The Summer We Fell (The Summer, #1)(67)

Yes, stay. But then he rolls beside me and pulls me to his chest.

“A room,” he says. “We’ll run off and have a room of our own. No, fuck it. We’ll have a whole house.”

I laugh quietly. “I thought of that today. I went to the neighbor’s place to take a shower and then I laid in their hammock and imagined it was ours.”

“We’d have a house just like that, but with way better waves than these. An oceanfront home facing the Pipeline, maybe, and every morning I’ll go surf and you’ll sleep in, and then I’ll come back and make you breakfast.”

I laugh. When he dreams, he dreams big. Neither of us could even afford an oceanfront shed.

“That sounds like a pretty easy life for me. Am I at least responsible for buying the groceries?”

“No. You can’t because I’ll have burned all your clothes.”

I giggle again. “If you’ve burned all my clothes, can I even go outside?”

“You make a good point. Okay, I’ll put up some hedges for privacy so you can go into the yard, but no farther.” He pinches me. “You can finally open that copy of Wuthering Heights you kept claiming to read for school. Now ask me what we’ll do after breakfast.”

“Okay, what are we doing after breakfast?”

He rolls above me. “You’ve been sitting there eating pancakes naked for thirty minutes. What the fuck do you think we’re doing?”

I’m still laughing when he pushes inside me again, surging harder and harder like a storm coming in. And when I’m close, when my body stiffens and I’m sinking my nails into his back because I need him to tip me over the edge, he gasps against my ear.

“God, I’d do anything to have that,” he says, and for a single blissful moment, when I’m blind and senseless and stunned by the force of my orgasm, distantly aware of his hoarse cry as he joins me, it feels as if it all came true.

As if there is another life in which we moved to Hawaii and never let the world come between us. Where we’d sway in a hammock, wondering if we should take our twin girls to Paris. And ultimately decide we were too happy where we were to ever leave.





29

NOW

T here’s a small reception after the ceremony for Danny’s House.

Caleb, Beck, and Harrison are here, as handsome as ever but world weary now. Caleb has some kind of tech company, Beck’s still at the bar, and Harrison’s an attorney. Somehow, I’d pictured them happier in adulthood than they are, and it was kind of them to come out for this on a workday, especially when they live to the north, but I sort of wish they hadn’t. That New York Times reporter seems to be roving from group to group. She’ll get to them eventually, and God knows what they’ll say.

“It was a nice ceremony,” Harrison says. “Danny would love this. And it’s a much better way to remember him than…” He trails off.

“Than what?” I demand, my voice sharper than I intended.

His eyes widen. “I shouldn’t have brought it up. But you know…the night he died, he just wasn’t himself. He argued with Luke, he—”

“He was drinking,” I say firmly.

They’re too polite to point out that the bad mood came first.

“Well, anyway, I’d like to remind you all that I’m the one who said Juliet and Luke would be famous,” Caleb announces with a grin.

“Anyone who heard Juliet sing knew she’d be famous,” Beck counters. “But Luke, not so much.

That asshole still can’t surf.”

My eyes widen until I hear Luke’s laughter behind me.

“True,” Luke says. “But I still surf better than you, Beck.”

They shake hands, and I’m about to excuse myself when Luke clears his throat. “But in all seriousness, I guess I’ve got one of you guys to thank. Those boards I was able to buy from the GoFundMe donation made all this possible. So, who was it? Which of you fronted the three grand?”

They all look at each other, confused.

“Believe me, I’d be taking all the credit now if it was me, but I was working as an unpaid intern,”

says Harrison. He turns to Caleb. “Was it you?”

Caleb’s brow furrows. “Where the hell would I have gotten a spare three thousand dollars, asshole? I was working as a lifeguard.”

They both look at Beck, and Caleb laughs. “We know it wasn’t you. You were borrowing gas money from us.”

“It had to be one of you guys,” Luke says. “Juliet made this big, embarrassing announcement around the bonfire basically insisting everyone donate, and the money was in there a few hours later.”

They look at each other, and then Luke looks at me, and I see something shift in his face. A question, one he dismisses then calls back. “She had no money, ” he’s telling himself. “It would have taken every penny she had.”

“I’d better check on Donna,” I say with a forced smile. “I’ll see you guys at the gala, right?”

I don’t even remain long enough to hear their answer. I cross the yard toward Donna, who’s talking to a stunning woman in a nicely tailored suit. I realize, belatedly, that the girl is Summer, all grown up. She’s ditched the bleached blonde hair and heavy self-tanner, lost a little of the baby fat.