One last weekend to save us

*This one came from a hot desert night and the ache of a goodbye that hasn't happened yet. Thanks for reading. I hope it stings a little.*

The flight from Denver got in at one in the afternoon and the shuttle to the resort took another forty minutes, so by the time I dragged my suitcase across the lobby of the Hotel Bel Azur I had been awake for eleven hours and my deodorant had given up somewhere over Arizona. It was 103 degrees outside. The front doors were open to the desert and the air conditioning inside was fighting a losing war against it, and the whole place smelled like sunscreen and bougainvillea.

Iris Hernandez, 28 years old, receptionist at a dental office in Aurora, and I had been on a plane since 6 a.m. to attend the wedding of my cousin Samantha to a man I had met exactly four times. You know how it is when a wedding is the reason for the trip but not really the reason for the trip.

The real reason for the trip was standing at the pool bar in a white linen shirt with the sleeves rolled up, wearing a sunburn the color of the salmon they were probably serving at cocktail hour.

Colt Laurent, 30, architect, the man I had been dating long-distance for a year and a half, had not seen me yet. He was talking to a bald guy in a Tommy Bahama shirt, and he had a beer in one hand and his phone in the other, and he looked so much like himself that something in my chest unclenched for the first time in weeks. That is the thing about him nobody tells you. Colt does not look like much in photos. In person he is all shoulders and forearms and this way of tilting his head when he listens to you.

I came up behind him and said, "You're already burned and it's day one."

He turned around and the smile he gave me was the full one, the one he usually saved for when I said something dumb. "Iris." He set the beer down and hugged me, and he held on a beat longer than a hug for a guy you see every couple months needed to. He smelled like coconut sunscreen, and I noticed his shirt had a wet spot on the shoulder from where he had leaned against a lounge chair.

"Hi," I said into his chest.

"Hey, you made it. How was the flight?"

"Long. There was a toddler who screamed the entire time, like a fire alarm with legs. And my row mate ate sunflower seeds and spat the shells into a cup, which, fine, but the cup was full."

"That's disgusting," he said, and steered me toward an empty cabana. "Sit, sit. Have you had water? You look like beef jerky."

"Thank you, that's very romantic."

"I mean it as a compliment. Beef jerky is a delicacy." He flagged down the bartender and ordered me a spiked seltzer without asking what kind, because he had been doing that for a year and a half and had never once gotten it wrong.

The bald guy in Tommy Bahama came over and Colt introduced him as Dexter's uncle Rick, who shook my hand and told me I should try the mahi mahi at dinner, and then mercifully left. I settled into the lounge chair and pulled off my sandals and let my feet touch the hot concrete, which hurt in a way that felt honest.

"Where's your room?" Colt asked.

"Paloma 4. Samantha put me right next to the pool, so I hope you like hearing drunk women scream at two in the morning."

"I've slept next to a construction site for three years, I'll be fine."

"Your sunburn looks painful."

"It is painful. I fell asleep by the pool this morning like an idiot. Dexter wanted to do a sunrise round of golf, which I said no to, but then I came out here at eight to read and just, out like a light."

I looked at him over the rim of my seltzer. "How long until you leave? Actual numbers."

He did that head tilt. "Ten days. Flight is on the twenty-second."

Singapore. The word sat between us on the little table next to the chips. He had gotten the offer in March, a firm over there, more money than either of us said out loud to other people, and I had done the math on a Visa and my job and my apartment and my dental office with its four hygienists and its fish tank, and none of the math had come out right yet. That was in March. It was now October and the math had not improved.

"We're not doing this tonight," he said, but not in a mean way. "Tonight is cocktails and bad dancing. We do this Sunday."

"Fine by me."

Cocktail hour was at six in the courtyard, under strings of lights that nobody had turned on yet because the sun was still up and hammering. Samantha had commissioned the whole thing, turquoise linens and little succulents in pots for favors and a signature cocktail with jalapeno in it that I tried and did not finish. I wore the green dress I bought specifically for this weekend, the one that cost too much, and Colt wore the linen shirt again because I told him before we left that he should, and he had packed it on the top of his bag where I could see it, which was his way of being sweet without saying anything.

The courtyard was full of people I did not know, Dexter's enormous family from Baton Rouge and Samantha's coworkers from her firm, and a table of Colt's college friends who all greeted him with the same two-armed bro hug. I held onto his elbow through most of it, doing the smile and nod thing, and around seven I got separated from him by a stampede of women going to look at the ballroom.

That is how I ended up standing by the guacamole station next to Samantha's mother, Aunt Carol, who was holding a wine glass by the stem and talking to a woman I did not recognize, some friend of hers from the church. I was not trying to eavesdrop. There was just nowhere to go, the guacamole had me cornered.

"The receptionist," Aunt Carol was saying. "The one in his office. Very pretty, from what Dexter says."

"You're kidding."

"I'm not. And who could blame him, honestly? Because where is this going with the boyfriend? Dexter told Sam that Colt signed the papers last month. Singapore, for three years at least. And she's not going. So what is she going to do, wait?"

The church friend made a low sound. "Long distance never works past a year. Everybody knows that."

"Eighteen months for those two, and he's leaving in ten days. Ten. I give it till Christmas, and then he'll be free and she'll be free and everyone can stop pretending."

I want to tell you that I did something graceful, that I stepped out from behind the guacamole and said something cutting and dignified. What I actually did was eat two chips very slowly and then walk to the far side of the courtyard, where the lights had finally come on, and stand there with my back to everyone and watch the pool turn that fake postcard turquoise it turns at dusk.

