Happy After All

Chapter Twenty-One

Spice—what online communities call sex to get around censors.

I’m planning nightly dive-in movie spectaculars with a different Christmas film every night. I was excited about this before Nathan and I started our fling. Mostly because I don’t really want to cut into my time with him. But I can’t swerve on my plans. I promised everyone this would happen, and we chose the movies for it last year.

I don’t expect that Nathan will come out for it, even though our entire relationship has changed in the last week and a half.

His relationship with the rest of the world hasn’t.

It’s complicated because at some point he’s going to step out as Jacob Coulter, but he isn’t being Jacob now. It feels right that this morning Sylvia called to say the newly announced event has sold out already.

Each and every chair sold.

All that heaviness, and success right in the middle of it.

It seems to be Nathan’s story.

I’m trying to remain cheery while I set up the projector. I’ve run this motel for years without him participating in any of my events. I don’t need him to do it now.

Jonathan and Joseph have already taken their seats, along with a couple of their friends who have come to stay and visit them for the holiday. Albert has arrived in a red turtleneck and red plaid pants, along with red-framed glasses to match. He looks every bit as dramatic as he is, but he is seasonal .

Lydia, Wilma, Ruth, and Gladys have their cribbage boards out, and Alice is set up with a keyboard next to where I’m putting the projector. She’s going to play while Ruth sings.

Our short-term guests have also turned out for the festivities, along with Ben, who is sitting on a blanket with Emma and Elise.

I look to see how close Elise is sitting to him.

They give me hope. My current situation is far too temporary to feel hopeful about it.

Even if so ... I’m not sure what hope looks like in our situation.

Maybe I don’t need to. Maybe I just need to get the movie started.

I make my way to the computer that’s going to stream the film, and Alice and Ruth begin to play and sing. Everyone sitting around the pool joins in, a rousing rendition of “Here Comes Santa Claus” filling the air.

Which then transitions into “Santa Claus Is Coming to Town” and “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.” Perfect, because we’re watching the 1960s Claymation classic about Rudolph.

I hit “Play” on the movie, and the crowd cheers.

A few of the kids are floating in the pool, almost every adult opting to stay dry. I intend to join the kids now that everything has begun.

But then, I turn and nearly run smack into Nathan’s broad chest.

“Oh,” I say.

“You look startled,” he says. “Is it because this movie is creepy?”

I let out a shocked laugh. “This movie isn’t creepy. It’s adorable.”

“It has an elf that pulls teeth.”

“He’s a dentist,” I say.

“It’s creepy,” he says.

“It’s a classic,” I counter.

“Classics can be creepy.”

“Well this one isn’t. And no. I was shocked to see you. Out of your room. With all these people here.”

“It seems stupid not to join you,” he says.

I try not to read too deeply into that, but one of my big problems is that I read too deeply into just about everything. Maybe it’s because I’m a writer. Or maybe I’m a writer because I do that. It’s hard to say. But either way, this is different. The biggest thing that’s changed is the fact that he and I are ... I can’t even call it sleeping together. He hasn’t spent the night with me since the night I slept near him when he was passed-out drunk. We have sex in the night, he goes back to his room, we have sex in the morning. It’s a lot of sex and very little intimacy. Except ... There’s plenty that feels intimate. I can’t deny it.

“You really came to watch the movie?” I ask.

“I didn’t realize it was this movie,” he says.

I push his shoulder. “Well, what’s your favorite Christmas movie?”

He has to think about it. “ Home Alone ,” he says. “I thought that if my house got broken into, I could handle it too.”

I laugh. Because of course. I suppose every boy in the nineties thought the same. Then I wonder, growing up in his house, how much more important that would’ve felt. Given that his dad is all about the military and he has older brothers who were super involved with it as well.

Or maybe it’s just a favorite movie and not childhood trauma. But I find myself wanting to dig deeper and deeper into him, who he is, every day.

I’ve never really thought that I was well suited to casual sex. Maybe because my emotions are never casual no matter how much I want them to be.

But I still don’t regret this. I’m determined that I won’t.

