Happy After All

Chapter Twenty-Two

It’s Never Just Sex—sex in romantic fiction works to build feelings between the main characters, whether they want it to or not.

When I wake up in the morning, he’s still there. Sunlight filters through the curtain and reaches the edge of his bare shoulder. I touch it with my fingertips. Afraid that maybe he’ll disappear, maybe the light will disappear.

Both stay.

I trace a line down his skin, following the trail of the sunbeam. He opens his eyes, and my breath catches. I remember seeing him for the first time. Those eyes startled me then. Now he’s here, in bed with me. Looking at me. I know him now. Yet, looking at him isn’t any less impactful. Maybe it’s even more so.

“Good morning,” he says, his voice full of gravel.

“Good morning,” I murmur back.

We lie there for a while, in the quiet, in the realization that we’ve spent the night together. Or maybe that’s just me. “Shower?”

He nods. He gets out of my bed, naked, and I admire the broad expanse of his back, the fine musculature there. He is so hot. Genuinely. So incredibly hot.

And also, his ass, which is glorious.

He turns and looks over his shoulder. “Are you checking me out?”

“Yes,” I say, scooting out from beneath the covers and climbing slowly out of bed. Then I head into the bathroom and turn the water on. I feel a strong arm wrap around my waist, and I find myself pulled against his naked body. He kisses my neck, and I sigh.

This feels good. It also feels significant. I know we aren’t supposed to be significant. But we are. I realize, with no alarm or fear, that this is changing me. I don’t know if a fling is supposed to change you.

Very little in my life has gone the way people think life should go. There have been a lot of good things, but some really terrible things too. I don’t know if it’s supposed to be this way, but I’m grateful for him. I try, as I put my hand over his forearm, to hold him where he is holding me, to be grateful for whatever happens after this. I need him. I know that I do, that I did.

I need this.

I want to believe that maybe he does too. Maybe this is the only way he’s going to get through finishing this book. Maybe this is the only way he’s going to be able to move forward.

I hope so. I hope that even if I’m not the love of his life, I’m something . Because he certainly is to me.

We shower, and he offers to go get real coffee. I feign offense at the slandering of my single-cup coffee maker but can’t deny that I prefer drip or espresso. When he comes back, he’s got his laptop with him.

“I had an idea,” he says, sitting down at the table. “For an opening scene.”

“Oh,” I say. “One of the thrillers?”

“Yes. New series,” he says, his movements quick and decisive. I’ve never seen him creatively enthused before, and I love watching it.

He gets his computer out and puts it on my table. I take this as an invitation to get mine.

“Well, why don’t you do that, and I’ll work on getting my word count.”

That’s how we have our coffee. Sitting across from each other at my tiny bistro table, typing away, intermittently scowling at our screens. He looks up, over his laptop, his expression somewhat bewildered. I don’t ask, so he goes back to work.

“Is it good?” I ask him after a few minutes.

“I am a genius ,” he says, taking a long drink of his coffee.

“Same,” I say. “Though, if you ask me in ten minutes, I might tell you it’s the worst thing I’ve ever written.”

“The beginning is the best part,” he says.

I shake my head. “False. The beginning is the worst part.”

“No it isn’t,” he says. “You get to begin with all kinds of explosive action, and you don’t have to shape it into a narrative for a while yet.”

“No,” I say. “Beginnings are terrible because there are so many things you still have to figure out about the book, about the characters. Every time I start, I’m overwhelmed by all the things I don’t know.”

He shakes his head. “That’s a problem for the future.”

“My preference is to gather it close and make it my problem for now ,” I say.

I like this. I like that we think of it differently. I feel like maybe I’m seeing a little bit of him. Separate from this project. Separate from this tragedy. Separate even from the way that he sees himself. He isn’t as taciturn or difficult as he seems to think he is.

He’s just been made to feel like he is.

He’s not an extrovert, but that’s fine. I don’t mind it at all. I’m not especially shy, but I need time to think. He asked me a while ago about spending time alone. It’s true, I have avoided it for the last few years, but even when I’m alone, I’m often thinking about my stories. Not about myself. I think naturally, I would choose to have more mornings like this. Quiet, working on my book.

With someone important sitting close to me.

We work like that until it’s time for me to go man the desk for checkout, and he goes to his room to work on the memoir. He brings me lunch at around one o’clock, and we eat sitting in my room again.

It gives me a taste of what life with him could be like, but I’m not trying to get like that. I’m trying to just appreciate what he gives to me right now.

