Isla and the Happily Ever After(38)
Author: Stephanie Perkins

When the sunlight streams in through the windows, it’s the happiest morning of my life. We’ve shifted in the early hours, but our legs are still hooked together.

I stare at his adorable, sleep-rumpled hair and his long, lovely spine. I touch the skin of his back with the tip of one finger. He rolls over. He smiles at me languorously. With contentment, I scoot in closer for a kiss. “Mm,” he says. “Is next weekend too soon to do this again? Switzerland. Let’s go to Switzerland.”

“You’ll be in New York next weekend.”

His smile falls.

“Next-next weekend,” I say.

“Deal.” He brushes my hair away from my shoulder, leaving it bare. “So. Tell me. Who’s the better bedmate? Me or Kurt?”

“Kurt, obviously.”

“I knew it.” He kisses my nose and hops from bed. “I’ll be right back.”

“Hand me my phone? I wanna double-check our departure time.”

Josh digs it out from my bag, tosses it to me, and goes into the bathroom. The door shuts. I flip the volume switch from silent to on. The screen illuminates. My heart stops.

“No,” I whisper.

Twenty-nine new messages. Kurt. Nate. Hattie. The school. My parents.

“Josh? Josh!”

The bathroom door bursts open. “What happened? Are you okay?” And then he sees the way I’m clutching my phone. The blood drains from his face.

“No,” he whispers.

I start crying. He tears apart his own backpack, yanks out his phone, and swears at its screen. “Kurt. Nate. My mom, like, a hundred times. My dad.”

I’m sobbing now.

He paces the room. He rakes his scalp with both hands. “It’s okay. It’ll be fine. I’ve messed up before. It’ll be fine.”

“How will it be fine? This’ll go on my record!” My entire college future vanishes. I feel faint. My stomach churns, threatening upheaval.

“No. I’ll take full credit for this. You won’t get in trouble.”

“How won’t I get in trouble? I’m just as here as you are. In Spain.” I scroll through the texts, trying to piece together a timeline of events. But I can’t focus.

I listen to Kurt’s voicemail, and he’s completely freaked out. Hattie was asking around for you, and Nate overheard, and then they noticed that Josh was missing, too, and they came to me, and I had to tell them where you were. I’m sorry, Isla. I had to tell them.

I’m an idiot.

I am such an idiot.

How could I have forgotten about Hattie? She’s the one person that I can always count on to say or do the wrong thing. Of course she’s behind this. And of course Kurt was the one who couldn’t keep his mouth shut.

Josh sinks beside me onto the bed. He places one hand on each side of my face and touches his forehead to mine. “Breathe,” he says. “Breathe. Breathe.”

“I don’t wanna breathe!”

“It’s okay,” he says. “I’ll call the school. You call your parents.”

Everyone is furious with us. Maman screams so loudly that I have to hold the phone away from my head. Josh gets an earful from Nate, and then I force him to call his mom. She won’t pick up, so he leaves a message. He refuses to call his dad, but I insist, so he calls his dad’s security aide instead.

And then he makes me text Kurt and Hattie.

They aren’t furious – they just want to know that we’re okay – but I’m not feeling so charitable towards them. I tell them we’re fine, we’re coming back, the end.

The train ride to Paris is the opposite of the one we took to Barcelona. The sky is sunny, but our car is dark. We hold hands, we don’t let go, but our grasp still feels like that. Like grasping. Like we’re trying to hold on to something that’s slipping away. Neither of us speaks of the thing that we fear is about to happen. I cry, and Josh holds me. It was selfish to think about my problems first. What he’s facing is much, much worse.

Our dread and terror grow. We’re almost back to the dormitory when Josh can’t take it any longer. He pulls me into someone’s private garden. There’s a pair of French students on lounge chairs, smoking clove cigarettes and soaking in the last warm rays of the year. They hardly even blink at us.

“I want you to know that I love you,” Josh says. “And I want to be with you. No matter what happens.”

My eyes fill back with tears. “Don’t say that.”

“It might happen.”

“Don’t say that!”

His shell is cracking. “I love you. Do you still love me?”

“How could you ask me that?” The change in Josh’s demeanour is frightening. It’s as if he could shatter at any moment. “Of course I love you. This hasn’t changed anything.”

“But it was my fault. This whole weekend was my idea.” He’s breathing too fast, and his eyes aren’t focusing. He’s having a panic attack.

“Hey. Hey.” I wrap my arms around him and place my head against his chest. “I wanted to go. It was my decision, too.”

But he can only cling to me. His fingers grip my shoulders so hard that it hurts.

“I love you,” I say quietly. “I have always loved you.”

His heart rate slows. And then again. “What do you mean? Always?”

I pull back to meet his gaze. I hold it, steady. “I mean that you never have to worry about me leaving you, because I’ve been in love with you since our freshman year.”

My confession leaves him stunned.

“There’s no story,” I say. “I saw you one day, and I just knew.”

Josh stares at me. He looks inside of me. And then he kisses me with more passion than he’s ever kissed me with before. It gives us the strength to face our future. It gives us the strength to return to our dorm. And it gives us the strength to knock on Nate’s door.

Unfortunately, Nate doesn’t open it.

Mrs. Wasserstein does.

Chapter nineteen

“I had to catch a flight, and I still beat you here. Outstanding.” Mrs. Wasserstein throws up her hands in anger. Nate stands behind her, tense, a prisoner of his own apartment.

Josh is in shock.

“Do you realize what an inconvenience this is?” she continues. “Being called overseas one week before the election? Do you even care?” Mrs. Wasserstein is petite, much shorter than I’d realized, though you’d never dwell on it. Her presence is huge. She looks as strong as she does on camera, but – in this moment – far more frightening. She sizes me up with hazel eyes that are startlingly familiar. “And you must be Isla.”