Chapter 34
Katie
Saturday morning, I called Lola from the curb of a coffee shop walking distance from Danny’s rental. My head was pounding,
and my skin didn’t feel quite like my own. My Friday night—a melted blur of sunset in the pool, of warm, wet whiskey burning
my throat and widening my eyes, of this bar and that lounge and then calling it off, calling a car, and crawling quietly and
alone into Danny’s empty bed.
“I don’t get it, Katie,” she said as Juniper yapped in the background about celebratory, fourth-round-of-interviews pancakes.
“What are you even doing there? Go back to Meredith’s. Go figure this shit out with Tyler.”
“I like Danny,” I said, tipping my head against a street sign. Swallowing the churn in my stomach back down. “I’m just not
feeling well, that’s all. But he checks all my boxes. Really.”
“Huh? Checks what boxes? You sound insane. You sound, like, thirty. I know you’re protecting yourself, but this isn’t healthy.
The way you pick men—it’s like a punishment. They’re all exactly the same, and you wear them like costumes. Like shields.
Like you’ve got something to prove.”
I poked at an ice cube in my cold brew, which I’d yet to sip. “It’s just . . .”
“He doesn’t even know about your brother.
Or your shit with your mom or anything. That’s not normal.
How are you going to explain the gala you’re planning?
How are you going to introduce him to your parents?
Are you just going to bring him and be like, surprise, my brother’s dead, and my mom acts like he was the second coming of Jesus, do you want the chicken or the beef, do you want to meet the junior senator from the great state of New York? ”
“I know, I know.”
Lola sighed. “Does he even know half the story about you and Tyler? That you guys grew up together? That you guys had a thing?”
“We did not have a thing,” I said, closing my eyes. A strike of memory: Tyler’s mouth on my ribs, his breath on my skin, my
heart in his hands. Lace, sliding down my hips. His body, hovering over mine. Soon, he said, drawing careful swirls down the slopes of my stomach. So, so soon. I could not stop touching him. “And, um, no. No.”
She was quiet for a moment.
“You’re twenty-five years old,” she said. “You write literal bodice rippers for a living. Don’t you want to be with somebody
who sees you? Don’t you want to feel like your soul’s on fire? Like your heart’s going to explode?”