Page 36 of The Heartbreak Hotel

Twenty-Seven

Thanksgiving is a cold, sunny Thursday that I wake up to alone.

For the first time since September, my house is empty: Lucy, Willa, and the rest of their friends are gone; Nan flew home yesterday.

She’ll be back after visiting her family in Pennsylvania, and everyone else I care about is scattered like dandelion filaments across the country: Mei’s at home in California; Goldie and Quinn are in New York; my mother, I assume, is with Mark in Ohio.

Usually I spend Thanksgiving with Nate’s family in Denver, but this year—well.

When Henry dropped us back at the house after dancing at Ophelia’s, he crowded me into the doorframe as everyone else tumbled upstairs. His hands were cold from the October chill, raising goose bumps on my neck when he lifted them to my face.

“Thank you,” I’d told him, and he answered by kissing me long and slow before walking back to his car.

I haven’t seen him since then—just a string of texts, back and forth, photos of the Florida coast, and one I wish you were here with me sent past midnight that wrung through me like a muscle spasm.

Now I’m parked in front of his condo: one in a row of identical units overlooking Lake Estes.

My phone buzzes as I stare up at his door—Goldie, the first time I’ve heard from her since she left nearly a month ago.

It’s a photo of Quinn in a construction-paper hat shaped like a turkey, grinning so hard his eyes are pressed shut.

Beneath it: Happy Thanksgiving. I send a heart emoji and nothing else; I’m still mad at her.

Goldie’s the last person I want to think about right now.

Henry’s door is nondescript, a carbon copy of the ones on either side of it.

I hear his footsteps before I see him, each one thudding in my chest like a heartbeat.

He opens the door in a deep green wool sweater and dark jeans.

Socked feet. Clean-shaven. When he smiles, it’s small and shy and it makes me want to launch myself at him.

But I only say, “Hi,” and he says, “Hi.”

I hold out the pie I spent all morning making: Nan’s recipe, apples with cinnamon and homemade piecrust she prepared for me in advance. “Pie.”

Henry takes it. “Thank you.”

“Least I could do,” I say as he ushers me through the doorframe. “Considering where we left things.”

Holding the pie with both hands, Henry watches me unzip my boots.

His condo is clean and plain: gray walls, neutral furniture, a few framed paintings that look like they belong in a hotel room.

It’s nothing like the house, and it squeezes my heart to imagine him here alone, all these years, just down the street from me.

Coming home from work to this emptiness.

“Where did we leave things?” Henry says.

I take the pie from his hands and set it on the entryway table behind me. When I step into Henry’s space, an inch away but not touching him, he inhales. “You don’t remember?”

“Remind me,” he says, and I rise onto my tiptoes to press my lips to his. The feeling I’ve been longing for since that night at Ophelia’s—warm and soft and Henry.

He wraps both arms around my waist, pulling me into him.

I’m heat and hunger—forget the pie, forget Thanksgiving in its entirety—he makes me feel unmoored, insane, inside out.

I knew he couldn’t stay over after Ophelia’s, that it wouldn’t have been right to invite him in as the un-bachelorette crew’s laughter echoed through the house.

Knew, too, that he may not have wanted to stay after what happened the first time.

I knew these things, but they did nothing to douse the heat of my wanting—especially knowing it would be so long before I’d see him again.

Henry leans me against the wall, now, his knee nudging mine apart and sliding up between my legs. I tip backward, finding his eyes.

“Don’t start something you aren’t planning to finish,” I whisper.

His lips twitch. “Who says I’m not planning to finish?”

But then he releases me, a sudden whoosh of cold, and steps backward. His hand slides the length of my arm before lacing our fingers together. He nods his head down the hall. “Come in.”

I bite my lip, and his eyes darken. He reaches out to unhook my lip from my teeth.

“Hungry?” he asks softly.

“Starving.”

“Good.” He leads me further into the house, and I follow. “Let’s eat.”

Henry’s small, tidy kitchen smells like rosemary.

When he pulls a turkey breast from the oven with paw-print-patterned oven mitts, I take a sip from my wineglass.

It’s disorienting, to watch him here—this man who restored my historic home with brass faucets and stained glass and printed wallpaper, the only point of light in his own gray, standard-issue house.

I know without checking that none of the doors in this condo creak like music, like a song I’d learn by heart.

