Page 26 of The Heartbreak Hotel

Twenty

“Let me.” Henry reaches past me, arching onto his tiptoes. When he lowers a pot from the high cabinet and hands it to me, I force myself to look away from the exposed strip of his stomach.

“Is all this stuff where you left it?” Mei asks from the island. She’s putting in her earrings. “Back when you lived here?”

“Not quite,” Henry says, leaning his hip into the counter. “I didn’t keep my heaviest pots on the top shelf, but”—he raises his hands—“it’s Louisa’s kitchen now.”

Mei barks out a laugh. “Yeah, she’s not exactly Michelin-chef material, if you hadn’t picked up on that yet.”

“Weren’t you leaving?” I ask, shooting her a frozen smile.

“I was.” She smiles sweetly. “I’ll see you tomorrow; give Quinn a hug for me when he wakes up.”

Mei’s spending the night with some work friends in Denver—a girls’ night designed to get her over Andy that she’s been dreading ever since it was proposed. Go , I’d told her. Forget about them for one night . And her miserable, whispered reply: I’m not ready to forget about them .

But now I watch her go, in a maroon corduroy dress and platform boots that I could never in one hundred lifetimes pull off.

Kim and Bea are having dinner in town, and Nan’s been upstairs with a set of paperback romance novels all evening.

It’s just Henry and me in my quiet kitchen, the setting sun casting us multicolored through the stained glass.

When I open the pantry for a box of Quinn’s favorite mac and cheese, I ask, “Where should I keep my pots?”

“It’s your kitchen,” he repeats. But when I hike my eyebrows at him, he points to the cabinet next to the sink, where a pair of low drawers house my cutting boards. “I kept them here.”

When I sidestep him to fill the pot with water from the sink, Henry doesn’t move: his body is warm and solid, brushing against mine. I glance up at him and quickly away, whisking the pot to the stovetop.

“How long did you live here, on your own? Like, not as your parents’ house?”

“Five years,” he says. I twist the burner and look back at him as the gas hisses on.

He’s watching me carefully, a glass of my best red wine ($17) in one hand, and doesn’t offer anything more.

I wish I didn’t have to drag it out of him, all the details I’m ravenous to know—if he was here alone, and why he left when he did, and whether he likes what I’ve done with the house.

Whether he still pictures his life here, when he steps inside.

“Why’d you leave?”

He takes a sip of wine, and I watch the movement of his throat as he swallows. “It was time to move on.”

I roll my eyes, and he takes a step closer to me. “Why are you rolling your eyes at me?”

“Because you’re impossible.”

His eyebrows twitch. “How so?”

“You want to stay for dinner,” I say, “which I assume means you want to talk to me.” I wait for him to nod his acknowledgment. “But you refuse to answer any of my questions directly.”

Henry points to the cabinet. “I told you where I kept my pots.”

I roll my eyes again, and he breathes a low laugh. “Fine. You answer one question for me, and I’ll answer one for you.”

I bite my lip. He tracks the movement with his eyes. There’s so much I don’t want Henry to know, so many avenues for this deal to go sideways: the status of my counseling license, the shameful way Nate left me, the precarious mess of my mother—always teetering in the background.

But Henry’s eyes are dark and liquid in the sunset through the kitchen windows.

His fingers are curled just so around the edge of the counter.

His mouth is wet and red with wine. I think of him remodeling this kitchen for me—without knowing it—and find, terrifyingly and all at once, that I’d give nearly anything to learn just one concrete thing about him.

The family he doesn’t want to talk about, the life that took him away from this house.

How do you know , Rashad asked me that blue-dark morning, that you aren’t ready?

“Deal,” I say softly.

Henry tips his head to the pot, which has started to boil. As I dump in enough macaroni for all three of us, he says, “How did you wind up with Nate?”

I make an involuntary noise, a cross between a squeal and a laugh. “Wow.” I shoot Henry a look over one shoulder, then reach for a spoon to stir the noodles. “Straight to the point.”

“Well, if I only get one question.”

I turn to him. “I thought we were just going back and forth until one of us refuses to answer.”

Henry studies me, the ghost of a smile on his lips. “If that’s how you want to play.”

“It is.”

He nods, then waves a hand at me, giving me the floor.

“We met in college,” I say straight into the pasta pot. The last thing I want to think about is Nate, but if this is the one thing Henry most wants to know about me—well. “We were just kids.”

“Not by the end.”

“No,” I say, meeting his eyes. I wonder, not for the first time, how much older Henry is than Nate and me.

“And you just hit it off, or…?”

“One question at a time, sir.”

“I don’t think you finished answering my first one.”

“I did,” I say, smiling sweetly. “We wound up together after meeting in college.”

Henry makes a sound in his throat, a frustrated sort of growl that I feel in my stomach.

“How old are you?” I say into the pot, steam rising to heat my cheeks.

“Thirty-four.” He takes a sip of wine and adds, “But I have it on good authority that I have a baby face.”

“ No ,” I groan, holding up the pot lid and hiding behind it. I like your baby face . I peek at him over the top of it. “You remember that?”

