Chapter 30
Katie
Writer’s block lifted, Tyler and I settled into a new routine in West Egg. In the mornings, we’d bike into town to grab iced
coffees and twenty-dollar bagel sandwiches. From there, we’d do a little location scouting as suggested by Meredith via note
card left on the kitchen counter. A park or pond, or once even, a produce market that sold fifty-dollar half-pints of chicken
salad to nannies in Bridgehampton. After our research was complete, we’d head back to the house, set up shop on the veranda,
and begin drafting. Tyler in a pair of basketball shorts, me in a good-for-tanning-and-thus-very-small bathing suit or, if
my shoulders were getting too much sun, a giant T-shirt and yet another itty-bitty bathing suit bottom.
Around lunchtime, Meredith would bring us a chilled carafe of iced tea and a tray of sandwiches: arugula and prosciutto or
curried chicken salad or thick-cut heirloom tomato and crisped bacon. We’d do exactly what we did at the café—go back and
forth, talk everything over, throw ideas onto sticky notes, and then stick our tongues out at each other—while the sun rose
higher and higher over the terrace, the hedges, the loud-but-hidden sea.
In the evenings, Tyler and I would make dinner together, still talking shop.
There were seemingly endless little things to iron out, and keeping the story alive even as our laptops clicked shut made the following day’s writing that much easier.
The words practically poured onto the page.
Even our edits were light now. On Wednesday, for example, I literally had no notes for Tyler.
He had written—fuck him, he was so fucking talented—a perfect chapter in which Henry, post-bickering with Willa about spending too much money on designer paint, stayed up all night slathering the walls of the Inn’s detached honeymoon suite with her favorite hundred-dollars-a-gallon shade of crisp linen.
And sure, there was a part of me that wanted to tear our schedule in half, to jump into the ocean, to go to whatever Gwyneth
Paltrow–sanctioned pop-up was hiding behind the humble facade of a Main Street boutique, but our progress was too delicate
to disrupt, and we both knew it. We had found magic again, and could not afford to let it slip away.
And so, those first few days of our own forced proximity, we stayed the course. We wrote, and we ate, and we talked, and at
night—after Tyler had gone into town to do a virtual meeting and I’d used the landline in my sitting room to check in with
Danny, Lola, Selma, and my mother—we’d crawl into our respective beds and walkie-talkie each other about fictional nonsense
until we’d both run out of things to say.
Sometimes, my light flicked out first, and sometimes, his. But no matter what, Tyler was always the last to whisper good night.
It was Thursday afternoon when Meredith, gardening gloves still on, walked toward us with a heaping pile of lavender clippings
in her arms. Tyler pushed his laptop back a few inches.
“Meredith, hi,” he said, shaking out his hands.
I did the same, stretching my fingers and flexing my wrists.
“We’ll have the new chapters ready for you soon.
Sorry about the delay, but everything’s”—a quick flash of hazel, of that soft and easy smile—“flowing again now. I’ll print the pages before I head back to the city tomorrow afternoon. ”
“The city?” she said.
“We don’t write on the weekends,” I said, remembering where I’d left things with Danny last night. He was up to his eyeballs
in contracts, some massive land-lease thing in Ohio, but he was doing everything he could to get out to Montauk for the weekend.
We’ll see, he’d said, as if trying to let me down easy. We’ll see, I’d repeated back to him as if trying to prove he could
let me down. “We’re trying not to burn out, and . . .”
A little bit of moisture gathered along the lines of Tyler’s throat, his forearms, his fists. That raven tattooed onto the
tight swell of his biceps, slick and shimmering and peeking out from the lazy sleeve of an old, soft T-shirt. I imagined pushing
it up an inch, tracing what I found behind it. All those warm, familiar slopes and new, uncharted edges. All those—
“It’s the Hamptons, Tyler,” Meredith said, and I nearly jolted. I also wiped my mouth. “You should stay. Relax. Read. Swim.
Henry grew up here, after all. He took his first steps on these beaches. Wander the backstreets—see the town. Learn it. Learn
him.”
“I really don’t want to outstay my welcome. I’ll come back first thing Monday if—”
“There are a lot of very pretty girls who want to see Tyler,” I said, right back in the game. “And they all live in Manhattan.”
“That’s not true. I—”
“They’re models,” I said. “They love his tattoos. They—”
Tyler kicked me in the shin. Like, very weakly.
“Ow!” I squeaked.
Meredith smirked, and then, before she turned away, said, “I’ll leave you a few fresh towels, Tyler. Just in case you decide
to stay.”