Chapter 45
Katie
I could not get inside the fucking house. There were more than a dozen doors on the terrace—each one, glass and huge and dark
and locked. I tried half of them again, shaking, pounding, screaming while Tyler, from a safe fifteen feet away, wearing nothing
but his boxer briefs, shouted my name again and again, dripping in salt water from Meredith’s zillion-dollar pool.
“Katie, stop! Please, just listen to me! Just—”
“It won’t fucking open!” I said, but not to him. Not to anyone. The rain, by now, was a full-on thunderstorm: squalls, lightning,
and hot, wet wind. I had to get away from him. I had to get away from him now.
“Katie! It’s not what you think!”
I didn’t even turn around. Instead, I ran—no shoes, no phone, no fucking underwear—across the veranda and through the garden,
past the waterlogged lavender and the gushing birdbaths and the rain-drenched, whooshing hedges until I’d reached the eastern
side of the house.
The door to the fitness center, locked.
The window to the pottery studio, bolted.
The slider off the sculpture room, sealed.
The rest of the house was no different. The front door was shuttered.
The delivery entrance to the catering kitchen, jammed.
I hugged my body and raced toward the gate.
If I could just get out of here, just get back to Fowler Street, I could figure something out.
But right as I rounded the driveway, a boom. A blast.
Darkness had turned to pitch-black.
The power had gone out, and there was only the sound of the pummeling rain. Of the howling wind. Of Tyler, calling out from
across the driveway. I ran up to the gate, knowing it was no use. The motion detector would not respond, and I didn’t have
an emergency key. I had a key to the walk gate, but it was at Danny’s, in Montauk, in my goddamn overnight bag. I couldn’t
jump the fence—it was easily twelve feet tall.
“I just need your key! Just give me your key to the gate! Please!”
Tyler was maybe thirty feet away. He jogged closer, but only by a few yards. “I don’t have it! It’s in the kitchen! I left
it on Meredith’s counter. I was—I was going to leave!”
I didn’t even bother to respond. Of course he was going to leave. That was all he knew how to do. Leave. No, instead, in this
complete and utter darkness, in this hot and sudden downpour, I simply wrapped my fists around the warm, wet metal of Meredith’s
gate and screamed. I screamed for what had happened when I was a freshman in high school, and then again when I was a sophomore,
and then again when I was a junior, and then again for every year and day and hour and minute that had passed since. And I
screamed because all the growth, all the progress, all the concessions and pep talks and diary entries and New Year’s resolutions
and fresh starts and boys kissed and men fucked had amounted to nothing. To absolutely nothing. Because here I was, eleven
years later, falling apart because Tyler McNally still didn’t want me.
I slumped down onto the muddied gravel and put my head in my hands. I was stuck there—drenched and hardly dressed and wholly frozen in front of the only man on this planet who knew how to snap me in half.
A dampened crunch of footsteps grew louder, despite the rain. I lifted my head. Through the howl of the storm, a hint of him:
a frown, a half-floating hand.
“We should go back to the cottage,” he said.
I looked away. “I really just need to leave. I can wait. The power will go back on, and then the gate will open, or Meredith
will wake up, or—”
Just when I’d said it, thunder roared. This time, so loud the earth shook. A second later, lightning—and so close that, for
a blink, it lit the sky: Tyler, hands on his head, soaking wet, a mess of olive and ink. The house, a skeleton of brown shingles
and bright white as a wild bolt of electric blue cracked across a hundred panes of fogged-up glass.
“Katie,” he said as the earth began to rumble again. The sky seared white. “We have to get inside. Come on, it’s not funny.
It’s seriously not safe.”
“No. I—”
More thunder. More lightning. I tipped my head back and hugged my hands around my knees. Tyler, suddenly, leaped toward me.
“Get off the fucking gate, Katie! Get up! It’s metal!”
“I . . .”
He yanked me up by my drooping arms, looked me right in the eye—wind slashing the sky, our hair, our skin—and said, “I cannot
leave you out here,” then threw me over his shoulder and—the gutters surging, the garden a river, the pool deck as dark and
loud as the ocean itself—raced back to the cottage, whose door he’d left unlocked.
He latched it behind us and set me down on what must have been tile—hard and cool. A moment later, he fumbled for something, maybe under a sink or in a cabinet, I wasn’t entirely sure. And then, a strike of light. He’d lit a match.
At first, it was only him that was illuminated. The glow of his face, furrowed and frowning but oddly calm. Then a candle,
and then another. The cottage, revealing itself in a slow and gilded haze. A shag rug, a queen-size bed, a fireplace, a kitchenette
with a bistro table and two tiny chairs.
Tyler disappeared for a moment. When he returned, he handed me a towel—his face, unwavering. Sober. I watched him. I watched
him in the warm blur of that cottage. I watched him dig through his backpack, pull out a T-shirt and a pair of boxer briefs,
then set them on the foot of his bed. I watched him light the fireplace, fill the kettle, and start the stove. I watched him
fiddle with a transistor radio—an artifact, I realized, he must’ve been using to listen to the goddamn Mets—and tune it until
the weather report garbled on.
He did all this without stopping, without drying himself off, without throwing on a shirt. And when he handed me a mug of
tea, when Tyler McNally—the boy who’d broken my heart a thousand times, the boy who’d toyed with me and teased me and tortured
me since the day I was born—handed me a mug of chamomile fucking tea, that was when I finally began to cry.
