“Are—Are you okay?” I said.
He glared at me.
“Do you want me to ask Ingrid to come suck your dick?”
He glared at me again and then nodded toward his dresser. Toward a slew of bottles, orange and opaque. He was grimacing now. His face was a little gray. “Will you just hand me a few of those? The Oxys? It’s all that works.”
I nodded. I pulled the bottle off his dresser, tilted the label, and studied it for a second too long.
“Want one?” he said. “I’ve got, like, a thousand.”
My tongue caught the back of my teeth, and for a moment, it all flashed before me—my father, drunk; my father, gone; my car, flying across the ice; Mikey’s future, shattered; Katie’s face, crushed—and I knew it, I knew it, I knew it. This was when I was supposed to sayNo. This was when I was supposed to say,Man, thisshit’sdangerous.This was when I was supposed to say,Mikey, listen, do you maybe want to talk?
But instead, I said, “Yeah, why not?”
I spent the next fifteen months chasing that high.
And Mikey never, ever stopped.
Second-Chance Romance
Henry and Willa had history. Of course they did. But teenagers had crushes that amounted to little more than a couple of weeks of kissing all the time. That, in and of itself, was not strange.
What was strange was watching the boy who’d broken your wide-eyed heart walk back into your life as a full-grown man. What was strange was watching the only girl who’d ever mattered crawl into your bed and hold you as you finally fell apart.
60
Katie
Present Day
The Hamptons
I found Tyler in the kitchen the following morning. His brow was furrowed, and he was scribbling furiously in a notebook. My hair was damp from the shower, and my skin was still a little sticky from the magically replenishing Parisian moisturizer on my vanity. I curled into the window seat beside him and dropped my head onto his shoulder. The cotton of his T-shirt, heathered and worn. The ink on his pages, so scattered and scratched I couldn’t make out a single word.
“You good?” I asked. “I feel like I haven’t seen you write longhand all summer.”
“It’s just...” He closed his notebook. I turned to face him, and he twisted the slightest bit away. His shoulders were up, and his voice was strained. “They have to have sex, Katie. It’s time. We can’t possibly fit in another side quest. It’s almost the third act already, and...”
I pulled him back toward me, leaving my hand on his wrist. “I know. It’s okay. It’s—”
“I don’t know what I’m doing! I’m trying to imagine it, trying to write it, trying to model what we’ve read, and it comes out stiff.There’s no romance! There’s no warmth, no whirl. It comes out cold and technical and—”
“Let me write it, then.”
“But we agreed Henry had to take the scene! That we have to stay with him—that he’s the one who has more to show.”
I reached for his pen. “I can write in Henry’s voice, okay? Just come outside with me. I can show you what Willa wants. I can show you everything.”
61
Tyler
Katie crawled into my lap on the terrace and, with dew still clinging to the dining table, began to write. I pressed my nose into the nape of her neck and watched her work her magic. Watched her loopy letters—in my dense black ink—show me all the ways Willa wanted it.
And, mostly, Willa wanted it soft.
At least, she did at the very beginning.
