“How about,” I say, “you buy me a bottle of water and we go paddleboarding?”
“Sounds like a plan,” he agrees.
HENRY AND I head down a winding path off the other side of the whitewater center and come upon a river shore, where we rent stand-up paddleboards. Most people have paddled out a bit from the shore and stopped, but there’s a wide-open river in front of us (“Just don’t go past the bridge,” our guide said), and I push through the water past the crowd.
We paddle, hard, almost all the way to the bridge, and I take in a deep breath of clean air. I stop and get onto my knees, then lean back, lying down with my knees bent and my shoulder sticky against the board. Henry sinks down onto his board next to me, sitting up straight with his feet dangling off his board in the water. I stare up at the sky, so blue and endless.
“I had forgotten,” Henry says after a minute.
“Hmm?” I respond.
“What you’re actually like. It’s been a while. Chicago, maybe?”
“Yeah,” I answer icily. “And whose fault is that?”
“Mine, clearly,” he answers without conviction.
It sits there between us, his bullshit and my distance, until I can’t take it. “What’s wrong with you?” I ask, my voice neutral.
“Can you be more specific?”
“You tell me in Chicago that you desperately want to burn this show down to be with me, and then what? You panic? You get a slap on the wrist and fall in line?”
“I’ve been working here for twelve years. My relationship with the 1 is the longest of my life.” He floats there a moment more before he says, “It’s hot. I’m getting in.”
He slides off his board, the water covering him up to his chest. We both have on life jackets, so he floats to the top, putting his elbows up on his board.
“So, what were you like before the show?” I ask.
“I feel like you’re interviewing me.”
“Then impress me.”
“I don’t know.” He splashes me lightly, and I splash him back. “You know what I’m like.”
“Manipulative, withholding, and kind of a dick?”
Henry laughs. “Sure.” He tilts his head back, his black hair getting wet and sticking to his forehead. “I transferred after my first year in school, out to the East Coast. Thought the change of scenery would do me some good.”
I glance at him over my shoulder. “You don’t really strike me as the East Coast type.”
He sighs, almost says something, and stops. “I went back home eventually,” he says. “Obviously. Everything after that was kind of an accident. I wasn’t trying for any of it. It just happened to me.”
“And you let it,” I continue. Sweat is rolling down my back, and I work so hard to keep myself focused. There’s something that feels dangerous about falling too deep into Henry’s words. That’s where I keep getting lost. I love hearing him talk to me, and I love hearing myself talk back to him.
“I let it. I didn’t—or at least, not on purpose. I kind of stopped trying to steer the car anymore.”
“And you wound up here,” I finish for him.
He flattens his forearms and sets his chin on them, watching me. “Guess so.”
With the heat and the intensity of his gaze, I find myself wanting to escape. I clumsily fall into the water myself, releasing the straps of my lifejacket and diving under, coming back up quickly and pushing my hair out of my face.
“Why’d you pick this place anyway?” I ask, paddling back over to my board.
“Because of what you said on that date with Marcus,” he says as if it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “You said being outside and hiking made you feel like a person again.”
It shocks me, the effect the words have on me. The memory of it, the idea, in that moment, that I exist, that I am not a character on a show, but a real, alive person who thinks and feels and hurts, almost takes my breath away. I exist. I exist. My stupid heart almost bursts open in that moment, and entirely without my permission, a gasp escapes me as if the last few weeks are spilling out, me barely holding back a flood of tears. I put my hand to my chest and push the rest back in. Henry stares out over the bridge behind us, leaving me in a moment of privacy. It’s too intimate.
I swallow the lump in my throat, wait until I’m sure I can speak rationally again. “You have to quit the show.”
He absorbs the words. “I don’t think you get it,” he says. The simplicity of this scene feels wrong, two people floating out on SUP boards in the shadow of an overpass in the quiet of a Carolina fall, the opposite of the 1 with its extravagant settings and inane platitudes. “I wish I could quit the show for you. Make a big grand gesture.”
“Oh, fuck off,” I say. “I don’t even mean to do it for me. Do that shit for yourself.”
His eyes pierce mine. “And then what?”
“You figure out how to be happy,” I say, pulling myself up on the board and pulling my knees into my chest, drying myself in the sun. He doesn’t say anything.
We sit there like that, in silence. After a while, I stand back up on my board and paddle over to a secluded beach cove, lying back in the sun, life jacket off, waiting to dry. Henry follows me, sits next to me, the sun shining off his skin, sunglasses over his face, just slightly behind me. I think about him like that so often, a hidden smile playing at his lips.
“Can I ask you a question?” Henry asks. I don’t answer, so he says, “What’s going on here?”
“I don’t know,” I say. I train my gaze on a cloud covering the sun, squinting up at it, thinking if there’s some easy summary of this. “I’ve always been a little too much for most well-adjusted people. I really fucking want to succeed, but more than that, I want to be seen as successful, and that’s what drove me. And when I’m not, I turn to men and alcohol, and sometimes, it all feels like a vicious cycle.”
“And I’m what?” he asks. “The alcohol? The men? Or the cycle?”
“I think I’m in love with you,” I tell him. I glance over at him. “Or something like that? I think you’re in love with me, too, only maybe you’re not? I don’t know, you turn it off and on like a light switch.”
