Tyler whirled around. His face, red. His fists, tight. I gulped.
“Goddamnit, Katie. Jealous of what?”
I said nothing. I opened my lips to speak, but nothing came out.
“Jealous of what, Katie?”
I breathed. I tried to breathe. Maybe if I breathed, I could speak. But no.
He shook his head, and then he ducked out the door, and then he was gone. I stood there, trembling, wondering why I couldn’t have just answered his question. Wondering why, as I settled back into my chair, as a grinning Danny slid his hand up my leg and ordered a second bottle of wine, I hadn’t just told him what we both already knew.
44
Tyler
I slammed the door to the cottage shut so forcefully it shook the pictures on the wall. What was I doing here? What did I think was going to happen? Did I honestly believe I was going to turn back time? Did I really think I could be Katie’s friend? Pretend I didn’t care that another guy was sliding his hand up her thigh and taking her home? Pretend it didn’t kill me, realizing that the story we were writing was nothing more than a fucking fairy tale? That every goddamn trope on Katie’s twenty-page list wouldn’t have been enough to give a guy like me a second chance at a girl like her?
I started packing up my shit. I was throwing boxers and notepads and loose socks into my backpack. My sweatshirt. My phone charger. My toothbrush. Everything, and as fast as I could. I did not belong here. This whole summer had been a mistake. A reopening of a wound that was never going to heal. Of a hundred other traumas that should’ve been kept asleep.
When I was done, when all my crap was in my bag, I closed the door to the cottage, sat on the foot of a lounge chair on the pool deck, and shut my eyes. The past two months played back. Katie’s face, the minute I walked through that café door. The tremble in her voice the following morning, telling me to go. The light in her eyes, teaching me to write a different kind of story. The way the days and weeks had started to melt into each other. How I never wanted the work to stop. How I would’ve written every minute ofevery hour of every day if it meant we could just sit there, laughing like we used to.
But none of it mattered. Nothing was ever going to change. We could not be friends. We could barely be colleagues. It was too much to ask, and I had known it from the start. I had known, and then I had tested the truth anyway because I had to see it for myself. The fallout of what I’d done. And now, sitting here, left with no choice but to turn my back on the two things in my life that seemed like they might be good, I let out a single, quiet—
“Hey.”
I looked up.
“Where—where’s Danny?”
“I ended it.”
“Wh-why?”
She took a step closer. Her mascara, dripping down her face. Her dress, sliding off her shoulder. Her too-strappy, too-studded sandals, dangling in her hands. She was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
“Because,” she said, “he’s an asshole.”
“And you,” I said, “don’t like assholes.”
She nodded, coming closer, dropping her shoes to the stone. She was standing between my trembling knees, tracing the links of my watch, biting her bottom lip.
“Except for you,” she said.
“Except for me,” I said, rising to my feet. Our bodies, inches apart. Her fingers, light and tentative around my wrist, but dropping now, steadying into the palm of my hand and lingering for a single, eye-crinkling second before hooking themselves into my belt loop. My pulse was pounding.
She tugged me forward, her mouth wet and her eyes wide as she took one, two, three steps back. Behind her, the pool glowed turquoise.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Leveraging the setting.”
I laughed. She took another step backward and into the water—onto the pool’s first stair. She was still in her dress, still chewing her lip. Her fingers were circling the buttons on my jeans, slowly unfastening each one and then exploring the swell of cotton she’d found below. She tugged again on the denim.
“Katie,” I said.
“Take those off,” she said.
I nodded, muttering, making quick work of my pants, my shirt, my glasses as she stood there, watching. I stepped in after her, and then her hands were in mine, and I was so fucking hard, and she was halfway down the stairs and facing me, the water at her knees, guiding me deeper and deeper into the soft, cool blue.
