Happy Place

“I THINK WE should give you a proper wedding tomorrow,” I announce over breakfast.

“Oh, thank god, someone said it,” Kimmy says, dropping her spoon into her acai bowl.

Parth casts a quick glance over at Sabrina, who dusts her hands off on her cloth napkin.

We’re sitting at a white wrought iron table in the Bluebell Inn’s overgrown garden, tucked up in one of the hills that overlook the harbor. Our server stops by to drop off fresh cappuccinos, then moves off to another table.

“We don’t need anything fancy,” Sabrina says. “This, the six of us, is all that matters.”

“I’m not saying fancy,” I reply. Lying awake, late into the night, it became apparent that the only way to make it through these last two days without crumbling was to give my brain something else to focus on. “I’m just saying, like, a cake. A photographer. Maybe something old, new, and blue, or whatever the saying is?”

Wyn softly snorts beside me.

“Could be nice,” Parth says, eyeing Sabrina again.

“It’s tomorrow,” she reminds me.

“It would only take a few hours,” Cleo says.

“We can split up tasks and knock it all out,” I add. A completable chore and alone time: the perfect combo.

Sabrina’s head tilts as she sips the foam from her cappuccino. “Okay.” She nods to herself. “Okay, sure. You and Wyn handle the cake.”

I balk. “Wouldn’t it be faster if we all divided up? Covered twice as much ground?”

“No, it would be chaotic. We’d end up with six cakes.”

“Probably why Harriet suggested it,” Wyn says.

I ignore him, regroup, and face Sabrina again. “If we’re teaming up, then you and I should be on cake duty. I want to be sure I get something you like.”

Her head slightly cocks, and something flits behind her eyes.

She and I have barely had a second alone together since the ride from the airport, and for the first time, I’m wondering if that’s because I’ve been afraid she’d find Wyn and me out or if she’s been avoiding me.

She gives a little shake of her head. “I don’t care about the cake. If I care about absolutely anything other than the ceremony, it’s the bachelorette-slash-bachelor party, so I’ll figure that out.”

“I want to plan that,” Parth says.

“Duh,” she says. “We’ll do it together, and Cleo and Kim can try to find a photographer, if they’re up for it.”

“We’d love to,” Cleo says.

“But a hard out in two hours, okay?” Sabrina says. “No matter what progress you have or haven’t made, in two hours, we meet back at the house.”

Wyn’s gaze darts my way, and I look at the floor.

It’s only two hours, I think.

What have I done, I think.

•   •   •

I DON’T KNOW if he’s picking up my discomfort and mirroring it back to me or if he’s really in his head. Maybe about the text from Gloria or maybe something else entirely. But as we drive from bakery to bakery, we barely even make small talk.

The afternoon flies by. We’ve reached the ninety-minute mark of our allotted two hours when the fifth local bakery tells us they don’t touch weddings. “No one gets quite so litigious as the parents of a newlywed,” the red-faced baker tells us.

“Did we say wedding?” Wyn laughs, looks at me, and claps a hand to his forehead, shaking himself. He faces the baker again, leaning across the counter with a devastating smile, the kind that looks like a hook has snagged under his lip. “I meant birthday. We’ve been planning this wedding of ours for, like, four years, so I guess that’s why that came out. This cake is for a birthday.”

The baker narrows her eyes. “All our birthday cakes say Happy Birthday on them.”

“Okay, then what about a regular cake,” I say.

“Those say Happy Birthday on them too,” the woman says, determined not to sell us a black market wedding cake, I guess.

“Great,” Wyn says. “We’ll do a red velvet one of those.”

The baker’s lips purse. “Who should it be addressed to?”

It’s not enough that she’s forcing us to buy a cake with Happy Birthday on it when she knows it’s for a wedding.

“Happy birthday, wicked pissah,” Wyn suggests.

“That’s not how you use wicked pissah in a sentence,” the baker tells us.

The rules surrounding this cake are getting more specific by the second.

A smile blossoms from one corner of Wyn’s mouth. “Inside joke.”

The baker does not smile, but she turns to inscribe our not-wedding cake all the same.

In the Rover, we fall back into silence. We’re halfway up the wildflower-covered hill to the cottage when Wyn suddenly pulls over onto the gravel shoulder that overlooks the ocean. “Okay,” he says, looking at me.

“Okay, what?” I say.

“What’s going on?” he asks.

“Nothing,” I lie.

His head tips back on a frustrated laugh. “Please don’t do this.”