“Is he Elise’s boyfriend?” Nathan asks, gesturing toward Ben and Elise.

“I’m hoping that he will be. They’re friends.” I give him meaningful side-eye. “For obvious reasons, she’s determined not to disrupt that.”

This feels like a potential minefield. Stepping into conversations about relationships and why people might not want to be in them.

“It’s complicated,” I say.

“Is it?”

“Yes,” I say slowly. “Just, you know, the eternal complication of people being afraid of getting hurt.”

He nods. “I mean, I am familiar.”

“Of course,” I say.

“If you have the chance, though,” he says, “you should take it.”

Our eyes meet, and my stomach gets tight. I know he isn’t talking about us. He’s talking about them. Maybe talking about his wife. But for one moment, for the space of a breath, I wish he were talking about us.

My thoughts race, and I try to sort them out. Try to stop myself from this intrusive line of thinking that I didn’t even realize existed so strongly inside me. This potential to fantasize about a future beyond this week.

I shouldn’t. I know better.

I hope he doesn’t see all these thoughts playing through my eyes. Because this is about Ben and Elise. Two people who have known each other for years, who live in the same place. This is not about Nathan and Amelia. Two people who do not live in the same place. Who wouldn’t even be able to blend their lives easily if they wanted to.

I don’t even know enough about his life to have these kinds of thoughts.

That I feel like I know him as well as I do is about sex. I’m too smart to let myself believe that sex is knowing someone.

I know the way his skin smells. I know how he tastes. I know how he looks when he loses control. That’s a kind of knowing that goes deep.

I knew Chris for years. It took a pregnancy for us to even really behave like we might be forever. To buy a house, to set it up and get ready to bring a new life into the world. We were having a baby, and we hadn’t even talked about getting married.

Now I’m letting little drops of fantasy about forever invade me regarding a guy I’ve been sleeping with for nine days. I feel like I should be more realistic than that.

There’s that word again. Realistic.

Maybe I should be happy about these fantasies, actually. I guess it means I’m still able to hope with some part of me on a level of delusion that might be disturbing. But at least it’s hope, I suppose.

“Life’s too short.” I realize that might not be the best choice of words, but he doesn’t even flinch.

“I agree.”

But I feel a wealth of complication in that statement. Just because he thinks life is too short to avoid certain kinds of happiness, I don’t believe he applies that same exact thought to himself.

He has clearly decided that his own life must contain a measure of sadness now. I wonder if I’ve done the same.

“How would you write it?” Nathan asks.

I do a double take when he says that. “Um ... I mean, classic friends to lovers, right? He’s been in love with her forever, but because he’s sensitive to her past, he won’t compromise the trust they’ve built, the relationship they’ve built. He loves her, but he also loves her daughter, and he’s a father figure. She’s skittish, and she leans on him, but she doesn’t fully see what he could be to her.”

“Why not?” he asks.

“She doesn’t let herself. It’s self-protection.”

“Seems valid.”

“It is, but ... she’s protecting herself from happiness too. Of course, she’ll have to have a dark night of the soul before she realizes that. My fictional heroine, if I were writing the story.”

“Yes, obviously.”

“Right, so she has to lose him. She has to lose everything so she can see that’s the cost of holding on to fear.”

“Why?”

“See, this is why I do think romance novels are realistic, Nathan. Things just happen in a different order. In real life we have a spate of issues, and we don’t know where they all come from. But they always show up. We date the same people who are the same kind of wrong, we fall into the same bad patterns with work, with personal habits. We fail our friends in the same ways, and we have the same fights with our significant other. Over and over again. Each and every time we have to hit these mini crises, and if we want to move past them, we have to drain a little poison out of the wound. A little bit each time, and next time maybe we won’t fall as hard.”

I take a deep breath. “In romance you drain the poison out. In one big cathartic fight. One catastrophic loss. The loss of the person who showed you that you needed to heal, and you have to let the poison go to be happy. It’s the same process. It just takes a little more time.”

We look at each other, and I can feel the truth of our own wounds between us. We both know why people don’t just do that. It hurts too much.

