Beach Read

by Emily Henry

I recognized that choreography well. 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.

“Then I’ll take you through my research process. I’ll help you lean into your latent nihilism, and you’ll teach me how to sing like no one’s listening, dance like no one’s watching, and love like I’ve never been hurt before.”

And I hid the complicated feelings that came with trying to memorize someone you loved, just in case.

“You know, maybe the reason you haven’t been able to finish your book is that you keep asking what someone else wants to read instead of what you want to write.”

I know feeling small gets to some people, he had once told me, but I kind of like it. Takes the pressure off when you’re just one life of six billion at any given moment. And when you’re going through something hard—at the time, Mom was doing chemo—it’s nice to know you’re not even close to the only one.

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.

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.

He was always leaning on something, like he couldn’t bear to hold all his own weight upright for more than a second or two. He lounged, he sprawled, he hunched and reclined. He never simply stood or sat. In college, I’d thought he was lazy about everything except writing. 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.

and now I’d started getting emotionally attached to someone who’d done everything he could to convince me not to.

There’s nothing you can do to make someone keep loving you.

No one had chosen Gus. From the time he was a kid, no one had chosen him, and he was embarrassed by that, like it meant something about him. I wanted to tell him it didn’t. That it wasn’t because he was broken, but because everyone else was.

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.”

“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. That’s what you do. For your readers. For me. You make beautiful things, because you love the world, and maybe the world doesn’t always look how it does in your books, but…I think putting them out there, that changes the world a little bit. And the world can’t afford to lose that.”

“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.”

“When I watch you sleep,” he said shakily, “I feel overwhelmed that you exist.”

In books, I’d always felt like the Happily Ever After appeared as a new beginning, but for me, it didn’t feel like that. My Happily Ever After was a strand of strung-together Happy for Nows, extending back not just to a year ago, but to thirty years before. Mine had already begun, and so this day was neither an ending nor a beginning. It was just another good day. A perfect day. A Happy for Now so vast and deep that I knew—or rather believed—I didn’t have to worry about tomorrow.