“Shoot,” I say, letting a breath out, squeezing Ian’s upper arms to call him off. “We’re supposed to go to that happy hour, remember? The place with the hundred beers.”
Ian groans. “Let’s skip it,” he says, ducking his head to nip at my shoulder.
“Can’t,” I murmur, grinning as I wriggle out from underneath him and reach for my tank top, enjoying the tease. “Gotta stick to the schedule.”
Ian grumbles a bit more, but after a moment he gets up too, heading into the bathroom to brush his teeth while I dig through my suitcase for a silky black T-shirt dress, pushing the thought of Gabe standing there on that train platform out of my mind once and for all. Everybody has their secrets, I tell myself, fluffing my hair out and slicking on a pale swipe of lip gloss. The trick is to leave the past where it belongs.
“You ready?” Ian asks now, coming out of the bathroom and holding his hand out, pink-cheeked and scruffily handsome.
“Sure am,” I say, then twist my fingers through his and squeeze. “Let’s go.”
Day2
We spend the next day playing tourists, Tower Bridge and the Rosetta Stone at the British Museum, popping up out of underground stations like subterranean animals after a long, cold winter. For lunch we slip into a tiny corner shop and pick up cheddar cheese sandwiches with mustard and pickles on bread so crusty you could break a tooth trying to eat it. I like traveling with Ian, I think again as we post up on a bench in Covent Garden to eat them: in spite of all my careful planning he’s open to a kind of wandering, with a willingness to sit in one place for an hour at a time and watch the world go by. “We’re notseeinganything,” I protest when he suggests running across the street for ice cream.
“Take a breath, General,” Ian tells me, nodding at the crowded plaza. “We’re seeing plenty.”
“Jerk,” I tease, although truthfully, my new vacationsandals are rubbing a blister on my pinky toe and I’m happy to have a break. In any case, it’s not like he’s wrong. When I follow his gaze I spy a deliveryman unloading a shipment of flowers from a truck and loading it into the service entrance of a nearby restaurant; I watch a pack of skateboarders in brightly colored T-shirts zipping through the throng. Across the street is a newsstand packed with gossip magazines, their covers splashed with lurid photos of Sabrina Hudson’s latest nightclub meltdown, and I frown for a second, squinting to read the headlines: Sabrina Hudson was a huge TV star back when I was in middle school, and there was even chatter about her possibly playing Emily Green in my mom’sDriftwoodmovie, but for the last year or so she’s been on what seems like one long bender, getting fired from film projects and arrested for a DUI and embroiled in public knock-down-and-drag-outs with one sketchy boyfriend after another.
“I used to have a huge crush on Sabrina Hudson,” Ian tells me now, nodding at the magazine racks with a grimace. “I mean, before she turned into a giant train wreck, clearly.”
“You and everybody else,” I tease, though I’m still peering distractedly at the tabloids. God, it must be awful to crash and burn like that in front of the whole entire world. “Okay,” I say finally, smiling at him and reaching for my phone to check the schedule. “Let’s get going.”
In the afternoon we wander through the cluster of bookstores on Charing Cross Road, all low ceilings and narrow aisles and the smell of old paper and must, rare first editionslocked safely into glass-front cabinets and fusty shopkeepers like something out of Harry Potter keeping a watchful eye on their wares. A bookstore cat darts across the end of the aisle, a flash of white paws and Bengal stripes, there and gone again. It’s the kind of place I probably would have found boring a year ago, but Ian is so clearly in heaven that I find myself getting excited about it too, the two of us digging through the messy, overcrowded stacks with the enthusiasm of contestants on some kind of ultra-dorky game show.
“You’re not going to have room for all of those in your backpack,” I warn him finally, eyeing the growing haul tucked under his arm. Ian collects Vintage Contemporaries paperbacks from the eighties, the kind with tacky paint-by-numbers art on their covers and bright bands of color along their spines. I’ve seen them lined up on the bookshelves in his apartment, forming a rainbow nearly narcotic in its orderliness.
He shakes his head, looking confident. “Oh, I’ll make room,” he promises.
