Page 16 of The Heartbreak Hotel

Twelve

There is no shame like a hangover. This one lasts nearly all of the next day, as Mei and I moan through our headaches on the couch.

I’m sick with nerves. My first guest, Grace—the divorcée—is checking in tomorrow, but it’s not her sending me into a tailspin.

It’s Henry. Henry, who wasn’t here when I woke up.

Who left at some point last night, though neither Mei nor I can remember when.

Who I’m pretty sure I said things to that no professional adult should ever, ever say to another.

“You were on him like a monkey up a tree,” Mei says unhelpfully. She’s nursing a coconut water and wearing gold eye masks. “I don’t know that I’ve ever watched a rebound unfold in real time like that.”

I groan, thunking my head back against the couch. “Henry’s not a rebound.”

“No?” Mei looks over at me. “Sure seemed like you wanted him to be.”

“ Mei .” I press the heels of my hands into my eyes.

I don’t say what I’m thinking, which is that even through all the tequila, the way I felt last night wasn’t fleeting.

I didn’t wake up horrified that I’d come on to Henry because I don’t feel the same way sober; I woke up horrified to find myself feeling the exact same way.

“What am I going to do? He’s my landlord.

He must think I’m a disaster—what if he backs out of the rentals? ”

“He won’t,” Mei says, gripping my forearm and shaking it. “You were cute. From what I remember. Just text him and say sorry.”

But the thought of texting Henry paralyzes me.

A texted apology isn’t enough, not for the broken moments I remember from last night: touching his mouth with my fingertips, bracing myself on his shoulders, challenging him to stay over.

I need to either apologize in person or never, ever see him again.

And I’m too ashamed to apologize in person.

Mei intercepts me at the top of the staircase, gesturing wildly down the hall at the Spruce Room’s bathroom. She’s got headphones in, and when I say, “What?” she points at them before darting another pointed look at the bathroom. Then she lifts her shirt so I can see her stomach and grins.

“Yes, Ma,” she says, skirting past me to get down the stairs. “I’m drinking enough water. Heaps and heaps, I promise.”

I glance down the hall to the bathroom, where Henry’s been for the last twenty minutes.

Grace arrived last night, and her shower isn’t working.

So when I finally texted Henry after the unforgivable show I put on the other night, it was just a cowardly request for his plumber’s contact information.

He’d responded: Kitchen apple clogging the drain? I’ll come take a look this afternoon.

I’m so embarrassed that I made Mei answer the door when he arrived. Then I hid in my room like a hermit until I knew he was safely tucked away in the bathroom.

Now I stare at the door I know I’ll find him behind. Wonder if whatever Mei’s on about is worth the risk of seeing Henry’s face. Or worse, him seeing mine. Something clunks from inside Grace’s room, startling me.

In her first day at the Comeback Inn, Grace has kept to herself.

She showed up in a Subaru just as the sun was starting to set, looking weary and overheated.

I put together a check-in guest survey to gauge how interactive people want to be: Would you like company at breakfast, or to eat in your room?

Would you like to join me (Louisa) and other guests for a group discussion in the afternoons?

Please check which of these programs appeal to you: Movie nights. Group hikes. Crafts. Gardening.

Grace had elected to eat in her room, and apparently none of the programs appeal to her.

I’m not hurt, exactly . It was one of the first things I learned about counseling, about supporting other people at all: you can’t make people want to be supported in the way that you want to support them.

The inn is for everyone—even the people who want nothing to do with me.

Who come here for silence and mountains.

Never mind all the thought I put into supporting everyone in the softest, warmest ways. It’s fine. I’m fine.

The most Grace has said to me was when I picked up her breakfast tray from the hall floor this morning.

She opened her door at the sound of my footsteps, tired-eyed in one of the matching waffle robes I ordered.

Over her shoulder, I could see a framed photo of her children that she’d added to the nightstand.

“Um,” she said. I’d thought, This is it. She wants to talk about her heartbreak. “There’s a problem with my shower?”

