The Summer We Fell (The Summer, #1)(72)

Even now, confused and guilty, all I want in the world is more time with him.

I hear the gate shut outside, footsteps, and then the shower door is flung open.

Luke stands there, naked but for the swim trunks hanging off his lean hips, his eyes moving over me like I’m something he’s been starved of for too long. When he steps inside, letting the door shut behind him, I close the distance as if we’ve been magnetized. As if I’ll die without the sleek, sandy feel of him pressed to my bare skin. His hand cups the side of my face, thumb smoothing a path over my cheek, eyes flickering over my face. His brow scrunches, and I know he can tell I’ve been crying, but he says nothing. He knows why. He always knows. My hand goes to his shorts, pushing them down his hips, distracting him from his thoughts and my own.

He lifts me up, holding me against the wall. My legs wrap around him, pulling him closer as he slides inside me. “I haven’t asked you once if this is okay,” he says. “Like, without protection.”

“I think it’s fine,” I gasp.

“You know why I didn’t ask?” His teeth slide over my earlobe like he’s skimming them over an artichoke peel. “Because a part of me wanted it to happen. I’m that desperate to get you to leave, Jules. I know it’s wrong, but that’s the truth. It would mess up our entire future and I don’t even care.”

I realize only as he says it that I’m just as desperate. That a part of me wants my hand forced.

“Give me a week,” I beg. I tighten around him, close already.

“Thank God,” he whispers. “One week. I’ll come get you.”

His mouth finds mine as I fall apart, silencing the noises I make. His eyes are dreamy as he finally pulls away and sets me back down.

“One week,” he says, and his smile is so sweet that it makes my eyes fill with happy tears.

“One week.”

I KNOW, as I walk back to the house, that I should be anxious and guilty, and it’s not that those feelings aren’t there, but right now I’m so thrilled, so overwhelmed by the possibilities, that there’s no room for anything else.

It’s the end of trying to be good all the time. It’s the end of an internship I hate, and cooking dinner

for a man who never stops thinking I owe him more. It’s having a room or even an apartment where I can hang things on the wall and set my own schedule.

But best of all, it’s Luke. It’s Luke when he sleeps and when he wakes and all the hours in between. I’ll probably spend the rest of my life missing Donna, and feeling bad for the way I handled things, but Luke is my sun, my moon, my tide, and I’m tired of fighting his pull.

It’s our last night, but I don’t drink. I’m already drunk on hope, and every time I look at Luke, I know he is too.

We barely even speak. It’s just a smile, a knowing thing in his gaze.

“One week,” he whispers by my ear, just before I go to bed.

“One week,” I repeat.

I fall asleep dreaming of it, once again pretending the warm shoulder wedged into my back isn’t Danny’s. I’m dreaming of it still when a phone rings in the middle of the night. The mattress rolls so suddenly that I fall right off the side as Danny reaches for the call.

“I don’t understand,” Danny says into the phone.

I sit up. Over the mattress, his shocked eyes meet mine. “Okay,” he says. “We’re on our way.”

He puts down the phone, his voice barely audible. “It’s my dad. He had a heart attack. We need to get up there.”

We pack as quickly as we can. Grady offers to drive us, since he was going back today anyhow.

My gaze meets Luke’s as we’re walking out the door, just before dawn. He’s wondering what happens now. I wish I had the answer.

We make the drive to Rhodes in near silence. Sporadically, Grady says a prayer, or suggests God has a plan. It annoys the shit out of me, but Danny doesn’t even seem to notice.

“I don’t understand,” Danny says out of nowhere. “I thought he had the surgery to avoid this. Why didn’t anyone tell me he was sick?”

Grady glances at me in the rearview mirror as if this is entirely my fault.

“You and I could take over for him,” Grady suggests to Danny. “I can handle the counseling and sermons, you could handle the management of everything else.”

My eyes roll. How like Grady to use Danny’s family tragedy to move himself up in the world, and frame it as charity.

When we arrive at the hospital, we’re told it’s family only, so Danny goes back to his dad and I sit in the waiting room with Grady, the two of us uttering not a single word to each other. The guilt eats at me: I shouldn’t have left Donna to care for the pastor by herself. And how the hell am I going to leave in a week? When the pastor gets home, he’s going to need so much more help than he did, and Grady will be gunning for his job with all he’s got.

And just when I think I can’t take it anymore—the silence, my guilt—the doors slide open and Luke walks in.

My shoulders sag in relief as our gazes meet. I assumed he drove back to school after they



cleaned up the house this morning, and I shouldn’t want him here now but, oh my God, I do.

We don’t discuss what is going to happen to our plan because it isn’t the time. He doesn’t hold my hand. But his arm is beside mine and he’s here and that’s enough.