped. Like he’s that stranger again, walking through my house with a mug of coffee he’s too scared to drink.

I remember, hazy, what he said the last time we spoke— Come stay here to get over your ex-boyfriend?

How he made it sound so petty. And I have the desperate urge, consuming, to make him understand.

“I’m not hung up on him,” I say, reaching out both hands to plant them on Henry’s shoulders. He’s tall enough that it makes my own shoulder joints twinge. “Did you know he cheated on me with her?”

Henry goes very still under my hands.

“After six years together,” I say. “He couldn’t just tell me, like a courtesy.

It would’ve been decent. But no.” My fingertips dig into the ridge of muscle that races from Henry’s shoulders up his neck, and I realize that I’m using him for balance.

“It’s so annoying not to be rid of him, that he’s always going to be there in the press.

Because honestly, it’s been done. We should’ve broken up years ago. ”

“Why?” Henry asks quietly. At some point while I was talking his free hand rose to my waist to keep me steady. With the other one, he’s got his flashlight pointed up at the ceiling so it illuminates the basement.

“We didn’t even know each other anymore,” I say. I rub my thumbs into Henry’s collarbone, studying the way it peeks from beneath his shirt, dips at the base of his throat. “We didn’t even try to. We didn’t care to try to. Which should have been enough of a sign, but I was stupid.”

“You aren’t stupid,” he says softly.

“No,” I agree. Our bodies are very close. I’ve had more tequila than I can remember and I want to make him smile again; I want that Henry, the soft one, the one that opened up for Custard like a flower after rain. “I just didn’t want to lose the house.”

Henry laughs, then. It’s breathy, a great gust, moving through his entire body so spectacularly that I step back from him to watch it happen. My hands drop from his shoulders; his hand drops from my waist. All the tension he carries, every bit of him he zips away—all if it changes when he laughs.

“What?” I ask, grinning. Henry shakes his head, smiling like he’s trying to swallow it.

“You stayed with someone for six years just to keep living in this house?”

“Maybe not all six,” I say. There was a time, once, when I loved Nate in every real way. “But definitely the last few.”

“Why?” Henry watches me like I’m a science experiment, like a model volcano, like he’s trying to figure out how I work. “That’s a high price to pay.”

I shrug, and catch myself before stumbling backward. “I’d pay any price for this place.”

Henry pulls his lip into his mouth again, tongue running over it like he’s thinking, like he’s not even aware of it. “Louisa—”

“Why do you call me that?” I tip my chin up to the ceiling. His formality, his stoicism, I don’t want it—I want him laughing, loose, like he was just a minute ago. “ Louisa . Always Louisa.”

“Is that not your name?”

“It is ,” I say, driving one fingertip into his chest. Right over his heart, warm and firm. I’m fascinated by how he feels; I spread my entire palm over his T-shirt, tucking my fingers under the lapel of his coat, and Henry watches me do it. “But so formal. Everyone else calls me Lou.”

When he’s quiet, I pull my eyes up to his. Blue, blue, blue. Unbelievable.

Henry’s voice comes softly. “Maybe I don’t want to call you what everyone else calls you.”

“Any luck?” Mei shouts down the stairs. I yank my hand out from under Henry’s coat like I’ve been caught shoplifting. “I’d love to get this blender going again before I hit old age.”

“Blender,” Henry says, looking at me. “You were using a blender when the power went out?”

“Frozen margs,” I confirm, with a little shimmy that pulls Henry’s gaze from my eyes to my hips. “Want one?”

“No,” he says, and then he takes my elbow in one hand to guide me up the stairs. “But the kitchen outlets are all GFCI—if you tripped it, it would’ve taken the power out.”

“What’s GFCI?” I ask, and from the top of the stairs, Mei calls, “Is that related to the kitchen apples?”

Henry ignores us both as we collide into breathless laughter at the top of the staircase, arms coming around one another.

Across the kitchen, he fiddles with an outlet and all the lights come back on.

The music starts up immediately, blasting through the house.

I wince at Henry, blinking as my eyes readjust to the light.

“Ta-da!” Mei shrieks, and then she whirls across the room, hip-checking Henry out of the way so she can get back to the blender. “Our hero.”

“You should stay,” I say, still holding Henry’s eyes from across the room. It feels very important, suddenly, that this moment doesn’t slip through my fingers. That this new version of Henry—the one who laughs, the one whose warm hand holds me steady—doesn’t disappear.

“Should I,” he says, his voice low. Not quite a question. I don’t want to call you what everyone else calls you.

“I think so.” I come closer as the blender starts up, closing the distance so we can hear each other over the ice and the music. “I think you should have a margarita.”

Henry reaches out, unsticking a piece of hair from my cheek. “I think you should have some water.”

I cross my arms. I feel feisty. I feel free. I feel like I’m on fire. “I think you should stay and make me.”

Henry’s eyebrows rise. At the corner of his jaw, a muscle twitches.

He says, “Okay, Louisa.”