Happy Place

by Emily Henry

invisible string

I told myself I was too smart to think I was falling in love with him. Because I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. If only I’d been right.

“Just because you don’t see me grabbing a mop every time you walk into a room doesn’t mean I don’t notice you’re there.”

“Every rose has its thorn,” Sabrina says, angling our cart back toward the front of the shop. “Just like every cowboy sings a sad, sad song.”

It’s by this married couple who usually publish separately. One of them writes literary doorstop novels and the other writes romance.”

I have no idea if that’s true. I just know every second before we touched felt like a century.

Now I know how he’d taste, how he’d touch me, how quickly he’d become the foremost need in my personal Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Which is why I need to put distance between us again. His gravity’s too strong.

Because feelings were changeable, and people were unpredictable. You couldn’t hold on to them through the force of will.

After Wyn’s and my first kiss, in the cellar over the summer, I’d expected that to be it: our curiosity satisfied, our crush squashed. Instead, the moment the door to our shared room at the cottage closed, he’d lifted me against him, kissed me like only seconds had passed.

(I’ve never seen a dishwasher loaded so inefficiently.)

He’s the only person who knows how much it bothers me that I barely know Eloise, that despite having a sister, I always felt acutely alone in our childhood home. Between our six-year age gap and her constant disagreements with our parents, we didn’t have much time to bond.

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.

his laughter spilling across my skin, dripping down my spine, lighting up my nerve endings as it goes.

“Soft,” he says. The backs of his fingernails drag back down my thigh, sliding past the hem of my dress to the bare skin above my knee. My head falls back of its own volition. “Delicate. So fucking light it dissolves on your tongue.” His eyes meet mine. His nails drag back up, a little heavier. For several seconds, or minutes, or hours, we hold on to each other’s gazes while his hand makes slow passes, up, down, up a little higher. “Can I see more pictures?” he says. I startle from my lust haze. “What?” “Of your pottery,” he says. “It’s not good,” I say. “I don’t care,” he says. “Can I see it?”

They all do, I think. You are in all of my happiest places.

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

It’s not that I think what happened downstairs

was an act. But it was part of an agreement. This isn’t. And neither of us seems to have decided what happens next.

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

“Never got a detention,” Mom says, “had perfect grades, got plenty of scholarships. No matter how stressful anything else was, we always knew Harriet was fine.”

Our girl Harriet is going to change the world.” It makes me beam. It makes me ache.

Not miserable. Just like it’s not enough. Like he and Mom both know there are other universes where they’re more, bigger, happier.

It knocks the wind out of me. The way he says it—so easily, so lovingly. That familiar homesickness, that longing, roars awake.

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.

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

Not enough, I think with a pang. How can I exorcise all this trapped, combustible love in one day?

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.

He was right about one thing, though. He can’t tell me what I want.

Dad comes around first. He starts sending me articles about the mental benefits of making pottery, and texts about a new TV competition between ceramists. Mom is a harder sell.

“I’m never not going to worry about you.”