Chapter 12
Katie
For the next week, we worked incessantly. Tyler, by now, had devoured over thirty romance novels and, since we “started over”
on Monday, had watched a Hallmark movie every night. I knew this because he’d relayed any and all thoughts he’d had about
the films to me in real time via a constant onslaught of late-night text messages.
Things like, I’m sorry, but liking Christmas is not an entire personality, and Do you think I could, theoretically, cut down a tree?
Or am I too narrow? and Shakespeare can see this, Katherine, and he’s embarrassed for us.
It was easy, honestly, being friends with Tyler again. It was easy, after doing this alone for so long, to have a partner
to write with—to have Tyler to write with. To look up from my laptop and have him right there beside me, lost in the tiny universe we’d built together.
To, when the day ended, rub our eyes and shake out our hands, spackling some pesky little plot hole as we walked those first
few strange and hazy blocks home, waiting for the real world to come back into focus.
Truthfully, when I’d offered Tyler a clean slate, I’d barely thought it through. All I knew was, wherever his mind had wandered
as we lay in that grass, he was not all right. He was suffering—and viscerally. And, to be honest, so was I.
After all, hating Tyler did not come naturally to me. The mere performance of it, the past few weeks, had wiped me out. And I was getting worse at it with every passing day.
You already know this, of course. You could flip through the first dozen or so chapters of this story and pinpoint all the
times I’d let my guard down. I’d laughed when I should’ve frowned. Participated in pointless banter when I should’ve bitten
my tongue. Allowed my gaze to linger on his cotton-cradled and, frankly, very good quad-thigh-hip-dick-region-zone as he stood
in his doorway, half-asleep and biting his bottom lip and staring right back at me.
It was so much work, icing him out. It was so much work, constantly reminding myself why I could never let him back in. I
simply couldn’t have stayed that mad or that sad for another ten weeks. Not if I wanted to be a normal girl, having a normal
summer. To do that, I needed to let go. I needed to move on, to start over. To put the past behind us.
And, so far, it was working—and making our manuscript better. By Wednesday, Tyler and I had turned the storage closet at the
café into a detective wall of sticky notes, scribbled-on maps, and napkins full of chicken-scratched ideas for side characters
and subplots.
By Thursday, we’d ironed out our writing process: Working from our outline, we each took on an alternating chapter, with Tyler writing Henry and me writing Willa.
We followed the beats as best we could, but we also listened to our characters, trying to remain receptive to whatever it was they wanted to do.
In the mornings, while I drafted, Tyler would go back to his previous chapter and review my notes, clean up his sentences, and respond to my bigger-picture comments.
At lunch, after he’d read and marked up my work, we stayed seated and talked everything through.
And then, in the afternoon, we switched, Tyler writing while I tweaked my scenes and updated the outline as needed.
Around four, when he was finished, I’d leave my thoughts on his new pages for the following day while he did research or worked on larger thematic tasks.
By Friday, we were so immersed, so deep in selecting digital paint swatches for a completely fictional bed-and-breakfast,
so mid-argument about whether Henry lost his virginity at fifteen-and-a-half or fifteen-and-three-quarters, that neither of
us realized the sky had gone from blue to violet to black . . . or that Lola was standing at the door, tapping her foot.
“Guys,” she said. “It’s nine o’clock.”
“Shit.” Tyler took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I’m on a roll. I just figured out Henry’s crap with his uncle. Can
we have a few more minutes?”
I was nodding, only half paying attention. Mostly, I was researching claw-foot tubs. We needed—well, sorry, the Inn, the fake
Inn—needed a dozen of them, and wow. So expensive.
“I have plans,” Lola said, tossing us the keys. “Lock up when you’re done. And don’t make me regret this.”
We didn’t answer. We were already back to work: typing, talking, showing each other pictures of bathroom vanities.
Asking questions like, “Could Henry build this?” and “Would Willa want cleaner lines than that, where the backsplash ends?” and “Is this countertop sturdy enough for him to fuck her from behind?” And then, somehow, half an hour became five.
Somehow, it was two o’clock in the morning, and we were still talking.
We were still writing. We were sixty pages in now, ten more than we needed to show Meredith on Tuesday, and our characters were really starting to come to life—to have minds of their own.
We were just typing and typing and going and going, and then Tyler startled.
“Fuck! I completely forgot it was Friday.”
“Well, it was Friday. It’s Saturday now.”
He pulled out his phone and began texting furiously.
“You miss a date or something?” I said.
He didn’t even glance up. “I don’t really date.”
“Of course you don’t.”
Now he looked at me. “Seriously. I just have this thing I do on Fridays, okay? It’s no big deal. I never miss it, that’s all.”
“And what do you do, exactly? Skin small animals? Leave bad reviews on small business’s websites? Bark at people who smile
at you?”
“Oh, it’s much sexier than that.”
“Hmm, wait! Do you separate your laundry into darks and more darks? Do you sit at the laundromat and smolder? Do you scream
if someone else’s white sock gets stuck to yours in the dryer? Do you demand a refund?”
He laughed, then rubbed the back of his neck. “I go to an A.A. meeting,” he said. “And then I eat Chinese food with my friends
where I’m pretty sure the median age is fifty-five, and they all talk shit about me to my face.”
“Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know if you still . . .”
“I do.”
