Happy Place

A FOUR-BEDROOM APARTMENT that the five of us can barely afford. One full bathroom, with a rigid shower schedule (organized by Sabrina), and a half bathroom we call the “emergency can” because there’s nothing but a toilet and a lightbulb with a chain in it, and it’s creepy as hell.

Original hardwood floors that bow in the middle, tired of holding up grad students’ thrift store furniture for generations. Windows that get stuck for days at a time and must simply be left, tried again later. When it’s hot or when it’s raining, the smell of cigarettes past seeps faintly out of the walls, reminding us that we’re passing through, that this building has stood here since long before we came to this city, and will be here long after we leave.

After Wyn’s and my first kiss, in the cellar over the summer, I’d expected that to be it: our curiosity satisfied, our crush squashed. Instead, the moment the door to our shared room at the cottage closed, he’d lifted me against him, kissed me like only seconds had passed.

Still, we took it slow that first night, kissing for hours before finally taking off each other’s clothes. Are you sure, he’d whispered, and I was.

Will we still be friends after this, I’d whispered, and he’d smiled as he told me, You’ve never been just a friend to me.

He’d laid me gently in his twin bed, and when the creak of the bed frame threatened to give us away, we moved to the floor, hands tangling, and whispered into each other’s mouths and hands and throats, trying not to call out each other’s names to the dark.

Every night after had been the same. We were friendly until the door closed, and then we were something else entirely.

Still, when we moved into the new place with the others—so I could start medical school, and Sabrina could begin 1L at Columbia Law, and Cleo could take up her post at an urban farm in Brooklyn—I expected this delicate thing to fizzle.

Instead, it heightens. When everyone’s around, we find seconds of privacy, steal brushes of each other’s shoulders and hips, the bare skin just beneath our shirts. And when we’re alone, the minute the front door snicks shut, he tugs me into his closet-sized room—since I share one with Cleo—and for a few minutes, we don’t have to be quiet. I tell him what I want. He tells me how it feels. And this thing between us isn’t a secret.

Though maybe the secret is what makes it fun for him.

One night, while everyone else is out, we lie in his bed, his hand tugging at each of my curls in turn. “If we aren’t friends,” I ask, “what is this?”

He studies me through the dark, smoothing my hair back from my forehead so tenderly. “I don’t know. I just need more of it.”

He kisses me again, slow and languid, like for once we have all the time in the world. He pulls me on top of him, his hands soft on my waist, our eyes holding. Our breaths rise and break together, our hands knotting against his headboard as he murmurs into my mouth, “Harriet, finally.”

Finally. The word pumps through my veins: Finally. You. Finally.

I’m on the verge of crying, and I’m not sure why, except that this is so intense. So different than it’s ever been.

“I changed my mind,” he tells me. “I think you’re my best friend.”

I laugh against his cheek. “Better than Parth?”

“Oh, much better,” he teases. “After tonight, he can’t compete.”

“I think you should know,” I say, “Cleo and Sabrina are my best friends. But you’re my favorite man I’ve ever met.”

He turns his smile in to kiss the inside of my elbow. “I can live with that.”

We don’t talk about what it means or how it will end, but we talk about everything else, text all day, every day, even from the same room.

He sends pictures of the new mystery releases during his shifts at Freeman’s to see if I want them. Or samples of fabric from the upscale reupholstery job he goes to after his bookstore shifts, especially the more abstract textiles that inevitably look extremely and only like vaginas or penises.

I fire back illustrations from the medical journals I’m poring over, or give the textiles informal diagnoses, or send screenshots of Google image searches for cowboys and ask him, Are any of these your relatives? to which he always has an answer, like, Only the one with all the gold teeth. When he dies, I’m actually going to inherit those.

When he goes to Montana to visit his family, he comes back with a stack of ten-cent Goodwill paperbacks for me: She’ll Be Dying Around the Mountain, Purple Mountain Tragedy, Big Rock Candy Murder, and Cowboy Stake Me Away, the last of which is actually about vampires and was misshelved.

When he stops by Trader Joe’s on his way home from work, he brings me cartons of ice cream, Maine blueberry or Vermont maple.

So much of life is waiting for more of him, and even that torture is bliss.

One night, after months of sneaking around, while everyone is home, he offers me a spare movie ticket—a work friend of his canceled—and we leave the apartment together. Outside, he takes my hand and holds it tightly, his pulse tapping into my palm: you, you, you.

