Sometimes I get lonely.
When he finished, he showered and had lunch, sitting back at the kitchen table with his laptop.
He was munching absentmindedly on a sandwich and some chips when his fingers crept toward the
keyboard. He opened his e-mail app, clicked "compose," and in the subject line wrote:Last night.
Tyler,
You were not out-of-line at all. If anything, I was. It was cold. You were warm, and my body
reacted. It's embarrassing, regardless of whether or not alcohol was to blame. Please don't hold itagainst me.
Alec
He hit send, casting his line, and immediately regretting it. He reread the last sentence a half a dozen times, contemplating only the innuendo it contained. Britney Spears was now singingHold itAgainst Mein his head and he wondered if Brett had been a fan of her as well. Maybe Tyler could reinterpret that song at the next talent show.
Girl, you need to calm down,said Demarco in his head.It's just a sentence.
About an hour later he heard the incoming chime on his laptop and practically leaped over the
sofa to get to it. The reply was only one sentence.
Maybe I want to hold it against you.
Alec grinned, and his and Tyler's e-mail correspondence commenced.
They didn't see each other in person again for a week, but they e-mailed every day, sometimes
so much that Alec lost count. It was always small talk, a few sentences here and there revealing subtle and not so subtle hints of their lives, past and present. Occasionally, they would talk music, but to Alec's surprise, Tyler was not nearly as much of an aficionado as himself. That particular obsession was Brett's… and Tyler indulged it, picking up songs by ear, and learning them to please his spouse.
He discovered that Tyler's family was originally from South Dakota and that his parents had
come to Melody in the late 1960s as teenage hippies because they liked the name. He was the child
they had been told they could never have, born late in their marriage and a total surprise. Alec could sense Tyler's love for them in his carefully composed sentences. When he inquired as to their
whereabouts, Tyler told him that his mother had passed eleven years earlier and that his father went shortly after, succumbing to what Tyler felt could only be a broken heart.
As the e-mails came and went, Alec found that his flow was coming much better, writing-wise.
He polished a laugh-out-loudCirclecolumn—with a city-writer-in-the-wilderness theme for The Post—and Kristen loved it. She had already sent it to proofing and planned for it to hit the press the following week. He promised her more misadventures in the Montana wild and she said she was
holding him to it.
The book was another story. He made copious notes on music genres, specific artists, and tried
in vain to come up with some kind of structure, even toying with symmetry as far as chapter numbers and breakdowns, but nothing. It was aggravating. He could write nonfiction columns about himself
and his crazy life, but when he wanted to write about a subject dear to him, he was shooting blanks.
Maybe it wasn't meant to be, Tyler suggested in one of their e-mails.Sometimes you just haveto walk away. Find that other thing that gives you fire.
Alec contemplated that one for a while. Tyler was right. Many writers had trunk novels that they
had been tinkering with for decades for the very same reason. Why force yourself to do something that simply won't come?
But he couldn't give it up just yet. His being somewhat OCD would not let it pass that quickly.
