I slipped into bed, my heart still walloping. My skin, still burning from the press of his knee, the drop of his voice, the brush of his steady fingertips charting every curve and crease and corner of my trembling hand.
I imagined his nose on my neck, his hands on my hips, his mouth on my spine. I imagined us now, as adults, or something close to it, getting a second chance at finishing what we’d started. I imagined him sliding the lace off my shaking body. I imagined him taking his time. I imagined how his eyes might go wide when he finally slipped a single finger alongside me, when that first slide through the mess we’d made sent him straight to his knees. And then my hands—already wandering—thought better of it. I turned out the light. The cottage, which had been aglow, went dark.
My walkie-talkie garbled.
“Is this okay, Katie?”
I counted the thumps of my heart, the heaves of my breathing.
“Yes,” I said.
“Will you tell me if you want me to stop?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Okay then.”
“Okay then,” I said. “Over.”
I spent the whole night tossing and turning and thinking about Tyler’s hands, his mouth, the tip of his tongue, the way it might feel for him to crawl under the covers and peel away my clothes and kiss me hard while I came undone. And then, the following morning, after a quick stop for iced coffees and chocolate croissants, he took me to see... the Big fucking Duck?
On the way there—we’d had to ride our bikes along the Montauk Highway; what a disaster—he stopped from time to time to read a Tripadvisor review at the top of his lungs, but he wouldn’t tell me where we were going.
In Shinnecock Hills, he shouted, “?‘What a piece of Long Island history!’?”
As we passed over the canal, he dinged his bell twice. “?‘Cured my sadness and anxiety!’?”
And then, finally, we were on the shoulder of Flanders Road, pedaling through Hubbard County Park, the trees arching and the birds chirping and the creeks flowing and, probably, the ticks ticking, and he said, “?‘Interesting local attraction but avoid the guy who works there!’?” and we kept pedaling and pedaling, and then I saw it, and he grinned.
“Exactly as advertised!” His bike fell sideways. “Come on!”
I laughed, then smoothed out my dress and followed him inside. When we were done—there wasn’t much, it was just a white stucco duck roughly the size of a U-Haul that sold smaller, duck-themed knickknacks—we wandered to the side of the structure and ate syrupy, sun-melted peaches we’d snatched from Meredith’s magically replenishing fruit basket. The afternoon boiled onto the grass beneath our feet, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky.
“And to think,” Tyler said, wiping the juice off his wrist, “we spent our entire childhoods on this island, and nobody ever thought to take us to see the Big Duck.”
“It is, without question, a masterpiece.”
“A modern marvel!”
“Cured my sadness and anxiety!” I said, and then we both started laughing, and then he looked at me. The smile on his face, morphing into something else. Something serious.
“I missed you,” he said. “I missed this.”
I closed my eyes and tried to breathe, knowing it was this, not want, that had really kept me up last night. Knowing it could never be just fun between us. We could never just write our book or ride our bikes or fuck each other’s brains out. I wasn’t ever going to forget the past—not really. We were always going to have a backstory.
“I missed you too,” I said. “I missed this too.”
Tyler tipped his head back against the duck. “My senior year, when I got sober... When Mikey and I weren’t speaking... I don’t know, Katie. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.”
My eyes welled. Tyler frowned, but he did not move, and I did not wipe my tears away.
“About what?” I said.
He looked at me. He really, really looked. His sunglasses, off. His hair, a little damp. The unmistakable signs of summer, glistening on his rough, flushed skin. I was holding my breath, every cell in my body doing what it had always done: hanging on his every word.
Eight years was nothing. It was absolutely nothing.
“About this,” he said. “About us. About the way it feels when you walk into the kitchen every morning. About the things that happened when we were kids. About how it felt to kiss you for the first time. About how it feels right now, knowing I might get another chance.”