It’s the same reason Elise won’t drop her guard and give herself what she wants. The sad truth is, you protect the wound, and it begins to protect you. So you guard it at all costs.

“I’m not writing it, though,” I say. “Elise really went through it with her ex. I think it’s all complicated when you have a child.”

“I can see that.”

Neither of us really knows, though. Because I know what it’s like to love a child, but I never got the opportunity to take care of that child. At least outside of my body.

He loved his wife. He still does—I can see that. Though it’s a different kind of love. One that’s about partnership more than simply caring for another person. Though, then I realize that of course he did take care of her.

My breath leaves my body in a gust.

You say vows to somebody when you marry them. In sickness and in health. He did that. He fulfilled his marriage vows. Maybe that’s why there’s a strange sort of finality to so many things he says. Maybe that’s why when he says things like life is too short, he doesn’t mean himself. In some ways, I wonder if he feels like he’s done. He ran the race. He completed the task.

Why would he ever want to do it again?

It’s not a wound so much as a sense of completion.

It isn’t really as sad or hopeless a realization as I might’ve thought.

I’m standing here staring at a very good man. One I would never want to ask more of. One I would never want to ask to sacrifice himself like that ever again.

“How did you meet Christopher Weaver ?” he asks me, saying Chris’s name like it’s consequential. I’m actually kind of glad he did ask. I can’t pretend that Chris isn’t something I’m going to have to deal with.

Especially since he’s acting as our moderator.

I can’t pretend that he wasn’t part of my life for all those years.

“When I moved to LA, I had a roommate. She was taking writing and acting gigs. Chris is just an actor. I mean, not just. I mean only. They ended up at a lot of the same table reads and things. Sometimes they made it into commercials or movies together, sometimes not. She got to know him, and they had a little bit of a friend group. I got brought into it. It was nice meeting somebody who was in the same industry because he understood how difficult it was. But we weren’t competing with each other.”

“What made you decide to write for TV?”

“I grew up just a few hours away from Hollywood. We did a class field trip to this studio. We went to a writers’ room. I’ve always loved books. Movies.” I gesture to the screen. “I love stories. Growing up ... I was really lonely. My house was just a desperately sad place to be. I have a mother who is deeply uninterested in me. Books, movies, TV shows, they gave me a chance to live a different life. A different reality. If I watched a sitcom, it was like being part of the kind of family that I didn’t have. Sometimes even watching dysfunctional families helped because I could imagine myself navigating those situations. I could think of myself as a character when my mom was being ridiculous. When she didn’t come to my Christmas pageant or something. It was a way to deal with it. To imagine I was in an emotional Christmas special when I looked out in the crowd and saw an empty chair instead of my mother. Or my father. Though, he lived an hour away so ...”

I was always thinking of myself in stories. Now I think of how I’d write someone else in them.

“He knew how your mom treated you,” Nathan says.

“Yes. He did. It’s ... It’s complicated. They got divorced when I was really little, and my mom hated him. He left her, and he found another woman suspiciously soon after who it turns out is the love of his life. He’s still with her all these years later. My dad loves me, but I’m a complication. A piece of his old life.”

“You’re not a complication,” Nathan says, his expression suddenly grave. “That’s the most absurd thing, Amelia. Your parents should not treat you like a complication.”

I feel run over by this. No one has ever said anything like that to me. People usually agree with me that it sounds like my dad is a decent guy who was in a difficult situation. I feel a little like Nathan has torn a favorite teddy bear out of my hands. A talisman that I find comforting. I like to pretend that I have one good parent.

He’s just made me question that.

“I get it,” Nathan says. “Really. Because my dad is a dick. So it’s easy to have an issue with him. My mom was sweet. Supportive, except she never stopped him from talking to me the way that he does. She never stood up for me. I wouldn’t need her to do it now. But when I was a little kid? I needed somebody to be on my team. She wasn’t. I can come up with all kinds of excuses about why. Shouldn’t somebody stand up for you? I mean, we didn’t choose our parents. I guess they didn’t choose us , the people we are and the people we grow into, but they did choose to have us.”

There’s truth to his words, however uncomfortable they are.

