People We Meet on Vacation

THERE ARE PLENTY of empty chaise lounges available at the Desert Rose complex pool—everyone’s in the water—so Alex and I take our towels over to two in the corner.

He winces as he lowers himself to sitting. “The plastic’s hot.”

“Everything’s hot.” I plop down beside him and peel off my cover-up. “What percentage of that pool do you think is pee by now?” I ask, tipping my head to the gaggle of sunhat-wearing babies splashing on the steps with their parents.

Alex grimaces. “Don’t say that.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s so hot I’m going to get in the water anyway, and I don’t want to think about it.” He glances away as he draws his white T-shirt over his head, then folds it and twists to set it on the ground behind him, the muscles pulling taut along his chest and stomach in the process.

“How have you gotten more ripped?” I ask.

“I haven’t.” He pulls the sunblock from my beach bag and pumps some into his hand.

I look down at my own stomach, hanging over the tight highlighter orange of my bikini bottoms. In the last few years my lifestyle of airplane cocktails and late-night burritos, gyros, and noodles has started to fill me out and soften me. “Fine,” I say to Alex, “then you look exactly the same, while the rest of us are starting to droop in the eyes and the boobs and the neck, and get more and more stretch marks and pockmarks and scars.”

“Do you really want to look like your eighteen-year-old self?” he asks, and starts to smear big globs of sunblock onto his arms and chest.

“Yes.” I pick up the bottle of Banana Boat and work some of it onto my shoulders. “But I’d settle for twenty-five.”

Alex shakes his head, then bows it as he slathers more sunblock onto his neck. “You look better than you did back then, Poppy.”

“Really? Because the comments section on my Instagram would disagree,” I say.

“That’s all bullshit,” he says. “Half the people on Instagram have never lived in a world where every picture wasn’t edited. If they saw you in real life, they’d pass out. My students are all obsessed with this ‘Instagram model’ who’s completely CGI. This animated girl. Literally looks like a video game character and every time the account posts, they all freak out about how beautiful she is.”

“Oh, yeah, I know that girl,” I say. “I mean, I don’t know her. She’s not real. But I know the account. Sometimes I go down deep rabbit holes reading the comments. She has a rivalry with another CGI model—do you want me to get your back?”

“What?” He looks up, confused.

I lift the bottle of sunblock up. “Your back? It’s facing the sun right now.”

“Oh. Yeah. Thanks.” He turns around and ducks his head, but he’s still tall enough that I have to sit up on my knees to get the spot between his shoulder blades. “Anyway.” He clears his throat. “The kids know I get seriously repulsed by the uncanny valley so they always try to trick me into looking at pictures of that fake girl, just to watch me writhe. It kind of makes me feel bad for doing that Sad Puppy Face at you all these years.”

My hands go still on his warm, sun-freckled shoulders, my stomach pinching. “I’d be sad if you stopped doing that.”

He looks over his shoulder at me, his profile cast in cool blue shadow as the sun beats down on him from the other side. For a millisecond, I feel fluttery from his closeness, from the feeling of his shoulder muscles under my hands and the way his cologne mixes with the coconut sweetness of the sunblock and the way his hazel eyes fix on me firmly.

It’s a millisecond that belongs to that other five percent—the what-if. If I leaned forward and kissed him over his shoulder, slipped his bottom lip between my teeth, twisted my hands into his hair until he turned himself around and pulled me into his chest.

But there’s no more room for that what-if, and I know that. I think he knows it too, because he clears his throat and glances away. “Want me to get your back too?”

“Mm-hm,” I manage, and we both turn again so that now he’s facing my back, and the whole time his hands are on me, I’m actively trying not to register it. Trying not to feel something hotter than the Palm Springs sun gathering behind my belly button as his palms gently scrape over me.

It doesn’t matter that there are babies squealing and people laughing and preteens cannonballing into far-too-small spaces in the pool. There’s not enough stimuli in this busy pool to distract me, so I move on to a hastily formed plan B.

“Do you ever talk to Sarah?” I blurt out, my voice a full octave higher than usual.

“Um.” Alex’s hands lift off me. “Sometimes. You’re done, by the way.”

“Cool. Thanks.” I turn around and shift back onto my chaise, putting a good foot of space between us. “Is she still teaching at East Linfield?” With how competitive teaching jobs were these days, it seemed like a dream when they both found positions at the same school and moved back to Ohio. Then they broke up.

“Yep.” He reaches into my bag and pulls out the water bottles we filled with the premade margarita slushies we got at CVS. He hands me one of them. “She’s still there.”

“So you must see each other a lot,” I say. “Is that awkward?”

“Nah, not really,” he offers.

“You don’t really see each other a lot or it’s not really awkward?”

