More thunder. More lightning. I tipped my head back and hugged my hands around my knees. Tyler, suddenly, leaped toward me.
“Get off the fucking gate, Katie! Get up! It’s metal!”
“I...”
He yanked me up by my drooping arms, looked me right in the eye—wind slashing the sky, our hair, our skin—and said, “I cannot leave you out here,” then threw me over his shoulder and—the gutters surging, the garden a river, the pool deck as dark and loud as the ocean itself—raced back to the cottage, whose door he’d left unlocked.
He latched it behind us and set me down on what must have been tile—hard and cool. A moment later, he fumbled for something, maybe under a sink or in a cabinet, I wasn’t entirely sure. And then, a strike of light. He’d lit a match.
At first, it was only him that was illuminated. The glow of his face, furrowed and frowning but oddly calm. Then a candle, and then another. The cottage, revealing itself in a slow and gilded haze. A shag rug, a queen-size bed, a fireplace, a kitchenette with a bistro table and two tiny chairs.
Tyler disappeared for a moment. When he returned, he handed me a towel—his face, unwavering. Sober. I watched him. I watched him in the warm blur of that cottage. I watched him dig through his backpack, pull out a T-shirt and a pair of boxer briefs, then set them on the foot of his bed. I watched him light the fireplace, fill the kettle, and start the stove. I watched him fiddle with a transistor radio—an artifact, I realized, he must’ve been using to listen to the goddamn Mets—and tune it until the weather report garbled on.
He did all this without stopping, without drying himself off, without throwing on a shirt. And when he handed me a mug of tea, when Tyler McNally—the boy who’d broken my heart a thousand times, the boy who’d toyed with me and teased me and tortured me since the day I was born—handed me a mug of chamomile fucking tea, that was when I finally began to cry.
Tyler grimaced, then pushed down his shoulders. I was standing at the foot of his bed.
“You should get some sleep,” he said. “The storm isn’t supposed to let up until the morning.”
I nodded, wiping my face dry. I turned away and slid on his underwear, then dropped the straps of my dress beneath my arms and tugged his shirt over my head. It was warm and soft and smelled just like him, and it only made my tears come back with a vengeance.
I kept my back turned, careful to stifle the sounds of my sobs as I, sideways and with my head down, crawled under his covers. Another soft and perfect thing that smelled just like him—like two-in-one shampoo and rough, clean skin.
A full-blown choke of tears came out of me then. I shattered into his pillow, my spine shaking, my body quaking. I stayed like this for a long while—five, ten minutes—falling apart. I did not know how he passed the time.
When I was done, when I had nothing left inside, I rolled over and opened my eyes. Tyler was dressed and rearranging a series of upholstered poufs in a row. There was no sofa. There was not even an armchair. There was only the four-poster I was in, the two little dining chairs by the window, and those three glorified stools. Tufted linen and square and probably five-thousand dollars each but stools all the same.
I raised my head an inch.
“There’s just one bed, isn’t there?”
“Obviously,” he said.
And then it happened. I couldn’t help myself. I burst into laughter, and the tears came back too, and I could not stop any of it: the hot, wet rush of salt storming down my face, the heaves of sheer ridiculousness escaping my stomach. It was all so absurd. The kiss, the storm, the keys, the cottage. That every last trope in our story was taunting us. That every scene we’d written, every watershedmoment and throwaway detail and stolen glance, seemed to come back for us—seemed to play out like pages of a frame story in our hands.
Tyler set his mug down on the kitchen table. “I hate it when you cry.”
“Then stop making me cry.”
He frowned, taking a few steps closer. “Katie,” he said. “I’m scared.”
I sat up against the headboard. “About what?”
“About the way you make me feel. About sex, and... I’ve never done this before. I’ve never been with...”
“Tyler,” I said. “You are not a virgin. You slept with, like, half our high school. You are not going to convince me you didn’t have sex with Marissa or Ashley or Maya or...”
He shook his head. He was standing very still. “No, I did. It’s not that. It’s more that I’ve never...” An inhale. An exhale. All six feet and two inches of him, scrunched up, and the smallest he’d ever seemed. “I haven’t been with the same girl twice. Not in years.”
“What? What do you mean?”
He turned away. Something cracked open just above my rib cage. Something softened.
“Tyler,” I repeated. “Please tell me what you mean.”
“Exactly what you think I mean.” His back was still turned. “After I sleep with someone, I lose interest. I get physically ill—nauseous, cold. It’s been like this my whole life.”
“Even when you were in college? All those girls—and you never had a girlfriend? Or something casual? With any of those models, or another teacher at your school?”