She is not wrong, is the thing. That was what stuck in me, that it wasn't even gossip, it was just the math again, coming out of somebody else's mouth. Wait. Everybody knows that. Aunt Carol did not invent that opinion, she had just said it out loud at a party, the way you say two plus two.

Colt found me there about ten minutes later. I felt him come up beside me before I saw him, that warm shoulder near mine.

"There you are. Dexter wants to do toasts, and Samantha is looking for you specifically, she said and I quote, where is my maid of honor, I don't have one, but where is Iris."

"Fun crowd in there," I said.

He looked at my face and stopped with the joke. "What happened?"

"Nothing. Aunt Carol happened. It's fine, it's cocktail hour, everyone talks." I turned and looked up at him, at the sunburn peeling a little at his nose, and I decided something right then that I did not fully understand yet. "Colt, do you want to skip the toasts? Just for a bit. Walk with me."

"Right now?"

"Right now. Before the dancing and the mahi mahi and all of it. Just walk with me by the pool for ten minutes."

He set his drink down on the nearest table without a word about it, which for Colt was practically a yes with a bow on top.

We walked the long way around the pool, past the cabanas where the staff had stacked the lounge chairs for the night, and I told him what Aunt Carol said, mostly all of it, including the part about Christmas. I left out the bit about the pretty receptionist in his office, not because I was protecting him but because I was protecting me, I did not want to watch his face while he answered it.

Colt listened all the way through, hands in his pockets, and then he stopped walking near the deep end and looked at the water instead of me. "You know what the stupid part is," he said. "I've been having that same conversation with myself since I got the offer. Every day on the site, every night in the hotel, I run the math. And the math always comes out the same way."

"Which is what."

"Which is that I'm asking you to give up three years of your life for a maybe. Or I'm giving up the maybe to stay, and then in five years you're a receptionist in Aurora who could have gone anywhere, and you resent me for it, and honestly Iris, some nights I think that's what we're doing already. Holding the door for each other. Standing in it so nobody gets to walk through."

"That is the dumbest thing you've ever said, and you once told me Brutalism was romantic." My voice came out louder than I wanted and a cabana guy looked over, so I lowered it. "I have a job, Colt. I answer phones for four hygienists and feed a fish. I'm not some museum piece you're afraid to move in case it ruins the composition."

"You know that's not what I mean."

"Then say what you mean, because the thing you're actually saying is that you already decided we're over and you're just waiting for me to agree so it isn't your fault."

That landed. He turned away from the pool and faced me fully, and his jaw was doing the thing it does when he is working up to something. "I'm scared, okay? There it is. I'm thirty years old, I'm terrified, and I have spent seven months being good at this from four hundred miles away, and the second I'm in a room with you I remember that I actually love you and I have no plan for that."

Somewhere behind us the courtyard speaker started playing the toast music, which meant Dexter was up there doing his thing, and we both ignored it. I was aware of everything at once, the cicadas, the chlorine smell, the heat still coming up off the concrete at nine at night like the ground itself was angry.

"So what do we do," I said, quieter. "Tell me a plan. You're the architect, draw me something."

"I don't have one. I have ten days and a signed paper and I don't have one." He rubbed his eyes with the heel of his hand, and the sunburn there looked painful. "And I'm sorry, because I promised myself this weekend I would not be this guy, I would just be present, and here I am."

We stood there and I thought about the fish tank at work, how every morning the biggest fish presses his face against the glass at the same time, like he remembers the store. Then I said, "Take me upstairs. Not to talk. I'm done talking for tonight, I've been awake for fifteen hours and I'm tired of being reasonable."

He blinked. "Iris."

"Colt. Paloma 4. Come on."

The walk across the parking lot felt longer than the shuttle ride had, and in the elevator he stood next to me and did not touch me, and the not touching was almost worse than the fight. My room had two double beds because Samantha had booked the block before she knew anyone was bringing anyone, which now felt like a metaphor somebody smarter than me could use. Colt shut the door and leaned against it and looked at me across all that hotel carpet.

"I don't want to leave you," he said. "That's the whole thing. Everything else is noise."

"Then don't. Tonight, I mean. Don't leave the room tonight."

"Nobody's asking me to."

"I'm asking you to."

He crossed the room fast then, and he took my face in both hands, careful of his sunburned forearms, and he asked, "Yes?" like it was still a question even after all that, and I said yes, and then his mouth was hot and desperate on mine and I grabbed two fistfuls of the linen shirt I had told him to pack. We got the green dress off in the doorway without breaking the kiss much, which is harder than it sounds and cost me a popped strap I fixed later with a safety pin from the sewing kit. He walked me backwards to the bed nearest the window and laid me down and followed, all long limbs and still too many clothes.

"I missed you," he said into my neck. "God, I missed you, the phone is nothing, the phone is a rumor of you."

"Then shut up and be here."

He was here. I got his shirt off and my hands flat on his back, that familiar topography, the ridge of spine and the places his ribs flare, and he got my bra off with the small grunty struggle that always makes me laugh even in the middle of everything, and I laughed and he laughed against my collarbone and then it wasn't funny anymore, it was hungry, it was the kind of where-have-you-been hungry that doesn't leave room for style. He went down on me with the patience he never has anywhere else in his life, slow and thorough, his fingers and his mouth working until I had a fist in his hair and my hips off the mattress, and I came with my hand over my own mouth because the walls at the Hotel Bel Azur are not that thick and there was a