People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry (best story books to read .TXT) 📕

matters!” I shout when he refuses to enter a bar with an—no joke—all-saxophone band playing in the middle of the day.

“Theme matters!” he cries when I say I don’t want to buy shirts that say Drunk Bitch 1 and Drunk Bitch 2 like those Thing 1 and Thing 2 shirts they sell at theme parks, and we leave the shop wearing the shirts over our clothes.

“I love when you get weird,” I tell him.

He squints tipsily at me as we walk. “You make me weird. I’m not like this with anyone else.”

“You make me weird too,” I say; then, “Should we get real tattoos that say ‘All the world’s a stage’?”

“Gladys and Keith would,” Alex says, taking a long drink from his water bottle. He passes it to me afterward, and I greedily chug half of it.

“So that’s a yes?”

“Please don’t make me,” he says.

“But, Alex,” I cry. “Theme matt—”

He pops the water bottle back into my mouth. “Once you’re sober, I promise you won’t think it’s funny anymore.”

“I will always think every joke I make is hilarious,” I say, “but point taken.”

We hit happy hour after happy hour, with varying results. Sometimes the drinks are weak and bad, sometimes they’re stiff and good, often they’re stiff and bad. We go to a hotel bar that’s mounted to a carousel and each buy one fifteen-dollar cocktail. We go to, allegedly, the second-oldest continuously operating bar in Louisiana. It’s an old blacksmith shop with sticky floors that looks like a half-assed living museum, except for the gigantic trivia machine set up in the corner.

Alex and I sip slowly on one shared drink while we wait our turn. We don’t break the record, but we make the scoreboard.

The fifth night, we wind up at a fratty karaoke bar with an over-the-top stage and laser-lights show. After two shots of Fireball, Alex agrees to sing Sonny and Cher’s “I Got You Babe” onstage in character as the Vivants.

Halfway through the song, we get into a miked fight about the fact that I know he’s sleeping with Shelly from makeup. “It doesn’t take an hour to put on a freaking fake beard, Keith!” I shout.

The applause at the end is muted and uncomfortable. We take another shot and head to a place Guillermo told me about that serves a frozen coffee cocktail.

Half the places we’ve gone have been places Guillermo recommended, and I’ve loved all of them, especially the hole-in-the-wall po’boy shop. Having a chef for a boyfriend has perks.

When I told him where Alex and I were going, he got out a piece of paper and started writing down everything he could remember from his last trip, along with notes about pricing and what to order. He starred all his must-eats, but there’s no way we’ll get to all of them.

I met Guillermo a couple months after moving to New York. My new (first New York) friend Rachel got a request to eat at his new restaurant for free, in exchange for posting a few pictures of it on her social media. She does that kind of thing a lot, and since I’m a fellow Internet Person, we do these sorts of things together.

“Less embarrassing,” she insists. “Plus cross-promotion.”

Every time she posts a picture with me, my subscriber count goes up by hundreds. I’d been hanging around thirty-six thousand for six months, but have ballooned to fifty-five thousand through sheer association with Her Brand.

So I went with her to this restaurant, and after the meal, the chef came out to talk to us, and he was gorgeous and sweet, with soft brown eyes, dark hair swept back off his forehead. His laugh was soft and unassuming, and by that night, he’d messaged me on Instagram, before I could even post the pictures I’d taken to my account.

He found me through Rachel, and I liked the way he told me that right up front, without embarrassment. He works most nights, so on our first date, we went for breakfast instead, and he kissed me when he picked me up rather than waiting until he dropped me off afterward.

At first, I was seeing a few other people and he was too, but several weeks into it, we decided neither of us wanted to see anyone else. He laughed when he told me, and I laughed too, just because I’d gotten in the habit of giving encouraging laughter from being around him.

It’s not like it was with Julian, not all-consuming and unpredictable. We see each other two or three times a week, and it’s nice, the way this leaves space in my life for other things.

Spin classes with Rachel and long walks down the mall of Central Park with a dripping ice cream cone in hand, gallery openings and special movie nights at neighborhood bars. People in New York are friendlier than the rest of the world warned me they would be.

When I tell Rachel this, she says, “Most people here aren’t assholes. They’re just busy.”

But when I say the same thing to Guillermo, he gently cups my jaw, laughs, and says, “You are so sweet. I hope you don’t let this place change you.”

It’s sweet, but it also worries me. Like maybe the thing Gui loves best about me isn’t some essential part, but something changeable, something that could be stripped away by a few years in the right climate.

As we wander the streets of New Orleans, I think multiple times of telling Alex about what Guillermo said, but every time I catch myself. I want Alex to like Guillermo, and I worry he’d be offended on my behalf.

So I tell him other things. Like how calm Guillermo is, that he laughs easily, how passionate he is about his job, and food in general.

“You’ll like him,” I say, and I really believe it.

“I’m sure I will,” Alex insists. “If you like him, I’ll like him.”

“Good,” I say.

And then he tells me about Sarah, his unrequited college crush. He ran into her when he was up