Page 3 of On Fire Island

“Just good?”

Truth was, I wouldn’t have killed off Patrick O’Reilly either. I wouldn’t have given him and Erin O’Malley a happily ever after, but I wouldn’t have offed him, a detail that wasn’t in the early draft I had read. I certainly would not tell him as much.

“What? Was it the ending?” he asked impatiently. “Most people love it, you know. Only a few readers have said otherwise.”

I decided he must be one of those authors who combs through Goodreads and Amazon for negative reviews. My Hemingway comparison that had seemed so promising when he ordered a Scotch and soda came to a hard stop. I doubted Papa Ernest would give a crap that Suzy from Schenectady was disappointed in the ending ofA Farewell to Arms.

“It’s good, really. I mean, how many weeks have you clocked on the bestseller list now?”

In a case of perfect timing, my date, the Doctor, entered and caught my eye.

“My friend is here. Very nice to meet you!” I exaggerated.

I wished I hadn’t had to.

That night I returned home to a new follower on Instagram and a private message that read,

Curious about how you would have ended it.

I had thought about this before but spent more time contemplating if I should answer than how I should answer. In the end I decided it was in no one’s best interest to edit a book already in print. I went to sleep without responding.

In the morning I woke up to another message from him.

Sorry if I was rude at the bar last night. I’m obviously insecure about the ending.

It’s hard to know if neurotic people become authors or if becoming an author makes people neurotic, but either way the result is the same. As familiar with this particular human condition as I was, I responded with real insight and praise, stroking his ego and soothing his self-doubt as I had found myself doing often with many an author facing criticism. Soon a back-and-forth between us developed. What began as typical publishing industry therapy morphed into shoptalk, followed by chitchat and eventually flirtatious banter. Somewhere in between it all the real Ben Morse, with his boyish charm and his powerful observations, grew on me, and eventually the reality of him excited me more than the fantasy. Tired of obsessively checking my Instagrammessages, I gave him my cell—and each of us later admitted to texting and deleting multiple iterations of the question “Should we meet in person?”

That summer, I took a share in a house on Fire Island with my old roommate from Sarah Lawrence, Sarah Lawrence. (Yes, her name and the name of the school were one and the same, and yes, it had made her an instant campus celebrity—which she thrived on.) I’d never been to Fire Island, but Sarah Lawrence had been a part of a group house there every summer since graduation. The vibe of the house, which had been founded on beer pong, cold pizza, and shots of Jäegermeister, had matured with its residents, now more interested in charades, clambakes, and chardonnay. It was finally approaching my speed, so when a spot opened, I grabbed the chance to perk up my social life a bit. I spent too much time reading and way too much time texting with Ben Morse. He was no better, by the way. Writing epic love stories on trains, on planes, and in hotel rooms while covering games and tournaments and even the Olympics seemed to render his personal life nonexistent.

Sarah Lawrence was pacing back and forth across our itsy-bitsy room in her teeny-weeny bikini, the smell of her, courtesy of her sacred tube of Bain de Soleil Orange Gelée, penetrating my nose every time she trudged by. She was obviously eager to get to the beach, though too passive-aggressive to say it with actual words.

I looked up from my current entertaining exchange with Ben and blurted, “Go to the beach, Sarah. I’ll meet you there.”

“Is it that author again? Will you ask him out already?”

“I will, soon.”

“Bullshit!” she called, as she grabbed my cell and took off with it to the bathroom.

Five minutes later she returned, announcing, “Benjamin Morse will be on the noon ferry.”

I probably changed six times before picking up Ben at the dock that day, which was quite a feat, since I’d packed only three outfits. I’d never experienced anything close to what I was feeling when his ferry appeared in the distance. My heart froze in my chest, and by the time the boat came close enough for me to read her name—ironically enough, theI’M HERE—I thought I might pass out from nerves. As it turned out, I wasn’t the only nervous one. Ben had also tuned in to the discrepancy in our sizes and our uncanny resemblance to Beauty and the Beast. He’d convinced himself that the chemistry we had clearly established through the written word would never fly in person.

And so it was, on that hot summer day, many, many months after I had first read his manuscript and fallen in love, Benjamin Morse exited the ferry with a shy, blushing smile and a handful of wild clary—the same flowers that Patrick O’Reilly had given Erin O’Malley after they first made love in the fields of Tipperary. How he found a bouquet of wild clary before making the afternoon ferry was beyond comprehension. I ran to him.

When I reflect on that weekend, I always seem to see it through a hazy lens, offering only a fuzzy recollection of first touches, first smiles, and first inhaling of the scent of him, a woodsy mixture of the salty bay and a summer campfire. When his lumbering arms enveloped me in our inaugural hug it filled me with a feeling I had never experienced before. I belonged in his arms. I badly wanted to stay in them forever.

It was his maiden visit to Fire Island and, while I was a newbie myself, I was sufficiently familiar with the simple lay of the land—a grid-like arrangement of beach-themed streets traversing the narrow strip from the bay to the ocean—to find my wayaround. The bay side boasted a small town dense with bars, restaurants, boutiques, and three separate ice cream shops, each with a perpetual line leading to its door. The ocean side contained a vast and beautiful beach dotted from one end of the thirty-two-mile island all the way to the other with colorful towels, colorful people, and an abundance of gratitude.

We spent most of the day by the ocean in the company of my housemates, playing Kadima, riding the waves, reading, and basking in the sun. We took part in the group barbecue dinner and stayed for a few rounds of charades. I pickedA Tale of Two Cities—which Ben quickly guessed from my miming a tail. For his turn he quite hysterically got stuck withThe Vagina Monologues.If I hadn’t been into him before, watching him attempt to act out the wordvagina, without one, made me fall even harder.

He suggested a walk and an ice cream cone before the last ferry, and we ended up sitting on the swings at the playground on the Great South Bay, each with a scoop of Moose Tracks to distract us from the narrative running through both of our heads—Where is this going?

“I have to make the boat,” he said, slowing down his swing and jumping off. He grabbed the chains of mine to slow it down too. The moon was full, and its light caught his shy smile.

“Can I kiss you goodbye?” he asked softly.

“You can kiss me hello,” I responded breathlessly.

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