“Nathan, it’s the middle of the night.” While Katrina’s putting on impatience, I know she’s faking. I hear her guarded hesitance. “Why are you here?” The uncertainty in her eyes changes into realization, and she continues. “You went looking for them.”
“I wasn’t the only one,” I say, matching her feigned confidence syllable for syllable. It’s not hard, I find, like an after-hours rehearsal of the performance we put on for each other every day of writing.
Katrina huffs. “Don’t bother yourself with them. There’s nothing in these pages.”
She’s lying. I can read her, the flickers in her expression, the way she plays with the ends of her hair. “What scene is it?” The question comes out of me with a breathlessness I know betrays my interest. I don’t know what the point of hiding my reaction would be, though. It’s not like Katrina can’t read me the exact same way.
She looks away. “An unimportant one.” She’s definitely lying. The flickers of indication in her expression leap into flames. Her cheeks redden. She swallows. Her reactions only heighten my furious curiosity. Now I have to know.
“You don’t want to give them to me,” I say, understanding. “Do I need to remind you it’s my handwriting you’re reading?”
Katrina retreats deeper into her room, positioning herself in front of the bed. There’s protectiveness in the gesture, like she’s putting herself in my way. “Nathan, they’re meaningless. I just wanted to read them to judge what Harriet was saying.”
It’s nearly a convincing explanation, except why would she need to judge Harriet’s feedback in the middle of the night? I walk into her room, highly aware I’m stepping onto dangerous ground. “If they’re meaningless,” I venture, “why can’t I have them? What’s in the pages, Katrina?” I’m coming closer, right up to her, while she stays still.
She lifts her chin up subtly, combative. “Nothing real. It’s just fiction,” she says, practically exhaling. “Fiction.” She repeats the word like it carries enormous weight, or like she wishes it did.
I take another step. I’m walking into fire. It consumes me, fears and fantasies of whatever of my writing lies exposed on Katrina’s sheets. The stagnant heat of the room is suffocating. It’s not just the Florida weather—it’s the room, the feet separating me and Katrina turning into inches. The way I know I shouldn’t come closer, yet I do. I know I’m not thinking straight. Practically dizzy, I keep walking toward the pages, toward the bed.
“Prove it,” I half whisper. “Prove to me it’s fiction.”
I’ve lost track of the layers in the conversation. Katrina’s right in front of me now. I lean closer to reach for the pages—to reach for her?—nearly bringing us together. We have half a foot’s height difference between us, which means when I bend down, our lips are only inches from touching. I don’t know if I’m dreaming, if the restless hours of the night have warped hallucinatory imaginings into my waking moments, or if I recognize the same heat I feel in myself rolling off Katrina. Her perfect stillness feels poised, purposeful. Her round, dark eyes look like they’re waiting.
Without breaking eye contact, she lowers herself to the bed, staring up at me from the sheets.
I’m definitely dreaming, though this is brazen even for my dreams. While I watch, fixed in place, her body unfurls. One slender forearm slides backward. I follow the motion, my heart pounding, not daring to wonder where this is going.
Her hand clenches on the pages. Before I can react, she shoves them into my chest. The fire in her eyes is not what I thought. It’s confrontation.
“Like I said”—her voice is sharp—“there’s nothing worth hiding here. There’s nothing at all.”
14
Katrina
When Nathan leaves the room, his features hard, I collapse onto the bed. The instant he closes the door, I let everything I’m feeling wash over me. It is not refreshing, like the ocean on summer days. It’s more like when unexpected waves hit you right in the face—suddenly you’re underwater, spinning, currents pummeling you from every direction. Flat on the bed, I’m breathless. I’m confused and hating the confusion. How could Nathan Van Huysen conjure this much uncertainty in me all these years later?
I reach a hand under my pillow. From beneath the cool cloth, I retrieve the one creased piece of paper I’d hidden when Nathan knocked.
It’s the only page I knew I couldn’t show him. When his knock echoed into my room, I moved with instinct, shoving the page under the pillow. I couldn’t bear for him to have it—couldn’t bear to lose it, either. I’m not sure where one desire begins and the other ends. I wasn’t lying to him, exactly. The scene is inconsequential. The characters, Jessamine and Jordan, go out to drinks in Greenwich—Nathan insisted on Greenwich so he could draw from his upbringing and his parents’ marriage—and exchange a charged look. It’s nothing, five-and-a-half pages of context, except for one handwritten sentence.
I read over and over again everything he’s written in the margins. His handwriting is like a third character on the page. He rewrites the description of Jessamine, the onetime artist who’s settled for suburbia with the man she loves, or loved. I’m unable even now to resist conceding everything Nathan’s done enlivens the passage. He’s rendered her hair, her posture, particularly her clothing, with not only precision but devotion.
When I get to the bottom of the page, I know what I’ll find. In Nathan’s inimitable handwriting, he’s scrawled like a casual afterthought, Sorry to steal your dress. But you look nice.
Just reading the line, I’m wrenched into the moment when I first held this page, in hands no less wavering. It’s uncanny, how we’ve cycled over the past four years, ending up exactly where we were when we wrote Only Once.
The location isn’t the only similarity. In so many frustrating ways, what just happened was a hateful reprise of exactly how Nathan and I behaved when we were at our worst four years ago. Always wondering, never speaking except in writing, where we scream at each other from the comfortable distance of prose and characters.
Heat pounds in my head. I don’t even know what it is I want. Half of me aches for when everything wasn’t fucked-up with Nathan, the happier days when he and I would exchange ideas easily and, god forbid, laugh while writing. The other half wants to do nothing except be furious forever for the damage he did to our partnership. I’m desperate for whatever would cool me off. My writer’s imagination flits past everything I’d wish for. Winter weather, iced tea with no sugar, vanilla ice cream.
In the next moment, I’m pulling out my phone. I’m dialing a number I know as well as my own. It rings and rings, and I have a feeling I’m going to voice mail.