I look at the tree. It’s nearly finished. Pink and sparkly and ready to get transported to the site.

“I have just a few flamingos to finish up,” I say. “Then I’m going to wrap it in Saran Wrap, and I need to get it over to the A Very Desert Christmas location.”

“I can help with that,” he says.

“With hot gluing flamingos?”

“If you need it,” he says.

“I would love that, actually.”

“My pleasure.”

I laugh. “Somehow I doubt it.”

“I mean it. Christmas has pretty much meant nothing to me for three years, but it’s impossible to be a grinch when ... flamingos.”

“The kids are coming here for one of their rehearsals. I’m thinking I should have them all do a tree. They deserve something fun. They’re going to school in a hollowed-out Walmart. They’ve been through all the same trauma as the adults, but they’re little. I feel so bad for them.”

“The kids should definitely do a tree,” he says.

“I’m going to have to get some supplies.”

We spend a chunk of the afternoon on the flamingos. Then a plumbing crisis in one of the rooms takes up some of my time. He tries to help, and I tell him I absolutely cannot have a guest helping me with a motel disaster, regardless of whether the guest and I are fraternizing . (He objects to that term, and I tell him that’s his problem.)

He and I share a long look at that, but he lets me take care of it on my own. It’s getting dark, and I’m a little bit hungry, but I decide that it’s time to get the tree out to the A Very Desert Christmas site, and afterward there can be food.

Nathan helps me wrap the pink tinsel tree and get it loaded into the back of my Jeep.

I drive the short distance up the road to the site, and I’m awed by what I see.

Most of the trees are already there, lit up, with lights strung over the top.

“It’s magical,” I say.

This is the new home of my Christmas memories. My childhood ones really aren’t good, and a lot of the things pertaining to my life in LA feel tainted now.

But this doesn’t.

The community has experienced hardship. I guess you can’t keep the bad things out no matter how hard you try sometimes. But what they’ve done in response has turned it into something new.

It’s a miracle, Christmas or otherwise.

We open the Jeep, and he lifts the tree out, not taking my help. He hefts it over his shoulder and moves with fluid grace ahead of me.

“As much as I’m enjoying watching this display of masculine strength,” I say, “you don’t know where this is supposed to go.”

He turns and looks at me, and I grin back at him.

“Then where should I put it?”

“I’ll show you,” I say, happily scampering in front of him as we make our way through the grove of lit trees.

I search for my number, and then find it.

“This is the spot,” I say.

He sets the tree down and begins to unwrap it. It is a glittering pink monstrosity in the midst of all the green. I love it more than I can say.

“You’re running the auction for all these?”

“Yes, I’m the auctioneer, and I handled the sign-ups for all the entries.” I look around and start laughing. “I almost do have a Christmas tree farm.”

“What?”

“Oh, I just keep thinking, parts of this feel like one of those Christmas movies, but often someone owns a Christmas tree farm. Here’s mine, I guess.”

I take his hand, and we start to walk slowly through the trees. Lit-up Christmas trees, reindeer, and cacti are mounted on posts that provide scaffolding for a net of white lights that are overhead, like stars that have been brought down lower just for the occasion. The lights are so bright in the grove, it blots out everything beyond them.

It’s like we’re the only people in this bright, glittery world, and I want to believe it.

Just for now.

“There’s the one Elise made for Ben’s mechanic shop. This one,” I say, pointing to one with mermaids all over it. “This one is from Bob Riker at the antique store.”

There’s a tree with coffee-themed decorations from the local coffee place, and there’s one with woodland animals, which I quite like.

“One thing I don’t understand about your story,” he says. “How did you end up here?”

I stop and look around, at the lights, the trees. I draw strength from them. “I moved out of our house as soon as I caught him cheating. I was in a hotel; it was so temporary .” I take a breath. “Three months after we lost her, I had a job opportunity out of town, and that was when my flight got canceled and I found out he was cheating. Just three months after. Her nursery was still set up. So I ... I couldn’t deal with it; I left that night. I didn’t even really have a fight with him—it just felt like ... my whole life was already ash, and he was making sure that was all it was. That there was nothing good or redeemable left there. So I was in a hotel, with one suitcase of stuff, and I was dreaming about another life. A new one, where I could just leave. Where I didn’t go and tear down her nursery piece by piece, but I could start over. I saw a real estate listing for this motel.” I laugh. “I put an offer in that day. I used my savings. When we sold the house, I put it into renovations. It was basically just a facelift, so they only took a couple of months. The Hemingway Suite ... I’d just gotten all that posted not long before Sarah would have passed.”

