“Fucking perfect, Katherine. Always have been.”
She grinned, then disappeared for a moment under another wave. The sun sparkled off the shore, and with rays so bright they bleached the whole scene. She turned back to me, her head tilted. Her smile, wide. She was the only thing I could see.
“What’re you doing, Carraway?” she asked, squinting.
“Just watching you.”
“Yeah? Kind of creepy, no?”
“Probably. But I can’t help it. You’re, like, this speck of glitter that I want to talk to all the time, but also want to fuck, and... it’s just a lot for me, all right? How good you look. The fact that we’re here. How much you shine.”
Her eyes crinkled even more. “Well, that’s very cute. And I appreciate the vulgar sonnet, really. But this isn’t high school. You’re not supposed to stand there. You’re supposed to follow me!”
The sun set on the ferry ride home. It was cinematic timing, really. That the fading sky had become a swirl of raspberry, apricot, and peach. That Katie and I had gotten the perfect spot behind the railing all to ourselves. That her head had fallen onto my still-aching shoulder, and that her hair smelled like lavender and sunscreen and seaweed.
I pulled her closer and shut my eyes.
“Thank you,” I said.
“For what?”
“For being you. For waiting for me.”
68
Katie
On Thursday, after letting Tyler get an extra couple of hours of sleep, he and I made our way to Meredith’s dock for another pondside picnic to get back to work on our novel. This lunch, of course, was a little different from the one we’d been forced into back in June. Namely because our dangling legs were completely intertwined, we’d spent the entirety of last night having filthy, if not slightly sunburnt, sex, and our manuscript was now 300 pages long—and due in nearly a week. We still had to add another eighty-or-so pages to the story, which, as you’ve probably guessed by now, was running long.
Still, neither of us was worried about the third act. We’d both written our fair share of novels, and emphatically agreed that endings should be written as quickly as possible. That the faster and more inspired the sprint toward the finish, the better the climax, that final page. And so, instead of forcing ourselves to knock out twenty-five-hundred words a day of flat and predictable prose, we were polishing everything we’d drafted to date so our last chapters could be written in one caffeine-fueled fever dream.
We were in the middle of tweaking Willa’s backstory when my phone rang. I hadn’t even realized I had service out here. In fact, over the past couple of months, outside of taking pictures of food and flowers and Tyler’s scruffier-by-the-day face, I’d sort of forgotten I even owned a phone. I was starting to like that about Meredith’s little universe—the quiet. How small and weightless it made the real world seem.
It rang again.
“You going to get that?” Tyler asked.
I shrugged, flipping through my notebook, still refining that backstory. I was searching for a list of Willa’s high school boyfriends I’d scribbled down months ago. I’d forgotten the name of her junior prom date, and it was about to come up in an angsty flashback scene.
The phone rang a third time, and suddenly, my stomach churned. I didn’t have to look at the screen to know who it was. And neither, apparently, did Tyler. He’d been leaning back on his elbows, careless and languid, but now? He’d stiffened.
I walked ten feet down the dock and turned my back.
“Mom?” I said. “I can’t really—”
“Katie, baby. Thank god. Do you have a TV where you are?”
“A TV? What? No. I’m working. I—”
“You need to find a TV,” she said. “You need to turn on ESPN.”
That ache in my stomach traveled north and tightened around my rib cage. When it began to rise through my throat, I swallowed it back down.
“Mom,” I said. “I’m writing. I really can’t—”
“It’s Alex Peridos. He’s pitching for the Rangers right now. Don’t you remember? He played with Mikey at that camp in Virginia Beach. He’s making his debut, and his parents are there, and his wife, and...”
I pushed the dry, itchy cattail out of my face. Suddenly, hot gray clouds hung so low and thick I could not breathe. I closed my eyes and inhaled anyway. “Mom, it’s okay. It’s—”
