“Hello. You’re new, aren’t you? What are you doing?”
I can taste my tears now.
“Katie,” he prompts.
I take a shaky inhale. “Installing a camera. What are you doing?”
His hand tightens on the ladder. “Saving your life.”
I can’t breathe. I know all the next words by heart. Hisnosy questions about my age, his insistence that we be friends. I know my feelings by heart too—the breathlessness of realizing how attractive he was, the tug in my stomach at how attractedIwasto him, like he’d been conjured specifically from every fantasy I’d ever had. The awful, crumpling realization that we could never be more. My determination to forget how I felt.
“Do you like chess?”
“That’s not the next line.”
His smile tips over. I see in his eyes that he’s pleased that I know the next line.
“Go with it.” He’s fighting a smile.
“I love chess,” I say, my voice trembling.
“Want to teach me?”
This conversation is from a month after we met. “You want to learn?”
“I want to spend time with you.”
I shake my head furiously. “That’s not what you’re supposed to say.”
His gaze simmers. “That’s what I should have said. Ask me whether we can be friends, Katie.”
My throat seizes. I can’t. My eyes are wide and wild. I feel like an animal, trapped on this ladder, forced to admit all the feelings I hid from both of us, forced to repeat every conversation that I wished had ended differently.
“Ask,” he says.
How much do I trust Tristan?
Back then, he said, “Of course. You’re one of the guys,” and it sank barbed hooks into my heart.
I lick my lips. “Can we really be friends? Is that too weird?”
“No.”
My stomach plummets.
“We can start as friends, but I want so much more than that with you.” Tristan’s hands wrap firmly around my waist, and he hoists me off the ladder. He’s so strong, so self-assured. It feels like he can hold all my fears and all my insecurities and stand between them and me, maybe forever.
“Katie, sweetheart.” He kisses me and I lunge for him, sinking hands into his hair, trying to crush him with the force of my emotions. He laughs into my mouth and crushes me to him.
“This is how it should have been,” he says.
“No,” I tell him fiercely. “It turned out exactly the way I wanted.”
65
EPILOGUE
TRISTAN
