I chuckled as we made our way onto the sand. “I don’t even do American fiction. That’s seventh grade. In sixth, there’s this whole Greek Festival the curriculum’s built around. Mostly, we write a ton of five-paragraph essays, and then the kids readThe Odyssey, or at least pretend to, and then they write their own deranged Greek monologues they deliver in togas in front of their parents, who are all billionaires. It’s actually really cute.”
Katie laughed. Her feet were already buried, and that last bit of day was shining off the shoreline. “How’d you end up there, anyway? At such a fancy school?”
“I don’t know. I needed a job after college. I was doing the whole restaurant thing at the very beginning, thinking that would give me more time to write, but I was too tired to function by the time I got home. I had this roommate senior year of college—he’s from the city. He went there, and his parents are pretty big donors. I’d gone up to his town house for dinner a couple of years ago, and they were hiring. I guess they were trying to make the school younger and cooler. That, and a bunch of teachers were fired after a college admissions scandal. So I guess they were like, yeah, we’ll hire the sad, tattooed boy, he seems incorruptible. And now, here I am.”
“Shaping the minds of the next Sophocles.”
I grinned at that. “You know, Sophocles actually took character development in playwriting to a whole new level. What he did with Oedipus, no one had ever really done that before. He—”
“Holy shit, Tyler. You are absolutely insufferable.”
I grinned again. The sun had disappeared behind us, and the sky had been bewitched by that medium-blue twilight. “Yeah? Well, just so you know, so are you. You remain to be the most annoying, outrageous, inexplicably absurd thing I’ve ever seen. With your highlighters and your heart-shaped sticky notes and your seven hundred different colors of glitter pens and the fact that you never wear any clothes.”
“These are clothes!” She pointed to the gauzy linen shirt she was wearing as a dress. It was sheer, unbuttoned past her sternum, and riding up her thighs. Underneath it, still, was today’s bathing suit: hot pink, and criminally small. I remembered the taste of her stomach on my tongue. Of that second summer, turning me inside out. “Would you like me to wear more clothes?”
I stared straight out toward the water. We were always saying things like that, then staring straight out toward the water. But this had to be it, right here—the closest we’d come. We were playing with fire.
“Didn’t say that, did I?”
Katie inhaled. My heart was racing, and my stomach was upside down. I took a deep breath and—carefully, so carefully—pressed my bare knee against hers.
She inhaled again but did not move hers back.
We were touching.
Katie took a long sip of her water. I bit down on my bottom lip.We kept our eyes fixed on that horizon, and we were very, very quiet. It was just the waves crashing and the breeze blowing and the sand swirling and the two of us, alone together, eleven summers later, saying nothing at all.
I reached for her hand.
I started at the bottom—at her wrist. I charted it. The skin, the bone, the ripples, the ridges. I traced every tendon, every vein, and then, when her fingers curled into a perfect little fist, I wrapped my hand around it and squeezed twice. She was shaking.
I said nothing.
We were still silent, still staring out into that safe and endless sea.
I unlocked her hand, then turned her palm over. I explored it, soft and slow. I drew circles and squares and stars, ran my fingers along the creases of her skin, over the stories we’d buried beneath them, and a current tore through me, clearing at once the dull rust that clung to my eroded heart lines.
“What are you doing?” she said. Her words came out in a squeak, but she did not move her knee. I did not let go of her hand.
“Trying to get you back. Trying to fix what I fucked up when I was nineteen.”
She breathed in again. I was still holding her hand. Tracing her knuckles. Intertwining my fingers with her trembling fist.
“I’m still seeing Danny,” she said. “He asked me to be his girlfriend, and...”
“Danny,” I said, “is ridiculous.”
“Funny,” she said, even though her voice stayed strained. Even though her fingers were shuddering in my working hand. I was playing with her ring now, sliding it up and down, and blood was coursing through me, rushing to my head and my heart and between mylegs, and I had to breathe to stop myself from pulling her onto me right then and there, from saying all the things I’d wanted to tell her when she was still mine, from showing her all the things I should’ve shown her when we were still kids, like how it felt to see the world through her eyes, to see lightness again, to fall asleep to the glow of her window knowing some sliver of this life must’ve been worth waking up for because there she was, listening, holding me, forgiving me. “He said the exact same thing about you.”
I laughed, and then, for a little while, we were quiet. We just stared out into the ocean, and I touched her. I breathed, and I touched her, and time stood still.
“Don’t go to Montauk,” I said. “Let me take you somewhere. Spend the weekend with me. Please.”
She pulled back her hand. But not before she’d whispered, “Okay.”
41
Katie
