The Roughest Draft(53)

Feeling remorseful for how I’d handled her transference explanation, I decided—today, I could be Katrina’s friend. From there, we would see.

“Was it just me,” she starts while we walk, “or did it feel like they wanted us to neither confirm nor deny whether we had an affair?” She speaks casually, like she’s wondering what frozen food to heat up, not opening up the question that ruined us.

I cough. “It wasn’t just you.”

“I get it,” Katrina continues easily. “Of course the reporter will ask those questions.”

“But we don’t have to do what they’re suggesting,” I cut in. “We can tell the reporter the truth. Our relationship is professional, and we never slept together. Not while we wrote Only Once, not ever. We’ve never even kissed.” I’m instantly conscious of what implications might lie under what I’ve just said. Affairs concern sleeping with other people. The kissing hardly comes into it, so in a way, I’ve accidentally answered a question no one asked. Except myself.

Katrina laughs. “The truth,” she muses.

“It is the truth, Katrina.” I’m pressing now, the intensity in my voice incoherent with the tranquility of the Florida evening. But I need this out there if I’m going to hold on to this tentative effort to be friendly toward her.

“I know that,” she snaps.

The sudden sting in her tone surprises me. I look over. She’s facing forward, her mouth flat. What does she want me to say? Does she want me to confess to how I can’t stop thinking about her, how I can’t sleep, how I hate the progress we’ve made on the book because I know once we finish, she’ll be gone from me?

There’s a bigger reason why the full truth is unwelcome, one she knows. I voice it, anyway. “You’re engaged,” I say quietly. “Aren’t you worried how this could affect your relationship?”

Chris was on the call, I note in my head, and didn’t object once. I just don’t understand it. Regardless of whatever personal feelings I may have, I won’t wish on Katrina what I went through at the end of my marriage. While I don’t like Chris, I respect the commitment he and Katrina made. I refuse to break it, not physically and not in insinuation to this reporter or the world.

Katrina gives me a cutting glance out of the corner of her eye. The sun is low now, the light a golden glow on her face. She takes a deep breath.

“Chris gave me permission to fuck you if it meant finishing this book,” she says. “So I doubt he’d care about rumors.”

I stop walking. That word from Katrina has caught my mind like a sharp corner, ripping a gash in how I expected this night would go.

Sensing I’m not with her, Katrina pauses. She faces me from a few feet ahead on the sidewalk. “I didn’t, like, ask if I could, if that’s what you’re freaking out about,” she says.

It wasn’t. It hadn’t even occurred to me. “Do you . . . have an open relationship?” The question jumps into the space in my head her words emptied. It’s not even the most important question. In fact, it feels silly. But for some reason, I need it answered first.

Katrina huffs a laugh. “I guess so.” She looks past me, like she’d never contemplated the possibility. “When it’ll sell copies.”

“That’s an awful thing to say.” There’s no malice in my reply. The sadness of what she’s said is so huge it eclipses even the fact her fiancé said she could sleep with me. Because this is how it is with Katrina, my subconscious whispers to me. It’s not just Kat herself I find irresistible—her laughter, her eyes, her body. It’s this. It’s the impulses so much simpler, so much more innocent, so much more fundamental. To feel her wounds with her. To be there for her. To help her through. Even now, I couldn’t fight it if I tried. My first thought is for her.

Her expression closes up. “Yeah, well. It’s true.” She continues walking, like she’s decided this part of the conversation is over.

I follow her, thinking back to last night, when she touched me, when I had to fight down everything I wanted. She’s just revealed she has the type of relationship where I could do those things. I should be excited. Yet somehow, I’m not. Not while she’s unmistakably unhappy, and furthermore, the idea of sleeping with her, then sending her home to Los Angeles and Chris has me nowhere near excited.

I have to remind myself that while I know Chris’s feelings on the matter, I still don’t know Katrina’s. Surely, if she felt the way I did last night and knew she had permission from her fiancé to act on those feelings, she would have. She didn’t, though. I know what it means.

“We shut down the rumors. All of them.” I say decisively.

Katrina blinks, surprised. “And the book sales?”

“We’re writing a fucking good book,” I say. “It doesn’t need rumors about us to sell.”

She’s silent. Finally, she nods. “The truth, then. We tell them nothing ever happened between us.” Her voice gathers conviction, momentum. “And we split because . . . ?”

She’s right. We can’t tell the whole story.

“Because writing a book with someone is hard. We needed space,” I say. “That’s all.” It’s not all. But that piece of the truth is for us and no one else. If we’re ever going to confront what happened, it won’t be in front of a reporter. It won’t be to make our publisher happy or promote a book.