And now, Henry in the bathroom.

I edge down the hallway as quietly as I can, craning around the bathroom’s doorframe to catch a peek at whatever Mei was flailing about.

Immediately, I jerk back around the corner.

Henry’s flat on his back on the bathroom floor, half in the shower stall and half out of it, a wide strip of his stomach exposed as he reaches upward to fiddle with the shower handle.

This bathroom is the smallest in the house, but my favorite: Its original copper faucets are mixed with new, moss-green subway tile and LED-outfitted light fixtures. And, now, Henry.

I swallow, looking down at my hands. One of them is clenched around my grocery list—I came up here to find a pen—and the other is holding a glass of water that I’ve managed to dribble all over my arm.

The hot flare of longing that licks along my pelvis is like an old friend, home from a long trip.

Nate was always gone—and when he was home, there was no more of this.

Of the way it feels to see the muscles move on Henry’s stomach—or the dark hair that curls there, disappearing into the blue cut of his jeans.

You’re confused , I tell myself. You drank too many margaritas and touched his mouth like some kind of horny goblin and now your body’s all mixed up.

“Louisa?”

I jump. “Yes?”

“Can I get a hand?”

I press my lips together and turn back into the doorframe, wondering what of that he saw—me glimpsing his torso and promptly spilling all over myself?

When our eyes meet, it comes back to me in a sickening flash: my finger on his lips, his hands bracketing my rib cage, the way I ran my palm along the line of his jaw sometime after the lights came back on and said, I like your baby face.

“Will you pass me that screwdriver, please?” Henry looks up at me from the floor. There’s a towel spread beneath him on the shower tile, a small pile of tools next to his head. “On the sink?”

I swallow and reach for it, catching my own reflection in the beveled mirror. My cheeks are smoldering pink.

“How’s it going?” I ask, handing Henry the screwdriver. I keep my eyes trained very purposefully to his face, which is clean-shaven again.

“All right,” he says, his gaze flicking to mine. He reaches above his head to twist a screw into place, and his biceps move in a way that I have to look away from. “The valve was broken, but I’m almost finished.”

I can tell he’s going to make me bring it up. And I should . I have to. So I sit down on the closed lid of the toilet across from him and force out, “I’m so sorry about the other night.”

Henry adjusts the shower handle. “Which night?”

“Henry.”

He glances at me, smiling, and I can’t believe I touched his mouth like that. “How are you feeling?”

“Mortified,” I say. “Like I should live out the rest of my days under a large, flat rock.”

“I wasn’t sure if you remembered any of it.” He tightens another screw and this time I watch the muscles in his forearms tense. “I didn’t hear from you.”

I drop my head into my hands. I need to stop looking at him. I need to stop. “I didn’t know what to say. I’m so sorry.”

“Do you?” Henry asks. I risk a look at him and he’s pulled himself up to sitting against the tiled wall of the shower. He props one elbow on his bent knee. “Remember any of it?”

“Enough.” His eyebrows lift, and I add, “Like the part where I basically assaulted you.”

Henry’s lips twitch. “I don’t remember that.”

“Oh, great,” I say, “maybe I made it up.” Then I realize how this sounds, and start scrambling. “Not that I thought about—or, I didn’t mean I’ve been—”

“Louisa.” Henry’s smiling again. All it ever took, apparently, was me making a fool of myself. “It’s all right.”

“It’s not,” I say, raking a hand through my hair. “It was so unprofessional, and I’m really embarrassed, and I’m really sorry.”

Henry shakes his head, making to stand. “I’m just glad you’re okay. And that we got the power back on.”

I bite my lip, and Henry’s gaze drops to my mouth. A great rush of heat whooshes up from my belly, and I wave an arm toward the shower to change the subject. “Were you a plumber in a past life?”

“No.” He starts packing his tools into a black case sitting on the vanity. “But I did a lot of the remodel on this house myself, a long time ago.”

