Tully and Chad Begin a Romance

Tully and Chad Begin a Romance marks a complicated turn in Tully's life: intimacy with Chad, her professor and mentor, becomes both a source of comfort and a relationship that Tully and Chad recognize as wrong. It gives her a new experience of safety, helps her speak about the rape she had kept inside, and brings her friendship with Kate into painful conflict.

From Fear to Intimacy

Tully describes being frightened at first. Chad's kiss changes the moment: she says she had been thinking of the night with Pat and feared she might become sick or run, but then she melted into the kiss. She recounts that he had her clothes off before she was paying attention. The memory does not erase the earlier assault; instead, it shows how fear and desire meet as Tully begins a different kind of sexual relationship.

The affair develops beyond physical intimacy. Chad recognizes that Tully and Kate have fought about him and that Kate's opinion matters deeply to Tully. Tully is surprised that he has listened closely enough to understand this, because she has gradually shared pieces of herself with him after sex and while they drink. Though they are lovers who do not love each other, she feels safe in his bed and free from judgment. Being understood comforts her, even as that comfort frightens her.

Kate's Objection and Tully's Promise

Kate believes the relationship is wrong, and Chad agrees that it is. Tully responds that Kate is her best friend and is supposed to support her no matter what. Her insistence draws on the promise the two friends made years earlier; the words falter as she invokes it. The disagreement makes clear that loyalty, for Tully, is not an abstract ideal: she wants the friendship to hold even when Kate condemns a choice Tully is making.

The conflict also reveals how difficult it is for Tully to separate comfort from consequence. Chad tells her she should listen to Kate, rather than encouraging her to dismiss the warning. His tenderness and moral candor coexist: he understands why Kate's judgment hurts, but does not pretend that the affair is right. The relationship therefore offers Tully a refuge without resolving the ethical and personal disagreement surrounding it.

What the Affair Gives Tully

Tully later reflects that sleeping with her professor has become a full-blown affair, though she is no longer sure how it began or whether it started as a career move, as Kate had suspected. What she knows is that she feels content in Chad's arms, an unfamiliar emotion for her. Their time together is also a mentorship: he teaches her things she believes would otherwise have taken years to discover.

Most consequentially, Tully experiences a degree of sexual intimacy that lets her reconsider the rape by Pat. Chad's bed becomes a place of safety in her telling, and she says that the memory of her first time in the woods of Snohomish fades little by little. She does not claim the experience disappears: it remains a scar on her soul, but one that changes from a bright, burning wound into a thin line that is only sometimes visible. The account presents healing as gradual and incomplete, not as the cancellation of what happened.

Significance

The romance complicates the best-friends-forever promise by placing Kate's honest concern against Tully's demand for unconditional support. It also connects Tully's history of sexual violence to her later capacity for intimacy: Chad's attention and instruction matter not because they undo the assault, but because they help her experience safety and speak more freely. The relationship brings comfort, learning, and a measure of recovery, while leaving intact the conflict over whether the affair is right and what friendship requires when the friends disagree.