“Do what?” I demand.

“Pretend you’re fine,” he says. “Act like I’m imagining that you’re pulling away from me.”

“Pulling away?” The words squeeze out of my tightening windpipe. I’m suddenly so frustrated it becomes a kind of claustrophobia. I undo my seat belt and throw open my door, stumbling out into the harsh midday sun.

He gets out too, rounding the hood of the car toward me. “This isn’t fair.”

I throw my arms out to my sides. “What isn’t fair?”

“We were getting along,” he says. “We were acting like friends, and now—”

“Friends?” The word tears out of me on a laugh. “I don’t want to be your friend, Wyn!”

“I don’t want to be yours either!” he cries.

I turn up the hill, but he catches my hand and pulls me back to face him. I don’t know how it happens: I’m confident I don’t trip into his mouth, but that’s how it feels, because I’m positive he didn’t initiate it—Wyn would never—and it makes no sense that I would do this, but I have.

I am.

My hands are twisted into his shirt, and his are flat against my back, and we’re kissing, hard, hurried, like this is a timed activity and we’re in our final seconds.

“What was the text,” I hiss out as our lips draw apart.

“What text,” he asks, turning me back to the car, the warm metal of the hood meeting my back.

“From your mom,” I say. “I saw a text from your mom.”

“Nothing,” he says, lifting me onto the hood.

“Wyn.”

“It’s about work, Harriet,” he says, squeezing my thighs, pulling them around his hips.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” I say as he kisses his way down my throat, hand curling against my ear.

“I can explain it to you right now,” he says, “or we can have sex in the car.”

A plumb line of heat drops through my center, my thighs tightening against him as he kisses me more deeply. “The car? We’re like a mile from the house.”

“I don’t have a mile in me right now, Harriet.”

I push against his shoulders even as the rest of my body strains toward him. “Tell me,” I say.

He steps back. A car flies by our spot on the shoulder, and he blinks as if emerging from a trance. Then obvious anxiety torques his brow and mouth, and I am positive I made the right decision, that there’s something I need to know.

With a resigned sigh, he pulls his phone out of his back pocket and taps on it for several seconds, teeth worrying at his lower lip, while the suspense pummels my nerves.

Finally, he hands the phone to me.

There’s a web browser open to some hip minimalistic shop. A white backdrop. Soft serifed headings: Gallery, Contact, Social Media. Beneath them, a photograph of a massive oak pedestal table out in a green-gold meadow. Mismatched wooden chairs line it, wildflowers bursting up around their legs. Behind the meadow, periwinkle mountains jut up into a cloudless sky.

It’s so beautiful it makes me ache. I feel the same brand of longing I used to get when I rode my bike home at dusk as a kid, past lit kitchen windows, saw the people inside laughing while they set their tables or washed their dishes.

I tap the image. An option to purchase the table pops up. “Fifteen thousand dollars? American dollars?”

“It’s the cheapest one,” Wyn says.

I look up, stunned. “Wyn. Are you buying a fifteen-thousand-dollar table? Here I was freaking out about a coffee-table book, and you’re buying a millionaire’s table?”

“What?” He laughs uncomfortably. “No. Harriet. It’s not—I’m not buying it . . . I made it.”

I stare at him. “You . . .” I look back down to the table, then up at him. “You made this? Or you fixed it?”

Color rises along his cheeks. “I made it. For that home goods store in Bozeman. Juniper and Sage?”

Juniper and Sage. I went once with Wyn’s parents, and Hank joked that we shouldn’t touch any of their vases, because if we broke them, we’d have to mortgage the house.

“They’re selling them on consignment,” Wyn says. “The first two they bought are already gone. I kind of hate that one, and apparently the Bozeman millionaires agree, because it’s been sitting for weeks. But I’ve started doing commissions too. Mostly for people’s summer homes, but I’ve also got this sixty-thousand-dollar order for a resort. I’m getting requests every few days. Tourists want something locally made—I’ll have to hire someone to help soon if it keeps up—and . . . what?”

“Nothing.” I look away, toward the water, bat my eyelashes against the welling emotion.

“Harriet?”

“You’re . . .” I shake my head. “You’re amazing, Wyn. This is amazing.”

The corner of his mouth twitches, his gaze dropping to the water below us. “Yeah, well, turns out that business degree wasn’t a complete waste.”

I flip through the pictures on the home page, and he watches me out of the corner of his eye, like he can’t bear to see it straight on.

