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.

“Surprise.” His gray eyes communicate something more akin to Welcome to hell; I’ll be your host, the devil.

“A whole semester apart,” I say, “and you look exactly the same, Sabrina.” Symmetrical dimples appear on either side of his mouth. “Really? Because I cut my hair, got colored contacts, and grew four inches.”

I feel the moment his gaze lifts off me and returns to the windshield, but he’s left a mark: from now on, dark cliffs, wind racing through hair, cinnamon paired with clove and pine—all of it will only mean Wyn Connor to me. A door has opened, and I know I’ll never get it shut again. Regency era or not, in a lot of ways, he ruins me.

“I think I love you, Harriet,” he says. Love, I think. That’s new. And I’ll never be happy without it again. Without any forethought, any worry, I tell him the truth. “I know I love you, Wyn.” He touches my chin, his hand shaking a little, and slides his nose down along mine. “I love you so much, Harriet.”

I already know: I will love Wyn Connor until I die.

Every time his expression changed, I used to think the new one was my favorite. Until it changed again and I had to accept that whichever Wyn was directly in front of me, that was the one I loved most.

Wyn ran wild here, and this place carved him into the man I love.

“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.

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 always got one hand on you.”

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

Time doesn’t move the same way when we’re there. Things change, but we stretch and grow and make room for one another. Our love is a place we can always come back to, and it will be waiting, the same as it ever was. You belong here.

“And then I met you, and I didn’t feel so lost or aimless. Because even if there was nothing else for me, it felt like loving you was what I was made for.

“I will always love you,” he says fiercely. “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 still love you more than I’ve ever loved anything else.