The Summer We Fell (The Summer, #1)(59)

He waits at the lowest rock until the tide rushes in before he jumps, and then he’s paddling furiously, a tiny figure on a blue and green board, fighting his way through violent surf to reach the break. Soon he’s inside what’s probably a sixty-foot wave, working his way to the top, and my heart is in my throat. Am I the only one who understands how wrong this can all go? He’s scaling something that could crush him in seconds.

“You want the binoculars?” asks Summer, and I take them with shaking hands, zeroing in on him.

He looks like an ant in that wave even now, impossibly fragile.

I think of my brother, of how invulnerable he seemed when he left to talk to the police. They said he never even saw the shooter. That he walked out of the station and was on the ground seconds later.

Humans are so much more fragile than they seem, and you don’t know it until it’s too late. If Luke fails today—assuming he manages to survive the wave itself and isn’t shattered in a thousand ways from that alone—he could still be held under for ten minutes if luck isn’t on his side.

I hand her the binoculars. If these are his last moments, I don’t want to see him up close. I don’t think I want to see them at all.

Danny, beside me, is tense. “This was a bad idea.” At last, there’s concern for Luke instead of bitterness. “I should have stopped him.”

I press my face to my hands, thinking of this morning. I should have told him not to do it. I should have begged him. I should have told him how I feel, either way.

“He’s up next,” someone says.

I peel my hands from my face just as he takes the next wave, paddling hard to get ahead of it, popping up at the top of the crest before gliding down.

It’s a mountain of water, and he’s flying over the surface as if it’s something solid and unmoving, as if the energy beneath his board isn’t rumbling like a freight train.

“He’s got it!” someone shouts. “He’s fucking got it!”

“Wow,” Danny whispers. “He’s really doing it.”

But just as Luke enters the barrel, there’s a bump and he’s just…gone.

As if he was never out there at all.

Every exultant shout stops entirely, and everyone—even the strangers scattered across the viewing area—are staring at that one spot in the water where he disappeared.

“Fuck,” Beck hisses. He looks to Caleb, then Danny.

They all stand, and suddenly it’s chaos. Summer starts crying. The crowd is shouting, and the guys start toward the rocks, though I don’t know what the hell they’ll do when they get down there—they can’t possibly reach Luke without boards. Even with boards they’d all just get sucked into the wave and drown with him.

Inside, my very bones are pleading with God to let him be okay, screaming it, but I’m locked so tight I couldn’t say it aloud if I wanted to.

I will do anything You want. Just don’t take him away from me.

Everyone is running, moving, crying…but I can’t seem to unfreeze. I scan the water, desperate for any sign of him, sick to my stomach and numb all at once.

And then, like a miracle, Luke appears. He’s bleeding from a cut on his arm and his board is gone but he’s there, swimming back toward the shore.

A sob swells in my throat as the guys wade out to help drag him onto the rocks, but it’s only when he climbs out and looks straight at me that the sorrow wins out, and I rise to my feet and run.

I have no idea where I’m going. I only know I feel completely out of control, that I can’t let anyone see me like this.

I push through the brush with tears streaming down my face, and when I’m out of sight, I press my face to a tree and cry like a baby. I don’t even know why. He’s okay. But my tears aren’t just over the terror of those last few minutes. They’re about all the things I want from life that I’m not going to get.

Luke, most of all.

A twig snaps behind me. I turn to find Luke marching toward me, wetsuit hanging off his hip bones, water glistening on his skin, still bleeding.

“What the fuck, Juliet?” he begins.

I round on him, suddenly livid. It enrages me that he took the risk he just did. How could he?

“You fucking scared me!” I cry. “Do you have any idea how devastated I’d be if—”

Before I can say another word, he’s closed the distance between us, one hand wrapping around the back of my neck as he pulls my mouth to his.

It’s not a sweet, gentle peck on the lips. It’s as if I’m his only source of oxygen, as if he’ll die without it. Something desperate, something magical, is pulsing in my blood, blooming as his hands grip my jaw, framing my face in his palms.

“I thought I was going to die, and the only thing that mattered, the only thing I wanted, was you,”

he says against my mouth. “You were all I fucking thought about.”

He pushes my back to the tree, the saltwater on his skin seeping through my clothes. I groan as his hands slide down my sides to drag my hips closer, and I let my fingers dig into his hair, the way I’ve wanted to…always.

This is what existed between the two of us whether we were touching or not. This is the source of my sharpness with him, the source of his narrowed eyes as he watched me at dinner, and the rage leveled at me as often as it was leveled on my behalf.