Beach Read

by Emily Henry

If you swapped out all my Jessicas for Johns, do you know what you’d get? Fiction. Just fiction. Ready and willing to be read by anyone, but somehow by being a woman who writes about women, I’ve eliminated half the Earth’s population from my potential readers,

I never get to say bulbous succulents of flesh in my books.”

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

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.

That deep ache passed through me. It felt like a metal cheese slicer, pulled right through my center, left there midway through my body. I’d thought missing my dad would be the hardest thing I’d ever do. But the worst thing, the hardest thing, had turned out to be being angry with someone you couldn’t fight it out with.

They spent every moment with each other, but somehow told each other very little.

Like…like my husband was clinging to whatever he could grab hold of. Like being right mattered less than being…okay.”

“Bullshit. You called me a fairy princess.” He coughed out a laugh. “Because you’re the bright light! Don’t you get it?”

wrecked

“I don’t need you to tell me you care about me,” I said finally. “Two nights ago you held me while I sobbed. I think I blew my nose on your

i appreciate it’s a slow turn into relationship not sudden. more realistic they’re talking about it

He cleared his throat. “I meant Friday.” “Friday what?” “Do you want to go to Pete’s on Friday?” “Yes,” I answered immediately.

In my own story, I didn’t want to be the heroine who let some silly miscommunication derail something obviously good, but in my real

And the clowns.

Idc

“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

have to look back on every memory I have and wonder what was a lie.

Destroyed. And I was still upright.

thought, If I listen to it, maybe it will be content to close back up for a while.

She learned to let it out, bit by bit, and that sometimes, it was okay to let a little ugliness into your story. That it would never rob you of all the beauty.

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.

To Megan and Noosha, the women whose friendship has taught me how to write about best friends.