Tropesick

Chapter 62

Katie

After that, we were off to the races. There was no other way to describe it. We were, after the first go-round, absolutely

feral. There was no more sweetness. There was no more timidity. I had been bent over the stove, the sink, each and every one

of those upholstered poufs. I had come in Tyler’s mouth, in his hands, while he pulled my hair, while I filled a just-occurred-to-me

plot hole in our manuscript, while I ate a bowl of cornflakes on his bathroom floor.

By sundown, I could not walk, and we were curled up in bed, channeling whatever we’d done to each other into seven thousand

words of pure erotica—sixty-five hundred of which we’d surely cut from our draft as soon as we emerged from our oxytocin-induced

fever dream and remembered other people were going to read this thing.

“Can I take you to dinner?” Tyler said, kissing my bare shoulder.

I looked up from my screen. “Like, on a real date? A Friday-night date-date?”

He nodded, propped up on a single elbow. His hair, falling onto his forehead. Some ridiculous T. S. Eliot stanza he’d paid

good money to have seared onto his oblique, rising and falling as he breathed.

“What?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said, closing my laptop. “Just thinking about what I’m in the mood for.”

He grinned. And then, just like that, his hands were gliding up my thighs, and I was on top of him, straddling him, giggling.

“Again?” he asked.

“Yes, please.”

“Are you going to get a UTI?”

“Yes, please.”

He laughed, then flipped me over, pinned me down, and pushed himself inside of me. When he hit the edge and groaned, I captured

the sound with the pull of my mouth.

“Fuck, Katherine. I can’t get enough of you.”

“Please,” I said between gasps, kissing him harder. “Please, just never stop.”

We did make it out the door eventually, although by midnight, options were limited to a single sports bar on the other side

of town. We slid into a sticky booth, our hair still wet from a long, steamy shower. A smirking server brought us a couple

of waters as Tyler, underneath the table, clutched my knee.

“Does everyone in this establishment,” he said, “know we’ve been screwing for twelve hours straight?”

“It is very obvious. We’re glowing. I know how hard that must be for you. This public display of humanity.”

He put his head in his hands and groaned. I kicked him in the shin, and he grabbed my bare ankle. Tightly, at first, and then . . .

barely at all. He drew a single swirl on my skin and breathed out, pulling my foot into his lap.

“When I saw you,” he said, “back at the café, that first day . . . I almost turned around. Before you looked up, I got this glimpse of you, and I nearly walked out the door. You were so happy. You were so you. I don’t know how you do it. How you’re still like this. How you’re still so bright.”

I crushed the tip of my straw, biting back a frown as he drew another shape on my shin. I thought of a million things to say.

That I was born this way. That I loved life. That everything happened for a reason. That I’d let all the bad stuff go. But

something else came out. Something unfiltered—something true.

“I’m not,” I said. “My senior year of high school, after we moved . . . I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. Every time I stepped

outside, every time I opened the fridge—there was no color. Everything in my world was gray. I couldn’t make friends. I couldn’t

laugh or read or write. I felt like I was dying. I kept trying to scream, but I didn’t know how. I knew it wouldn’t have mattered

anyway. That nobody would’ve heard me. That nobody would’ve seen.”

Tyler grimaced. His head fell into a slow and gentle nod. His hand was still on my leg. “Did things get better, at least,

when you got to Hunter? When you got out of the house?”

I fiddled with the hem of my dress, only half looking at him. “My parents spent everything they had on Mikey. My college fund,

everything from my grandma . . . It wasn’t much, but when he died, it was all gone. I went where it didn’t cause any trouble

for anyone else. I got that CUNY scholarship—the one that covers room and board. Getting to live in the city was huge for

me. And then Lola was my roommate, and I got the internship at the agency, and it felt like things were finally going my way.

I mean, I felt happy, I looked happy. But, deep down, I think I knew I was pretending. That I’d just gotten really, really good at pretending.”

Tyler was quiet for a minute.

“Is that why you still write for Selma?”

My heart skipped a beat. “What?”

