Happy Place

by Emily Henry

My best friends taught me a new kind of quiet, the peaceful stillness of knowing one another so well you don’t need to fill the space. And a new kind of loud: noise as a celebration, as the overflow of joy at being alive, here, now.

“I’m good!” my mouth says. You are VERY bad, actually, my brain argues.

“Flirting never killed anybody, Harriet.” “Clearly you’re unfamiliar with the concept of the Regency-era duel,” I say.

“It’s dating, Wyn, not an all-you-can-eat barbecue buffet,” I say. “Although, from what I’ve heard, maybe for you they’re the same thing.”

“Are you slut-shaming me, Harriet?” “Not at all,” I say. “I love sluts! Some of my best friends are sluts. I’ve dabbled in sluttery myself.”

Regency era or not, in a lot of ways, he ruins me.

His eyes go stormy. His lips part. He looks toward the balcony, grooves rising between his eyebrows. He just has one of those vaguely tortured faces, I remind myself. He can’t help it, and he certainly doesn’t need my comfort.

I rarely said his name, though. It felt too much like an incantation. As if it would light me up from the inside, and he’d see how much I wanted him, how all day long my mind caught on him like a scar in a record. How, without even trying, I knew exactly where he was at all times, could likely cover my eyes, get spun around, and still point to him on the first try.

Sabrina had never wanted to get married, lest she have to go through a vicious divorce. I was more scared of marrying someone who couldn’t bring himself to leave me or to keep loving me.

I don’t look over, but I feel him stretched out under the sun on my left, a second star, a thing with its own gravity, light, warmth.

A silent conversation passes between us: Hi and Hi back and You’re smiling at me and No, you’re smiling at me.

“Wow. Stop hitting on me.” “It’s cute,” he adds. Another full-body flush. “Okay, now you really need to stop flirting with me.” “You make it sound so easy,” he says. “I believe in you,” I say. “And you have no idea how much that means to me,” he replies.

“That’s the thing. Abnormally good-looking people aren’t supposed to also be so . . .” “So . . . ?” He arches a brow. I wave my arms in a circle. He cracks a smile. “Spherical?” I latch on to the closest word I can find. “Vast.” “Vast,” he repeats. “Funny,” I say. “Interesting. It’s like, pick a lane, buddy.”

“I don’t know, Harriet. What do you want?” “You say my name a lot,” I say. “You hardly ever say mine,” he replies. “That’s why I had to get you to say Wins what.”

“Just to be clear, you’re always welcome to touch me.” I become acutely aware of every place the cool silk sheets skim my legs. I shake the blankets out. “What an extremely generous offer.” “Not generous at all,” he says. “I’m voracious for physical touch. Can’t get enough.”

“Cute.” He glances over his shoulder at me, then back to the phone before I can react. He spreads his thumb and finger over the image to zoom in on my face. I watch him in profile, his face lit up, his dimples shadowing. “So fucking cute,” he repeats quietly.

“You don’t date your friends.” “You’re not my friend, Harriet,” he says quietly. “What am I, then?” I ask. “I don’t know,” he says. “But not that.”

I remember telling Wyn that sitting by the fire, he’d looked like the devil, and him saying, Stop flirting with me, Harriet,

every time I came near you, you’d rub your ass on my crotch until I left you alone.” I scoot abruptly back from him. “There is absolutely no way I did that.” “Don’t worry,” he says. “It was clearly vengeful grinding.”

The instant I step under the jangling bells and into Murder, She Read, I feel five hundred thousand times better. Which is to say, I still feel like utter shit, but shit ensconced in books and sun-warmed windows. Shit with sugary iced latte flowing through its veins.

“Sabrina needed more coffee,” Wyn says. “And Parth needed more Sabrina.”

He’s become my best friend the way the others did: bit by bit, sand passing through an hourglass so slowly, it’s impossible to pin down the moment it happens. When suddenly more of my heart belongs to him than doesn’t, and I know I’ll never get a single grain back.

