him. It was cool and still outside, the lights of the far-off lodge reflecting onto the lake, and the stars above us as bright and bountiful as I’d ever seen.
“Our PPOs are asleep—”
“Popeye never sleeps.”
“So we could pop out into the wilderness—”
“Is there actual wilderness at a five-star resort?”
“And get up to no good.” His fingers crept under the waistband of my jeans.
“You’re bold in Canada,” I told him, running my hands up his chest to lock them behind his neck.
“It’s all this fresh air,” he explained.
“But you’re also forgetting that we can get up to a lot of no good right here, without worrying about wild animals.”
“Besides each other,” he teased, lowering his lips to mine. Neither of us said anything else for a long time.
We weren’t the only ones who felt the touring life agreed with us. BuzzFeed wrote an entire listicle called “Here’s Forty-Five Photos of Nick and Bex Eye-Banging All Over Canada,” while People’s website went with the more delicate euphemism “The Look of Love.” When the tour moved west to Vancouver, even British Columbia’s lieutenant governor noted with a wink that we seemed “awfully inspired” by the Great White North. You can see my blush in the photos. Nick had been right: Taking the Duke and Duchess of Clarence Show on the road was a fresh start for our marriage and our jobs.
Our last stop in Canada was at Whistler, which included a trip on the famed gondola that stretches more than two miles between the resort’s peaks. Nick and I had been allowed to ride totally alone in one of the twenty-five-person glass-enclosed pods, gliding a mile high above a perfect canopy of evergreens sparkling in the sun. Below to the left, I saw a bear edging toward a river that snaked down the slope.
“Eleven minutes of heaven,” I said. “This is incredible. A private gondola, this view to ourselves. We are the luckiest people.”
Nick intertwined our fingers. “I have never felt luckier,” he said. Then he scooted so we were touching and nipped at my ear. “On many levels.”
“We shouldn’t miss a second of this view,” I teased. “What if there’s a quiz?”
“Seen one tree, you’ve seen them all,” he said. “But I’ve never fooled around with my wife while dangling from a pod over the earth, and I don’t mind telling you, the danger is very alluring.”
I pretended to pat myself down. “Where is that schedule? I didn’t see a visit to the Mile-High Club on it.”
“Tell me, madam, are they letting anyone else ride this in either direction while we’re here?”
“I don’t believe they are, sir,” I said. “Besides, it sure would be hard to tell what we’re doing in here, if we’re in the right place.”
“So we can investigate the blind spots.” His hand drifted. “For eleven minutes.”
“I dare you,” I purred.
Nick whistled, low and under his breath. “You’re on.”
* * *
Lacey and I had graduated from Cornell in upstate New York, so I’d done Manhattan more than a few times. We would take the long train ride into the city for a weekend spent whipsawing from the Guggenheim to Saks Fifth Avenue to nosebleed seats at Madison Square Garden, to a French bistro she knew Jennifer Aniston frequented, to a subterranean bar whose only sign was made of lightbulbs that spelled out BAR. I took us on the subway and wanted to walk for blocks; Lacey preferred cabs, especially at night, when people would turn their lights on and leave their windows open and we could peek into their apartments and their lives—their dinner parties, their built-in bookshelves, their dying balcony plants, packaged as thirty-second soap operas during the crawl up Tenth Avenue. As the skyline rose up now in front of me and Nick, I felt like I was reuniting with an old friend.
“It’s so lumpy,” was Nick’s poetic take.
“That is not a word I have ever heard used about New York,” I said.
“I just mean, everything along the way is pretty low and flat, and then, boom, all that height. It’s like when you shave your legs and miss an entire knee.”
He tickled mine and I swatted his hand away. I looked out at the city, all tall boxes and stone and steel, peppered with cranes and scaffolding, a city created so much by modernity as opposed to one carved by history that technology simply caught up to without asking permission. So much of our relationship had been Nick opening doors for me—sometimes of literal castles—but this