“I just . . . I don’t know. You had all these big dreams when we were kids. Watching you write this summer, watching you write

today . . . There’s this connection between who you are and the words you choose, and you have this voice, and it’s so singular.

I’ve read a hundred of these books now. You’re out-of-this-world good. You know every single person in publishing. Why are

you playing it safe? Why aren’t—”

“I don’t want to write my own books. I’ve told you that.”

Tyler frowned. “Come on. You don’t have to pretend for me. You don’t have to couch your dreams. They’re the same as mine.

They’re not stupid. They’re—”

I closed my eyes. “I just . . . I don’t . . .”

He reached across the table and squeezed my hand twice. “Tell me why you won’t dream big, Katie. Please. You can talk to me.

You can tell me anything.”

Tears streamed down my face. I didn’t look at him when I answered. I focused, instead, on the scuffed laminate on my menu.

On the hand-adjusted price of a half-rack of barbecue ribs.

“Because,” I said, “nobody’s going to catch me if I fall.”

Tyler was quiet for a long time. He thumbed soft, steady circles into the creases of my palm. “Will you let me know?” he said.

“When you’re ready to try?”

I nodded. He squeezed my hand again, then pulled my leg a little deeper into his lap and asked if I wanted a milkshake, if

I’d mind if he checked the score to the ballgame, and, when we got home, if I’d like to go for a swim—and then maybe even

spend the night.

Tyler tossed a giant inflatable swan into Meredith’s glowing pool and looked toward the deep end.

The water, by now, teemed with the kitschy floats we’d found in the shed: a mallard duck, a slice of lemon meringue pie, an orange wedge.

On Tyler’s body was a pair of pin-striped swim trunks—and on his face, a full-blown and incandescent grin. The silver moon hung low and bright.

“So,” he said, “we just jump right in? Like children?”

I reached for his hand. “That’s right. We just jump right in.”

He laughed, and then I swung his arm one, two, three times, counting aloud while I did it, and our feet arched high off the

stone, and that was it. We were in the air, and then we were falling, and then we were beneath the surface. And for a flash,

in that cool, bright aqua—in that soft, silky blue—I opened my eyes and saw nothing but him. The water was whooshing, and

his arms were waving, and his hair was swaying, and his fingertips were grazing mine, and all I wanted was to stop time. To

take a picture, freeze the moment, put it in a frame. To tell every other version of myself to hang on, to not change a thing.

To not regret for a single second locking up my trampled heart, knowing damn well he was the only person on this planet who’d

ever hold the key. To not regret for a single second the way the world stopped when he wrapped his arms around me.

We came up for air. A raft floated by—another citrus slice. This one, lime. Tyler shoved it out of our way, then pushed the

hair out of my eyes. I hooked my legs around his hips, and his face found mine.

It started slow. The tilt of his nose. The tip of my chin. The gentle nudge of his parted lips, coaxing me open. I let out a sigh, and he slid his tongue over mine. I fought back, taking small but sure swipes. He had one hand twisted in my hair and the other holding me tight.

“Katie,” he said. When I opened my eyes, his were already wide.

“Yeah?”

“At the café, that second day . . . Did you hear me?”

“What?”

He traced my cheek as my mind rewound to the earliest chapters of our story. To the way things were before I’d thawed, before

we’d rebuilt what we’d lost.

“It was selfish,” he said. “You’d already asked me to leave. But when I walked out the door, I thought, maybe, if I said it

aloud, it might happen. That maybe, if I put it out there, you’d come back to me.”

“I couldn’t hear you—not really. I was a mess. I heard just a word.”

He walked me to the steps. I was in his lap, and his forehead was pressed against mine. “I said it today, when you were in

my bed. I said it a thousand times, watching you fall apart. I thought maybe you’d heard me. That you already knew.”

I shook my head, replaying our morning. The cottage, a smudge. Our bodies, tangled. Those three words, unraveling me, and

pushing me over the edge.

“Say it for me,” I said. “Say it for me again.”

His mouth found mine.

“There’s only you,” he said. “There’s only you. There’s only you and you and you.”