“Can we talk about what happened last month?” Henry says, his back to me. He slides the mitts off and reaches for a thermometer. Straightaway, I think of him in the first-floor bathroom. His cheek pressed to my thigh, his chin tilted up to look at me, his knees on the woven bath mat.

I cross my legs on the stool at his island, squeezing. “Which part?”

Henry sets the thermometer aside and turns to me, hands braced against the counter on either side of his hips. Music plays, softly, from speakers in the ceiling. “Louisa.”

I could get drunk from it, the way he says my name. “Yes?”

“The part where your sister showed up and you shooed me out the back door like a delinquent teenager.”

I take another sip of wine. “Ah. That part.”

“That part,” Henry says. He crosses his long legs at the ankles and glances down at his feet; when he looks back up, there’s a pink flush across his cheekbones. “Are you ashamed of me?”

Oh, god. Am I ashamed of Henry ? Henry, who reached for that roll of paper towels the day I cried in his office, who’s every animal’s favorite person. Whose expressions bear his feelings so clearly—like his face is the book that taught me to read.

“No,” I say, as quickly as I can get the word out. I don’t tell him what pops, unbidden, to the roof of my mouth: I’m ashamed of me. “Of course not.”

“Then, what? You clearly didn’t want her to see me again.”

“I was trying to protect—” I break off. Protect him?

Protect myself? I wave a hand between us.

“This.” This vulnerable thing that’s flickered between us since the start, that crystalized so sharply in the dark of my living room back in October at two o’clock in the morning.

“Goldie’s so judgmental, I was worried she’d—I don’t know.

” I take a breath and let it out, my shoulders slumping.

I know I owe him an explanation, but I so, so keenly don’t want to talk about her.

I want to stay Henry’s version of me: the woman who’s cared for his house all these years, the woman who steps up.

Not Goldie’s version: the woman who hasn’t amounted to anything yet. “It would have been complicated.”

Henry studies me. His arms are crossed over his chest, sweater tugged up above the bones of his wrists. I want to walk over and untwist the pretzel of his body. “I’m okay with complicated.”

I swirl the wine in my glass, instead, watching it move.

“Fine,” I say, drawing another breath. When I look back up at Henry, he hasn’t shifted a centimeter: legs crossed at the ankles, eyes unwavering on mine.

“Goldie and I had a hard childhood. It wasn’t—” I look away from him, out the kitchen windows, where the last licks of daylight sink over the lake.

“It wasn’t all bad. But our mom was—is—tough.

” I inhale slowly and then tell him what I hardly tell anyone; not because I need to, but because he showed me something, that night on the couch.

“She was diagnosed with borderline personality disorder when I was in elementary school, and there was almost always an awful boyfriend in the picture. It all just—” I glance at Henry and quickly away.

His eyes are too endless, too soft. “It made Goldie really scared all the time. She needs to control everything, even me. And she’s really distrustful of men.

” I take a long sip of wine, steeling myself to look at him and add, “I didn’t want her to mess this up. ”

Henry shifts off the counter, stepping around the island. He swivels my stool so that I’m facing him, his hips bracketed by my knees, and tips my chin up so I have to meet his eyes.

“Thank you for telling me that,” he says quietly. He presses his lips to mine. “And I’m sorry.”

“You don’t have to be sorry.” I lean my forehead into his sternum, breathe in the heady smell of his citrusy soap, of the spices he’s been cooking with, of his skin. “It’s just like I said: complicated.”

Henry’s hand smooths over my hair, warm and grounding. I bookend his ribs with my palms. “How was your trip?”

“It was fine,” he says on an exhale. “A little too long.”

I nudge my chin into his chest so I can look up at him. “Why do you go this time of year? Why not for the holidays?”

Henry studies me, his hand moving over my hair before coming to rest at the base of my skull. I can see him deciding how much to tell me, weighing how far to let me in—and I’m relieved when he says, “It’s tough, doing the holidays with them.”

I brush my thumbs over his ribs. This moment feels tenuous—like this close, honest version of Henry is a firefly I’ve managed to catch open-palmed. “Tough how?”

He swallows. “It’s a nostalgic time of year. Sometimes they get—” He breaks off, eyes moving over mine like he could find the words there. “Sometimes it’s too much.”

“About Molly,” I say quietly, so he doesn’t have to. When he nods, his eyes flutter shut—like that hurt, even just hearing it.