Page 75 of What Happens in Amsterdam

“Please. You were so chill, it took me ages to realize you liked me back.”

He holds a hand to his heart in faux shock. “Me, chill? My seventeen-year-old self didn’t know the meaning of the word.” Now his hand finds mine, tracing along my knuckles, inching up my wrist. “There was something special about it, wasn’t there? Sharing all those firsts the way we did.”

“Stumbling through them, sometimes,” I say, all my senses attuned to his fingertips. “Like the time we were fooling around in my car, and you smacked your head on the roof of it. I was so worried you had a concussion, even though you had zero symptoms, and I was going to have to explain to my parents that you got it from trying to take off my bra with your teeth.”

“Suave, I was not.” His hazel eyes turn soft, crinkling at the edges. “But you still stopped at a grocery store for a bag of frozen peas.”

We sat in a park like this one until curfew, Wouter’s head in my lap, me holding the makeshift ice pack to his forehead, feeling for a bump that wasn’t there.

“I think my hand went numb,” I say, laughing. I never thought I’d have the chance to do this kind of reminiscing with him, and it’s healing something inside me I didn’t realize needed closure.

“We had a couple disasters, yes, but I like to think we figured it out.”

And we did, didn’t we? For a while, we had something so precious. Maybe it ended in heartbreak, but the memories are still there, and finally knowing the truth about the breakup repaints them all with the rosiest lens.

He brings his hand to my shoulder, fingertips flirting with the edges of my hair. I lean into him—not overthinking, just accepting this kind of simple, tender touch for what it is. Now that he can be open about how he feels, he’s letting out everything he’s kept lockedaway. I close my eyes at the sensation, lost in thought while a beautiful man braids his fingers through my hair.

In so many ways, I still don’t know what I’m doing here. I was supposed to find a new job, but I can’t picture being stuck in another one of those corporate offices. I don’t know what I want, but it’s not that.

Burnout, he called it at the STRAAT Museum, and it seemed foreign to me. Probably I thought you had to be settled in a career to feel burned out, that you needed to have some kind of fire beneath you when all I had were a few sparks. I don’t think he was wrong, though—between the job I didn’t love and the constant yearning for more, my utter exhaustion and my stay in the psych ward…all of it added up to something that’s only now becoming clear.

“I guess it just feels like I’ve never found my footing. A perpetual late bloomer.” I glance up at him. “Is there a similar phrase in Dutch?”

“It’s the same, actually. Laatbloeier.” He considers this for a moment. “I get it. I can’t decide if I’m too old for my body or if I’m something of a laatbloeier, too. Or maybe I bloomed, but not in the right way. Not in a way that my younger self, the self that you knew in LA, would be very thrilled with, I don’t think.”

“Then change,” I say, as though it’s so easy. As though it didn’t take me stumbling halfway across the world to learn I was capable of it. “It’s not too late. I promise.”

It’s only when we fall into a companionable silence that I realize he called me “lief” when no one else was around. I looked it up after Culemborg. “Sweetheart,” “darling”—that’s what it means.

Scattered raindrops have started falling, and some people are packing up their stuff. I’m not used to putting my insecurities on display like this. Even Jace didn’t know much about my hospitalization or the residual miracle-baby anxiety.

We said this was going to be casual, but that doesn’t account for all the truths I’ve already spilled to him. All the things I’ve never been able to share with anyone else.

I squint up at the clouds. “Should we get back on our bikes, or—”

It’s at that moment the sky opens up, unleashing a torrent of rain unlike any I’ve seen before.

People shriek as they snatch up their belongings and head for shelter. We jump to our feet, Wouter collecting the blanket and stuffing it into his backpack.

“You okay to ride back in the rain?”

The ground is soggy beneath my feet, and even though I’m already soaked, I’m not in any rush to leave.

I tilt my face toward the sky, letting the rain wash over me. “In a minute?” I ask, and he laughs.

His hair is already slicked back in a way that makes me want to run my tongue from the hollow of his throat down to his navel. Rain dots his glasses, but I can still tell he’s watching me as the downpour renders my thin T-shirt absolutely useless.

The pure yearning in his expression is enough to undo me. I can’t resist—I crush myself against him, tipping up my head to catch his lips.

I don’t think it’s closure at all. It’s something else, something scarier, and yet I can’t help running straight toward it.

His mouth is wet and wanting. If I’m shivering, I’m not sure if it’s from the weather or fromhim, the way he clutches my soaking body to his, the rumble in his throat sounding like thunder. I can’t see with the rain in my face, but it doesn’t matter—all I need to do is feel.

I don’t know how long he kisses me there, urgent and unafraid.

“What do you think?” I ask when the rain starts to let up. He’s still holding me by the waist, both of us breathless. “Should wekeep biking, or…” I hook a thumb to one of his belt loops, hoping my intention in theoris clear.

A shake of his head. A crooked smile. “What I want right now,” he says, fingertips splayed on my hips, “is to go home and fuck my wife.”

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