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

“We’ll figure something out,” I insist.

Alex bumps an arm against my back. “Poppy’s an expert on traveling on the cheap.”

“That so?” Nikolai couldn’t sound less interested. He pulls out his phone and types with one finger. “Refund’s issued. Not sure how long it’ll take, so lemme know if there’s a problem.”

Nikolai turns to go but swivels back. “Almost forgot—found this on the welcome mat outside.” He hands us a piece of paper folded in half. In looping cursive, it says on the front THE NEWLYWEDS with, like, twenty-five little hearts drawn around it.

“Congrats on the nuptials,” Nikolai says, and lets himself out.

“What is it?” Alex asks.

I unfold the piece of paper. It’s a Groupon printed in shoddy black ink. At the top, scrawled in the margin in the same handwriting as on the front, is a note.

Hope y’all don’t think it’s creepy we figured out what apartment you were in! We thought we might’ve heard the sounds of passion coming from this one. ;) Also Bob said he saw you leaving this morning (we are three doors down). Anyway! We have to take off bright and early for the next stage of our vacation (Joshua Tree!!! Yay! I feel like a celebrity just writing that!) and unfortunately we never got a chance to use this. (Barely made it out of our bedroom—you two will know how it is, LOL.) Hope y’all have a great rest of your trip!

Xoxo, your fairy godparents, Stacey & Bob

I blink at the voucher, stunned. “It’s a one-hundred-dollar gift certificate,” I say. “For a spa. I think I read about this place. It’s supposed to be amazing.”

“Wow,” Alex says. “Feeling kind of bad that I didn’t even remember their names.”

“They didn’t address it to us directly,” I point out. “I doubt they know ours either.”

“And yet they gave us this anyway,” Alex says.

“I wonder if there’s a way we could create a long-lasting friendship with them, get super close, take trips together, all of it, and keep them from ever finding out our names. Just for fun.”

“We absolutely could,” Alex says. “You just have to make it long enough that it’s too awkward to ask. I had so many ‘friends’ like that in college.”

“Oh, god, yeah, and then you have to use that trick where you ask two people if they’ve been introduced, and wait for them to say their names.”

“Except sometimes, they just say yes,” Alex points out. “Or they say no, but just keep waiting for you to introduce them.”

“Maybe they’re doing the exact same thing,” I say. “Maybe those people don’t even remember their names.”

“Well, I doubt I’ll ever forget Stacey and Bob now,” Alex says.

“I doubt I’ll forget much about this trip,” I say. “Except the gift shop in the dinosaur. That can go, if I need to make room for more important things.”

Alex smiles down at me. “Agreed.”

After an awkward beat of silence, I say, “So. Should we find a hotel?”

28

This Summer

THE LARREA PALM Springs Hotel is seventy dollars a night in the summer, and even in the dark, it looks like a kid’s Magic Marker drawing. In a good way.

The outside is an explosion of colors—banana-yellow pool cabanas, hot-sauce-red chaises lined up around the water, each block of the three-story building painted a different shade of pink, red, purple, yellow, green.

The room we check into is every bit as lively: orange walls and drapes and furniture, green carpet, striped bedding matched to the building’s exterior. Most important, it’s very cold.

“You want to shower first?” Alex asks as soon as we’re inside. I realize then that the whole drive over—and before that, when we were packing our stuff up, tidying Nikolai’s apartment—he’s been waiting to be clean, suppressing a desire to say over and over again, God, I need a shower, while all I was doing was thinking about what happened on the balcony and going hot all over.

I don’t want Alex to go take a shower right now. I want to get in the shower together and make out some more.

But I also remember him confiding once that he hated shower sex (worse than outdoor sex) because when he was in the shower, he just wanted to be clean, and that was hard to do with someone else’s hair and dirt pouring down you, while the sex part was just as challenging because there was constantly soap in your eyes or you were brushing up against the wall and thinking about the last time the tiles were cleaned, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

So I just say, “Go for it!” and Alex nods but hesitates, like maybe he’s going to say something, but ultimately decides not to and disappears into the bathroom for a long, hot shower.

My T-shirt and hair have both dried out, and when I go to sit out on the (non-plastic-wrapped) balcony of our new room, I realize that’s already mostly dry too.

Any sign of the rain that broke the heat has burned off, like it never happened.

Except that my lips feel bruised and my body is more relaxed than I’ve been all week. And the air is lighter too, breezy even.

“All yours,” Alex says behind me.

When I turn, he’s standing there in his towel looking shiny-clean and perfect. My pulse quickens at the sight of him, but I’m aware of how filthy I am, so I swallow my want, stand up, and say, “Cool!” too loudly.

To put it lightly, I don’t enjoy showering.

Being clean, yes. The act of being in the shower, also yes. But everything about having to brush out my tangled hair beforehand, stepping out onto a ratty bath mat or tile floors, getting dry, combing my hair out again—I hate all of that, which means I’m a three-shower-a-week person to Alex’s one to two showers a day.

But taking this shower, after the week we’ve had so far, is absolutely luxurious.

Standing in hot, hot water