I realize that it’s chance that we ever met. That I saw the ad. That he’d gone on his honeymoon here, so this was where his wife looked. That she saw the room I designed and thought it would be perfect for him.

It makes me feel like somehow part of me did make it for him. It makes me feel like in some ways I got to meet Sarah, even though I never will.

Sarah is why he comes here. She wanted him to, and so he did. He does. Year after year to work on that book. I came here because of the listing in the paper. We would never have met if those things hadn’t happened.

We would never have met if our lives hadn’t crashed and burned. But it doesn’t feel like something that happened because of tragedy. It feels like a small miracle. An oasis in the middle of the desert, which in many ways is what Rancho Encanto is.

“I wanted something different than a city,” I say. “It was competitive. The pace was too fast. I liked it for a long time. I just couldn’t after we lost the baby.” I frown. “I couldn’t find myself there. Because everything around me was still trying to be the way it was before. I wasn’t the same, though. I couldn’t be. I think that’s what happened with Chris. He wanted things to go back to how they were before that happened. He wanted to pretend it didn’t. At least, that’s how I felt. So I thought since I couldn’t be the same in that place, where everything else was exactly like it had been before, I needed to go to a place that was totally different, where nobody would know I was different.”

“I think that Sarah didn’t want me to die in my office. I think she wanted me to have to make this drive. To get out. To see people, even if it was just because I had to stop to pump my gas.”

“She knew you really well,” I say. “That’s an amazing gift. I say that as somebody who was in a relationship with someone who didn’t really know them.” When I say that, I realize how true it is. I also realize how much of that is my own fault.

“Why didn’t he know you?”

I want to blame Chris. But that’s not real. It’s not even fair. It’s been three years, and the truth is, as much as I don’t really want him here, I can’t hate him anymore.

I’d rather be honest, because that might be the only thing that helps me.

“I don’t think I wanted him to.”

It was my slow-draining poison. The wound I already had by the time I got to him.

“Not on purpose,” I continue. “I wanted to blend in with everybody there. With that life. I didn’t want to be me. I’m realizing that more and more recently. I didn’t want to be this girl from a small town who hated driving in the traffic and felt sad and lonely whenever I thought about my childhood. I wanted to be ... interesting enough. Smart enough, cool enough, to be with him. I think ... The thing about grief is ... it makes you so tired. It makes you way too tired to put on a facade. I have always felt things deeply. I spent my life hiding that. Pretending I didn’t care whenever my mom was ... herself. Pretending it didn’t bother me when my dad couldn’t make it to things because he lived far away. Pretending that I didn’t feel second best to his family. I carried all that for so much of my life. But then Christopher and I lost the baby and I couldn’t do it anymore.”

I let out a long, slow breath, and I look up at the diamond-studded sky. “I think maybe neither could he. There were no masks. There was no bright, shiny veneer of anything. We just didn’t have it available to us. He needed someone to cater to him more than I could. He needed things to be okay on a surface level, and I needed to be devastated. We just couldn’t find each other. I think ... I don’t know. He didn’t know me. If it would’ve been like Sarah, if he were dying, he wouldn’t have known what road map to leave me behind. I’m very sorry that your wife had to do that. I just think that what she did was extraordinary. I can see that the way she loved you was extraordinary.”

It makes me feel crushed to say it. I’m happy for him. And at the same time, sad for myself. Not about my relationship with Chris. Not about what we had or didn’t have. About the fact that I’ll never be able to love Nathan like that. Knowing him. Inside and out. His every breath. What he needs.

We wouldn’t have met if not for our tragedies. But it’s those tragedies that hold us separate now.

We’re meant to be, I’m convinced of that. We’re meant for this moment. It’s just that the moment is destined to be shorter than I want it to be.

Maybe it’s a happy ending of a kind.

Endings move on a continuum. One thing ends, something else begins. If I were writing this in a romance novel, readers would riot. They wouldn’t consider these few weeks a happy ending.

Time moves different in romance novels—we talked about that earlier.

Time moves differently, but the feelings are real, so maybe this is real enough.

A few weeks to heal each other. To make each other laugh. To be skin to skin with another person.

No happy ending lasts. Not really. It ends the way that his did. Eventually.

It ends like Alice’s, whether it’s weeks or fifty-seven years.

So maybe I should just be thankful we have this.

“You didn’t move closer to your dad, though,” he says. “Or back to where any of your friends from high school were.”

