Page 8 of What Happens in Amsterdam

Time has only been unkind to him in the way his hair is thinning in the back. I can’t help wondering if he’s self-conscious about it, but it doesn’t seem to have affected his confidence. There’s an ease to him I’m instantly jealous of, long legs spread as he leans back in his chair.

It’s the cruelest thing he could do—have the nerve to look this good, thiscomfortable, after all these years.

My parents had always wanted to host a foreign exchange student, loved the idea of learning from them as much as they’d be learning from us. When I was seventeen and Phoebe was in college, they filled out all the applications and attended all the seminars, and then they were matched with a student from the Netherlands.

Wouter and I were the same age, and he immediately struck me as different from the boys I went to school with. Older, somehow. I tried to imagine living in the same place Van Gogh, Rembrandt, and Vermeer once did, captivated by all that creative energy in such a small country. The sheer amount of independence he’d grown up with floored me; he traveled everywhere by bike and had for years, often alone and never with a helmet. My parents couldn’t get over that part, no matter how many times Wouter told them that’s just how it was in the Netherlands.

The more time we spent together, the more I realized my feelings were deeper than simply finding him interesting. I couldn’t stop thinking about his messy hair and soft accent and ink-smudged hands. His shirt hem would brush mine as we passed each other in the hall, and my heart would leap into my throat. I’d doze off on the couch in the middle of my homework, and he’d drape a blanket over me. It was torture, the fact that he was sleeping in the room across from mine, only a few feet away. Off-limits.

But I swore I’d never act on it. My parents would have grounded me until I was sixty, and I assumed Wouter didn’t want to jeopardize his program by hooking up with his host parents’ daughter. And yet—those feelings didn’t go away. I wore my shortest shorts around the house, took him to my favorite places in LA, stayed up late watching movies with him. If we couldn’t be together, I reasoned, then at least we could be inseparable.

One December evening when he was studying and no one else was home, I knocked on the door of his room. There were doodles in the margins of his notes. A sunset. A knight on horseback. “Do me,” I said, summoning all my courage as I stood next to his desk, presenting my arm. He blushed, tapped the pen on his chin a few times before lowering it. The tip skated over my skin from freckle to freckle, curved lines forming the swell of the ocean. A ballpoint blue tidal wave.

“What do you think?” he asked as I gazed down at it. He was still touching me, his thumb moving in circles on my palm, and I was done for. The rest of the night unfolded in dizzy snapshots: my hand on his jaw, his fingertips skimming up my bare legs. We kissed until the garage door rumbled beneath us, and when I got into bed that night, I clutched my tattooed forearm close to my chest.

I knew we shouldn’t—but for the next six months, we did.

“Wow,” he says again now, after the server drops off a couple beers. “How are you doing? Aside from the crash, of course.” His English still has that slight Dutch accent, giving his words round edges.

My stomach twists with long-buried frustration. Before he left LA, we’d made a plan. In all our starry-eyed optimism, we thought we’d do long-distance until we could reunite. Maybe I’d study abroad or he would, or we’d spend summer and winter breaks together. The geography was inconvenient, but we were determined to figure it out.

Then, a few days after he got home, enough time for the jet lag to settle his brain, he sent me the too-short text that sliced my life into a Before and After.

Now that I’m back, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking, and I’m just not sure it’s going to work. I need to be with someone who has a little more ambition. I’m so sorry. Thanks for everything.

As though thanking me somehow made it okay. I’d be so touched by his politeness I’d forget what he was really saying.

Thanks for everything.

Six months of secrecy, and he didn’t even have the guts for a phone call—I tried and tried, and he never picked up. He couldn’t say it to my fucking face, which must have meant I didn’t matter to him the way he mattered to me.

The heartbreak was a vicious, all-consuming thing. I remember bursting into Phoebe’s dorm room at USC, tears dripping down my face, and she swaddled me in a blanket and slowly rocked me back and forth until I stopped crying.

I vowed I’d never let someone else control my emotions that way again. By the first week of school, I was dating a JV soccer playerI’d dumped by homecoming because I could sense him losing interest. To this day, I’ve always been the one to end a relationship before the other person can decide they’re through with me. Anything to prevent feeling that hollow.

Wouter took the coward’s way out—but he was exactly right. He was the one with all the ambition, buoyed by his parents’ high expectations, while for my parents, sometimes it seemed like it was enough that I was alive. No pressure to achieve, a shrug andyou’ll do better next timewhen I got the occasional B-minus. I flitted from hobby to hobby and all they did was smile and clap.

I was adrift, and most days it feels like I haven’t changed at all.

“I’m…yeah.” Apparently, that’s the best way to describe it. How do you catch up with someone when it’s been that long? When they were this vital part of your life and then they were suddenly just…gone? I clear my throat and try again. “The past couple weeks have been interesting.”

“You said you’re here for work?”

With a nod, I readjust the ice pack. “I’m a UX designer at a fintech startup.”

“What are the odds you’d end up in Amsterdam after all this time?” His initial excitement has worn off, replaced by something fidgety. Whenever his hands used to twitch in his lap the way they’re doing now, I thought it was because he didn’t have them wrapped around a Faber-Castell. Now I’m wondering if it’s because he realizes how untidy our ending was.

Two baskets arrive at the table, and Wouter seems thrilled to have something to do. He gestures to the fried balls of dough in one of them. “Traditional Dutch snacks. Bitterballen, and these are kaasstengels—cheese sticks. I hope you like fried food.” Then something seems to occur to him. “But you always preferred sweets, right? I can order—”

“This is fine.” Even though it’s true that I’d rather have dessertat any time of day, it’s almost unsettling that he remembers this about me. He should have forfeited his right to those details, however trivial, the moment he decided it was over.

I bite into one of the bitterballen, and though it nearly burns my tongue, it’s so good I don’t care. Savory and warm with the perfect crunch. He nudges a small cup of mustard my way, and the next bite is even better, even if it’s underscored by an awkward silence.

“I have to admit, I’ve spent all these years thinking you’d come at me with an axe if we ever saw each other again,” he says.

“Nope, just a bike.”

A groan mixes with a laugh as he pushes a hand into his forehead, jostling his glasses. “I was seventeen and an idiot. I would have deserved it.”

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