A dark walnut table sitting in a sparkling creek, vases filled with prairie coneflowers and common chokecherry and Rocky Mountain penstemon. And then a cedar table with a live edge, sitting in a pine forest, like an altar in a cathedral made of trees.

The photograph sends an imprecise ache through my limbs. To be there, maybe, or maybe to be standing behind the camera with the man who built that table.

“In their natural habitat,” I say.

What I mean is, In your natural habitat.

I think back to those phone calls when he went home to Montana, how even over video, I could see that the colors of Wyn had leached back into him, after months of fading under the fog and drizzle of San Francisco.

“I mean, it’s a table.” He reaches for the phone, but I hold on to it. “No table is worth that much.”

“This one is,” I murmur.

I look up and catch him watching me, a look of raw vulnerability, hope.

“It’s amazing,” I force out. “I didn’t know you were building anything. When did you start?”

He scratches the back of his head. “I started building in San Francisco.”

“You what?” I say.

“The second job I had,” he says. “It wasn’t upholstery. I was apprenticing for a designer.”

In the scheme of things, it’s not a salacious reveal, but it is disorienting. To realize the rift between us began even longer ago than I realized. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I don’t know. I was embarrassed.”

“Embarrassed,” I repeat, like it’s my first introduction to the word. It might as well be. “What could possibly be embarrassing about this?”

“I’ve never been like you,” he says. “I wasn’t brilliant. I wasn’t someone with a ton of goals. I’ve spent my first thirty years tripping through life.”

“That’s not true,” I say.

“Harriet.” He looks at me through his lashes, every variety of green and gray in his eyes on full display in the sunlight reflecting off the water below. “I barely got into college, and I barely graduated. And then I followed you out to San Francisco, and even with a degree, I managed to botch every interview I went to for jobs that would actually pay. If I fucked up the apprenticeship, I didn’t want you to watch it happen. Saying it was another upholstery job took the pressure off, because if I lost it, I could find another.”

My nose burns. I drop my eyes back to the phone, the screen blurring.

“He actually didn’t think I was any good,” he says.

I look up.

“The designer I apprenticed for,” he says. “He said I had no instincts.”

I snort. “What, like you’re some kind of birding dog? What an asshole.”

Wyn smiles faintly. “When I left that job and went home, I was pretty sure I was done even trying. Figured I’d stick with the repairs.”

“What made you change your mind?”

He eases onto the hot metal of the hood beside me. “It’s hard to explain.”

We’re back to the push and pull, the little drips of him and then the droughts that follow.

I’ve never known how to take him in small doses. One taste only ever makes the thirst worse.

“Well, I’m proud of you,” I say thickly, folding my arms, barricading myself from him the same way he’s done to me.

His eyes return to mine. “I could make you one, if you want.”

“A table?” I ask. He nods. “I don’t have that kind of money, Wyn.”

“I know,” he says. “That’s not what I meant.”

“I couldn’t take something like that for free,” I say.

“It’s going really well, Harriet,” he says. “And I hardly have any expenses right now—maybe you’ve heard: I live with my mom?”

I laugh. “I think I remember reading that on TMZ.”

He touches my hand against the hood, and god help me, I turn my palm up to his. I need to hold on to him right now, need to feel the calluses I’ve memorized on his palm.

“I would love to make you one,” he murmurs. “I’ve got time, and I don’t need money.”

Reading my expression, Wyn says, “Or if you don’t want one . . .”

“It’s not that.” I shake my head. “It’s amazing. Seeing you like this. So happy.”

He studies me for a beat before dropping his gaze on a nod. “I am. I’m really happy.”

Now my chest is folding over on itself. “I’m so glad.”

“You too, right?” He matches my gaze.

That seesaw feeling rocks through me. “Yeah,” I say. “Me too.”

“Good,” he says softly.

“Why was Gloria so worried about you telling me this?” I ask.

“Because she thinks we’re still together,” he says, his gaze dark and steady. “She thinks you’re still waiting for me to come back.”

Back to San Francisco.

Back to me.

I’m not waiting. I’ve known for months he wouldn’t be coming back.

So why does hearing it hurt so much?

My phone chimes, and I break eye contact, blinking rapidly as I pull it out, read the new message. “Sabrina,” I tell him thickly, sliding off the hood.

His mouth hitches, an unconvincing quarter smile. “Looks like our time’s up.”

It already was, I think. But the pain, it still feels fresh.