I ask what movie we’re seeing. “There is no movie,” he says. “I just wanted to take you on a date.”

Date, I think. That’s new. I hadn’t even known to want a date with Wyn Connor, but now that it’s been spoken, I feel a kind of breathless happy-sad. Like I’m missing this night before it’s even begun. Every time he offers me more of him, it gets harder not to have it all.

We traipse around Little Italy for hours, stuffing ourselves with cannoli and gelato and cappuccinos—or rather I stuff myself while he tries bites. He’s not big on sweets.

He tells me he didn’t grow up eating them, that the Connors were a “meat, potatoes, and Miracle Whip family,” and then he says, “Did you always love sugar this much?”

“Always,” I say. “And you just did that thing again.”

“What thing?”

“The thing where you give me the tiniest kernel of Wyn, then turn things back to me.”

He rubs the back of his head, frowning.

I ask, “Why don’t you like talking about yourself?”

He says, “Remember when you told me you thought you were slow-release hot?”

“I finally stopped falling asleep to that humiliating memory one month ago,” I tell him, “and now I have to start all over.”

He pulls me closer, hooks his arm around my shoulder as we make our way down the frosty, light-strewn sidewalk. After several seconds, he says, “I think I’m slow-release boring.”

“What are you talking about?”

He shrugs one shoulder. “I don’t know.”

I wrap my arms around his waist, beneath his coat. “Tell me,” I say. “Please.”

He hesitates. “It’s just,” he says, “I’m the kind of guy people are always more interested in before they get to know me.”

“Says who,” I ask.

“Take your pick, Harriet.”

My brow knits. He laughs, but it’s shallow.

“I’ve had like ten years to come to terms with this,” he says. “People are interested right up front, but it never lasts. I told you I don’t date friends, and that’s why. Because once I get together with someone, really let them in, the novelty wears off fast. It’s been that way since high school, when girls would come from out of town for the summer, and it’s still that way. I’m not all that interesting.”

“Stop,” I say. “That’s bullshit, and you know it.”

“It’s not,” he says. “Even with Alison. I thought it would work with her, I really did. I figured I’d been going for the wrong people, so I went for someone more like me, who didn’t have all these huge aspirations, so she wouldn’t get bored so fast. Then she broke up with me for her yoga teacher. Said they connected on a deeper level than I was capable of. I’m . . . I don’t know. Simple?”

He sounds self-conscious. My chest aches, like I feel the little sore spot in him, the thorn deep in between layers of muscle. I’d do anything to get it out.

I grab the lapels of his coat and look up into his face. “First of all,” I say, “simple isn’t bad. Second of all, simple isn’t stupid, and you’re not stupid, and I don’t know why you’re always trying to convince yourself you are, but it really is bullshit, Wyn. And lastly, you’re the opposite of slow-release boring. I like you so much more than when we first met. Partly because you actually answer my questions now, instead of turning everything around to flirt.”

His brow lifts. “And what’s the other part?”

“Everything,” I say.

He laughs. “Everything?”

“Yes, Wyn,” I say. “I like your body and your face and your hair and your skin, and I like how you’re always warmer than me, and how you never sit still except when you’re really trying to concentrate on what someone’s saying, and I like how you always fix things without being asked. You’re the only one of us who will actually take out the trash before it’s spilling over. And every time you’re doing anything—going to the store or doing laundry or making yourself breakfast—you’ll always ask if anyone else needs anything, and I like how I know when you’re about to text me from the other side of the room because you make this really specific face.”

He laughs against my cheek. I wish I could swallow the sound, that it would put down roots in my stomach and grow through me like a seed.

He says, “The I want to go down on you face?”

I hug him closer as we pause at a DO NOT WALK sign. “I didn’t have a name for it until now.”

The light changes, but instead of crossing, he draws me around the corner into an alleyway and kisses me against a brick wall until I lose track of time, of space. We become the only two people in the world.

Until a group of fratty drunk guys hollers at us from the street, and even then we don’t stop kissing, our smiles colliding, our hands twisted in each other’s clothes.

When we draw apart, he rests his brow against mine, breathing hard in the cold. “I think I love you, Harriet,” he says.

Love, I think. That’s new. And I’ll never be happy without it again.

Without any forethought, any worry, I tell him the truth. “I know I love you, Wyn.”

