Beach Read

by Emily Henry

“Yeah, and I don’t know how to drive.” “Then you should probably give that license back,” I said. “Believe me, I’m waiting for it to expire. I’m going to feel so free. I hate when people think I’m able to drive just because, legally, I am.”

So much for Midwestern hospitality. At least in New York, our neighbors had brought us cookies when we moved in. (They’d been gluten-free and laced with LSD, but it was the thought that counted.)

I was in a funhouse of geriatric adultery.

Tell me, which do you find more fascinating to write: love-struck pirates or love-struck werewolves?” And now I was seething again. “Well, it’s not really about me so much as what my readers want. What’s it like writing Hemingway circle-jerk fan fiction?

I’d had two sips of Pete’s latte, and it was three sips too many.

“I remember how you wrote when you were twenty-two,” he said carefully. “It won’t be bad.” I fought a blush. I didn’t understand how he could do that, bounce between being rude, almost condescending, and disarmingly complimentary.

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.

Is this a taylor swift music video. I think the author is a swiftie

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.

Confirmed

His hand was still hanging against my hip like he’d forgotten it was there, but his finger twitched, and I knew he hadn’t.

I realized I was holding my breath, and when I forced myself to breathe, the rise and fall of my chest was ridiculous, the stuff of Regency-era erotica.

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.

There was no reason that should’ve sent new fireworks of heat across my cheeks, and yet, here we were.

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

The pulsing blank of feeling so much you’re incapable of thinking anything.

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.

“It’s strictly need to know,” he said. “The last thing I told her must’ve been that we got caught making out at a drive-in theater.” I laughed and pushed him away, covering my burning face with my hands. “Now I’ll never be able to order another pink eye!” Gus laughed and caught my wrists, tugging them from my face. “Did she call it that again?” “Of course she did!” He shook his head, grinning. “I’m beginning to suspect her coffee expertise is not what keeps her in business.”

“Someone should invent a boredom EpiPen.” “I think that’s essentially what drugs are,”

“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.”

“Your mother has been a lot of people in the twenty years I’ve known her, and I’ve had a chance to fall in love with every single one of them, Janie. That’s the key to marriage. You have to keep falling in love with every new version of each other, and it’s the best feeling in the whole world.”

“You don’t know that,” I said. “You were a kid.” “Pete likes to say I was never a kid.” “That’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.”

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’ll come,” I said. “But I’m definitely bringing up rocks to Maggie.” “You’re sick and twisted, January Andrews,” Gus said. “That’s what I love about you.” My stomach dipped and rose higher than it had started out. “Oh, that’s what it is.” “Well,” he said. “One thing. It seemed too crass to invite you to my aunts’ house and then bring up your ass.”

knows how stupid I am when it comes to you, how crazy I was for you in college, and—” “What are you talking about?” I challenged. “You never even spoke to me.” He let out a humorless laugh. “Because you hated me!” he blurted. “I’d come late to class so I could choose my seat based on where you sat, and I’d rush out afterward so I could walk with you, ask to borrow pens every day for a week, fucking drop books Three Stooges–style when you hung back so it would just be the two of us, and you’d never even look at me! Even when we were workshopping your stories and I was talking right to you, you wouldn’t look at me. I could never figure out what I’d done, and then I saw you at that party, and you were finally looking at me and—that’s my point! I’m an idiot when it comes to you!”

“I don’t need you to be Fabio,” I said, voice thick with emotion, like it wasn’t the single stupidest sentence I’d uttered in my life.

“When you love someone,” he said haltingly, “… you want to make this world look different for them. To give all the ugly stuff meaning, and amplify the good.

“I don’t need snowflakes.” He kissed me. “As long as there’s January.”

“Falling’s the part that takes your breath away. It’s the part when you can’t believe the person standing in front of you both exists and happened to wander into your path. It’s supposed to make you feel lucky to be alive, exactly when and where you are.”

“I’ve never met someone who is so perfectly my favorite person. When I think about being with you every day, no part of me feels claustrophobic. And when I think about having to have the kinds of fights with you that Naomi and I used to have, there’s nothing scary about it. Because I trust you, more than I’ve ever trusted anyone,