“Glad that’s over,” he says.
I close the computer, ignoring my own galloping heartbeat. It’s just writing. Writing can get intense. “Want to order takeout for dinner?” I ask cheerfully.
“Works for me.” His voice is equally upbeat.
We’re pretending everything is normal, like nothing happened. Which . . . nothing did happen. The knowledge does nothing to calm the question lingering in my mind. If everything is normal, why does normal feel this hard?
“I’m going to go for my run,” Nathan says nonchalantly. His posture looks uncomfortable. “Eat at seven?”
I force a smile. “See you then.”
He walks out of the room. I stay on the couch, not sure what I want to do now, only that I don’t want to cross his path. It’s the characters’ scene, I remind myself. Separate from us. I cling to the reassurance like I would a flimsy blanket on a cold, cold night. The line between us and what we write needs to remain firm. If it crumbles, if we let ourselves bleed into our work, we’ll have nothing left except a messy confusion of lives and pages.
19
Nathan
? FOUR YEARS EARLIER ?
I’m writing into the night, every light on in my room in defiance of the late hour. My wrists hurt, my vision feels warped, and I don’t care. I have to finish the scene of Only Once I started hours ago, when Katrina and I went upstairs for the night. We’ve hit the part I love in the process, where ideas and inspirations outpace my fingers. Everything is fitting into place, and I’m racing to put one more passage down before I sleep.
Katrina and I write constantly now. It’s not exhausting—it’s exhilarating. It’s perpetual motion. This is the point I’m always chasing, where the ending materializes on the horizon, the clouds part, and everything becomes dazzlingly clear. There’s nothing like it. Every night when my head hits the pillow, I already can’t wait to wake up, meet Katrina in the kitchen, and keep writing.
I check the clock. One a.m. Shit. I know I’ll need rest if I want to work productively tomorrow.
When I grudgingly stand, I hear a knock on my door.
I smile. Katrina’s up late, just like I am. She’s pulled forward by the same ineffable momentum driving me. Leaving my computer open, I cross the room to the door. Whatever weariness was drawing on me has disappeared. It’s Katrina—she’s my second wind. When I open the door, she’s standing on the other side holding pages.
“Working late?” I put one hand on the upper door frame, leaning in the entryway.
Kat is flushed. She’s put her hair up, which she only ever does when she’s writing in a sprint. She looks like she ran one, too. When she speaks, she’s not quite shy, not quite casual. “I did a first pass on the . . . dream,” she says.
I straighten in the doorway. My eyes flit down to the pages in her hands, and I feel guilty, as if my gaze were following Katrina’s low-cut neckline instead. Which it doesn’t. The object of my curiosity is paper and ink. But those pages hold the first explicit content in the book—a scene where Jessamine fantasizes about Jordan in a dream.
“I didn’t know you were working on that,” I say.
“I wasn’t planning to,” she replies. “I just . . .”
She won’t meet my eyes.
“I was inspired,” she finishes. Several strands of her hair have fallen loose from her ponytail, framing her face. They caress her cheek when she shifts her posture. In the light from my room, her skin looks soft.
“I can’t wait to read it,” I say, meaning every word. Katrina notices her runaway hair and pushes it behind her ear. I hold out my hand for the pages.
She doesn’t give them over. “Nathan . . .” She pauses like her words have gotten stuck somewhere inside her. “It’s a sex dream,” she goes on. While she’s stating the obvious, her voice wavers. “But it’s not my sex dream, okay? I need that to be clear. It’s the character speaking. Not, you know. Me.”
I force a laugh, even though Katrina saying the words sex dream elicit in me decidedly nonhumorous reactions. “I know,” I say. She fixes me with a long look. “I won’t mistake what’s in these pages for your personal preferences,” I promise her.
She nods. “Good,” she replies, sounding more certain than she looks. My hand is still outstretched, and finally, she passes over the pages. “I’m not cut out for this kind of writing,” she goes on with an uneasy laugh.
The errant urge catches hold of me to reach out for her, make some gentle gesture, caress her shoulder or squeeze her hand. The idea flees from my mind as quickly as it came. “This is why we have each other, right?” I say instead.