“No, I understand what you’re saying,” I say.

“I didn’t really ever think of it this way either. Not until I met Sarah. I remember, the first time I took her home to have dinner with my parents ... she asked why we all just let our dad talk to us that way. Why we let it be his show. He’s not abusive, we aren’t walking on eggshells around him in that way, but we definitely all let him have his moods. We let him dictate so much of what happens. She came in and pointed out what a mess that was. She also pointed out that at a certain point, everyone is at fault for continuing to allow it.”

“It sounds like she was great,” I say, my throat tightening. I’m not sure that I mean it, though. Because from the grave, this woman has now disrupted a narrative about my life, about my family, and at the same time, I feel ... maybe a little bit jealous. It’s a weird feeling, and I don’t like it.

“I’m just saying, sometimes it takes someone from the outside to see a situation clearly. It sounds to me like nobody did right by you. Not really.”

“Well. Maybe not. Though, it’s why I got into writing.”

“You probably could’ve done it without the trauma.”

“Maybe,” I say, forcing a laugh. “But maybe not.”

“I’m just curious why you didn’t start with books,” he says.

“That felt like a whole different world,” I say. “I felt close to Hollywood. I did not feel close to publishing. But, I have to say, in the end, I’m happier. I actually prefer less collaborative writing. I like being able to have my own life. I feel like every bit of you can get swallowed up in LA.”

“Yeah, I’ve never been tempted to get involved.”

“Even with the TV adaptation of your series?”

“I leave that up to the professionals. Who are not me.”

“Well, I’m not sure I would want to go back now,” I say. “I’m enjoying what I’m doing too much.”

“So you found the right kind of writing for you,” he says.

I nod.

I look around the courtyard. I take in the feeling of rightness in this moment. “I think I ended up where I was supposed to be.”

Even as I say that, something inside me wants to reject it. It makes it feel like I’m saying I was meant to lose my baby. I struggle with that. I don’t think I was. And yet, this place feels like the right place for me. Maybe it’s just the right place for me now. Maybe it really is a matter of the Amelia I was before.

The Amelia that I’ve had to become.

I wrinkle my nose. “Life. It is so very ... life.”

“No argument.”

I lean back against the wrought iron fence that surrounds the courtyard. “How did you meet Sarah?”

I know a lot about her. Just from what he’s said. I know she was strong. I know she loved him. She defended him against his family. She accepted the Nathan of him.

“At a bar,” he says.

I don’t know quite what to do with that. “Really. Not ... a high-end equestrian event? A publishing gala?”

He chuckles. “No. It was a friend of mine from the military’s bachelor party. She happened to be there with a group of friends. We started talking because I had been drinking. And ...”

“You being a little bit drunk is a key part of the story?”

He nods. “Yes. Because I otherwise don’t go making conversations with strangers.”

I’m fascinated by this. By Nathan. By the fact that this ... this sort of difficult, locked-box aspect of him isn’t from his recent grief. But I do wonder if it made him double down on it.

“We didn’t have anything in common,” he says. “Her family is nice. Well adjusted. She grew up surrounded by horses. I’d never had anything to do with them.”

I look at him, but I don’t say anything.

“I found myself living on a ranch, basically. I had her horse for two years after she died. He was never happy afterward. I think he might’ve died of a broken heart.”

Tears sting my eyes. I can’t think about Sarah’s brokenhearted horse. It kills me.

It also kills me to know that there’s no way a horse loved Sarah more than Nathan did, but he still has to be here. He’s still breathing. Her parents are.

“She never really minded. She just seemed to take me at face value. I frustrated her sometimes. I mean, we were married for years. So of course I did. But ... she was really the first person who didn’t try to change me. That’s a pretty rare thing.”

That makes it even harder for me to fight back tears. I can’t think if I’ve ever been in a relationship where I didn’t feel like I had to change. Maybe that isn’t fair. Because I changed myself pretty substantially when I moved to LA. Maybe that’s something I do. I left Bakersfield and I wanted to start over. I wanted to be a more interesting character.