I’ve always known the house had been meticulously updated—its stained glass, its claw-foot tubs, its beautiful transom windows. But I never imagined Henry as the one who carved it apart to make it what it is now.

“When was that?”

“Ten-ish years,” he says, glancing at me. It’s tight in here; from where I’m sitting on the toilet, my knees are nearly brushing his legs. “I took it over from my parents, who took it over from their parents. They moved to Florida when they didn’t want to deal with snow anymore.”

“Did you grow up here?”

“Only place I’ve ever lived,” he says. He zips the bag, then reaches for the towel on the floor of the shower. “They never updated it, so it needed a lot of work.”

“Why’d you leave?” I can’t imagine it: the gift of spending your entire life in a place like this, just to go and rent it out.

Henry looks at me, eyes flickering between my own like he’s deciding what to say next.

But he doesn’t have to respond, in the end—a scream tears through the house, shrill and undulating and distinctly Mei.

Henry jerks around, but I’m already scooping up my water glass and grocery list and darting past him.

“Mei?” I call, halfway into the hallway. Henry’s right behind me. “Are you okay?”

“Help me!” she shrieks, and a brutal thought flashes across my mind: There’s a murderer in my house. There’s a murderer in my house on the first full day that I have a guest. My entire life is about to be dead in the water, literally and figuratively.

But when Henry and I hit the landing, I can see Mei in the living room—alone. She’s standing on the couch, phone clutched to her chest, hopping up and down.

“Get it!” she says, turning to us with her eyes wide. “Get it, get it, get it!”

I rush toward her, and stop short when I see what she’s pointing at.

An enormous wolf spider, brown and furry and damn near the size of my palm, perched on the edge of my vintage Turkish rug.

One leg twitching into the tufted fringe.

I let out an inhuman scream and dart around Henry, back in the direction I came.

When I grab on to his arm to hide behind him, he looks down at my fingers—then back up at me. I let go immediately.

“Sorry,” I say, flexing out my hand. I think of that first day in his office, the way his forearm tensed when I reached for him. All the ways I touched him in the basement—his chest under my palm, his lips under my fingers.

“Kill it!” Mei wails, and I blink away from Henry. He swallows. “Don’t leave me here with it, Lou!”

“What do you want me to do?” I say, as Henry takes a step toward her. “Come in there with it?”

“I don’t know!” She’s still hopping up and down. The spider starts to move, skittering onto the hardwood floor. I yelp and take several steps backward. Mei hollers, “Henry, kill it!”

Henry turns toward me, eyes connecting with mine for half a breath before he plucks the glass and grocery list out of my fingers.

For one terrible flash of a moment, I think he’s going to make me catch the spider with my bare hands.

But then he lifts the glass to his lips and knocks it back, downing what water was left, and flips it upside down to trap the spider in the middle of the living room floor.

When he slides the grocery list underneath, lifting the caged spider into the air, Mei repeats, “ KILL IT. ”

“If I did that,” he says, making for the back door, “Joss would have my head.” He uses his hip to nudge open the squeaky screen. “They’re good for the garden. And gentle, as long as you don’t bother them.”

“As long as you don’t bother them,” Mei repeats. “What bothers a spider? Breathing near it?”

But I’m watching Henry: as he takes the steps into the garden, as he looks both ways and then makes for one of our biggest pines, surrounded by bark.

A bough of Russian sage obscures his body as he squats along the gravel path and lowers the water glass to the ground.

When he tips it to release the spider, the midday sun catches the glass and sends light streaking across his face, pinched with focus.

The spider scurries away, and Henry rests one elbow on his bent knee to watch it dart off to its new life.

When he glances back toward the house, our eyes meet through the screen. Thank you , I mouth. His lips lift at one corner, an almost smile. I rub my fingertip against my thumb. Feel the ghost of his lips on the skin there. Louisa.

“Um.”

I turn, and Grace is standing on the landing in her robe.

“Is everything okay down here?”