Now Tyler and I exchanged the quickest of glances. After all, when was the last time Meredith Bradford left her house?
“I was thinking Saturday,” she continued. “Seven thirty, maybe? I’ll have Maurice make a reservation.” She turned to me then. “Are you still going to spend the weekend with that doctor, Katie? Danny, was it?”
“Oh, he’s actually an... never mind. And I haven’t really decided yet, I guess.”
“I see.” Meredith scooped up her notepad. “Well, if he survives the week, bring him. We can all meet. And Tyler will be here—won’t you, Tyler?”
Tyler nodded. And then, because what else was there to do, we both smiled, took equally long sips of our coffee, and said that sounds great, we can’t wait, thank you.
We spent the bulk of the next few days on the terrace, downing Arnold Palmers and dousing ourselves in sunscreen and polishingthe first 178 pages of our manuscript over and over again. Trying to nail every moment, clean up every sentence, put every word on trial for its life. But by Wednesday afternoon, our seventh read-through had resulted in only two measly tweaks: the removal of an echo in Henry’s dream sequence and the deletion of a single duplicated word in the chapter that followed. There was, quite simply, nothing left to fix. We had to keep drafting. We had to keep moving forward. We had to broach our midpoint—and all the things it stood for when you were writing a romance novel. I glanced up from my laptop.
“I might want more payoff than justKissing in the Rain,” I said. “They’ve already waited so long. It’s almost not enough, you know?”
Tyler was still typing. “What were you thinking?”
“Maybe they get stranded. Like, they finally kiss, and we’ll let that play out based on character, but then Willa loses the master key, and the storm is really bad, and they can only get into the honeymoon suite because the door isn’t installed yet or something. And maybe there was a delay with the sofa delivery, and the rugs aren’t in, and the floor is tile, and there’s just one bed.”
“That’s preposterous, Katherine.”
“So? Who cares? It’s hot. Romance readers eat it up every time. And besides, the tropes work.”
“Okay,” he said. “Fine. Let’s plot it, then.”
I glanced up from my screen. Humidity clung to Tyler’s jaw, his neck, his knuckles again, but not like last week. Summer was in full swing now, thick and relentless, and leaving its mark on his pinched, glistening skin. Sweat dripped down my chest just the same, pooling between the triangles of my bikini top and slidingeverywhere below. I dragged the moisture down my sternum with the palm of my hand, and his eyes, for a second, followed my fingers south. His mouth did something strange. I wiped my hand dry on the chair cushion and sucked in a breath.
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s... let’s plot it, then.”
Tyler adjusted his ball cap. Twice. “Who, uh... who should make the first move?”
“Henry,” I said. “It has to be Henry.”
His lips parted. “Oh. Okay. And how does... how does Willa want it?”
“She doesn’t care.”
“Really? She’s so... particular.”
“No. Not when it comes to Henry. Not for him.”
Tyler rubbed his throat, and something pulsed through my bloodstream. A synapse, firing. My hand, floating off my keyboard. Everything inside of me, low and liquid and spreading fast. That sun, this heat, the sharp lines of his jaw, convincing me I needed contact—needed fingertips on slick skin and the careful pull of two flimsy strings. That I needed those hands in my hair, those lips in my ear, that mouth on my—
“Katie?” he said.
“Yeah?”
“What’s Willa still doing with that guy?”
“She, uh... She just...”
“She keeps running from Henry. He tries to talk to her, and then she’s gone. He’s nervous enough as is. How’s he supposed to get her back if she won’t even stay the weekend? How’s he supposed to kiss her if she’s never there?”
“I think,” I said, “she’s just really afraid. That Henry hasn’t changed.”
“Is—is that why she went on the boat?”
I rubbed my wrist. “She didn’t go on the boat.”
Tyler, for a moment, closed his eyes. And then, after pressing both his hands to his mouth and letting out a long exhale, he leaned forward an inch in his chair. I wanted to finish the job for him. I wanted to climb out of my seat and into his lap, just to feel again the way he wrapped his arms around me. The way he anchored me. The way time stood still when, between kisses, he muttered my name into my neck.
