Chapter 40
Tyler
That night, after I’d taken three very long, very cold showers, Meredith found me at the kitchen table, staring at a wall.
My laptop was open, but I’d sort of forgotten how to use it.
“Tyler?” she said. “You all right?”
I made a weird noise.
She laughed. “Is Katie out?”
I nodded. A couple of hours ago, Katie and I’d begun to loosely draft the handful of scenes leading up to our first kiss when
a calendar alert on her phone dinged. She froze at once, then explained she needed to go into town for some “videoconference-planning-meeting
thing” for her mother. Right then and there, I knew it was for the foundation, and was forced to remember where Mikey was
and why his mother’s nonprofit did the work that it did and why I’d spent the last eight years running from what I’d done.
Meredith took a seat across from me. “Are you working on your manuscript?”
I blew out a breath. “Yours, actually. Henry and Willa, they’re supposed to kiss soon. Katie wants it at our midpoint. She
says that Henry needs to just do it—to just try. Any scene. Any time. That Willa’s scared, but she wants it. That Henry’s
all she thinks about. We worked on the lead-up all day, but I still can’t see it. I don’t think I’m ever going to get the
moment right.”
Meredith reached for the outline. A minute later, she set it back down.
“I think Katie is correct,” she said. “The tension is certainly adequate. If you drag this on much longer, your readers may
begin to skim. The past forty pages, really, have been a bit frustrating. I understand you’re writing a slow burn, and that
finding space in the narrative for all this characterization is difficult when you’re writing two points of view, but you
must deliver eventually. It’s time to give the readers what they want. What they bought the book for.”
“But what if Henry’s not ready?” I said. “What if he ruins everything? What if it’s just like everything else he thought he
wanted? What if he kisses her and changes his mind? And what about the landscape architect? I know Willa didn’t go on the
boat, but she didn’t exactly come back to the Inn two nights early either. That guy’s still hovering. He’s not going to disappear
just because Henry leans over and kisses her. It could take ten thousand words to get her out of that situation. I don’t have
enough pages! He’s going to destroy my pacing!”
Meredith chuckled. “You have to believe that this time, Tyler, it’s going to be different. You have to believe that this time,
when you—”
“You mean Henry.”
“Yes,” she said. “My apologies. Henry. Henry has to believe that what he has with Willa, it’s not going to be like what he’s had with the other girls.
And, more importantly, Henry needs to believe the story he’s telling himself about himself might be just that: a story.
A false narrative, a core misconception.
Do you know that story? Take a day off and learn it.
Because it’s the lies our characters tell themselves where internal conflicts really brew.
Eventually, Henry is going to have to try something new.
He’s going to have to trust that he can do this—that he can be a different kind of man now.
Otherwise, there’s no change. And when there’s no change, there’s no story. ”
I scratched a few notes onto the outline. Illegible chunks of thought. Henry. Willa. Different. Story. Those sorts of things.
“So, you think he should kiss her?”
Meredith laughed again. “Yes, Tyler. I think he should kiss her. As soon as possible.”
“And the other guy? The landscape architect?”
Meredith rose to her feet.
“Plot device,” she said. “Nothing you can’t handle.”
On Thursday, Katie and I made dinner together as usual. By this point, we’d bumbled through a dozen of Ina’s recipes: roasted
vegetable lasagna, fifteen-minute lemon capellini, easy tomato soup with grilled cheese croutons. Every night, we absolutely
trashed the kitchen, and every night, Katie spent at least two-thirds of the hour sitting on the counter, yapping about musicals,
taking breaks only to lick a balsamic reduction off a wooden spoon or tell me my chiffonnade sucked. She also insisted on
subjecting each meal we—well, I—cooked to a full-blown photo shoot, mini ring light and portable tripod for her phone and
all.
Tonight, we’d done another entree from Cooking with Jeffrey: roasted salmon tacos, but with cod instead because Katie thought salmon in a taco was gross.
“What are you going to do with all these pictures, anyway?” I said as she repositioned a sprig of cilantro on her plate for the thousandth time. “Blackmail me?”
“Exactly.” She snapped a few more photos and then signaled me outside. The sun was setting behind us, brushstrokes of rose
dissolving into a soft blue sky. “Grumpy man proven to be human. Can tell the difference between household and finishing vinegar.
No longer qualified to weigh in on human suffering or teach children about Mark Twain.”