“You will, huh?” I ask, charmed. He raises his eyebrows in reply, then sets the books on a nearby shelf and kisses me, broad chest and beer-tasting tongue and both hands on my face. I love Ian’s hands; they’re oddly aristocratic compared to the rest of him, long and lean, with bitten-down nails that are all college dude. Watching him hold a pencil always strikes me as stupidly dear.
“This,” he mutters against my mouth, “is how I want to die.”
I laugh, flattening my palms against his T-shirt; I can feel his heart tapping steadily away underneath the cotton. Bookstores are holy sites for Ian—he’s a double major in English and secondary education, the only guy in his teaching cohort. Back when we first started dating he used to bring me books instead of flowers, leaving them on my desk and in stacks at my door like offerings—Stephen King, Jane Austen, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I’ve never been a huge reader, truthfully—not to mention the fact that after theDriftwooddebacle I wanted to stay as far away from my mom’s career as humanly possible—but I didn’t want him to think I was a moron, and in the end I was surprised by how much I enjoyed them, dipping into a dozen different worlds in the sterile quiet of my dorm room. I wanted to know all the authors he’d fallen in love with. I wanted to read everything he’d read.
“Come on,” I say now, pulling gently away. “We get kicked out of this place for unliterary activities, you’re never going to forgive me.”
“You’re probably right,” Ian says seriously—then kisses me back into the shadows, grabbing one last book off the shelf above my head.
For dinner we’ve got a reservation at a place I scoped out on one of the travel blogs I haunted all summer, a ten-table bistro with crispy chicken cooked under a brick and the best mashed potatoes in London. It’s close enough to walk fromthe apartment, and we leave a little early, taking our time as we stroll past souvenir shops and coffee bars all closing up for the night, street vendors locking up their carts. It’s clear and cool outside, that first hint of fall coming. The sky is a soft, velvety blue. The streets are lined with pubs and restaurants, their patios packed with a rowdy Friday-night crowd; I press my cheek against Ian’s sturdy shoulder as we pass a street-corner busker picking out “Eleanor Rigby” on the guitar. The more time goes by, the more convinced I am that seeing Gabe was some kind of weird neurochemical aberration, my brain bending double and snapping back.
We’re nearly to the restaurant when I stop short at the sound of music coming from a massive brick building on the corner of a quiet street, a converted warehouse bearing the faded logo of a canned goods company on one side. I’ve noticed this about London, the way new places and things are layered on top of old ones, like the whole city is a talented seamstress fashioning one-of-a-kind couture out of ancient thrift store finds. An alley to one side is strung with a canopy of old-fashioned white lights and leads to a beer garden on a back patio; I can see a jazz trio set up back there, a girl in thick glasses and red high heels plucking away at the double bass. “Oh,” I say, before I can stop myself.“Look.”
“That’s fucking awesome,” Ian says, a slow smile spreading across his face and his accent just detectable like it always is when he’s excited about something. Then, taking my hand: “Let’s check it out.”
I hesitate for a moment—thinking, stubbornly, of the app on my phone—but Ian bumps my shoulder. “Come on,” he urges. “It’s akuddelmuddel.”
My eyes widen. “I’m sorry,” I say, a laugh pulling at the corners of my mouth, “awhat?”
“A kuddelmuddel,” Ian repeats, grinning back at me. “It’s German. It actually means, like, messy chaos? But my mom always uses it to describe what happens when you’re traveling and you find something sort of good and unexpected that isn’t part of the plan.”
“A kuddelmuddel,” I repeat, falling a little bit more in love with him. “Okay.”
The restaurant is massive inside, all dark wood and basket-weave tile and one whole wall of windows flung wide open to the courtyard, the faint whiff of cigarette smoke on the breeze. A dozen framed mirrors hung behind the bar catch the candlelight flickering on the tiny bistro tables; at the back is a row of booths with dividing walls that stretch to the ceiling, deep-red curtains hung across each one. It smells like fried fish and dark beer and underneath that a certain not-unpleasant sourness, generations of spills mopped up on the wide, scratched floorboards. Also, it’spacked.
“It’ll be at least forty-five minutes,” the hostess says, once we make our way through the crowd; she’s got impossibly long lashes and cat-eye liner, a smart black dress paired with combat boots. “You could get a pint while you wait?”
“You wanna bail?” Ian asks, checking his watch andglancing back toward the exit. “We can still make your reservation, if you want.”
