Happy Place(33)

“If only you’d brought your coffee-table book.”

Wyn looks abruptly back at me, eyes sharply appraising.

“Then we’d have something to look at,” I say.

His brow arches, tugging on his lip. “What do you have against my coffee-table book, Harriet?”

“Nothing.”

“Did you suffer some kind of coffee-table-book-related trauma in the last five months?”

“That thing cost sixty dollars,” I say.

He shakes his head, goes back to pacing.

“Is it a gift?” I say.

“Why would it be a gift?” he says. Not an answer.

“Because you never spend that kind of money on yourself,” I say.

The tops of his cheeks flush a little, and I really, really regret asking now. We go back to sitting in silence. Well, I’m sitting. He’s power walking in tiny rectangles.

Even after everything, it’s hard to see him like this.

When the defense of his charm gets peeled back, he’s always so expressive. It’s partly what made me pour out so many secrets to him all those years ago, the feeling that he absorbed some piece of whatever I gave him, felt what I felt. Unfortunately, the reverse was also true.

“You’ve been crammed in much smaller spaces,” I remind him as he’s passing me on his ninetieth lap (best guess; I haven’t been counting).

His gaze flashes toward the space under the stairs again.

Not what I meant. My face flames. “Like every single car you’ve ever been in,” I clarify.

“Buses are bigger than this,” he says.

“True,” I say. “But they also smell worse. It smells great down here.”

“It smells damp.”

“It’s Maine,” I say. “It is damp.”

He tips his head back. “I’m freaking out, Harriet.”

I stand up. “It’s okay. They’ll be here soon.”

“You don’t know that.” His eyes flicker back to me, the tension around his mouth revealing his dimples. “They might think we decided to hang back . . .”

I swallow. “Sabrina wouldn’t stand for that. We’re supposed to all be together.”

He shakes his head. He sees all the holes in that logic just like I do.

Sabrina might be annoyed if she thought we stayed back to score some alone time, but she’s already shaken up the natural order of things on our behalf, with giving us the nicest bedroom. Aside from that, if she tried to call and we didn’t answer, it’s not like she’d speed back here and storm upstairs to try to catch us in the act.

I try a different tack. “You come down here all the time. And you’ve probably been down here much longer than this, honestly.”

I try not to go back there.

I try not to revisit the memory.

The summer after he, Cleo, Sabrina, and I all graduated. Before we moved to New York to join Parth.

We’d driven down from Vermont, with all our stuff packed and ready for the big move. Parth had flown in from the city, fresh off finishing his time as a Fordham 1L.

It was his idea to play sardines, a kind of reverse hide-and-seek.

We turned off all the lights, then rolled dice to see who’d hide first.

Wyn lost. We gave him five minutes to hide before we spread out to search through the dark for him.

Somehow I knew, the same way I always seemed to, exactly where he was.

I found him in the cellar. Under the stairs, there was a waist-high rack of wine, but behind it there was a dark nook, empty space, and he was tucked inside it. I almost missed him, but on a double take, I spotted a shifting shadow.

We’d lived together all year but were never truly alone, not like that. For walks, sure, or in the library, where there was always someone around the corner at the reference desk.

I’d almost convinced myself we’d truly made it to the level of platonic friends until, per the game’s rules, I climbed over that wine rack to curl up in the dark with him, and my thumping heart and flipping stomach proved they’d never stopped waiting for this moment, this closeness.

I clear my throat, but the memory seems to stick in my windpipe. “We must’ve been down here for at least an hour.”

I have no idea if that’s true. I just know every second before we touched felt like a century. Then once we did, time lost all meaning. I think of the black hole documentary I watched with my dad a few years ago, how astrophysicists speculated that there were places in our universe where the rules of time and space inverted, moments becoming a place where you could stay indefinitely.

“I had a good distraction then,” Wyn says. No flirtation, no charm. Earnest Wyn. Matter-of-fact Wyn.

“You had the exact same distraction.” I hold my arms out to my sides, shimmering my hands.

He looks skeptical. “Fine, then distract me, Harriet.”

I tut. “Where are the famous Wyn Connor manners?”

His eyes glint, only the left dimple winking into being. “Distract me please, Harriet.” His voice drops a little.

I suppress the shiver that sizzles down my spine.

He takes another sip of wine and goes back to pacing, clenching and unclenching his fists. His hands, I know, go numb when his claustrophobia kicks in.

I have to do something. I have only one idea.