Page 27 of The Heartbreak Hotel

Twenty-One

I feel like I’ve spent weeks watching Henry move through this house: guarded, careful, each footstep chosen with weighted consideration.

I’ve watched him check things with me—a flick of his eyes over mine before he opens a cabinet or steps through a door—asking permission.

I’ve watched him hesitate to take up space here.

Watched him so thoughtfully make sure this house feels like mine.

But when Henry leads me up the stairs, he does it like a man in his own home. Someone who knows where to walk so the fourth step doesn’t creak, who navigates the narrow landing without flicking on the hallway light.

“Is anyone staying in that bedroom?” He points down the hall to the Lupine Room. It’s the smallest of the guest rooms, and the only one facing the street. When I shake my head, Henry leads me toward it.

He twists the doorknob on a steadying breath. Like he’s bracing, though this is Henry—who I’ve only ever seen solid and sure. When I place a hand on his back, warm ridge of muscle under soft flannel, he jumps.

“Sorry,” I whisper, dropping my hand. “Sorry, I didn’t—”

His eyes track over mine, back and forth. In the dark of the Lupine Room, we could be anywhere: a movie theater, the middle of the woods, outer space.

I say, “Are you okay?” and Henry only swallows.

He reaches to twist on the bedside lamp, which casts the room in a low, warm glow.

There’s a twin-size bed against the wall, white iron frame and sage-green duvet dotted in embroidered daisies.

Three scatter rugs layered in the middle of the room.

A small desk below the front window, stack of books in its corner.

And Henry, who’s taking it in like a painting. Like the longer he looks, the more there is to see. When he pushes the bedroom door softly closed behind us, heat rises to my neck.

“It’s here,” Henry says, lowering to a squat on the floor.

I don’t know what it is; if here is the bedroom or the house or the insulated cocoon that seems to be unfurling around us, warm and soft and dark.

“Just—” He breaks off when I crouch beside him on the hardwood.

With one look at me, he reaches for the baseboard next to the door and gently pries at the edge of the wallpaper.

It was here when Nate and I moved in: cream with a pale green pine needle motif, so delicate that if you let your eyes unfocus it loses all its shape.

I watch Henry peel it back, gently, one centimeter at a time.

“Sorry,” he says, though I’m unsure whether he’s apologizing to me or the house. “There.”

He drops his hands to his legs, fingers hanging into the space between his thighs.

I look at the wall, at his guarded face, back at the wall.

He’s exposed a sticky-note-sized window into the world beneath the pine wallpaper.

In the dim light, it takes me a moment to clock the pattern for what it is: a child’s sky, perfect blue, dotted with fluffy clouds and a plump bird and the colorful edge of a hot-air balloon.

“She died when she was three,” Henry says. In the silence after his words, a high whine. The alarm of myself: Oh my god, oh my god, oh my god. When Henry looks up at me, his eyes are dark and anguished. Here it is, finally—his heartbreak. “Six years ago.”

“Henry—”

“We picked this room because of the window.” His voice rises an octave, and I understand that he isn’t ready for—or doesn’t want—my sympathy.

“Because Bill and Martina across the street got Custard when she was just a baby—even then, he had paws the size of Molly’s face.

” Molly. “She was desperate for a dog. She’d sit on the desk just waiting to see Custard in the yard.

My ex-wife was allergic, or we’d have gotten her one; every sick kid should have a dog.

” He takes a breath. “Custard’s nine, and Molly would’ve been, too, and I see it all the time, but if that dog dies, Louisa, I can’t—”

Henry breaks off and it all blends: Molly, ex-wife, every sick kid .

Custard, here then and now. I have so many questions, but more than anything there’s Henry: inches away from me on the floor of his dead daughter’s bedroom.

The rise and fall of his chest. The way he looks at me now—like he’s handed me a grenade, and we’re both waiting to see if I’ll pull the pin.

“Henry,” I say, and he blinks. So slowly he could be falling asleep, turning back time, erasing all this. His eyelashes send shadows over his cheeks. “I hate that you went through that. I’m so sorry.”

It’s not enough. Nothing could be; I know that. I want to undo it for him, unlearn everything I know about acceptance, about grief, about the requisite pain—I want to take it away. I want to crawl inside of him and press my hands to the hurt.