He buys some time with a long chug on the water bottle. “Uhh, I guess either.”

“Is . . . she seeing anyone?” I ask.

“Why?” Alex says. “I didn’t think you even liked her.”

“Yeah,” I say, embarrassment coursing through my veins like a quick-hitting drug. “But you did, so I want to make sure you’re okay.”

“I’m okay,” he says, but he sounds uncomfortable so I drop it.

No shitting on Ohio, no talking about Alex’s ridiculously fit body, no looking him deep in the eyes from fewer than six inches away, and no bringing up Sarah Torval.

I can do that. Probably.

“Should we get in the water?” I ask.

“Sure.”

But as we pick our way through the herd of babies to move down the whitewashed pool steps, it rapidly becomes clear that this isn’t the solution to the touch-and-go awkwardness between us. For one thing, the water, with all the many bodies standing (and potentially peeing) in it, feels nearly as hot as the air and somehow even more unpleasant.

For another thing, it’s so crowded that we have to stand so close that the upper two-thirds of our bodies are almost touching. When a stocky man in a camo hat pushes past me, I collide with Alex and a lightning bolt of panic sizzles through me at the feeling of his slick stomach against mine. He catches me by the hips, at once steadying me and easing me away, back to my rightful place two inches away from him.

“You okay?” he asks.

“Mm-hm,” I say, because all I can really focus on is the way his hands spread over my hip bones. I expect there to be a lot of that on this trip. The mm-hming, not the gigantic Alex-hands on my hips.

He lets go of me and cranes his neck over his shoulder, looking back to our lounges. “Maybe we should just read until it’s less crowded,” he suggests.

“Good idea.” I follow him in a zigzagging path back to the pool steps, to the burning-hot cement, to the too-short towels spread on the chaises, where we lie down to wait. He pulls out a Sarah Waters novel, which he finishes, then follows with an Augustus Everett book. I take out the latest issue of R+R, planning to skim everything I didn’t write. Maybe I’ll find a spark of inspiration I can take back to Swapna so she won’t be mad at me.

I pretend to read for two sweaty hours and the pool never empties out.

•   •   •

AS SOON AS we open the door to the apartment, I know things are going to get worse.

“What the hell,” Alex says, following me inside. “Did it get hotter?”

I hurry to the thermostat and read the numbers illuminated there. “Eighty-two?!”

“Maybe we’re pushing it too hard?” Alex suggests, coming to stand beside me. “Let’s see if we can get it back down to eighty at least.”

“I know eighty is, technically speaking, better than eighty-two, Alex,” I say, “but we’re still going to murder each other if we have to sleep in eighty-degree heat.”

“Should we call someone?” Alex asks.

“Yes! We should definitely call someone! Good thinking!” I rifle through the beach bag for my phone and search my email for the host’s phone number. I hit call, and it rings three times before a gruff, smoky voice comes over the line. “Yeah?”

“Nikolai?”

Two seconds of silence. “Who is this?”

“This is Poppy Wright. I’m staying in 4B?”

“Okay.”

“We’re having some trouble with the thermostat.”

Three seconds of silence this time. “Did you try Googling it?”

I ignore the question and forge ahead. “It was set to eighty degrees when we got here. We tried to turn it down to seventy two hours ago and now it’s eighty-two.”

“Oh, yeah,” Nikolai says. “You’re pushing it too hard.”

I guess Alex can hear what Nikolai’s saying, because he nods, like, Told you.

“So . . . it can’t handle . . . going colder than seventy-eight?” I say. “Because that wasn’t in the posting, and neither was the construction outside the—”

“It can only do a degree at a time, honey,” Nikolai says with a beleaguered sigh. “You can’t just push a thermostat down to seventy degrees! And who keeps an apartment seventy degrees anyway?”

Alex and I exchange a look. “Sixty-seven,” he whispers.

Sixty-five, I mouth, gesturing to myself. “Well—”

“Look, look, look, honey.” Nikolai cuts me off again. “Turn it down to eighty-one. When it gets down to eighty-one, turn it down to eighty. Then turn it down to seventy-nine, and when it gets down to seventy-nine, you set it to seventy-eight. And once it’s seventy-eight—”

“—go ahead and just cut off your own head,” Alex whispers, and I pull the phone away from me before Nikolai can hear me laugh.

I drag it back to my cheek, and Nikolai’s still explaining how to count backward from eighty-two. “Got it,” I say. “Thanks.”

“No prob,” Nikolai says with another sigh. “Have a good stay, honey.”

As I hang up, Alex crosses back to the thermostat and turns it back up to eighty-one. “Here goes literally nothing.”

