The whisper of the ocean sounds like a roar when I pull back. It’s not because I don’t want to keep going. I just know we shouldn’t, not tonight, with Chris’s departure still fresh, with his ring still on my dresser upstairs.
“Real?” Nathan’s voice is a rasp.
“Yes,” I breathe.
Nathan nods. His hair sticks up where my hand gripped him only seconds ago. “Where does this leave us?”
I stand, smoothing down my skirt. “I . . . have no idea.”
We regard each other for a few moments, contemplating what just happened, neither of us speaking. It’s quiet, not forebodingly, yet not quite comfortably. It’s just the quiet of before. Finally, Nathan’s lips twitch up. “We’ve been working without an outline so far. Why stop now?”
I start to smile. “No reason I can figure. Good night, Nathan.”
I step toward the stairs. “See you in the morning,” I hear him say behind me.
I feel my smile spread as I climb the steps. His words promise a world of possibilities. I let myself imagine each one, sketching out our future like a plot without an ending.
48
Nathan
• FOUR YEARS EARLIER •
I watch the water under the clear night sky. The beach is empty, unsurprisingly. It’s only me, sitting on the sand. The glassy ocean reflects the moon, ribbons of moonlight shimmering with the small ripples on the surface. There’s something unnerving in the calm of being here, just myself, with this endless expanse. For the moment, it’s mine, and yet I know it’s very much not.
We finished the book today. Months of writing, outlining, discussion, and debate—ended with the final period on the final sentence. The white space following it no longer felt demanding. Only right. The ceiling fan spinning lazily, sunlight slanting in through the shutters, we were done. The book is everything I hoped it would be, the perfect mirror of what we’d envisioned in our heads.
It’s extraordinarily rare, I know. Usually the creation comes out somehow skewed from what was planned, requiring some strange getting used to for the creator. Not Only Once. I feel like it’s come from outside of ourselves, the way Michelangelo spoke of releasing his figures from the marble instead of sculpting them himself. I don’t need publicists or editors to know it’s going to be huge, either. I know it will.
When we finished our debut, Katrina and I celebrated by ordering too much food and trying to bake brownies. We fucked them up. I tend to underbake, while Katrina leaves every edge hard and crispy. Tonight, though, we didn’t celebrate, I think because we knew bigger celebrations are coming. We quietly submitted the book, Katrina writing the email to Liz while I changed into my jogging clothes upstairs. Once I’d read it over quickly, we hit send without ceremony. I wanted to hug Katrina. I didn’t. I told her I was heading out for my run.
Instead, I walked to the nearest beach. The evening cool enveloped me as I crossed streets, making my way through the quiet neighborhood. Everything felt strangely normal, dinners being finished in the windows of warmly lit dining rooms. The faint, grating hum of cicadas. When I reached the beach, I dropped down onto the sand.
I’m sitting close to the shoreline, facing out. The sand is cold under my legs, or my skin is on fire. I can’t tell which it is. Inside the house Katrina and I have called home for the past couple of months, I feel like I’m constantly on fire. Like my mind is shredded from the effort of fighting my own thoughts. Like I’m waging war every second of every day on my deepest instincts, trying to turn myself into someone else entirely.
I’m losing the fight. I realized it last week when Katrina touched my leg. When she told me she wanted everything. Everything. I felt the innermost part of me wave its smallest white flag.
I knew what she meant. She knew I knew what she meant. It’s Katrina. We’ve known what each other means for years, made a career of it. If I had to guess, I’d say she understood there was no room for miscommunication or uncertainty in the unsaid things we exchanged in our short conversation. Things I had tried to ignore in myself.
Finishing the book today, I knew I couldn’t. I could taste my dreams coming true, and it made me realize how much more I wanted.
I stare out, following the black horizon. It reaches forever. My eyes wander over the scatter of stars, my mind wandering with them, elsewhere entirely. New York. Where we’ll return, where we’ll live our lives in parallel lines—latitudes running through exchanged emails written from separate homes, working lunches in our respective neighborhoods, conference calls on speakerphone—until finally, we’ll reach our own horizons. Side by side but never crossing.
I want everything with her, too. The weight of this knowledge is physically painful. Not just the next book, the next contract, the next review. Not just more time in this house. I want to live my life entwined with hers, chasing her, leading her. I want to willingly allow my thoughts to stray to the soft skin on the back of her neck, or the way the ends of her hair stick to her sweat in the humidity. I can’t keep writing with her, can’t keep constructing this career with her. Not like this.
Because I’m in love with her.
I exhale, my head dropping to my chest. Just letting myself think those words splits open the dam within me, the feelings released rushing mercilessly over the floodplains of my soul. They’re uncontainable. I couldn’t ever possibly push them away again. Which means I need to face some harsh realities.
Melissa. My heart cracks for her, knowing what I have to do. I love her, if not in the soul-deep way I love Katrina. I don’t want to hurt her. She’s likely home right now, decompressing from her workday, heating up noodles from the place on our corner while Netflix plays. Distracting herself from her one-person dinner. The ordinary effort of it makes my eyes water. I thought I meant the promises I made on our wedding day. I’m realizing now that I didn’t.
The thought casts me far out to sea. Its enormity is impossible to contend with, like looking out on ocean in every direction. There’s nothing to do but let it swallow me. Tread water until I sink under.
And in the depths, I feel a new current pulling me down. Katrina—I don’t know whether she feels the way I do. The uncertainty is impossibly powerful, consuming. We’ve never actually voiced feelings for each other. While I’ve guessed I could read her thoughts, and guessed she could read mine, I can’t. Not really. We’ve exchanged the most personal writings one could, but I can’t know for certain the emotions in them exist outside of ink on paper.
But whether she does or doesn’t won’t change the fate of my marriage. I know that now. I can’t stay with Melissa, because I’m in love with someone else. If Katrina doesn’t feel the same way, I’ll lose my writing partnership and I’ll lose my marriage, because it would be the worst sort of unfair to reduce the woman I wedded to a backup. A contingency.