Happy Again (This is What Happy Looks Like #1.5)(3)
A few weeks after that, Ellie would be starting her senior year of high school, while Graham would be taking off on a worldwide publicity tour for the last movie of the trilogy that had made him a star.
Their lives would be a million miles apart in a million different ways.
Standing there on the beach, Graham had blinked at her a few times. He was already late for his last day on set, and would be leaving right after he finished his final scenes.
“Listen,” he said, clearing his throat. They’d spent the whole night on the beach, and he looked windswept and rumpled, his cheeks a little pink and his eyes a little watery. He didn’t look like a movie star. He looked like someone trying to say good-bye.
“Graham,” Ellie said, and his eyes flicked up to meet hers. “Let’s not do this.”
“What?” he asked with a frown. “Say good-bye?”
“No, I just meant…let’s not make any speeches,” she said, stepping into him so that his arms folded automatically around her. “We already said everything last night. I think now it’s just good-bye.”
He breathed out, ruffling her red hair. “I’m not sure I’m quite finished saying hello yet,” he said, and Ellie couldn’t help herself; she began to cry, sniffling into his shirt, remembering those words from their very first e-mail exchange, which had been sparked by the smallest of typos, unexpectedly connecting two complete strangers across all those many miles.
Somehow, that one mistake—that one missing letter in an e-mail address—had managed to start all this: first, the long correspondence between them; then the arrival of the movie set in Henley, which Ellie later learned had been orchestrated by Graham in an elaborate effort to meet her; and then his appearance on her porch that first night, looking hopeful and uncertain and decidedly unlike a movie star, and her realization that all that time she’d been writing to Graham Larkin.
She stepped back from him now with a wobbly smile. “How about we just go with sayonara then?”
Graham laughed. “Or au revoir.”
“Arrivederci.”
“Hasta la vista, baby,” he said, and then he stepped forward and kissed her again, sending a shiver through her in spite of the warmth of the early-morning sun.
“Good-bye,” he said, and Ellie felt her heart drop.
“Good-bye,” she said, holding his gaze—willing him to stay, wishing things were different—but he spun around and walked back up the beach toward the line of trees, turning only once more to wave before disappearing entirely.
Five
For the first few weeks, it was just like it had been at the beginning.
They wrote to each other at all hours of the day, a frantic, feverish volley of e-mails that felt so urgent, so burning, so exciting, that they could hardly type fast enough.
Only now it was even better. The first time around, Ellie had no idea who was on the other end of all those notes. But this time, she knew the sound of his voice and the exact color of his eyes and the precise shape of his smile. This time, she had memories to go along with the words: the saltiness of that last kiss, the feel of his hand on her hip, the way his hair fell over his eyes.
Sometimes they talked on the phone or texted, of course, and they tried video chatting a few times too. But this whole thing had started with an e-mail exchange, and it just seemed fitting to continue that way. Besides, Ellie found she liked the anticipation of it, waiting to see his name appear in her inbox, each message crafted like a little gift. There was something more thoughtful about it, less hasty and dashed off. They weren’t just chatting; they were corresponding.
Graham wrote to her about the wrap party for the new movie (where his costar, Olivia Brooks, had impulsively decided to launch her singing career, to disastrous effect), and about the tour schedule for the final Top Hat film (which, to his delight, would take him to Paris for the very first time), and about the next project he’d decided on (a modern retelling of Pride and Prejudice, where he’d be playing the Bingley character), so that she knew about these things days before they started leaking into the magazines that Quinn was always reading at lunch.
He told her about how he’d invited his parents over for dinner as soon as he got back, and how his mom had ended up cooking enough meals to last him three weeks while his dad fell asleep on the couch with Wilbur, his pet pig, who was looking very dashing in the lobster bow tie Ellie had sent for him.
When Ellie was away at her poetry course, Graham insisted she send him every single poem she wrote, which she did, a little sheepishly, since some of them were quite obviously about him (particularly the one called “Him”).
Better than Wordsworth was always his response, until one day she’d asked him to name a single Wordsworth poem, and he couldn’t. That’s why you’re better than him, he’d written back, and she couldn’t help laughing.
They mused about when they would see each other again, but Ellie was stuck in high school in a small town in Maine for another year, and once his press tour was over, Graham would be leaving for Vancouver to shoot his next film.
“Any chance his publicity tour will include Henley?” her mom had asked, unhelpfully, one night when she caught Ellie out on the porch swing, staring at the bluish screen of her phone.
“Unlikely,” Ellie told her.
Still, it was fun to imagine.
She took to daydreaming: sitting in a school assembly, wondering what would happen if Graham walked through the double doors of the gymnasium, or ducking through the branches on the way down to the water, picturing him sitting on the rock—their rock—with the ocean at his back and a huge smile, waiting there just for her.