Every Summer After(55)
“I want you. I’ve always wanted you,” he murmurs as I pant. I lean back, my bare breast cool from the dampness of his mouth.
“You’re so fucking gorgeous,” he says. I move my hand up his thigh, over the thin material of his sweatpants, until I find the hard ridge of his erection.
I kiss the crease on his bottom lip, then cover it with my mouth, sucking and biting while I move my hand under his waistband and around the warm length of him, moving my hand back and forth. When I run my tongue flat up his neck to his ear, pulling the lobe with my teeth, and whisper, “You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever known,” he grabs my hand and pulls it out of his pants, then squeezes my hips and brings me down against him, and his pelvis bucks underneath me. A loud, strangled cry leaves his mouth. His orgasm rips through him in three waves, and I leave kisses on his neck until it ebbs and then I curl against his chest and listen to the sound of his heavy breathing. His arms fold around me, and we stay like that for several quiet minutes.
But when I sit back to look up at him, his brows are furrowed.
“I loved you,” he whispers.
“I know,” I say.
Hurt eyes move across my face. “You broke my heart.”
“I know that, too.”
12
Summer, Thirteen Years Ago
“Sam Florek is a fucking lunatic, and don’t you forget it.” Delilah was sitting on my bed, her pale legs folded underneath her, delivering a pep talk as I packed for the cottage. “You are a smart, sexy, seventeen-year-old woman with a ridiculously hot boyfriend, and you don’t need some small-town loser who doesn’t appreciate how incredible you are bringing you down!”
Delilah was on an anti-man kick. She broke up with Patel when he went away to McGill, and threw everything she had at school. She had gotten it in her head that she was destined to change the world, and she wasn’t going to let any guy stand in her way. Her grades were better than mine. Though she and Patel were now “on again” for the summer.
“You know it’s weird to call your cousin ridiculously hot, right?” I said, cramming bathing suits into my overstuffed suitcase.
“It’s not weird if I’m just stating a fact,” she replied. “But you’re missing my main point, which is that I don’t want you to get hurt again. You’re too good for Sam.”
“That’s not true.” I may have spent the past ten months convincing myself that I was over him and that he was right to want to keep our relationship purely platonic, but I didn’t believe for a second that I was too good for him. “And he’s not a loser,” I added.
Sometimes I wondered if Sam called things off last summer because he didn’t want to attach himself to me when he had all these big plans to go away to school and become a doctor and never look back. He didn’t want to get stuck in Barry’s Bay, but at my most anxious I thought that maybe he didn’t want to get stuck with me, either.
I had joined the swim team, to my mother’s delight, and had distracted myself with practice, writing, and Mason’s hockey games, while Sam had spent the year studying or working to save for university. He barely took a break. I had to convince him to go to parties or spend a night playing video games with Finn and Jordie. He never mentioned girls, but I knew he wouldn’t waste time dating—not that I cared. Okay, I cared. He was still my best friend. But that was it. Best friend. Nothing more.
“I’ll be the judge of that once and for all when we come up to visit,” Delilah said, reaching into the suitcase and pulling out my team suit. “I get that you actually swim when you’re up there, but please tell me you’re packing something a little more exciting than this,” she said, holding up the navy one-piece. I smiled: Delilah was nothing if not predictable. I grabbed a gold string bikini and threw it at her.
“Happy?”
“Thank god. What’s the point of all that time you spend pickling yourself in chlorine if you aren’t going to show off the results?”
“Some people call it exercise,” I laughed. “You know, for health?”
“Pfff . . . as if you and Mason don’t lie around naked talking about how hot your hot athletic bodies are,” she scoffed.
“Again, he’s your cousin.”
Delilah and Patel started having sex a while ago and she assumed the same was true of Mason and me. To correct her would mean having a detailed conversation about exactly what was happening between us, which I preferred to keep to myself.
“I can’t help it if the Mason family gene pool is prone to extreme good looks.” Delilah tossed her hair over her shoulder. She wasn’t wrong. Even with her red hair and explosive personality, she looked softer than me, with roller-coaster curves that were irresistible to the boys in our high school, who constantly stopped by our lunch table to flirt. She dismissed them all with a flick of her wrist.
I gathered up a couple of notebooks and paperbacks and placed them on top of the piles of clothing.
“I’ll never get this zipped up,” I said, trying to shove everything down in my suitcase.
“Good, then you’ll have to stay!”
“I’ll see you in a month, D. It’ll fly by. Give me a hand here?” Delilah pushed down on the bulging case while I zipped it up.