He touches my chin, his hand shaking a little, and slides his nose down along mine. “I love you so much, Harriet.”

At home, we gather our friends at the dining room table Wyn rebuilt from scraps for us, all our favorite people looking various degrees of terrified to hear what we have to say. Wyn and I terrified for them to hear it.

“We’re together,” Wyn says, and when no one reacts, he adds, “Together. Harriet and I.”

Sabrina runs to the fridge like she’s planning to vomit in it, only when she throws the door shut, she’s holding a bottle of prosecco, then grabbing mismatched coupes from the shelf over the stove. And Parth is on his feet, pulling Wyn into a hug, then squeezing me tight next, lifting me off the ground. He shakes me back and forth before setting me back down. “About time our boy finally told you how he felt.”

Sabrina pops the cork and starts filling glasses. “You know that now that you’re finally together, you can’t ever break up, right?”

“Don’t put that kind of pressure on them,” Cleo says.

“The pressure’s on whether we admit it or not,” Sabrina says. “If they break up, this”—she waves the bottle between us—“implodes.”

“Lots of people stay friends if they break up,” Cleo says, then quickly to me, “not that you’re going to break up!”

“I’m with Sabrina on this one,” Parth says.

She holds the bottle up as she tries to cup a hand around her ear. “What’s that? Is that just global warming I’m feeling, or has hell frozen over and Parth is actually agreeing with me on something?”

“I’m agreeing with you,” Parth says, “because this time, you’re right. It was bound to happen eventually.”

She rolls her eyes, goes back to filling glasses.

“Harry, I’m serious,” Parth says, setting his hands on my shoulders. “Don’t you dare break my delicate angel’s heart.”

Sabrina snorts. “Oh, come on. Wyn better not break her heart.”

Cleo says, “There’s no need for all this pressure.”

“He would never in a million years hurt her,” Parth says to Sabrina, passing Wyn and me each a glass of champagne. Just like that, they’re back to their old squabbling selves.

“And she’s been secretly obsessed with him for years,” Sabrina argues.

“Speaking of unspoken sexual tension,” Wyn grumbles, waving his glass in their direction. “You two want us to leave you alone for this argument, or can we be done now?”

“Ew!” Sabrina says.

Parth pulls a face. “Thank you, Sabrina.”

“I’m not saying you’re gross,” she says. “I’m saying the idea of us is gross. Can you imagine? And also, the last thing this friend group needs is another romantic entanglement. We’re already playing with fire here, and I really, really cannot lose this. This”—she waves the bottle between us again—“is my family.”

It’s mine too, but I’m not worried. I already know: I will love Wyn Connor until I die.

That night, for the first time, I sleep in Wyn’s room. We lie awake late, with the sheets kicked off us, our sweat drying, and he plays with my hair.

“It’s always a complete mystery to me,” he murmurs, “what you’re thinking.”

“I’ll help you out,” I say. “Eighty percent of it is picturing you naked.”

He kisses my sticky forehead. “I’m serious.”

“I am too,” I say.

“You’re a mystery to me, Harriet Kilpatrick.”

My smile falters. “I’m a mystery to me too,” I say. “I didn’t realize how little I understood myself until I met Cleo and Sabrina. They’re both so sure of how they feel about things.”

He pulls another curl straight, and the gentle tug sends a current down my center. “Well, we should get to know you,” he says.

“I wouldn’t know where to start.”

“Something small,” he says.

“Like what?”

He smiles unevenly. “Like why do you love cozy mysteries?”

I shrug. “I don’t know. They’re so . . . mild.”

His kiss against the side of my head melts into a laugh. “Mild?”

“The worst thing that can happen to a person happens, right at the start of the story,” I explain. “And it’s like . . . this feeling of safety. You know exactly what’s going to happen by the end. So many things are unpredictable in life. I like things you can trust.”

He frowns, his golden hair mussed up off his forehead. I’m suddenly sure I’ve found the one unacceptable answer to his question, the one that makes him realize I am not the cool, sexy, mysterious woman he has confused me with.

His teeth scrape over the fullest part of his lip. “You can trust me, Harriet.”

In that moment, he pierces a little deeper into my heart, opens another door, finds an entire walled-off room I didn’t realize was there.

He pulls me into his chest, and our heartbeats sync. I’ve never felt so certain of anything, so right, so safe.