His hazel eyes slowly lift to my face, blink. “Hi?”

“Do you come here often?”

He studies me for a minute, visibly weighing potential? (possible) replies. “No,” he says finally. “I don’t live here.”

“Oh,” I say, but before I can get out any more, he goes on.

“And even if I did, I have a cat with a lot of medical needs that require specialized care. Makes it hard to get out.”

I frown at just about every part of that sentence. “I’m so sorry,” I recover. “It must be awful to be dealing with all that while also coping with a death.”

His brow crinkles. “A death?”

I wave a hand in a tight circle, gesturing to his getup. “Aren’t you in town for a funeral (a?ceremony honoring someone who has recently died)?”

His mouth presses tight. “I am not.”

“Then what brings you to town?”

“A friend.” His eyes drop to his phone.

“Lives here?” I guess.

“Dragged me,” he corrects. “For vacation.” He says this last word with some disdain.

I roll my eyes. “No way! Away from your cat? With no good excuse except for enjoyment and merrymaking? Are you sure this person can really be called a friend?”

“Less sure every second,” he says without looking up.

He’s not giving me much to work with, but I’m not giving up. “So,” I forge ahead. “What’s this friend like? Hot? Smart? Loaded (very rich)?”

“Short,” he says, still reading. “Loud. Never shuts up. Spills on every single article of clothing either of us wears, has horrible romantic taste, sobs

through those commercials for community college—the ones where the single mom is staying up late at her computer and then, when she falls asleep, her kid drapes a blanket over her shoulders and smiles because he’s so proud of her? What else? Oh, she’s obsessed with shitty dive?(bad) bars that smell like salmonella (a type of bacteria that makes people sick if they eat infected food; an illness caused by this bacteria). I’m afraid to even drink the bottled beer here—have you seen the Yelp reviews for this place?”

“Are you kidding right now?” I ask, crossing my arms over my chest.

“Well,” he says, “salmonella doesn’t have a smell, but yes, Poppy, you are short.”

“Alex!” I swat?(hit) his bicep, breaking character. “I’m trying to help you!”

He rubs?(to move backwards and forwards many times) his arm. “Help me how?”

“I know Sarah broke your heart, but you need to get back out there. And when a hot babe (baby) approaches you at a bar, the number one thing you should not bring up is your codependent relationship with your asshole?(a stupid)?cat.”

“First of all, Flannery O’Connor is not an asshole,” he says. “She’s shy.”

“She’s evil.”

“She just doesn’t like you,” he insists. “You have strong dog energy.”

“All I’ve ever done is try to pet her,” I say. “Why have a pet who doesn’t want to be petted?”

“She wants to be petted,” Alex says. “You just always approach her with this, like, wolfish (wolf) gleam?(an expression of a particular feeling or emotion that shows in sb's eyes) in your eye.”

“I do not.”

“Poppy,” he says. “You approach everything with a wolfish gleam in your eye.”

Just then the bartender approaches with the drink I ordered before I ducked into the bathroom. “Miss?” she says. “Your margarita.” She spins the frosted glass down the bar toward me, and a ping of excited thirst hits the back of my throat as I catch it. I swipe it up so quickly that a fair amount of tequila sloshes over the lip, and with a preternatural and highly practiced speed, Alex jerks my other arm off the bar before it can get liquor?(strong alcoholic drink) splattered on it.

“See? Wolfish gleam,” Alex says quietly, seriously, the way he delivers pretty much every word he ever says to me except on those rare and sacred nights when Weirdo Alex comes out and I get to watch him, like, lie on the floor fake-sobbing into a microphone at karaoke, his sandy hair sticking up in every direction and wrinkly dress shirt coming untucked. Just one hypothetical example. Of something that has exactly happened before.

Alex Nilsen is a study in control. In that tall, broad, permanently slouched and/or pretzel-folded body of his, there’s a surplus of stoicism (the result of being the oldest child of a widower with the most vocal anxiety of anyone I’ve ever met) and a stockpile of repression (the result of a strict religious upbringing in direct opposition to most of his passions; namely, academia), alongside the most truly strange, secretly silly, and intensely softhearted goofball I’ve had the pleasure to know.

I take a sip of the margarita, and a hum of pleasure works its way out of me.

“Dog in a human’s body,” Alex says to himself, then goes back to scrolling on his phone.

I snort my disapproval of his comment and take another sip. “By the way, this margarita is, like, ninety percent tequila. I hope you’re telling those unappeasable Yelp reviewers to shove it. And that this place smells nothing like salmonella.” I chug a little more of my drink as I slide up onto the stool beside him, turning so our knees touch. I like how he always sits like this when we’re out together: his upper body facing the bar, his long legs facing me, like he’s keeping some secret door to himself open just for me. And not a door only to the reserved, never-quite-fully-smiling Alex Nilsen that the rest of the world gets, but a path straight to the weirdo. The Alex who takes these trips with me, year after year, even though he despises flying and change and using any pillow other than the one he sleeps with at home.

I like how, when we go out, he always beelines toward the bar, because he knows I like to sit there, even though he once admitted that every time we do, he stresses out over whether he’s making too much or not enough eye contact with the bartenders.

Truthfully, I like and/or love nearly everything about my best friend, Alex Nilsen, and I want him to be happy, so even if I’ve never particularly liked any of his past love interests—and especially didn’t care for his ex, Sarah—I know it’s up to me to make sure he doesn’t let this most recent heartbreak force him into full hermit status. He’d do—and has done—the same for me, after all.

“So,” I say. “Should we take it from the top again? I’ll be the sexy stranger at the bar and you be your charming self, minus the cat stuff. We’ll get you back in the dating pool in no time.”

He looks up from his phone, nearly smirking. I’ll just call it smirking, because for Alex, this is as close as it gets.

“You mean the stranger who kicks things off?(to begin) with a well-timed ‘Hey, tiger’? I think we might have different ideas of what ‘sexy’ is.”

I spin on my stool,

our knees bump-bumping as I turn away from him and then back, resetting my face into a flirtatious?(behaving in a way that shows a sexual attraction to sb that is not serious) smile. “Did it hurt . . .” I say, “. . . when you fell from heaven?”

He shakes his head. “Poppy, it’s important to me that you know,” he says slowly, “that if I ever do manage to go on another date, it will have absolutely nothing to do with your so-called help.”

I stand, throw back the rest of my drink dramatically, and slap?(hit) the glass onto the bar. “So what do you say we get out of here?”

《People We Meet on Vacation》

by Emily Henry? 從朋友到戀人

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