“No,” I say.

I moved to be alone. Maybe I’m not any better than he is. It isn’t like I’ve let the people around me know me. Not really.

Just him, and he’s leaving.

“Maybe we’re the same, you and I,” I say.

“I don’t know if I would go that far,” he says.

“Maybe not,” I conceded. “Though I think we might both be very good at figuring out how to be alone in a crowded room.”

He nods slowly. “But not in an empty field of Christmas trees.”

I think maybe that’s one of the most romantic things I’ve ever heard.

“Are you hungry?” he asks.

“Yes,” I say.

“I have an idea.” He gets out his phone. “What’s the address here?”

“They’re not going to deliver to an empty field.”

“You don’t think they’ll do that here?”

“No,” I say.

He places an order for pizza anyway. Then he goes back to my Jeep and takes a blanket from the back.

It takes thirty minutes for the food to arrive, but it does arrive. Nathan takes the blanket out to the middle of the trees, under all that brilliant light, and spreads it out.

Hands down the most romantic picnic that has ever been conceived of.

I sit there with him, eating pizza, surrounded by eclectic trees, glowing in the lights.

“Perfect,” I say.

He looks at me, and Christmas lights reflect in his eyes. “I need you to know, if you haven’t guessed already. You’re the first woman I’ve been with. Since losing Sarah.”

I probably did know that. If I paused to think about it, that’s what I would’ve guessed. But hearing it from his mouth makes my heart do all kinds of things.

“When I ... The first time I came to the motel, I was a wreck. I was four months out from losing her. It was the absolute worst time of my life. I planned on never even noticing another woman again as long as I lived. I walked into that office, angry that I was there, mad that I felt beholden to a ghost to do what she said instead of staying home in my office. Knowing that if I did stay home in my office, I was going to lose my fucking mind. At least what was left of it. I walked in, and there you were. So goddamned beautiful. It was like an out-of-body experience. Because I couldn’t feel my body anymore. I just ... I couldn’t believe that you were real. I was so fucking resentful that my wife had sent me to a motel owned by the only woman I wasn’t married to who I’d thought was beautiful in ... God, years. Every time I saw you, it got more intense. I didn’t feel disconnected from my body anymore, and you weren’t just beautiful. I wanted you.”

I realize something then.

Us sleeping together, this, it was inevitable. Coming back in December was him moving it forward.

He could’ve waited until next summer, and I know that it has to do with the book. But in many ways, it has to do with two things.

His impatience for it all to be over, and his need for me.

Both things are true.

He wants this done so he never has to come back, and that’s the reason he was finally able to sleep with me. He isn’t coming back.

He’s also impatient. So he came back early.

He’s here at Christmas for this. For me.

It’s because he wanted me. The whole time.

“Goddamn. I don’t know what to do with this,” he says.

He sounds helpless and in awe at the same time.

He sounds angry, and happy.

It’s the strangest thing. Yet extremely real. Realism is overrated, honestly.

We finish our pizza, and then we’re just sitting, underneath the lights, the stars. I lean against his shoulder, and I take a deep breath. I smell his soap, his skin, the pine trees. I’ve never felt happiness that hurt so much. Like Christmas itself, I guess.

I start humming “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”

It’s a song that always makes me sad. I don’t know why. There’s a melancholy to it, or maybe it feels that way to me because Christmas was always a little bit lonely.

He takes my hand and pulls me into a standing position, brings me up against his chest. And before I realize it, we’re dancing. Slowly, without rhythm, to my song.

He looks at me, and my heart expands. Everything falls away. Everything but him. Everything but us. This is the single most romantic moment of my life, even though the road I had to walk to get here was an awful one.

Right now, it’s all beautiful.

I want to stop time. I want to live in this moment as long as possible. I remember sitting in my pain and wishing that time would move quicker. So that I could get past it.

Time is my enemy either way.

In Rancho Encanto, time hasn’t mattered quite so much. It’s like I’ve been sitting, staring at a blank page, unwilling to write any new words because once I do, my foot will be on a particular path.

A blank page has limitless possibilities, but at the same time, it’s nothing.

I can’t do nothing anymore. I have to choose what story I’m living.

At least now there’s a reason for this song to be painful and bright all at the same time. Because it will always be Nathan’s song.

This place will always belong to him. This moment.

This will always be a happy ending of a kind.

One that didn’t last as long as I wanted it to.

But was happy all the same.

I hang on to him, and we sway even after I stop singing.

Time just keeps on moving.