I inhaled, muttering as a flash of confusion—of desperation, of a thousand other things I could not describe—swept across her perfect, slackening face. She nodded, kissing me, moaning my name, and I held her tight, and I forgot the rest, and I let go. I fell apart, kissing her back, committing to memory the sound of her voice and the hum of her body and the hammer of her heart as every inch of me warped and seized and shuddered. As everything I’d ever feared flew through my bloodstream and left my body in a single, final sound.
Katie rolled us onto our sides and wrapped her arms around me. Everything was different. Everything was exactly the same.
“You’re still here,” she said.
Her heart was right there, hovering above her in the high noon light. I reached out to touch it.
“I’m still here.”
62
Katie
After that, we were off to the races. There was no other way to describe it. We were, after the first go-round, absolutely feral. There was no more sweetness. There was no more timidity. I had been bent over the stove, the sink, each and every one of those upholstered poufs. I had come in Tyler’s mouth, in his hands, while he pulled my hair, while I filled a just-occurred-to-me plot hole in our manuscript, while I ate a bowl of cornflakes on his bathroom floor.
By sundown, I could not walk, and we were curled up in bed, channeling whatever we’d done to each other into seven thousand words of pure erotica—sixty-five hundred of which we’d surely cut from our draft as soon as we emerged from our oxytocin-induced fever dream and remembered other people were going to read this thing.
“Can I take you to dinner?” Tyler said, kissing my bare shoulder.
I looked up from my screen. “Like, on a real date? A Friday-night date-date?”
He nodded, propped up on a single elbow. His hair, falling onto his forehead. Some ridiculous T. S. Eliot stanza he’d paid good money to have seared onto his oblique, rising and falling as he breathed.
“What?” he said.
“Nothing,” I said, closing my laptop. “Just thinking about what I’m in the mood for.”
He grinned. And then, just like that, his hands were gliding up my thighs, and I was on top of him, straddling him, giggling.
“Again?” he asked.
“Yes, please.”
“Are you going to get a UTI?”
“Yes, please.”
He laughed, then flipped me over, pinned me down, and pushed himself inside of me. When he hit the edge and groaned, I captured the sound with the pull of my mouth.
“Fuck, Katherine. I can’t get enough of you.”
“Please,” I said between gasps, kissing him harder. “Please, just never stop.”
We did make it out the door eventually, although by midnight, options were limited to a single sports bar on the other side of town. We slid into a sticky booth, our hair still wet from a long, steamy shower. A smirking server brought us a couple of waters as Tyler, underneath the table, clutched my knee.
“Does everyone in this establishment,” he said, “know we’ve been screwing for twelve hours straight?”
“It is very obvious. We’re glowing. I know how hard that must be for you. This public display of humanity.”
He put his head in his hands and groaned. I kicked him in the shin, and he grabbed my bare ankle. Tightly, at first, and then... barely at all. He drew a single swirl on my skin and breathed out, pulling my foot into his lap.
“When I saw you,” he said, “back at the café, that first day... I almost turned around. Before you looked up, I got this glimpse ofyou, and I nearly walked out the door. You were so happy. You were so you. I don’t know how you do it. How you’re still like this. How you’re still so bright.”
I crushed the tip of my straw, biting back a frown as he drew another shape on my shin. I thought of a million things to say. That I was born this way. That I loved life. That everything happened for a reason. That I’d let all the bad stuff go. But something else came out. Something unfiltered—something true.
“I’m not,” I said. “My senior year of high school, after we moved... I couldn’t sleep. I couldn’t eat. Every time I stepped outside, every time I opened the fridge—there was no color. Everything in my world was gray. I couldn’t make friends. I couldn’t laugh or read or write. I felt like I was dying. I kept trying to scream, but I didn’t know how. I knew it wouldn’t have mattered anyway. That nobody would’ve heard me. That nobody would’ve seen.”
Tyler grimaced. His head fell into a slow and gentle nod. His hand was still on my leg. “Did things get better, at least, when you got to Hunter? When you got out of the house?”