I scrunched my nose. My face was hot. Everything itched. “That’s great. I’m . . . I’m really happy to hear that.”
He closed his laptop. “Will you go with me?”
“To a meeting? Oh, I mean, I don’t . . .”
“No,” he said. “To get Chinese food. It’s Pavlovian. If it’s Friday, and I don’t consume half my weight in fried egg paper, I have to be recalibrated. Doctor’s orders.”
“But it’s the middle of the night.”
He rose to his feet and grinned. “Well, Katherine, it’s a good thing we live in the greatest city in the world.”
We rode the 6 train downtown, which took so long we got off a stop early at Houston, walked up the station’s filthy steps,
and wandered into a completely different world. Bars spilled out onto the sidewalk, voices slurred and loud. New York, all
of a sudden, too close, too drunk, too strange. I’d gone out around here a hundred times, drank myself into a stranger’s lap
more nights than I could possibly count, but it felt different now, with Tyler a half step ahead of me. It felt, suddenly,
distant and foreign and for somebody else. There was a recklessness to it, a temporariness, that I could not remember wanting
even a little bit at all.
Tyler guided me through the swarm, signaling with the crane of his neck and the dart of his eyes when we were about to turn,
swerve, or push our way through a flock of NYU students. Finally, we arrived at Mott Street, and the crowds were gone. SoHo
had turned into Chinatown, and the city had gone silent: shuttered grates, fire escapes, and darkened vertical signs I could
not comprehend. Paper lanterns lined the long-past-midnight sky, flashes of tangerine, fuchsia, and rose.
Nothing appeared to be open, but Tyler kept walking anyway, one block, then another, then the next, until he was holding open an unmarked door.
I ducked under his arm, then followed him up the crowded stairs, down a narrow hall, and through another door until we were standing in a tiny dumpling shop.
Fluorescent lights flickered, and two men in the corner ate quietly, undisturbed.
A woman behind the counter lit up at once, signaling for us to have a seat.
Tyler chose a table by the window, then nodded at the open chair across from him. It wobbled as I slid into it, and the metal
warmed the backs of my knees.
“You a regular here?” I asked.
“I lived down the street after college,” he said, already making little scratches on an order sheet with a too-small pencil.
His forearm flexed, and the scenes on his skin came into focus, inch by inch: A chain-link fence, a winding road, a half dozen
Technicolor characters I was fairly certain were pilgrims from The Canterbury Tales. “Before I got the job at the school uptown. Sometimes, I’d come here and write, usually in the middle of the night. My landlord
told me about it. I don’t always sleep well, and . . .”
“I remember,” I said.
He nodded quietly and then—out of nowhere—proceeded to have a full-blown conversation in not English with that octogenarian in an apron. She smiled at me, said a few more words to Tyler, then left us with a steaming pot of
tea.
“Tyler McNally,” I said. “Tell me you did not just drag me to a Chinese restaurant on the opposite end of the island of Manhattan
so you could show off your fluency in a foreign language.”
He poured me a cup of tea and grinned. “Katie Caruso. There’s not a thing on this earth I could do to impress you. I know
that. Honestly, I just . . .”
I waited for him to finish, but he had fallen silent.
His mouth twitched as he tapped the pencil on the peeling Formica.
Who was this boy? This man? But, in so many ways, I already knew the answer.
Because he was exactly the Tyler I’d been getting to know that first summer—and then again after everything changed between him and Mikey.
When it was just the two of us, silently counting the days in separate directions.
Tyler, away from his old life. Me, toward his new one.
There were weekend trains into the city, bookstores and bakeries and falling asleep on his shoulder to the rattle of the railcar, to the sensation of his fingertips silently learning the curve of my spine as we made our way home.
He was still fidgeting.
“After Mikey died,” he said. I jolted, and he winced. “I’m sorry, I—”
“I really don’t want to talk about it.”
“Me neither. I understand. It’s just—”
“Please, Tyler.” The muscles in my jaw ached. “I was so clear about this. I don’t want an apology. I don’t want an explanation.
I don’t want anything other than to forget all that. To put what happened behind us.”
“All I wanted to say.” He pushed his teacup around as a basket of plump, steaming dumplings hit the table. “Is that there
are very few places on this planet where I don’t feel like everything I’ve ever done is caving in on me. And I don’t know
why, but this is one of them.”
I folded the corner of my napkin over twice, then raised my eyes to meet his again. “And so you brought me here because?”
“Because I think you and I are more alike than—Because I still . . .” He shrugged his shoulders and then exhaled.
“There’s a part of me that thought maybe this place would feel safe for you too.
Sorry if that’s really dumb. Fuck, it sounds really dumb, doesn’t it?
I told you, I can’t miss my meeting, I . . .”
His eyes were so hazel and his eyelashes were so thick and his mouth was so unsure that I didn’t move or speak or smirk or
anything. I was frozen, sitting there, taking him in.
He plopped a dumpling on my plate and said, “Also, the Mandarin.”
I hurled a chopstick at him.
And then we ate everything in front of us, ranked each dish from first to worst, discussed his semester abroad in Shanghai,
and shared a cab uptown as night dripped into morning. By daybreak, I tiptoed through my apartment door, careful not to wake
a snoozing Lola. Careful not to think too hard about the unmistakable flutter in my stomach or how quickly it had spread to
the tips of my fingers and the tops of my toes.