Chapter 76
Tyler
I woke up to Katie crawling into my arms. My sheets were drenched in sweat, and the sun was high and bright.
“Katie?” I said, pulling her closer. I slipped my hand beneath the shirt she’d borrowed, expecting cotton, but found something
different—something stretchy and hers—instead. “What’s wrong? What time is it?”
No answer. Just her, burrowing into me.
“Katie,” I said again. “What’s going on? Why—Why didn’t my alarm go off?”
She took a long and strained inhale. “I told my mom about us.”
For a split second, I let go of her. “Wh-what? When?”
“I went to the city this morning,” she said. “It’s almost two. I turned off your alarm—you were tossing and turning all night.
I wanted you to get some sleep. I thought if I told her about us, tomorrow would be easier for you and you wouldn’t be so
nervous. That maybe everything would be okay.”
My stomach was upside down. I wanted to scream. I wanted to ask what the hell she was thinking. I wanted to shout that I’d
had a plan, that I wasn’t a coward, that I was about to tell her everything. That I knew better than to let tomorrow come
down to a goddamn miscommunication trope. But instead, I held her tighter. Instead, I let her continue.
“After we moved,” she said, “my parents stopped talking about you. It was like you never existed. The pictures, everything—they were all just gone. But everything was gone, you know? Everything was about Mikey and nothing else. I never told them we were together that summer. My mom knows. I’m not sure how.
But I never told them anything. Not that we kissed or how you left because .
. . because I thought you’d come back, and I didn’t want them to know how much you’d hurt me.
I didn’t want them to think you weren’t good. ”
I grimaced, but my hands did not betray me. Instead, they drew her closer.
Katie rolled over to face me. Her eyes were so red, her irises were lime. “She said I had to choose. Her or you.”
My heart was racing. My mind, a mess. But my body knew what to do. I was a marionette. It was almost as if some older, wiser,
less fucked-up version of myself was hovering above us in that bed, pulling all the right strings.
And so I kissed her. I kissed her softly. I kissed her with my eyes wide open. I kissed her with my hands cupped around her
face. I kissed her the way I should’ve kissed her when I was sixteen—before I pushed her away, before the accident, before
everything changed. I kissed her the way a boy in high school was supposed to kiss the girl next door.
I kissed her like I knew I could break her but wouldn’t. I kissed her like I was a good-enough guy that her brother wouldn’t
have cared that I wanted her. I kissed her like the things she’d wanted were important—Valentine’s Days and school plays and
a boy who wasn’t afraid to put his arm around her in the hallway.
I kissed her like the drugs were just a phase.
I kissed her like it was just a little weed, just a little bit of someone’s parents’ whiskey.
I kissed her like I’d taken her to the movies, to the mall, to the homecoming dance.
I kissed her like, when she was ready, maybe on her sixteenth birthday, something like that, something sensible and appropriate, I took her to the city and we saw a dumb musical and I saved up for a hotel room and I put rose petals on the bed—something like what was written in the books she loved—and she pulled me into her body for the first time.
I kissed her like I was not my father’s son.
I kissed her like the kind of man who stays.
Katie’s arms were locked around my neck.
“What happens now?” I said.
“I think,” she said, “we just stay here for a little bit longer, and we finish our story.”
I nodded, kissing her again. We spent the rest of the day in bed, moving against each other, drifting in and out of a slow,
hazy dream. But that night, under the covers, as Katie slept soundly in my arms, I felt it.
The ticking of the clock.
The turning of our page.