I go back over all the things I just said to Nathan, and I realize it’s true. I find it much easier to recast myself in a different role when I go somewhere new. I’m afraid of myself. Or at least parts of me. And I would never have said that before this moment, but it’s how I feel.

If I can’t think of myself as a character playing a part, then maybe I’m just a sad girl who isn’t important enough to have her mom show up to a Christmas pageant. Or a girl whose dad was happy to move away to be with the woman he preferred, the kids he preferred.

Maybe I’m the girlfriend that didn’t matter enough when I couldn’t be the support system my boyfriend needed me to be. When my pain was bigger than my ability to be there for him.

Then I’m definitely not the interesting stranger who moved to a new place and refurbished this beautiful pink motel.

I’m just Amelia. Amelia Taylor, the same as I’ve always been. Never quite being enough.

He’s here. Right now. And all these people are here with me.

So maybe it’s not quite as terrible as I think it is.

“Are you okay?” he asks.

“I’m working on it,” I say. “Every day.”

“I guess we all are.”

“I do think there’s something wrong with you,” I say. “This movie is great; I will hear no arguments.”

“You haven’t watched any of it.”

“I’ve seen it many times. How else is a kid supposed to spend a lonely Christmas Eve while her mother is out drinking and meeting men?”

He winces. “Really?”

“Yes. But that ...” I shake my head. “That doesn’t even bother me.”

It’s true. The stuff with my mother, it hurts, but I’ve accepted that about her. For the most part. I remind myself of that. My mother being a narcissist has nothing to do with how important I am. It’s just that nothing can ever be as important to her as she is. A lot of the things with her do feel like old healed wounds.

I leave them be now.

“Well, you’re not spending Christmas alone anymore,” he points out.

“No,” I say. “I’m not. Everyone is with me.” He’s with me.

We end up sitting with Elise and Ben and Emma for the rest of the movie. Ben and Nathan talk, and I’m more fascinated than I should be, watching him make conversation with someone else. It’s a rare sight.

Then Alice comes over and asks if he’s read any of my books. Albert finds himself engaged in a lively debate—meaning that the cribbage ladies, Alice, and Nathan, to my surprise, begin to argue with him about the function of genre fiction.

“Everything has a structure,” Nathan says.

“But some are more predictable than others,” says Albert.

“Let me ask you this,” Nathan says. “Why is a sad ending more unpredictable than a happy ending?”

Albert sputters. “It just isn’t realistic.”

“Why is tragedy inherently more realistic?” Nathan asks.

Given what I know about his life, I find this question to be revelatory. That he would dig into this. Into this conversation.

“Everybody dying is easy,” Nathan says. “I’m not an aficionado of romance novels, though I have now read a couple and listened to Amelia give some fascinating commentary on the topic. I have to say, both of the books I’ve read have felt pretty real. It shows people dealing with issues and living. That’s what we all have to do, deal with shit and keep going. If you want to kill everybody off and let them be dead, then I would suggest that you actually want a more digestible reality.” He pauses for a moment. “That’s the messy part. Bad things happen and people have to go on. There’s a whole genre of books that show you how to do that, and you want to dismiss them?”

I believe that. I agree with it. I have to stop myself from cheering when he says it. Because that is the truth. It’s the living that’s the hard part. He knows it. I know it.

“Well, everybody has their opinions,” says Albert.

Nathan’s mouth kicks up into a half smile. “Considering that I also write genre fiction, I would say that my opinion is founded in pretty deep understanding.”

I smile, because I know he’s going to do it.

“Have I read anything you’ve written?” Albert asks.

“Oh, you probably haven’t,” Nathan says. “I bet Gladys has.”

Gladys’s eyebrows shoot up high over her glasses.

“My pseudonym is Jacob Coulter.”

I delight in the bomb of excitement this drops in the middle of the gathering.

By the end of the evening, he has signed books for Wilma, Gladys, and a couple of our temporary residents who brought books on vacation with them.

I laugh all the way back to my room that night, hanging on to his arm. “You didn’t have to do that,” I say.

“Everyone here is going to find out soon. I’m shocked they haven’t yet,” he says.

“I guess they’re not looking at the Very Desert Christmas website,” I say.