He smiles, but it isn’t smug. It’s delighted. He’s unreasonably, unforgivably handsome. “Do you?”

“Yes,” I admit, my cheeks burning. “But I was hoping you didn’t.”

Henry runs a hand along his jaw. I remember what it felt like: Soft. Hard line of bone. “I’ve been shaving since, haven’t I?”

It lands like an ice cube at the back of my throat—an irrepressible jolt. I whirl toward the pasta pot, fighting to swallow my smile.

From behind me, Henry says, “Do you think I’m old?”

When I look back at him, glass of wine poised halfway to his mouth, I nearly laugh: he’s so beautiful, framed in the window, lit orange by the lowering sun. “Is that your question?”

“Yes,” he says, smiling.

“No.” I reach for my own glass of wine, taking a drink that warms me all the way down. “I don’t think you’re old, Henry. Besides, maybe I’m thirty-four, too.”

“You aren’t thirty-four,” he says, and I raise my eyebrows. “I have your birthday from the original rental agreement.”

I study him. “And you just…remembered it?”

He shrugs, completely unembarrassed. “Maybe.”

I laugh, and it goes high-pitched before I can help it. “Okay.”

“Why’d you stay in Colorado after school if your family’s so far away?”

My family . I know he means Goldie and Quinn, not my mother, who’s still in Ohio. It’s a loaded question, one with so many facets I could spend the rest of the night answering it. I let out a slow breath of air, turning from the stove to face Henry.

“That one’s got a really long answer,” I tell him.

Henry shifts his weight against the counter. Doesn’t look away from me. “I have time.”

By eight o’clock we’ve had bowls of mac and cheese with Quinn, watched two episodes of a show about an animated dog, and poured third glasses of wine.

When I come back downstairs from putting Quinn to bed, Henry’s still on the couch.

For a moment I stand in the hallway taking him in: his silver-threaded hair in the lamplight, one hand curved around his wineglass, the dark lines of his legs stretched out over the rug.

He looks exactly right in this room: like all my decorating, all these years, was to make him make sense here.

Something aches, painful and good, in the pit of my stomach. Nate’s energy was a lit fuse in this house, crackling and then gone. Henry, here, is different: quiet and enormous. Henry, here, makes this house feel more like mine.

“Are you stalling because you know it’s my turn?” He looks at me over the curve of his arm, stretched along the back of the couch. I imagine the night coursing ahead of us—the momentum of it, how inevitable Henry seems, the way I feel the hitch of his lips like an ab cramp. Wringing me out.

“Yes,” I say on a smile, and he breathes a laugh.

“I’ll be nice.”

I answered his question about Colorado as carefully as I could: I stayed for Nate, in some ways.

For grad school. For a life I’d built away from a complicated relationship with my family.

And for this house—for the home it had become to me.

Henry fell quiet at that. And at my question, What are you thinking right now?

he’d said simply, That I’m glad it was you who moved in.

I wanted to ask him why. I wanted to hear him say it. But then Quinn was up from his nap, and now it’s Henry’s turn.

“What did your sister mean?” he asks as I sit down beside him. I leave a foot of space between us on the couch, the size of Quinn’s body. This was easier when he was here between us, setting the guardrail. “In the kitchen, about postponing your career?”

I level Henry with my gaze. He says, “What?”

“You said you were going to be nice .”

“You can forfeit.” His fingertips on the couch are centimeters away from my shoulder. “End the game.”

But there’s more I want to know—all of it, everything about him—and when I bring my eyes back to Henry’s, I know that he can tell. That there’s hunger in both of us.

“I’m no quitter,” I say, and when he laughs the movement of it brings his fingers to the back of my neck. My skin blooms with goose bumps, sending a chill through my spine that goes hot as it reaches my core. “Though that’s exactly what Goldie thinks I am, and why she said what she said today.”

He’s quiet, waiting for me to explain. His fingertips move so gently above the collar of my shirt that I could be imagining it.

I can’t tell him about the test—can’t tell him about my failure, or the half-truths I’ve told to make the Comeback Inn what it is.

But I don’t lie. I say, “She wanted me to start working as a therapist the moment I graduated, and because I didn’t, I’m a failure in her book.

Goldie had a plan for me, and this wasn’t it. ”

“But you’re doing that work here,” he says. I wish it were true: that I was licensed, that I could legitimize the inn the way he thinks I can. “That’s not good enough for her?”

“Uh-uh,” I say, holding up my hand. “My turn to ask a question.”

Henry lets out a frustrated breath through his nose. “Fine.”

“At Polliwog’s that day,” I say, riding a wild surge of courage. “When I—got lost.”

Henry holds my eyes, steady and careful, like he knows what’s coming.

“You said you understood.” Henry’s fingers on my neck go still, but don’t move away. I focus on the warmth, the solid pressure of his skin on mine. “How?”

Henry licks his lower lip. Pulls it into his mouth.

When he presses his lips together and looks across the room, I think I’ve done it: forced his forfeit, pushed us to the end of the line.

But then Henry puts his wineglass on the coffee table and turns back to look at me, his eyes dark, and says, “Can I show you something?”