The light is dim now, but I can see him in shadows. The muscles in his throat flex as he swallows.
“I have a lot going on the next couple days,” he says, “so I don’t think…I may not be able to—”
Heat rushes through my cheeks, embarrassment and the sting of rejection. “Right. Of course. I completely understand.”
“No,” he says. “I’m…I’m not making excuses. These next two days are hard for me, schedule-wise. Truly. But if I could, I’d want to see you again.”
I look away. “Really, I get it. You don’t have to…”
His hand cups my face, his thumb brushing the curve of my cheek. “I want to see you again,” he says. “I want to. Even with what I have going on the next few days, I’d carve out time if I could, but…” He hesitates for a moment. “I don’t know if I can do this again without knowing your name. I don’t know if I can do this again knowing you’re leaving.”
My pulse thrums as his lips brush mine.
“This has been…you’vebeen more—well, better, really—than anything I expected. And I want to see you again, but I just…can’t.”
I’m stunned, my body still. I’m not used to this level of honesty, but it’s how he’s been from the moment I met him. Honest with his likes, with his wants, with every piece of himself that he’s shared.
“You’ve been more than I expected too,” I say. I reach for his hand, removing it from my face, but I continue holding on. We watch each other for a while, and our fingers interlace.
I wonder if things would be different under another set ofcircumstances, or whether this is the way it was always meant to go. The two of us meeting for one night, leaving with only a memory.
He squeezes my hand lightly before we both break away.
“I should go,” he says, and I lie back down.
I close my eyes as I hear him shuffle through the room. And I don’t open them, even when I hear thecreakof the door as it opens, the long few seconds of silence that follow, and the muffled sound of the door shutting behind him.
4
I don’t end up falling back asleep. I try for a little while, but I’m jittery, restless, and finally I kick the covers away and get up to take a shower. After, I log in to my work computer. We’re offseason at the moment, but there’s still prep to do. We have most of our cast figured out, but our itinerary is still up in the air.Love in the Sunshowcases four to five different cities a season, and arranging flights and resort sponsorships and activities for the couples to do at each location takes up a good amount of my time. The audience doesn’t like it when we get too repetitive, but due to the nature of the show we have to pick cities that give fun, beachy vibes, and after twelve years running, it’s getting difficult to find anywhere new. It’s getting difficult totryanything new.
I’ve been working on this show since I was fresh out of college, nearly ten years ago. I started as a production assistant and worked my way up, and my boss, Natalie, who’s now the showrunner, and I always talked about updating the show. But our suggestions, including reducing the number of couples so we can go deeper with eachone, or staying in one city so we can show more of the area and its culture, have all been rejected by the network. We’re a beach show, we’ve been told. We’re meant to be light, offering armchair travel, swoony romance, and drama.
I guess there was something to what that man was saying earlier, about style impacting substance.
My stomach growls, and I close my laptop, slipping it into my backpack. I get dressed quickly and leave the hotel room to find some food.
It’s quiet outside, midmorning on a Friday. The sky is gray and overcast, but still bright somehow, light filtering in through the clouds. I find a teahouse a short distance away and settle in at a table in the corner, ordering a scone and a pot of tea.
I haven’t really allowed myself a moment to stop and think since I’ve gotten here, but in the silence of this half-empty place, I finally ask myself:What am I doing here?
The invitation to my father’s wedding was a surprise. I’ve always had minimal contact with him, just occasional calls for birthdays and important holidays. When my parents split, he stayed here, in the UK, and he didn’t come to the U.S. often to visit. My mom said he made annual trips when I was younger, but I hardly remember them. He’d repeatedly asked for me to come visit him in Scotland, but my mother hadn’t wanted me to make the journey alone. Still, I’d begged every year to go, and the summer I was ten, my mother finally gave in.
I’d been so excited to see my father, to spend some real time with him, only to arrive and realize the man was basically a stranger. And he didn’t seem to know what to do with a kid in the house. At meals, he asked me the same questions in a cycle, the same ones he always asked on the phone: “How’s school going?”It’s summer vacation.“Do you like your teachers?”It’s summer vacation.“Tell meabout your friends.”Liz and Marcus. We all play soccer, but I haven’t seen them because it’s summer vacation.
Maybe I’d been a little surly when responding, but I’d been a child who was homesick, missing my mother and my friends and the food I was used to. My father didn’t know me, and it felt like he didn’t knowhowto get to know me. For the rest of that two-week vacation, he plied me with books and television, and I counted down the days until I could go home.
The next summer, he invited me back, but I didn’t want to go, and as I grew older, the phone calls became less frequent. We exchanged emails, but what did the two of us have to talk about? Conversation was always stilted, and I began to come up with excuses when his calls came, saying I had to run or sending them to voicemail, ignoring them entirely.
About a year ago, the frequency of the calls started increasing, but I was busy with work, with travel, with trying to keep a failing relationship afloat. It was easy to ignore, until my mother called me six months ago.
“Have you not been checking your old email address?” she asked.
I frowned. “No. Nobody’s using AOL anymore, Mom. I just use my work email for everything.”
She went quiet, and I felt something shift, immediately sensing that something was wrong.
“What is it?”