“If we can’t get it to work . . .” I trail off as the full force of our situation hits me. I was going to say that, if we couldn’t get it to work, I’d just book us a hotel room with the R+R card.

But of course we can’t.Ccontent © exclusive by Nô/vel(D)ra/ma.Org.

I could put it on my own credit card, but, living in New York, in a too-nice-for-me apartment, I don’t actually have a ton of expendable income. The perks of my job are arguably the biggest form of income. I could try to score us a room through an advertising trade, but I’ve been slacking on my social media and blogging, and I’m not sure I still have enough clout. Besides, a lot of places won’t do that with influencers. Some will even screenshot your email requests and post them online to shame you. It’s not like I’m George Clooney. I’m just some girl who takes pretty pictures—I might be able to land us a discount; a free room’s unlikely.

“We’ll figure something out,” Alex says. “Do you want to shower first, or should I?”

I can tell from the way he’s holding his arms slightly away from his body that he’s desperate to be clean. And if he hops in the shower now, maybe I’ll even manage to get the temperature down a few degrees in the meantime.

“Go ahead,” I tell him, and he slips away.

The whole time I can hear the water running, I’m pacing. From the foldout pseudo bed to the plastic-wrapped balcony to the thermostat. Finally, it drops down to eighty-one, and I reset the goal temperature to eighty and keep pacing.

After deciding to document this so I can report it to Airbnb and try to get some money back, I take pictures of the chair bed and the porch—the construction upstairs has mercifully ceased for the day so at least it’s quiet, the hum of conversation and splash of water drifting up from the pool—then head back to the thermostat, down to eighty now, to take a picture of that too.

Just as I’m resetting the temperature for seventy-nine, the shower turns off, so I swing my suitcase up onto the foldout chair, unzip the bag, and start rooting through it for something lightweight to wear to dinner.

Alex steps out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam with a towel wrapped around his waist, one hand securing it at the hip as the other swipes through his wet hair, leaving it sticking up and out messily. “Your turn,” he says, but it takes me a second to compute through the haze of his long, lean torso and the sharp jut of his left hip bone.

Why is it so different seeing someone in a towel than in a bathing suit? Thirty minutes ago, Alex was technically more naked than this, but now, the smooth lines of his body feel more scandalous. I feel like all the blood in my body is just bobbing to the surface, pressing against my skin so that every inch of me is more alert.

It never used to be like this.

This is all because of Croatia.

Damn you and your gorgeous islands, Croatia!

“Poppy?” Alex prompts.

“Mm-hm,” I say, then remember to at least add, “Yeah.” I spin back to my bag and grab a dress, bra, and underwear at random. “Okay. Bedroom’s all yours.”

I hurry into the steamy bathroom and shut the door as I’m stripping off my bikini top only to freeze, stunned at the sight of a huge blue-tinted glass capsule that occupies the entirety of one wall, complete with a reclined seat on either side, like it’s some kind of group shower from The Jetsons.

“Oh my god.” This, I’m sure, was not in the photographs. In fact, this whole room is unrecognizable from the one on the website, transformed from the subtle, beachy grays of its former self into the glowing blue and sterile whites of the hypermodern sight before me.

I snatch a towel off the rack, wrapping it around myself, and throw the door open. “Alex, why didn’t you say anything about the—”

Alex grabs for his towel and pulls it around himself and I do my absolute best to pick up where my sentence stumbled off and pretend that didn’t happen. “—spaceship bathroom?”

“I figured you knew,” Alex says, his voice hoarse. “You booked this place.”

“They must’ve remodeled since the photos were taken,” I say. “How did you even figure out how to work that thing?”

“Honestly,” Alex says, “the hardest thing was just wresting control from the 2001: A Space Odyssey–style artificial intelligence system. After that, the biggest issue was just that I kept mixing up the controls for the sixth shower head with the ones for the foot massager.”

It’s enough to break the tension. I dissolve into laughter and he does too, and it stops mattering so much that we’re standing here in our towels.

“This place is purgatory,” I say. Everything is just nice enough to make the issues that much more glaring.

“Nikolai is a sadist,” Alex agrees.

“Yes, but he’s a sadist with a spaceship bathroom.” I lean back into the bathroom to study the many-headed, multiseated shower again.

I burst into another fit of laughter and lean back out to find Alex standing there, grinning. He’s pulled a T-shirt on over his damp upper body but hasn’t risked swapping the towel out.

I turn back to the bathroom. “Okay, I’ll leave you to dance naked around the apartment in privacy now. Use your time wisely.”

“Is that what you do?” Alex calls. “Dance around the apartment naked whenever I’m in the other room? You do, don’t you?”

I spin away as I’m pulling the door shut. “Wouldn’t you like to know, Porny Alex?”