Beach Read

by Emily Henry

when the world felt dark and scary, love could whisk you off to go dancing; laughter could take some of the pain away; beauty could punch holes in your fear. I decided then that my life would be full of all three.

Grandly romanticizing my life had stopped serving me, but my fatal flaw was still riding shotgun in my dinged-up Kia Soul, narrating things as they happened:

I pushed a fistful of dark hair out of my eyes to study the cornflower blue shingles and snow-white trim. Just pretend you’re at an Airbnb. Immediately, an imaginary Airbnb listing ran through my head: Three-bedroom, three-bath lakeside cottage brimming with charm and proof your father was an asshole and your life has been a lie.

As ever, I’m more than happy to hop on the phone (or instant message, or a Pegasus’s back as need be) to help

These days, my reactions always felt outsized, and there was no easy way to explain them when strangers had the bad fortune of witnessing them.

Even silhouetted as he was, I could tell he went rigid. I’d learned it wasn’t uncommon for people to do that when they intuited a woman was on the verge of emotional collapse. In the last few weeks of our relationship, Jacques was like one of those snakes that can sense an earthquake, going taut whenever my emotions rose, then deciding we needed something from the bodega and rushing out the door.

Sure, he was just barely on the tall side of average, with the lean muscle of someone who never stopped moving around but also never intentionally exercised—a lazy kind of fit that came from genetics and restlessness rather than good habits—but it was more than that. It was the way he talked and moved, how he looked at things. Not, like, how he saw the world. Literally how he looked at things, his eyes seeming to darken and grow whenever he focused, his eyebrows furrowing over his dented nose. Not to mention his crooked mouth, which should’ve been outlawed.

He could love-struck pirates and werewolves me all he wanted, but when it came down to it, Augustus Everett was still pacing in the dark, making shit up like the rest of us.

Gus replied, “How do you know I won’t keep answering your questions with other questions until we both die?” “How do you know I’ll care?” Gus shook his head, smiling, and took another bite. “Wow, this is terrible.” “The donuts or this conversation?” I asked. “This conversation, definitely. The donuts are good. I Googled you too, by the way. You should consider getting a rarer name.” “I’ll pass that suggestion along to the higher-ups, but I can’t make any promises,” I said. “There’s all kinds of red tape and bureaucratic bullshit to go through.”

me and riley

I was praying for vampires.

Instead Gus smiled and picked up the highlighter and notebook beside him. He scribbled on it for a second, then held the notebook up so I could read it: LIFE IS MEANINGLESS, JANUARY. GAZE INTO THE ABYSS. I suppressed a laugh, then fished a Sharpie out of my backpack, dragged my own notebook toward me, and flipped to a blank page. In large, square letters, I wrote: THIS REMINDS ME OF THAT TAYLOR SWIFT VIDEO. His smile leapt up his face.

Jacques had been handsome like an underwear model, perfectly toned with a winning smile and golden-brown hair that fell the same exact way every day. But it was all of Gus’s minor imperfections—his scars and ridges, crooked lines and sharp edges—and how they added up that had always made it hard for me to stop looking at him, and made me want to see more.

The car was nearly pitch-black, for God’s sake. His eyes shouldn’t be allowed, physically or morally, to glint like that. His pupils were disrespectful to the laws of nature. My skin started burning under them.

That was what I’d always loved about reading, what had driven me to write in the first place. That feeling that a new world was being spun like a spiderweb around you and you couldn’t move until the whole thing had revealed itself to you.

getting him to understand what I loved about the genre—that reading and writing it was nearly as all-consuming and transformative as actually falling in love—

I’d always held things together, found ways to shut off the worrying and have fun with him, but this was different. Jacques didn’t know what to do with this version of me, who stayed in bed and couldn’t write or read without coming apart, who slugged around at home letting laundry pile up and ugliness seep into our dreamy apartment, who never wanted to throw parties or walk the Brooklyn Bridge at sunset or book a last-minute getaway to Joshua Tree.

Again and again he told me I wasn’t myself. But he was wrong. I was the same me I’d always been. I’d just stopped trying to glow in the dark for him, or anyone else.

He fit so perfectly into the love story I’d imagined for myself that I mistook him for the love of my life.

As different as I’d thought we were, it felt a little bit like Gus and I were two aliens who’d stumbled into each other on Earth only to discover we shared a native language.

I wanted to know whether you could ever fully know someone. If knowing how they were—how they moved and spoke and the faces they made and the things they tried not to look at—amounted to knowing them. Or if knowing things about them—where they’d been born, all the people they’d been, who they’d loved, the worlds they’d come from—added up to anything.

13 The Dream I DREAMED ABOUT GUS Everett and woke up needing a shower.

I turned toward him. His head was propped in his hand, his body angled toward me, and the light from the screen just barely caught his eyes, drawing liquidy slivers of color in them. His dark hair was as messy as ever, but his facial hair was back under control, and that smoky smell still hung on him.

I glanced up when I felt his gaze on me, and he didn’t look away. I wanted to say something to break the tension, but my mind was mercilessly blank. Not the blinking-cursor-on-a-white-screen blank of trying to concoct a novel from thin air. The color-popping-in-darkness blank of scrunching your eyes shut. Of staring at flames too long.

Maybe this was it: I would finally learn how to have a casual relationship.

