Page 100 of What Happens in Amsterdam

“Maybe a little. Sometimes,” I say with a half smile. “The one thing I’m certain of is that you’re the person I want next to me while I’m figuring it all out. No lies, no rules, no contracts. Just you.”

He told me I was brave. I finally feel like I am.

His eyes flutter shut as he takes all of this in. I watch his chest rise and fall, this beautiful man who showed me we could be vulnerable together. “I know I fucked up once,” he says, pulling me closer with the hand that’s holding mine, “but Dani…I’m not going to let myself lose you this time. I’d stand in front of a moving vehicle if it meant keeping you from getting hurt, I swear to you. Maybe it’s ridiculous to feel this way after less than six months, but god, I don’t know what my life was until you came in and painted it neon. I know this marriage was never supposed to be real, but you’re it for me.” His other hand is on my waist now. His mouth hovering above mine, his nose nudging my cheek. “I think you always have been.”

When he kisses me, there are thirteen years of yearning poured into it. Teenage firsts and misguided texts and the cosmic coincidence of finding our way here after all this time. The swish of the water beneath us and the ever-presentplinkof bicycles.

I breathe him in, and it feels like coming home.

Wouter. Home. At some point, the two became inexorably entwined.

“You fucking ruin me,” he says in a choked voice. A tear slips down his cheek, and I reach to catch it on my thumb. “You ruined me when we were seventeen, and then somehow I got lucky enough to get ruined by you again.”

“Lucky,” I repeat, the word thick in my throat. The next time I kiss him, I taste salt, and then he’s the one carefully swiping at my tears.

“Danika. Dani. I want to paint your face over and over. Learn all the curves of your body so I can try to do them justice. I want to know everything that drives you wild, all the things I can do to get you to scream my name. And then I want to wake up and make you breakfast. I want to know what you like on your pancakes, and I want to make sure there’s always enough sugar for your tea. I want our whole lives to be too much, because that’s how I feel when I’m with you. I want to make art together—messy, imperfect art.” He strokes the ring on my finger. “I think I love being married to you.”

“Ik hou van jou,” I say, and the look on his face could light up the whole sky on a cloudy day. After all this time, it’s that simple, isn’t it? I run my hand up his rough cheek and into his hair. “Ik hou van jou.”

He surprises me when he shakes his head.

“Am I saying it wrong?”

“No, no,” he says. “It’s just—it’s not enough, I don’t think. Maybe…ik hou het meest van jou. ‘I love you the most.’ ” Another soft slide of his mouth against mine. “Because I do. The absolute most.”

I repeat the words, committing them to memory as he kisses me again and again. I say them when he takes me back to his apartment,ourapartment, where we don’t come up for air for hours. I say them when we fall asleep together and the moment we wake up, love-dazed and drunk on each other.

I say them, and I say them, and I say them.

This isn’t our hazy, romantic daydream from long ago, those wishes we made when we thought we had all the time in the world to keep wishing—it’s something entirely new. Cozy and true and glowing with warmth.

Gezellig.

Epilogue

“…and if you takea look at these houses, you can see that a lot of them are tilting slightly forward,” I say, motioning to the row lining the Spiegelgracht. “Most of these used to belong to merchants who lived on the top floors and worked downstairs. They had hooks attached to the tops of the houses so they could bring up their goods with a pulley system, and the houses were built this way so that those goods didn’t smack into the building on the way up. And over the years, the leaning got more and more dramatic until we have…this.”

“They’re beautiful,” says an American tourist with short blond hair. “Is the pulley system still used today?”

“Actually, yes,” I say. “Although most of the time, they use elevators, but you can always tell when someone’s moving house because there will be an electric contraption out front. When you have incredibly narrow stairs and no elevator inside the building, you have to get creative. And that’s really where the Dutch have excelled, in everything from architecture to water management.”

The blond American leans back against her husband, a gingerguy who looks strikingly familiar—a little like this actor from a werewolf TV show I watched years and years ago. Probably just a coincidence.

In the off season, when it’s chillier out on the water, my tours aren’t always full. Six months after I accepted this job, I still love going to work in the morning. Every day, I get to see this awe on people’s faces, and I don’t think there’s anything that could fill me up in quite the same way.

“Where in the US are you from?” the American asks, and when I tell her LA, she and her husband exchange a grin.

“Small world,” he says. “We’ve spent quite a bit of time there—I lived in Los Feliz for over a decade.”

The woman nods, giving his hand a squeeze. “And I flew back and forth between LA and Seattle before we realized Seattle was a better fit for our personalities.”

“You’d probably be able to handle the weather here easier than I did at the beginning,” I say with a laugh, and then gesture to the gray clouds above us. “We’re going to be drenched in about ten minutes.”

When the guy triumphantly holds up an umbrella to show that they’re prepared, I’m almost certain it’s him. I wonder if there’s a casual way I can ask for a photo. “What brought you to Amsterdam?” he asks.

This question comes up on just about every tour, and my answer is always the same:

“I fell in love,” I say.

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