“When the memoir publishes, I’ll probably have to do publicity. It’s going to be the real me, my real life, and there’s no getting around that.”

I look up at him. “You really love her.”

He nods slowly. “She was the love of my life, Amelia. I think her story is really inspirational and important. Even if it wasn’t, I have the opportunity to publish it. I have enough trust with my publisher, so they’re letting me do it. Treating it like it’s kind of a big deal. Who wouldn’t take that opportunity?”

My chest feels sore. “Anybody would,” I say.

“That’s what I figure.”

I don’t have to ask him why it’s taken this long, because I can see how hard it is. All of it. I reach out and touch his face, and he kisses me.

He kisses me, and the sadness of the previous moment is wiped away. All I can think about is the joy. The way he talked to everybody. The way he stood up for romance, really because he was standing up for me. He sat for a movie he doesn’t even like. He talked to my friends. It feels like freedom, that I can just enjoy this. That I don’t need to believe that this means it’s forever.

He was lovely to me, now. Just because.

He’s not earning anything. He’s not saving up points, and neither am I.

He likes me. I’m not the love of his life, but he likes me, and that matters.

He kisses me deep and hard, and I kiss him back.

I feel a sort of giddy happiness inside me, but this kiss isn’t giddy. It’s dark and rich, like everything with him.

He is the flourless chocolate torte of men. Powerful, overwhelming.

Except I don’t feel like I can overdose on him.

Every bit I have just makes me want more. That’s the only part that scares me a little bit.

I try to ignore that particular thought. I try to just be in the moment. To just be kissing him. To luxuriate in the feeling of his hands as they move up and down my body. As he grips my hips, as he pulls me forward and lets me feel how hard he is.

He is the most beautiful man I’ve ever seen. It’s the hottest sex I’ve ever had. I tell him that. Over and over, in clumsy, broken words against his mouth. Against his neck and his chest as I kiss my way down his body and take his cock into my mouth. As I try to show him with my tongue, my lips, just how amazing I think he is.

One thing that hits me hard is that I felt this way before I knew his story. Whatever his feelings are for me, this passion existed before he knew who I was either.

It is something that goes beyond emotion. It’s elemental. It’s chemistry. I am undone with it.

It makes me feel special just for existing. It makes me feel like I don’t need to be a character or a new creation.

Because it’s nothing other than us. Who we are. At our very essence, apart from anything we’ve done, anything we’ve experienced, anything we could ever do.

It isn’t being the love of his life. But it is pretty amazing.

I take him to the edge, and then he makes it his mission to take me too. Over and over again.

I gasp as I find myself bent over the vanity in the corner of the bedroom. As he thrusts into me from behind. We’re back in that dark, swirling chemistry that captured us first.

I can see him in the mirror. The intent look on his face. The concentration. The torment.

We aren’t teenagers experiencing the first taste of passion. It’s all the more powerful for it. Because we have lived life, experienced consequences. Heartbreak. And we’re still here. And this is as powerful as it ever was. It is inevitable.

I flatten my forearms on top of the vanity and lower my head because I actually can’t stand to look at him like this. It makes me feel too much. It makes me feel like if I ever don’t have him, I might die. And he’s already so deep inside me that I feel like I need him in order to breathe. To be . That isn’t what I wanted. So I try to just feel. But feeling is complicated. It isn’t just my body. It’s my soul. My heart. Everything. So when my climax finally takes me, I shatter completely. Shaking, trembling, calling out his name as he does the same with mine.

When he carries me to the bed and lays me down, he stays with me.

I don’t sleep. I hold on to him, and I hope he doesn’t leave. At one point during the night, he gets up out of bed, and I hold my breath. Waiting to see if he’s going to get dressed, waiting to see if he’s going to go. But he gets back into bed with me and holds on to me. And I hold on to him.

Only then do I drift off to sleep. Because something has changed. When I wake up, I know Nathan is going to be in bed with me. I don’t have to imagine that I’m in a TV show, or in a book, because right now my reality is better than any story anyone could ever make up. Drifting off to sleep with that feeling is the best one I can remember.