There was the Gus I knew: funny, messy, sexy. And then there was the other Gus, who disappeared for days, who had played soccer as a kid and lived in the same town as his aunt, who said no more than he absolutely had to about himself, his family, his past while I spilled wine, tears, and my guts all over him.

And a small, stupid part of me even resented that Gus had secretly loved someone enough to marry her, while one brief make-out session with me had apparently been enough to make him relocate to Antarctica without so much as a See ya!

Actually, I’d been at my computer for nearly twelve hours and I’d only typed a thousand new words. Though I’d managed to open fourteen tabs on my web browser, including two separate Facebook tabs.

I felt a rush of anger low in my stomach. Why didn’t someone save you? I thought. Why didn’t someone scoop you up and run you out in the middle of the night? I knew it was complicated. I knew there must’ve been reasons, but it still sent a pang through me. It wasn’t the story I would’ve written for him. Not at all.

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Now I wondered if he was simply tired, if life had beaten him into a permanent slouch, folded him over himself so no one could get at that soft center, the kid who dreamed of running away on trains and living in the branches of a redwood.

Her name hung in the air, the afterimage of a lightning strike. Naomi. The woman Gus Everett had married, I presumed. He didn’t seem to notice my shock. Maybe in his mind he said her name often. Maybe having told me she existed felt the same to him as if he’d shown me their photo albums.

Not the kind who was always rude when she was grumpy, crying when she was happy, sad, overwhelmed. Who couldn’t help but let it all hang out.

I had begun to cry without giving myself permission to. I pressed my face into my hands to hide it, and Gus shifted closer, put an arm around my shoulders, and gathered me to him. Gently, he pulled me across his lap and held me there, one hand knotted into my hair, cradling the back of my head, as the other curled around my waist. Once the tears had started, I couldn’t stop them. The anger and frustration. The hurt and betrayal. The confusion that had been clogging my brain ever since I found out the truth. It all heaved out of me.

me and riley

Gus’s hand moved softly through my hair, turning slow circles against the back of my neck, and his mouth pressed into my cheek, my chin, my eye, catching tears as they fell until, gradually, I settled. Or maybe just ran out of tears. Maybe realized I was sitting in Gus’s lap like a toddler, having my tears kissed away. Or that his mouth had paused, pressed into my forehead, his full lips slightly parted.

“I don’t know,” Mom kept saying tearfully. “I don’t know, I just feel like it’s over.” “Our marriage?” Dad had asked after a long pause. “My life,” she’d told him. “I’m nothing but your wife. January’s mother. I’m nothing else, and I don’t think you can imagine how that feels. To be forty-two and feel like you’ve done everything you’re going to do.”

he’d knock me around to burn off his anger. I was always looking for the secret code, the rules I could follow so he wouldn’t freak out. That’s how you keep yourself safe, you know? You pay attention to how the world works. But there was no secret code for him. It was like our actions were entirely detached from his reactions to us.

I felt a little empty, a little light. Happy. Not giddy or overjoyed, but that low, steady level of happiness that, in the best periods of life, rides underneath everything else, a buffer between you and the world you are walking over.

I could feel the pain too, the low-grade ache I’d be left with if and when this thing between Gus and me imploded. I could perfectly imagine every sensation, in the pit of my stomach and the palms of my hands, the sharp pulses of loss that would remind me of how good it felt to stand here with him like this,

That was how it always was. He never looked away from any of it. Maybe he thought someone had to bear witness to the dark, or maybe he hoped that if he stared into the pitch-black long enough, his eyes would adjust and he’d see answers hiding in it. This is why bad things happen, the dark would say. This is how it all makes sense. I couldn’t go hide from this. I couldn’t leave Gus here alone. If he was descending into the darkness, I was going to tie a rope between our waists and go down with him.

Gus touched the side of my face. “I don’t need snowflakes.” He kissed me. “As long as there’s January.”

“It’s our anniversary,” Maggie explained airily. “With North Bear,” Pete added. “The day we moved here. Not our anniversary—our anniversary’s January thirteenth.” “No kidding,” I said. “That’s my birthday.” “Really?!” Maggie seemed delighted. “Well, of course it is! The best day of the year—it only makes sense God would pull that.”

I lived in the give-up pants and even swore to start calling them something better if I could just finish this book, as if I were bargaining with a god who was deeply invested in my (thoroughly non-capsule) wardrobe.

My body felt different. I could have convinced myself I’d snatched someone else’s limbs and life and fallen in love with them.

Deep cleaning put me into a trance; I wished I could stay in an emotional cryogenic chamber that would allow me to sleep through the worst of whatever heartbreak I was avoiding.

I’d finally fallen. It had been impossibly fortuitous, fated, for me to find myself crossing paths with someone I could love like Gus Everett, and I still felt lucky even as I felt miserable.

“When I think about you, January, and I think about doing laundry with you and trying terrible green juice cleanses and going to antiques malls with you, I only feel happy. The world looks different than I ever thought it could be, and I don’t want to look for what’s broken or what could go wrong. I don’t want to brace myself for the worst and miss out on being with you. “I want to be the one who gives you what you deserve, and I want to sleep next to you every night and to be the one you complain about book stuff to, and I don’t think I ever could deserve any of that, and I know this thing between us isn’t a sure thing, but that’s what I want to aim for with you. Because I know no matter how long I get to love you, it will be worth whatever comes after.”