I Should Have Known better

I should have known better than to go on my honeymoon by myself.

That's what I told the woman at the gate agent counter, half-laughing, half-sobbing, when she asked if I was okay. She had the kind of face that had seen a lot of crying travelers and had learned to say nothing and just slide the tissue box two inches closer. I took one. I didn't stop crying.

It wasn't the crying you do because your heart is broken. I want to be clear about that, because for a long time I thought that's exactly what it was, and I was wrong about almost everything else that week, so I might as well start by being right about this one thing. It was the crying you do when you're leaving something you built with your own hands, brick by brick, over seven days, and you agreed — you agreed — that it wouldn't survive the flight home.

Three weeks before that, I was standing at the end of an aisle in a dress that cost more than my first car, watching Michael not show up.

He didn't leave a note. He left a voicemail, which felt worse somehow, like he couldn't even commit to the effort of putting it in writing. Something about how he'd met someone — a woman named Crystal, who I would later learn worked at a club called Platinum Dolls, which is a detail I share not to be cruel but because I think it matters that even his affair had a stage name. He was sorry. He hoped I'd understand. He hoped, and I remember this specific sentence because I played it back so many times I could recite it in my sleep, that I'd still "get some use out of the honeymoon."

The honeymoon. Eight nights in Tulum, paid for, nonrefundable, sitting there like a wound that hadn't decided whether to heal or fester.

I don't know what made me go. Spite, probably, at first. Some version of I paid for this trip and I am going to lie on that beach if it kills me. My sister offered to come. My mother offered to come. I said no to both of them, because some small, stubborn, humiliated part of me needed to prove I could survive something alone, even something as absurd as a honeymoon for one.

I did not expect John Logan to be waiting at the resort's front desk when I checked in.

John was Michael's best man. Had been his best friend since they were nine years old and John pulled him out of the deep end of a public pool because Michael, who could not swim, had jumped in to impress a girl. John had given a speech at the rehearsal dinner that made my grandmother cry. John was, in the specific and unhelpful way I'd never let myself think too hard about, the better version of the man I was supposed to marry. Steadier. Quieter. He remembered things — my coffee order, the name of my childhood dog, the fact that I hated when people finished my sentences even when they got it right.

"He gave me the ticket," John said, before I could ask. He looked like he wanted the floor to open up. "Two days ago. He said — " and here John stopped, because I think even he understood that whatever Michael had said wasn't going to sound good in the retelling. "He said he didn't want it to go to waste. He asked me to check on you."

I should have told him to go home. I had eight nights and a plane ticket and every right to spend them alone, wallowing, eating my body weight in guacamole, and no obligation to entertain the best man's guilt trip. Instead I said, "There's a bar by the pool. Buy me a drink and we'll call it even."

I want to tell you I resisted for days. I didn't. It took one drink. Maybe one and a half.

It was the margaritas, I told myself, later, and told him, and told the ceiling of my hotel room at two in the morning like it was a confession I owed to God. It was the margaritas talking when I looked at John Logan across a table with sand still on his ankles and thought, clear as a bell beneath all that tequila, I have wanted this for years and never once let myself say so.

I said "fuck it" out loud. I remember that part precisely, because he laughed, surprised, like he hadn't expected me to say it first.

I won't walk you through all eight nights. Some things are worth writing down and some things are worth keeping exactly where they happened, which is, I suppose, the entire irony of what came next. But I'll tell you this: it was not what I expected grief to feel like. It felt like being unearthed. Like some version of myself that had been sitting quietly under a very heavy rock for a very long time finally got the chance to stand up and stretch.

On the fifth night, lying on his chest, listening to the ocean do whatever the ocean does at 3 a.m. in Tulum, I asked him — carefully, like it might break — how long.

"How long what," he said, though I think he knew.

"How long have you—" I didn't finish it. I never finished it. I let him choose which ending to give me.

"Longer than I should have," he said. "Longer than was fair to anyone. Including you. Especially you."

That was the closest either of us came, that whole week, to saying the actual thing. Instead, on the last night, sitting on the balcony with the last two mini bottles from the minibar, we made a pact. It felt very adult at the time. Very mature. This stays here. This was Mexico, and grief, and tequila, and two people who loved the same absent man in very different ways, colliding under a very forgiving sun. Real life had rent to pay and a canceled wedding to explain to three hundred confused guests and a mother who was going to need at least four phone calls to process any of this. Real life did not have room for whatever this was.

I agreed to the pact. I want to be honest and say I meant it when I said it. I even meant it the next morning, packing my suitcase, folding a dress I would probably never wear again because I'd worn it the night he first kissed me and I didn't trust myself around it yet.

I meant it all the way until I got to the gate.

That's where the crying started. Not because I was sad the trip was over — though I was — but because somewhere between the shuttle and security, I understood, with the kind of clarity that only shows up when it's deeply inconvenient, that I did not want it to stay in Mexico. I wanted it to come home with me. I wanted him to come home with me. And I had already agreed, out loud, with my own mouth, that I wouldn't ask for that.

So I sat at gate 14, crying into a tissue from a stranger, mourning something I had personally signed the terms of.

I didn't hear him approach. I heard him clear his throat, the way he always did when he was nervous, a habit I'd apparently catalogued without meaning to.

"I know we said what happens in Mexico stays in Mexico," John said.

I looked up. He had his boarding pass crumpled in one hand like he'd been holding it too tight for too long.

"But when we get back," he said, "can I buy you a drink?"

I laughed. It came out wet and ugly and completely involuntary, the kind of laugh that arrives before you've decided whether the situation is funny or devastating. Maybe it was both. He was standing there, best man, best friend, the boy who pulled a drowning nine-year-old out of a pool and had apparently been quietly saving people ever since, asking me out for a drink like we hadn't already spent a week learning every version of each other that a person can learn.

"That's it?" I said. "After everything, you're asking me on a date?"

"I'm asking you to start over," he said. "The normal way. The way where I don't have to feel guilty about how it began."

I should have known better than to go on my honeymoon by myself.

I should have known better than to fall for the best man while my almost-husband was three thousand miles away learning what a private dance costs.

I should have known better than to agree to a pact I didn't actually want to keep.

But sitting there at gate 14, mascara ruined, stranger's tissue in my fist, I thought maybe I'd known exactly what I was doing the whole time. Maybe some part of me packed that suitcase already hoping for this. Maybe the honeymoon was never really about Michael at all.

"Yeah," I said. "You can buy me a drink."

He sat down next to me, right there at the gate, and neither of us moved when they called our boarding group. We let it go by; now that we were traveling together, there was no rush.