Tyler grimaced, then pushed down his shoulders. I was standing at the foot of his bed.
“You should get some sleep,” he said. “The storm isn’t supposed to let up until the morning.”
I nodded, wiping my face dry. I turned away and slid on his underwear, then dropped the straps of my dress beneath my arms and tugged his shirt over my head. It was warm and soft and smelled just like him, and it only made my tears come back with a vengeance.
I kept my back turned, careful to stifle the sounds of my sobs as I, sideways and with my head down, crawled under his covers.
Another soft and perfect thing that smelled just like him—like two-in-one shampoo and rough, clean skin.
A full-blown choke of tears came out of me then. I shattered into his pillow, my spine shaking, my body quaking. I stayed
like this for a long while—five, ten minutes—falling apart. I did not know how he passed the time.
When I was done, when I had nothing left inside, I rolled over and opened my eyes. Tyler was dressed and rearranging a series
of upholstered poufs in a row. There was no sofa. There was not even an armchair. There was only the four-poster I was in,
the two little dining chairs by the window, and those three glorified stools. Tufted linen and square and probably five-thousand
dollars each but stools all the same.
I raised my head an inch.
“There’s just one bed, isn’t there?”
“Obviously,” he said.
And then it happened. I couldn’t help myself.
I burst into laughter, and the tears came back too, and I could not stop any of it: the hot, wet rush of salt storming down my face, the heaves of sheer ridiculousness escaping my stomach.
It was all so absurd. The kiss, the storm, the keys, the cottage.
That every last trope in our story was taunting us.
That every scene we’d written, every watershed moment and throwaway detail and stolen glance, seemed to come back for us—seemed to play out like pages of a frame story in our hands.
Tyler set his mug down on the kitchen table. “I hate it when you cry.”
“Then stop making me cry.”
He frowned, taking a few steps closer. “Katie,” he said. “I’m scared.”
I sat up against the headboard. “About what?”
“About the way you make me feel. About sex, and . . . I’ve never done this before. I’ve never been with . . .”
“Tyler,” I said. “You are not a virgin. You slept with, like, half our high school. You are not going to convince me you didn’t
have sex with Marissa or Ashley or Maya or . . .”
He shook his head. He was standing very still. “No, I did. It’s not that. It’s more that I’ve never . . .” An inhale. An exhale.
All six feet and two inches of him, scrunched up, and the smallest he’d ever seemed. “I haven’t been with the same girl twice.
Not in years.”
“What? What do you mean?”
He turned away. Something cracked open just above my rib cage. Something softened.
“Tyler,” I repeated. “Please tell me what you mean.”
“Exactly what you think I mean.” His back was still turned. “After I sleep with someone, I lose interest. I get physically
ill—nauseous, cold. It’s been like this my whole life.”
“Even when you were in college? All those girls—and you never had a girlfriend? Or something casual? With any of those models,
or another teacher at your school?”
He shrugged. Or at least, the back of his shoulders did. That was all I had of him right now. A mop of still-damp hair, a pair of gray sweatpants. A body that showed every sign of curated toughness, but held little, if any, at all.
His next few sentences came out in a squeak. “I don’t know how to connect. I don’t know how to make it anything more than
sex. When I finish, I’m just done. The feelings are gone, and then I leave, and everyone is upset, and I can’t stop it, and
I can’t do that to you. I couldn’t do it to you when we were teenagers, and I can’t do it to you now.”
I wiped the tears from my eyes. My chest, aching. My brain, reeling, rearranging his words, attempting to connect them with
all the memories I’d filed as irrefutable evidence of why I needed to stay the hell away.
“Come here,” I said.
He turned around, everything he’d just told me written across his frowning face. “I can’t get in bed with you, Katie. I’ll
kiss you, and then I won’t be able to stop myself, and—”
“We’re not going to have sex, you moron. We’re going to cuddle.”
“I don’t know how to, um . . .”
“To cuddle?” I tapped the bed again. “You almost railed me in our boss’s pool. You told me you wanted me to fuck your face.
The least you could do is get into this bed and let me play with your hair.”
He let out a sort of half laugh, then hung his head. “I don’t want you to think I don’t want you. That I can’t take care of
you. That I can’t do all those things I said I’d do to you. That I’m less of a man, or . . .”
“I don’t think that.”
He looked up. “You don’t?”
“No,” I said. “I think you’re more.”
“Really?”
I blotted my eyes and then pointed to the mattress. “Yes, really. Now come on—get in here. Come be my little spoon.”
He hooked his hands behind his neck. And then he took a long, deep breath, walked over to me, crawled under the covers, and—so,
so tentatively—curled his body into mine. I pulled the sheets to our shoulders and wrapped my arms around him, and I could
feel his every inhale through his shuddering spine. I nuzzled my nose into the nape of his neck, slid my fingers underneath
his shirt, and began to trace the hunch of his back, the curves of his muscles, the constellation of his bones. My hands were
shaking, and those flames were flickering, and the rain was pounding on the roof, and every pitter-patter was in sync with
the beating of our broken, buzzing hearts.
“I really want to do this,” he whispered. “I just don’t know how.”
“That’s okay. I can show you.”