Looking at him, I revel for a moment. For the first time in years, I know exactly what I want.
Stepping up to him, I put a hand on his pages. “No,” I say, pushing the pages to the side. “Not like that.”
I climb into his lap. My movements are slow, deliberate, showing him exactly what I mean. He takes me in, his expression greedy, his eyes lightly shocked in the best way. Like this is a fantasy he’s kept even from himself. Heart pounding, I place my hands on his chest, feeling how firm he is. Warmth spreads through me. My limbs melt, my breath catching. When his hands slide up my thighs, skimming over skin and under my shorts, I feel the tremor in his touch, and suddenly every inch of me wants to shiver in this heat. Our eyes locked together, I lower my lips with obvious intention.
We collide, waves crashing, striking the shore—his hand rising swiftly, instinctively, up my back, pressing me to him while I kiss him. He leans into me, his mouth meeting mine. His other hand moves to hold my hair from falling forward. I grind my hips into his, where he’s hard, unmistakably and urgently. Feeling light-headed, I pull back from the kiss to focus on his belt buckle.
He watches me. “I have a feeling we’re about to become very unproductive.”
My fingers fumbling the cool metal, I laugh. “Sorry our book was late, Liz. We were having vigorous, frequent sex.”
He lifts my shirt over my head. I raise my arms with the same sort of instinct I feel driving his every movement. I want the garment off, nowhere near us, immediately. He uses the opportunity to press one quick kiss to my lips. “Don’t even joke about it,” he says.
“About what? Our book being late?”
“The other part.” His hands dig into my hips.
“Do I seem like I’m joking?” I reach my hand down between us, watching his eyelids flutter closed while he lets out his breath, his grip on me tightening. “I’m not.”
While I touch him, his mouth moves to my neck, causing me to arch my back into the contact. His fingers slide to my stomach, then sink lower, stroking me over the fabric of my shorts. I close my eyes. Knowing it’s Nathan’s fingers slowly undoing me, Nathan’s lips meeting mine, feels like fiction—the kind you read with a hand between your legs, not the kind you get to taste on your tongue.
We pull back, panting and flushed. The mood shifts suddenly, like storm clouds opening up, the humidity splitting into rain. Gone is the humor, replaced by need. I stand up. While his stare drinks me in, I undo the button of my shorts, letting them drop to the floor.
Then I walk upstairs.
52
Katrina
• FOUR YEARS EARLIER •
I read Nathan’s pages standing in the middle of my room, light-headed. I’m not sure if I’m imagining what’s written, whether fever or fantasy have shifted the characters of something mundane into what’s on the lightly creased paper clutched in my hand. When I finish my first read, I pause, then return to the opening lines, going slower, reaching to understand.
I don’t recognize the characters’ names. There’s a man, Nick. A woman, Kelly. They’re poets in New York City. It’s no idea Nathan’s ever pitched to me, probably one of hundreds I know he has hidden in his iPhone, or maybe something brand-new that’s taken hold of him just now. His style runs within the syllables like electricity.
He’s started right in the middle of a scene. Nick waits outside Kelly’s door in the pouring rain. Slick with water, he’s given her a letter, which he demands she read right in front of him.
Kelly,
While I write this, I feel the words in me desperate to come out. Pressing up to the gates of my pen, demanding to be written. But K, just because they’re coming fast or fluid doesn’t mean the feelings they express have reached me recently or easily. You’re reading the direct line to my deepest truths. The fact they’re finding their way onto the page quickly doesn’t mean they haven’t been burning in me for so long I don’t remember when they started.
Honestly, I think every single word I’ve written since the day I met you has in some way been leading up to this. To you. To say you changed my life is the kind of understatement I could never permit myself to put in writing—you changed my entire world. You reached inside me with your words and your stories and wrote yourself onto my own soul. Before you, I was whole. I was one being, one heart. Now, I’m half of everything and greater for it.
I’m in love with you. I know we can’t be together. Not yet. But if you tell me you feel even remotely the same way, then we will. Maybe you’ve never considered it, but I find it hard to believe that my feelings, screaming in my head night and day, leaking into my writing with a vulnerability that would embarrass me if your eyes weren’t the ones reading them, sound only like a whisper to you.
If this is a surprise, forgive me. Read this. Consider everything, and write to me. I will understand whatever it is you tell me.
Writing alongside you is my greatest joy. Is it greedy to want more? You’ve changed every hope and dream I’ve ever chased—revised them to something smaller and yet more infinite. I want to write our lives together, K. To make each of my days a page written in your hand. To craft the chapters of my future with you in every word. Because I’ve realized a life lived with you is the best story I could ever tell.
Yours,
N
When I finish my second read, I find I’m crying.
Yours, N. Of course, he means “Nick.”
Of course, he doesn’t.
Overwhelmed, I sit down on my bed. I feel not quite in control of myself, the tremble in my lip, the force of the emotions clutching my windpipe. I feel like my heart is expanding so fast it hurts. The writing is stunning. It’s the profoundest proclamation of love I’ve ever read. Which only moves me more. Because I know in every syllable, every choice, this could only ever have come from Nathan.
From Nathan, to me. These aren’t just characters. He’s talking to me through the page. They’re his feelings—his feelings for me.
It’s tremendous, terrifying joy. Everything I’ve been trying so hard not to hope for. Now I’m holding in my hands an entire future, a life, a dream. They feel as fragile and as real as the paper they’re written on. I pause, the reality washing over me.
Then I rush to my desk. I pull one sheet of paper hurriedly from the printer. Pressing the tip of my pen to the page, I take a moment to figure out what I’m going to write. How to continue the story, to give Kelly her reply. I know what I feel. But the idea of giving those feelings voice is like contemplating the first brushstroke of the Sistine Chapel.
Of course I love him. I have novels’ worth of what I want to say. Paragraphs and paragraphs, pages and pages I could compose from the stray thoughts I’ve caught in the corners of my mind when I’d let my guard down. Nathan wrote that his words were pressing up to the gates of his pen. My feelings are lined up behind the gates of my heart, except they’re not pressing. They’re pounding.