“Yet,” she said, and then she was on top of me, tickling me like a child, under my arms, beneath my knees, laughing and laughing, morning light bathing the cottage, salt and dew and summer in the air, her eyes so bright and her smile so blinding I could’ve died right there, being attacked by this absurd, gorgeous little creature, who, despite everything, had not forgotten how to play.
When it was all too much, when I was wheezing, crying, kicking, screaming, begging her to stop, she sat up, kissed me on the mouth, then studied the tent in my boxers and said, “Go take care of that.”
I muttered.
“Now,” she said, biting her bottom lip as I stumbled out of bed, searching for my glasses. “We’ve got quite the day ahead of us.”
“Do we, Katherine?”
She rolled over and steadied herself on a single elbow. My shirt rode up her rib cage, revealing bronze, smooth skin. I wanted to climb back into bed and lick it.
“Yeah,” she said, and now she was looking me up and down, tracing the curves of her stomach. The waistband of my underwear was loose and slung unfairly low on her arching hips. Her eyes were twinkling. “You’re taking me on an extend-a-date. I want a boardwalk sequence. I want you to win me a giant fucking Pikachu.”
I had my hand on the doorknob to the bathroom, and I was squeezing the metal between my clenched fingers. My knuckles were white, and my cheeks burned.
“I gotta, uh...”
She waved me off, laughing.
“Hey, Tyler?” she said just before I locked the door.
“Yeah?”
“Easy does it.”
47
Katie
While Tyler was in the shower, I slipped out of bed and stepped outside. The sun was warm and rising, and on the deck, there were no signs of bad weather or foul play. No knocked-over umbrellas. No blown-astray branches or rogue purplish petals of morning glory. No sandals, abandoned by the lounge chairs. No thong, floating in the pool.
I cringed, then pushed open the door to the main house. It was effortless. Meredith sat on the sofa readingThe Shadow of the Wind, Pinot asleep in her lap.
“How was dinner?” she said, deep in her page.
“Oh, um, great. We missed you. Are you feeling all right? We...”
I almost asked her everything. About why, of all people, it was Tyler who’d been hired to write with me. About how, from day one, the tropes in our story had been a little too on the nose. About why, like magic, they just kept on coming true. But what did it matter? What difference did it make? The manuscript was excellent, and Tyler was finally mine, and I didn’t want to break the spell or cross a line or come off as clinically insane.
She looked up from her book. “Is there something you wish to discuss, Katie?”
“No. Uh...” I smoothed out my shirt. Well, Tyler’s shirt. “No?”
She smirked, then buried her head back in her novel. “I made muffins,” she said. “Blueberry—from the garden. Why don’t you bring a couple back for Tyler? I’m sure he’s absolutely famished.”
“Oh, I—We... Thank you?”
She flipped her page. “My pleasure.”
48
Tyler
We rode our bikes into town for breakfast. We bought three novels each at the bookstore. We splayed out on the warm, itchy grass of a sculpture garden and watched the clouds blow in and billow out of the cerulean sky. We snacked on stale fudge from the ice cream parlor and finger-staining cherries from the farmers market. We talked about Lola finally getting that job offer. We talked about Arthur and his grandkids and how, at this rate, he might never come home from his trip out west. We talked about the storm and the tropes and the muffins and how Meredith 100 percent thought we fucked and how, after last night, neither of us cared one bit. The hours melted into each other. Noon became two, became four, became six. And then, around seven, when the sun began to slant into evening, I rolled onto my side and asked Katie what she’d like to do next. She twisted her fingers into mine and grinned.
Fifteen minutes later, we were at a mini golf course off the highway, and I was handing over an exorbitant amount of money in exchange for two buckets of balls. Mine were black; Katie’s, bubblegum pink. This was not a thing we’d chosen. Instead, the unfazed teenager working the kiosk-hut-thing took one look at us, handed me a receipt, and filled our respective pails without so much as a word.
The course was Hamptons-themed. Nine holes of on-the-nose references to an already incredibly self-referential place. There wasOld Hook Mill, the Montauk Lighthouse, and even a replica of Dune Road, replete with real sand, rocks, and cattail corralled by a crooked driftwood fence. We were at our final scene—a micro-reimagining of the Water Mill Museum, spouting fountain and all—when Katie, after putting literally seven over par the entire course, shot a hole-in-one.
