“Anyway,” she says, “back to you and Henry. It’s pretty obvious that you two are all moony for each other.”
I make a scoffing noise. Nothing here is obvious. Trying to decipher who has genuine feelings and who doesn’t is harder than scoping out a fake pair of Louboutins from two blocks away. Even Addison, who is absolutely batshit, might be acting the way she is because she’s lovesick. There’s no way to know for sure.
“Did you hear Sara Claire on the way here?” she asks. “She sat there the whole time making a pros-and-cons list, trying to talk herself into falling for Henry. He’s not even her type!”
“How do you know her type?” I ask. “Her type could be Stanley Tucci for all we know.”
“Actually,” Stacy says, “Stanley Tucci is everyone’s type.”
I nod in solidarity. “Amen.”
“But really, Sara Claire’s type is a guy who grills. And wants to take care of a pool and wears cowboy boots with tuxedos.”
“Henry probably owns a grill,” I say.
She arches a single brow. “But does he introduce himself as the grill master to guests? Important distinction.”
I shake my head. “No, definitely not.”
“You two make sense.”
Thrill pulses through me at that. Henry and I could make sense. Someone else sees it.
“It’s, like, the most fashionable happily-ever-after. TV gold and IRL gold. But that’s not what’s important. Doyoulike him? It really seems like it.”
I lie back on my side and face her with my hands tucked under my cheek. “I…sometimes I feel like I don’t even know him, and other times I feel so in sync with him that I could predict the next word out of his mouth. But when we’re…” I hesitate for a moment before deciding not to tell her we’ve been alone together. I know I can trust Stacy, but being on this show has me feeling like I can never be sure of my footing. “When we’re simpatico, it’s like when you meet someone new and you should be freaked out by how much you like them, but you’re too in it to care.”
“What would you do if he proposed at the end of all this?”
It’s a possibility. And happens more often than not during the finale. I can’t imagine saying no, but I can’t see myself saying yes either. Everything around me seems to be shifting. I graduated. I moved. Erica moved. I was creatively blocked for so long, and I can feel something in my brain becoming slowly unstuck. Like all this frenetic movement has forced something loose. And now this new possible future with Henry and a real chance for us to get to know each other in the real world.
But despite all that, there’s some kind of hesitation in the pit of my stomach. A shadow of guilt for moving on to this next phase of my life without Mom and Dad. In many ways, college felt like an extension of high school, but that’s gone now, and I’m not a child anymore.
I shake my head finally. “I don’t know. All I know is I don’t want it to end.”
“Oof.” She laughs.
“Oof is right.”
After Stacy has a few more drinks and accidentally tries to go into Addison’s villa instead of her own, I decide to walk her to her door and say good night.
As I’m walking back, I see the camera crew clustering around two silhouettes on the beach in the distance.
Deep down, I know what Stacy said about Sara Claire having a type isn’t completely true. She could have said all that just to make me feel better. Still, I feel more confident, like maybe this attraction is shared and not just one-sided. Even now, seeing Henry and Sara Claire on their romantic date from afar doesn’t give me the gut-churning feeling I expect it to.
Back at my villa, I find my duvet turned down with a piece of dark chocolate waiting for me on my bed. Definitely beats the barely two-bedroom apartment Sierra and I shared for two years.
I try getting ready for bed, but I’m too restless to sleep, so I start the water in my outdoor tub and order a drink from room service.
I find a lavender bath bomb and throw a T-shirt on to answer the door. I sit perched on the edge of my bed, waiting for my room service to arrive, but a few minutes turns into fifteen and then twenty. The bath is full, and since I’d hate for it to get cold, I leave a note wedged into the door that readsIn the tub, please leave drink here. This moonlight bath is more luxury than I’ve experienced in a very long time, so I think I can handle skipping the fruity drink.
Outside, even though the outdoor shower and tub have a large vine-covered partition protecting me from unwanted onlookers, it’s still a shock to my senses when I strip out of my underwear and T-shirt. I know that no one can see me, but that doesn’t stop me from undressing and hopping into the tub and under the milky bath-bomb-infused water as quickly as I can.
I scoop my hair into a loose ponytail and lean back to take in the starry view. The quiet is so deeply comforting. I let the heaviness of it sink into my bones as I try to find some kind of peace in all this uncertainty.
My thoughts circle back over and over again to my conversation with Stacy. If Henry asked, would I say yes? I don’t know. I don’t know for lots of reasons, but maybe one of them is Dad. After he died, I kept brushing aside the future, only preparing for as far as my headlights out in front of me could see. The thought of meeting someone—someone who I could imagine myself being with for a long time—felt so distant and impossible. I couldn’t see that happening without my parents, but especially Dad, there to witness it all.
But that’s not reality. The realization snuck up on me at high school graduation and then again last summer when Erica asked me to sort through his belongings and then last month when I graduated from Parsons. Mom and Dad are gone. It makes me feel awful to even think it, but they are. And I wonder if all the language around grief and your loved one being there with you always makes it that much harder to deal with their deaths.