I chuckled as we made our way onto the sand. “I don’t even do American fiction. That’s seventh grade. In sixth, there’s this
whole Greek Festival the curriculum’s built around. Mostly, we write a ton of five-paragraph essays, and then the kids read
The Odyssey, or at least pretend to, and then they write their own deranged Greek monologues they deliver in togas in front of their
parents, who are all billionaires. It’s actually really cute.”
Katie laughed. Her feet were already buried, and that last bit of day was shining off the shoreline. “How’d you end up there,
anyway? At such a fancy school?”
“I don’t know. I needed a job after college. I was doing the whole restaurant thing at the very beginning, thinking that would
give me more time to write, but I was too tired to function by the time I got home. I had this roommate senior year of college—he’s
from the city. He went there, and his parents are pretty big donors. I’d gone up to his town house for dinner a couple of
years ago, and they were hiring. I guess they were trying to make the school younger and cooler. That, and a bunch of teachers
were fired after a college admissions scandal. So I guess they were like, yeah, we’ll hire the sad, tattooed boy, he seems
incorruptible. And now, here I am.”
“Shaping the minds of the next Sophocles.”
I grinned at that. “You know, Sophocles actually took character development in playwriting to a whole new level. What he did
with Oedipus, no one had ever really done that before. He—”
“Holy shit, Tyler. You are absolutely insufferable.”
I grinned again. The sun had disappeared behind us, and the sky had been bewitched by that medium-blue twilight. “Yeah? Well,
just so you know, so are you. You remain to be the most annoying, outrageous, inexplicably absurd thing I’ve ever seen. With
your highlighters and your heart-shaped sticky notes and your seven hundred different colors of glitter pens and the fact
that you never wear any clothes.”
“These are clothes!” She pointed to the gauzy linen shirt she was wearing as a dress. It was sheer, unbuttoned past her sternum,
and riding up her thighs. Underneath it, still, was today’s bathing suit: hot pink, and criminally small. I remembered the
taste of her stomach on my tongue. Of that second summer, turning me inside out. “Would you like me to wear more clothes?”
I stared straight out toward the water. We were always saying things like that, then staring straight out toward the water.
But this had to be it, right here—the closest we’d come. We were playing with fire.
“Didn’t say that, did I?”
Katie inhaled. My heart was racing, and my stomach was upside down. I took a deep breath and—carefully, so carefully—pressed
my bare knee against hers.
She inhaled again but did not move hers back.
We were touching.
Katie took a long sip of her water. I bit down on my bottom lip. We kept our eyes fixed on that horizon, and we were very, very quiet. It was just the waves crashing and the breeze blowing and the sand swirling and the two of us, alone together, eleven summers later, saying nothing at all.
I reached for her hand.
I started at the bottom—at her wrist. I charted it. The skin, the bone, the ripples, the ridges. I traced every tendon, every
vein, and then, when her fingers curled into a perfect little fist, I wrapped my hand around it and squeezed twice. She was
shaking.
I said nothing.
We were still silent, still staring out into that safe and endless sea.
I unlocked her hand, then turned her palm over. I explored it, soft and slow. I drew circles and squares and stars, ran my
fingers along the creases of her skin, over the stories we’d buried beneath them, and a current tore through me, clearing
at once the dull rust that clung to my eroded heart lines.
“What are you doing?” she said. Her words came out in a squeak, but she did not move her knee. I did not let go of her hand.
“Trying to get you back. Trying to fix what I fucked up when I was nineteen.”
She breathed in again. I was still holding her hand. Tracing her knuckles. Intertwining my fingers with her trembling fist.
“I’m still seeing Danny,” she said. “He asked me to be his girlfriend, and . . .”
“Danny,” I said, “is ridiculous.”
“Funny,” she said, even though her voice stayed strained.
Even though her fingers were shuddering in my working hand.
I was playing with her ring now, sliding it up and down, and blood was coursing through me, rushing to my head and my heart and between my legs, and I had to breathe to stop myself from pulling her onto me right then and there, from saying all the things I’d wanted to tell her when she was still mine, from showing her all the things I should’ve shown her when we were still kids, like how it felt to see the world through her eyes, to see lightness again, to fall asleep to the glow of her window knowing some sliver of this life must’ve been worth waking up for because there she was, listening, holding me, forgiving me.
“He said the exact same thing about you.”
I laughed, and then, for a little while, we were quiet. We just stared out into the ocean, and I touched her. I breathed,
and I touched her, and time stood still.
“Don’t go to Montauk,” I said. “Let me take you somewhere. Spend the weekend with me. Please.”
She pulled back her hand. But not before she’d whispered, “Okay.”