Book Lovers

by Emily Henry

The details may change from book to book, but there’s nothing truly new under the sun.

We’re fundamentally out of sync in a way I can’t seem to name, and not even my dream mattress and a cloud of diffused lavender oil are enough to keep me from lying awake, turning over our last few conversations like I’m looking for faint cracks.

The point is, Libby’s laugh makes me feel like the world is under my thumb, like I’m in complete control of The Situation.

Again I feel that heart-pinch sensation, like I’m missing her, like all our best moments are behind us. That, I remind myself, is why I’m doing this. By the time we get back to the city, whatever little gaps have cropped up between us will be stitched closed again.

Mom’s theory was that youthful skin would make a woman more money (true in both acting and waitressing), good underwear would make her more confident (so far, so true), and good books would make her happy (universal truth), and we’ve clearly both packed with this theory in mind.

He smells like evergreens and impending rain.

Anything broken can be fixed. Any problem can be solved.

the memory of her is a newspaper clipping and every time I take it out, she fades and creases a little more.

His eyes are heavy on me, his pupils almost blotting out his irises, a lustrous ring of honey around a deep, dark pit.

He made the world open up around me, like there were colors I’d never seen, new levels of happiness I couldn’t have imagined.

When his gaze meets mine, it’s startlingly dark. It feels like I’ve stumbled toward the edge of something dangerous. And worse, like I’m trapped there in viscous honey, incapable of stepping back from the ledge.

When I take his hand, the friction feels like it could light a fire.

I scoot forward too, our knees fitting together under us, like interlocking fingers this time:

My skin buzzes, like my blood is made of iron fillings and his eyes are magnets sweeping over them.

I feel like I’m sugar under a blowtorch, like he’s caramelizing my blood.

I’m acutely aware of how flimsy the space is between us now, slippery, finite, closable. Maybe this is why people take trips, for that feeling of your real life liquefying around you, like nothing you do will tug on any other strand of your carefully built world.

We’re both silent, like any word could break the spell of the silver moonlight.

My mouth feels like it’s melting under his, like I’m wax and he’s the burning wick down my center.

I read once that sunflowers always orient themselves to face the sun. That’s what being near Charlie Lastra is like for me. There could be a raging wildfire racing toward me from the west and I’d still be straining eastward toward his warmth.

I can see all of the shades of him at once.

Time collapses, and instead of the version of you you’ve built from scratch, you’re all the hackneyed drafts that came before, all at once.

And he’s looking at me like I could, like there’s an ache in him only I could soothe.

maybe it’s possible to have more than one home. Maybe it’s possible to belong in a hundred different ways to a hundred different people and places.

this wanting, it feels good, like a bruise you need to press on, a reminder that there are things in life so valuable that you must risk the pain of losing them for the joy of briefly having them.

Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either. Not the kind that forces two people into shapes they don’t fit in, but the kind that loosens their grips, always leaves room to grow. Compromises that say, there will be a you-shaped space in my heart, and if your shape changes, I will adapt. No matter where we go, our love will stretch out to hold us, and that makes me feel like . . . like everything will be okay.