The Summer We Fell (The Summer, #1)(47)

I rise, picking the guitar up with me. “What do you mean?”

His eyes fall to my lips, slow as a caress. “He doesn’t want depth, Juliet, and he doesn’t need it.

Not everyone does. There are people who skim the surface their entire lives. But you’re not one of them. That’s why you write a bittersweet song that’s full of fucking layers and he comes away with one word— sad, and Donna would use the same word. It doesn’t mean they’d be right, and that’s why you’ve got to stop listening to them.”

“I owe them a lot, though. I can’t just…not listen.”

“Something can be good for you once. That doesn’t mean it’s always good for you. You can’t let them hold you hostage.”

“Hostage?” I repeat, embarrassed and irritated at once. “Do I look like a hostage?”

He steps so close that I can feel the heat of his skin, smell his shampoo and the lingering hint of sunscreen beneath it. “You look like something rare and wild,” he whispers, pushing the hair back from my cheek. My breath catches at the feel of his fingers on my skin. “Something they locked up in a cage. And I think you were so relieved to find a safe place to land you didn’t even realize it happened. I thought I could save you if I came here this summer, but even if someone opens the cage, you’ve got to be willing to fly away, too, Jules.”

He swallows and steps away from me, looking down as if he’s said too much.

And I’m pretty sure he did.





21

NOW

I wake in my own bed. I didn’t stay for long last night, once it was done, and he didn’t say a word as I crept away. Surely Luke of all people knows better than to expect anything of me, but when I walk into the kitchen, there’s something in his gaze that wasn’t there before.

There’s something different inside me too. I know nothing is going to change—I can’t allow anything to change—but I feel alive again, as if I’ve been dunked into ice water then brought into the sun. The blood that moved sluggishly through my veins a few weeks ago now seems to zip along, made young and sprightly and unreasonably hopeful.

Donna smiles at me from the table, waving me over to eat pancakes with them. “You’re finally starting to look healthy again,” she says. “I like seeing those roses in your cheeks.”

My face heats, and I force myself not to look at Luke.

“I was just talking about the twins who are coming right after the opening ceremony.” She loads three pancakes on my plate and then slides a folder to me. “They’re the same age you were when you came.”

I open the file, frowning at their pictures. “They look really young. You’re sure they’re fifteen?”

Her smile is a little sad. “Honey, fifteen is really young. You looked like that when you showed up at my door, I promise.”

I raise a brow in silent disagreement. Mentally, I saw myself as an adult at fifteen, maybe because I’d lived through such hard things. I couldn’t possibly have been as small and uncertain as the kids I see in these photos.

“You don’t believe me,” Donna says. She walks out of the kitchen, and Luke and I share a glance.

I worry that I’ve offended her. I worry that what Luke and I did last night has shifted the balance here, and we are—once again—misweighted, destined to crash what remains of the Allens into the ground.

But she returns with a photo. “Danny took that picture of you the night you met.” Her smile flickers and her voice catches. She’ll never stop being sad about him. She’ll die sad for him. And that’s entirely my fault.

It’s a picture of me on stage at the county festival where he first saw me. I’m standing with two other girls after we’d performed an acapella version of some Taylor Swift song. I’m the smallest of the three of us, smiling like a little kid, apple-cheeked and wide-eyed. I wasn’t a fucking adult, not by any stretch of the imagination.

Justin blamed me for what happened. He said I’d seduced him, that if I hadn’t wanted it, I wouldn’t have walked around the house in my pajamas, that I wouldn’t have walked out of the bathroom after a shower with a towel wrapped around me. That I wouldn’t have dressed the way I did for parties and worn so much makeup. And no matter what I said aloud, I believed him. Some part of me has thought all along that I must have been gross and wanton in ways other girls my age wouldn’t have been.

But I was little. I was na?ve. I had no one to turn to for guidance about anything. I’ve spent the past decade blaming the little girl in the photo for sometimes responding to what he did, for not pressing charges against him though I’d have been absolutely defenseless if I had. I’ve blamed myself for not telling more people, though the people I did tell accused me of lying. Even after he went to jail for manslaughter, after being arrested dozens of times for other shit, I blamed myself.

And I really, truly was not at fault. I see that now. But forgiving yourself for the past is a slippery slope. Because if I forgive myself for the way I handled what happened in high school, it’ll become easier to forgive myself for everything else. One day, I’ll look back at a photo of me at twenty and think she was a kid too. I might convince myself that the mess I created with Danny and Luke wasn’t my fault, that I handled things poorly because I was so damn young.