But Henry says, “Thank you.” And when his eyes open, he’s the same Henry.

Steady and—the shade I’ve always seen but never been able to name—sad.

“Congenital heart disease. We tried everything. I mean—everything. There was nothing else.” He shakes his head, making to stand and drawing me with him.

His fingers frame my elbow. “My family—you asked. I just.” Henry’s always so measured with his words, but now they come out stuttered.

Unrehearsed, broken. “I was lonely, growing up. It was just me and our animals, my parents working. I wanted a big family. Kids.” He swallows, his voice wavering.

I picture him with Custard, that day: the way his whole body changed around that sweet, gentle animal. “And I lost all of it.”

I reach for him before I’ve realized I’m doing it—one palm pressed to the flat plane of his chest, my fingers spread over his heart.

One of his hands is still lifted—forgotten, maybe, on my elbow.

But when he looks down at my fingers on his chest, he releases my arm and spreads his hand over my own.

“And now I have this house,” he says, straight down at our fingers, “that I can’t bring myself to live in or get rid of.

” His heartbeat bruises under my fingertips.

He looks up at me in the soft dark. “Thank you for taking care of it for me.”

“Henry,” I whisper. I feel like I haven’t drawn a breath since he started talking. Like I’m lightheaded and static, like the lines between our bodies are blurring away. “Of course. Of course. ”

He pulls me out of the room and into his chest in the same breath—one moment we’re in the dark of Molly’s memories and the next we’re in the hallway, door knocking shut behind us, Henry’s hand next to my head on the wallpaper.

He boxes me in, the warm wall of his body, our hands still pressed to his chest.

“Louisa,” Henry says. I have the distant thought that someone could see us, that a door could open.

I find myself shamefully unable to care.

“You said I seemed scared. I am scared.” His eyes—that dangerous, trapping blue—are so close to mine that I feel like I’m breathing him, like Henry’s all there is. “You scare me.”

“No,” I say. My free hand rises to his face, his smooth jawline. “Why?”

He shakes his head like he can’t explain it, like this is too much.

“You must know how long I’ve wanted this,” he says, instead of answering.

“Since my office, in August. All those printouts you brought.” His eyes hold mine.

His hand over my knuckles presses down, grasps me to his chest. When he wets his lower lip, I feel it like the lick of a flame on skin.

“The way your nose crinkles when you’re trying not to cry.

How you yelled at me in the kitchen after the Denver Post article.

When the power went out. And before.” The palm he’s braced against the wall slides down, and he releases my hand to frame my hips with both of his own.

His voice goes impossibly soft. “Before we met. From the first time I saw you, the day you moved in, and I was so glad that it was you, here.” His fingertips flex, ten points of heat pulling me closer.

“You didn’t remember me, but I couldn’t forget you. Not in all this time.”

It’s too much. It’s not nearly enough—I drag his mouth to mine and his lips part, warm warm warm and ravenous, searching, his fingers kneading the base of my spine like this close isn’t close enough.

Our breath comes fast and ragged, my hands unbuttoning his flannel, the heat of his chest under my palms, all of it melting until I’ve gone tingly, let go, unrooted.

Henry’s hands side lower and lower until they’re cupping my ass, and when he presses me into him I feel the hardness beneath his jeans, meeting the seam between my legs in a way that sends heat all the way up to my lungs.

When I move against him Henry groans, the sound wrenching from his throat.

It makes me think of dropping the espresso machine on his knee, of every moment he’s been in this house with me. Of how much more I want.

I slide my hands up his chest, his neck, his jaw. Push the pad of my thumb into his lower lip until he breaks from me, breathing unevenly, his tongue on my fingertip.

“Stay,” I whisper. My eyes flick down the hallway—not to my own room, where Quinn sleeps, but to the empty guest suite near the stairs.

“Here.” Henry swallows, his gaze casting from my eyes to my mouth and back again.

He’s unbelievable in the half dark: shirt undone, hair mussed, mouth red and swollen.

I find that I’m not above begging. “Please.”

His thumbs brush my waist—soft. Agonizing.

When I tug his hips into mine, his eyes flutter half-shut and he swallows again, pressing his fingertips into my skin to still me.

He holds me like that: his eyes hooded, the heave of his breath against my chest. Like he’s deciding, like maybe he’s going to say no.