Her arms were wrapped around her elbows, and she was already standing on the opposite side of the shallow end, shivering.
“You,” she said, “are such a fucking piece of shit.”
“Katie, stop. You don’t understand. It’s not what you think.”
“You started this,” she said, backing farther away. She was nearly out of the pool. “You started this, and you chased me, and you made me feel safe, and you brushed your knee against mine on that beach, knowing I’d remember. Knowing what it meant to me. You made me think you were different, that you’ve changed, but you haven’t. You just can’t stand it when I’m with somebody else. You don’t want me, and you don’t want anyone else to have me either. You just want to keep me on a shelf to play with when you feel bad about yourself, and that’s it. You are so fucked-up, Tyler. You always have been. You are fucked-up beyond repair.”
“Katie, please. Let me explain. Let me...”
She was halfway to the house, and the drizzle had turned into a downpour. I could hardly see her. Could hardly hear her over the gushing. Could hardly piece together how, a mere minute ago, she was half-dressed and a mess, begging me to make her mine.
“Every time I have let you in,” she said, “has been the biggest mistake of my life.”
45
Katie
I could not get inside the fucking house. There were more than a dozen doors on the terrace—each one, glass and huge and dark and locked. I tried half of them again, shaking, pounding, screaming while Tyler, from a safe fifteen feet away, wearing nothing but his boxer briefs, shouted my name again and again, dripping in salt water from Meredith’s zillion-dollar pool.
“Katie, stop! Please, just listen to me! Just—”
“It won’t fucking open!” I said, but not to him. Not to anyone. The rain, by now, was a full-on thunderstorm: squalls, lightning, and hot, wet wind. I had to get away from him. I had to get away from him now.
“Katie! It’s not what you think!”
I didn’t even turn around. Instead, I ran—no shoes, no phone, no fucking underwear—across the veranda and through the garden, past the waterlogged lavender and the gushing birdbaths and the rain-drenched, whooshing hedges until I’d reached the eastern side of the house.
The door to the fitness center, locked.
The window to the pottery studio, bolted.
The slider off the sculpture room, sealed.
The rest of the house was no different. The front door was shuttered. The delivery entrance to the catering kitchen, jammed. I hugged my body and raced toward the gate. If I could just get outof here, just get back to Fowler Street, I could figure something out. But right as I rounded the driveway, a boom. A blast.
Darkness had turned to pitch-black.
The power had gone out, and there was only the sound of the pummeling rain. Of the howling wind. Of Tyler, calling out from across the driveway. I ran up to the gate, knowing it was no use. The motion detector would not respond, and I didn’t have an emergency key. I had a key to the walk gate, but it was at Danny’s, in Montauk, in my goddamn overnight bag. I couldn’t jump the fence—it was easily twelve feet tall.
“I just need your key! Just give me your key to the gate! Please!”
Tyler was maybe thirty feet away. He jogged closer, but only by a few yards. “I don’t have it! It’s in the kitchen! I left it on Meredith’s counter. I was—I was going to leave!”
I didn’t even bother to respond. Of course he was going to leave. That was all he knew how to do. Leave. No, instead, in this complete and utter darkness, in this hot and sudden downpour, I simply wrapped my fists around the warm, wet metal of Meredith’s gate and screamed. I screamed for what had happened when I was a freshman in high school, and then again when I was a sophomore, and then again when I was a junior, and then again for every year and day and hour and minute that had passed since. And I screamed because all the growth, all the progress, all the concessions and pep talks and diary entries and New Year’s resolutions and fresh starts and boys kissed and men fucked had amounted to nothing. To absolutely nothing. Because here I was, eleven years later, falling apart because Tyler McNally still didn’t want me.
I slumped down onto the muddied gravel and put my head in my hands. I was stuck there—drenched and hardly dressed and whollyfrozen in front of the only man on this planet who knew how to snap me in half.
A dampened crunch of footsteps grew louder, despite the rain. I lifted my head. Through the howl of the storm, a hint of him: a frown, a half-floating hand.
“We should go back to the cottage,” he said.
I looked away. “I really just need to leave. I can wait. The power will go back on, and then the gate will open, or Meredith will wake up, or—”
Just when I’d said it, thunder roared. This time, so loud the earth shook. A second later, lightning—and so close that, for a blink, it lit the sky: Tyler, hands on his head, soaking wet, a mess of olive and ink. The house, a skeleton of brown shingles and bright white as a wild bolt of electric blue cracked across a hundred panes of fogged-up glass.
“Katie,” he said as the earth began to rumble again. The sky seared white. “We have to get inside. Come on, it’s not funny. It’s seriously not safe.”
“No. I—”
