Happy Place

by Emily Henry

“I don’t want to do anything else that hurts you.” “You didn’t,” I say. I hurt myself, I think. He looks over my shoulder at the door, almost guiltily.

I could never forget how to love Wyn.

“No,” he says quietly. “In every universe, it’s you for me. Even if it’s not me for you.”

“You never annoy me,” he says. I look up, catch him watching me. My laugh is breathless, woozy. “We both know that’s not true.” He studies me for a second, brow furrowed. “Frustrate, maybe. Not annoy.” “What’s the difference?” I ask. His eyes drop to my legs and back up. “When you’re annoyed, you don’t want to be around a person.” His chin shifts to the left, not quite a shake of his head. “I always want to be around you.”

“If it was possible to stop loving you, I would’ve managed it in that first year of desperately trying to. I’m here. For good.”

“Joke’s on you,” I say. “The periodic table was my boy band poster.” He groans. “God, you’re such a nerd.” I lace my fingers against the back of his preternaturally warm neck. “But you still like me?” “You,” he says, “are my periodic table.” I laugh into his chest. “I don’t know what that means.” “It means when we get home,” he says, “I’m covering our walls in lewd posters of you.”

“Because you’re good at loving,” he says. “And that’s all you have to do.”

“How can love end up like that?” I ask thickly. “How is it possible to love someone so much and have it all just go away?”

The only way I can bear loving anyone this much is knowing it will never turn to poison. Knowing we’ll give each other up before we can destroy each other.

“I need to know we’re never going to hurt each other like this.”

“I’m not going to stop fighting for you, Harriet.” My vision blurs behind tears. He pulls me in, holds me tight. “I’m not going to stop loving you.”

“Your favorite part,” Sabrina says, “of this amazing trip I planned for us . . . is going to sleep.” “No.” I toss a seashell shard toward the sparkling lip of the tide. “It’s going to sleep so tired, in a good way. Feeling content and exhausted and relaxed, but also excited to wake up and still be here.”

“Because. That’s not what she wants.” You, you, you, my heart cries.

Accepting, now, the truth: That he’s moved on. That all these moments I cling to, like little mental life rafts, are just memories for him.

Stupid, stupid, stupid heart. Don’t you know he hasn’t been yours to cry over for a long time?

“Please don’t do this.” “Do what?” I demand. “Pretend you’re fine,” he says. “Act like I’m imagining that you’re pulling away from me.”

I don’t know how it happens: I’m confident I don’t trip into his mouth, but that’s how it feels, because I’m positive he didn’t initiate it—Wyn would never—and it makes no sense that I would do this, but I have. I am.

“You have nothing to be sorry for,” I promise. “I want to be better for you,” he says. “Stop,” I whisper. “I don’t need that. I don’t need anything from you. I’m okay.”

The tracks of our lives split little by little, but the moments we’re together, my love still feels so big and violent it could consume me.

But a deeper part of me, a voice that’s always been there, tells me it was always going to end this way. That I’ve known since that first trip to Indiana that I would never be enough to make him happy, that I couldn’t give him the kind of love his parents had when my only education on the subject had been the one my parents had.

“It’s nothing,” I say. “Forget it.” “I won’t.” He wipes water from his eye. “But if you want me to pretend, I can try.”

I can’t bring myself to look at him, not while I’m falling apart. Not after baring all the rawest parts of myself.

I’ve never known what to do with pain, Wyn. All I’ve ever done is hide from it.”

I think of the first time I ever saw his face up close, how his features had struck me as contradictory, a rare mix of magnetism and standoffishness: I want you close, but don’t look at me. Now he’s pure quicksand. No stoniness. Wide open.

“I wanted to be special, Harriet,” he says. “And since I wasn’t, I settled for trying to make everyone love me.

Because even if there was nothing else for me, it felt like loving you was what I was made for. And it didn’t matter what anyone thought of me. It didn’t matter if I didn’t have any other big plans for myself, as long as I got to love you.”

“So that’s it?” I say raggedly. “I took up all the oxygen, and you didn’t tell me until I’d suffocated you. Until you didn’t love me anymore, and there was nothing I could do.”

“That’s the point, Harriet. It’s the only thing that’s ever come naturally to me. The thing I don’t have to work at. I loved you all the way across the fucking country, and at my darkest, on my worst days, I...

I go back and forth every thirty seconds thinking I’m hurting you just by being here, and then thinking you couldn’t possibly still love me after all this time, and even if it’s not real, a part of me wants to pretend I have you, but another part thinks I’ll die if you don’t tell me you love me, even if it doesn’t change anything. Even if it’s just getting to hear it one more time.

“I tried so fucking hard to let you go, to let you be happy, and when I see you, I still feel like—like you’re mine. Like I’m yours. I got rid of every single piece of you, like that would make a difference, like I could cut you out of me, and instead, I just see everywhere you’re supposed to be.”

But does it even matter that we belong to each other when we can’t be with each other?

“What is this?” he whispers. I want it to be an I’m sorry and an I forgive you and a Promise you won’t ever let me go and a million other words I can’t say.

“We shouldn’t do this while you’re upset anyway,” he says. I move my hand down him. “I’ll be less upset once you’re inside me.”

“Harriet,” he rasps against my ear. “You’re so fucking soft.” “Thanks,” I say, breathless, “I don’t work out.”

There’s an electricity in the air, a feeling of possibility. Maybe it’s emanating from Wyn and me. Maybe every time our hands link, or he tugs me into his side or pulls me to a stop and presses me back against the guardrail for a kiss while the others keep walking, we let a little more charge into the air.

How can I exorcise all this trapped, combustible love in one day? How can I stockpile pieces of him in the next twenty-four hours and then let him go, like he needs? Like he deserves.

“I did what I had to,” Sabrina says. “Just like I always do, because no one makes even the tiniest bit of effort anymore. If I waited on all of you, this friendship would already be over, and you know it.

“We kept something from you that was so painful I haven’t been able to make myself tell anyone about it. I can still hardly think about it—about him—without feeling like . . . like the world’s coming apart at the seams.”

just because we used to, than adjust to the fact that maybe we’d all rather do something different! We’re not in the same place anymore. We’re growing up.”

In a way, I tell myself, it’s a relief, to have everything out in the open. But the truth is, if I could take it all back, I would. I’d do anything to go back to that happy place, outside of time, where nothing from real life can touch us.

I wasn’t afraid they’d be mad at me, exactly, for how things ended with Wyn. I was afraid of their sadness.

I was afraid of ruining this place where they’ve always been happy. I was afraid they would resent me and never say it, afraid they wouldn’t like me as much without Wyn, because I didn’t like me as much without him.

I was afraid they’d ask me what went wrong, and no matter what answer I cobbled together from the rubble, they’d see right thro...

Of crying into a pillow that smelled like him, and waking up from dreams of him, my chest filled with knots.

One more deal I struck with a disinterested universe: If I’m good enough, I’ll be happy. I’ll be loved. I’ll be safe.

I kept so much of what I was feeling from him, thinking the weight of my emotions would only drive him further from me, push him back behind a door I couldn’t open.

“No.” His brow lifts. “No, what?” “We’re not done fighting,” I say. “I thought we weren’t fighting,” he says. I step in close enough to feel the warmth radiating off him. “We’re in an all-out brawl.”

“This is fighting?” he murmurs. I nod as I sink into his lap. His Adam’s apple bobs.

“This is what you wore to fight?” “I’m new to this,” I say. “I didn’t know there was a standard uniform. Do you want me to go change?”

“Everyone fights with the people they love, Harriet,” he says. “What matters is how you do it.”