I’ll have everything I want.
The reality cools my mind. I push myself to render the details, just like if I were writing a scene. Nathan will return home, where he’ll end his marriage. Then, after some weeks, some impossibly short time . . . he’ll return to me. And he’ll never leave. He’s courteous enough that he’ll give Melissa their apartment. He’ll use my bathroom, watch TV from my couch, sleep under my white duvet. With me. I’ll have him, then and forever.
In a year, Only Once is going to come out and be a huge success. I can feel it. Every single page is electric. The echo of finishing it today hasn’t stopped reverberating in my ears. It’ll change our careers. Change our lives.
For my entire professional life, I’ve stared up the side of this mountain I’m climbing with Nathan, finding clouds obscuring the summit. Now, the clouds have parted. The way is clear. I imagine reaching the peak not long from now, imagine how it’ll feel gazing down from the dizzying height. I’ll be struggling in the thin oxygen.
I feel paralysis seeping in even now. I can’t. I can’t have everything at once, everything I’ve ever wanted.
Especially not when Nathan’s put his promises into words like these. Whatever he thinks he feels is too wrapped up in a story he’s telling himself, the story of us. It’s plain in the pages in front of me. He couldn’t even put his feelings for me down without fictionalizing them. That’s how real they are.
But real life is everything else. Everything continuing on once the story ends. I’m not certain which one Nathan wants, the story or the everything else.
The pen falls from my hand. What I’ve been feeling this summer was, I realize, just the ominous pull of the current. Now I’m swept off my feet. Sucked out into very deep water. The future is overwhelming, suddenly here, daunting and mine to lose. And I’m thrashing furiously under the surface, not sure which way is shore. And I’m scared.
Because the true, true horror, the one seemingly no one realizes but me, is that once you have your dreams, all you have left is the chance to lose them. It’s inevitable. Losing writing will hurt. Losing Nathan—
It’s like some switch flips in me, leaving me unfairly furious. He put his words down on paper, where they’re fucking perfect, immaculately unmistakable—where they’re fiction.
Where they’re easy to destroy.
I walk downstairs, my heart pounding, my head memorizing every single word written on the page in my hand. The living room is dark. One forgotten coffee mug sits on the side table. There’s something foreboding in how normal everything looks, like it’s ready to be disrupted. I walk to the fireplace we’ve never once used.
Hands shaking, I reach for the lighter.
This way, Nathan can return to his wife, to the life that’s real. This way, I’ll fall from a lower height, one I can survive.
It takes me two tries for the lighter to spark in the dark frame of the fireplace.
When it does, the flame burns steady.
53
Nathan
? PRESENT DAY ?
Katrina walks five or six steps in front of me. In the hallway, I follow her outline, my heart like a drum.
She leads us into my bedroom, not hers. The choice is inspired, of course. It’s utterly sexy, the confidence, the self-possession of taking me to my bed to sleep with me. When I walk in, she’s sitting up on the bed, wearing nothing except her underwear. Her eyes fix on me with gentle invitation, her legs folded loosely under her—the legs I’ve watched her reposition countless times while we work, except now they’re bare, only one soft triangle of fabric separating me from what I want.
I linger in the doorway, trying to memorize every detail. The waterfall of her hair spilling over her shoulder, brushing the tops of her breasts. The hinting curve of her rib cage under her bra.
But my body wins out. I’m pulled forward, hands finding those curves, my lips crushing to hers. She kisses me fiercely, clinging to me, her hands taut in the fabric of my shirt.
Which I tear off. I catch her leaning forward in one smooth motion, reaching—her bra falls, her wonderfully soft chest meeting mine when I pull her to me. When I reach up, caressing, the small, gasping moan I hear escape her undoes me.
“Fuck,” I say into her neck. She lifts her chin, the motion perfectly synchronous with mine, like we’ve practiced this dance. It might be because we have in dreams—I know I have. But I don’t think it’s why we know each other’s movements before they happen. Why her fingers find mine to interlace over her breast. Why she knows to spread her knees when I reach to cup her lower down.