He’s a golden boy. I’m a girl whose life has been drawn in shades of gray.

I try not to love him. I ...

“I thought I made you.” He tips his head so that my hand slides back toward his ear. “Just by wishing.”

You’re so soft, Harriet—as his hands stole up my shirt to find more of me: The others won’t like this. I’d whispered back, I like it, and his laugh shifted into a groan, and then a promise: I do too. I’m not sure I’ve ever liked anything more.

From the loneliness, from the fear that I would never escape it. Because feelings were changeable, and people were unpredictable. You couldn’t hold on to them through the force of will.

I don’t think she’s ever totally understood why I find it easier to fulfill other people’s expectations than to set my own.

“If we aren’t friends,” I ask, “what is this?” He studies me through the dark, smoothing my hair back from my forehead so tenderly. “I don’t know. I just need more of it.”

Date, I think. That’s new. I hadn’t even known to want a date with Wyn Connor, but now that it’s been spoken, I feel a kind of breathless happy-sad. Like I’m missing this night before it’s even begun. Every time he offers me more of him, it gets harder not to have it all.

I like your body and your face and your hair and your skin, and I like how you’re always warmer than me, and how you never sit still except when you’re really trying to concentrate on what someone’s saying, and I like how you always fix things without being asked.

“You can trust me, Harriet.” In that moment, he pierces a little deeper into my heart, opens another door, finds an entire walled-off room I didn’t realize was there. He pulls me into his chest, and our heartbeats sync. I’ve never felt so certain of anything, so right, so safe.

So many of his details are slightly different, but my heart still sees him and whispers into my veins, You.

Hearts can be so stupid.

“You fit with me, and I was there.” “I know,” he says. “I think that’s really why I went. To find you.”

“I like seeing you here,” he says, voice low, a little hoarse. “It makes me feel like this is real.” “Wyn.” I look up into his face, searching his stormy eyes, the rigid lines between his brows and framing his jaw. “Of course it’s real.” He folds his fingers through mine and brings my hands to the back of his neck, our foreheads resting together, our hearts whirring. “I mean,” he says, “like I can make you happy.” “This is me, happy,” I promise.

Home, I think. That’s new. But it’s not. It’s been growing there for a while, this new room in my heart, this space just for Wyn that I carry with me everywhere I go.

was in a dark place,” he goes on. I turn from him because I feel the cracks spreading, my eyes stinging. “I know.” I did know. Every second of every day. “I just didn’t know how to fix it,” I choke out. “You couldn’t have,”

Everything combusted at once, and somehow I still thought we’d make it. When he promised to love me forever, I believed him. That was what made me the angriest, with both of us.

“I didn’t think that I . . .” His eyes hold mine, his jaw muscles working. “I never wanted to hurt you.” “I know.” But it changes nothing.

He broke your heart. He was never yours to keep, and deep down you knew that. I watched him fade from me, bit by bit, day by day, a mirage receding into nothingness.

Maybe that was part of the anger that burned in me too: disappointment that I hadn’t loved him well enough to make him happy nor well enough to let him go.

The weed is still making time stretchy as taffy. Some colors paint his face for eons, and others flash so fast I hardly have time to register them.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” he asks. “Like what?” I say, a bit thickly. He tucks his chin. “Like you want to eat me.” “Because,” I say, “I want to eat you.”

“Is there one that looks like us?” he asks. They all do, I think. You are in all of my happiest places. You are where my mind goes when it needs to be soothed.

“Except with you. You’re like gravity.”

I couldn’t have pulled myself away from him then if he’d burst into flames.

“Everything keeps spinning,” he says in a low, hoarse voice. “But my mind’s alwa...

Or I do care, in that I need it. I need his gravity. I need his mouth and hips to pin me in place, to anchor me in this moment, to slow time even further, like he always has, until this becomes my real life,

He broke my heart, destroyed it. And even if I could forgive him, he’s happy in his new life. I know there’s no going back. So why does hearing it make my chest feel like a split log?