The Summer We Fell (The Summer, #1)(76)

I haven’t seen Luke since the night of Danny’s proposal three months ago, when he watched me say, “Yes” in stunned silence. He was gone the next morning, before I woke.

I think he understood that I didn’t have a choice, that I couldn’t take one more thing away from them when they’d just lost so much, and he appears to have moved on just fine—he won a shortboard contest in La Jolla and finally secured enough major sponsors to go on the tour, though he nearly lost all of them when he got into a fistfight at the next competition.

I’m happy for him, but when I close my eyes, I still picture the plan we made: LA, living together, him coming in to see me at work every morning after a day of surfing, curling up next to me at night.

We’d have been broke, the place would have been a dump, and I still can’t imagine anything better.

I spend a lot of time telling myself to stop imagining it, but this weekend is just going to make it harder.

The guys are on the deck discussing the storm coming in when Luke arrives. “There’s the hero of the hour!” Caleb booms, clapping him on the shoulder. “Nice work, man.”

Luke smiles and thanks him, but then his gaze lands on me with something bleak in his eyes that wasn’t there before. I was wrong, then, when I said he was doing just fine. He was reckless when he won at La Jolla. I wonder, now, if that’s my fault. I glance away, but not fast enough. Grady is watching, already angry. I still can’t believe Danny invited him after the way he acted at the funeral, but he’s always been better at forgiveness than I have, and as he pointed out—we couldn’t invite Libby without asking Grady too.

“How are the waves?” Luke asks.

“There’s no way, bro,” says Liam, nodding toward the churning ocean. It’s a small strip of beach, set between two cliffs, each of them littered with jagged rocks at the base. The break is far out, and

the wind is pushing the waves hard to the south. Simply trying get out there would mean getting thrown into the rocks. “Maybe it’ll calm down a little tomorrow, but right now that’s a death wish,”

Liam adds.

Luke continues to survey it, though, and my stomach drops. He is desperate to get away from me. I already knew I shouldn’t have come, but now, watching him, I’m certain this weekend was a big fucking mistake.

We all get settled into our rooms. Danny and I are given a master bedroom with a king-sized bed in honor of our upcoming wedding. We exchange an awkward glance as Harrison sends us in.

Currently, I share a bedroom with Donna, in the two-bedroom apartment we moved into after the church kicked them out of the house. I’ll switch over to Danny’s room when I become Mrs. Allen mere weeks from now, though I can’t begin to imagine what our nights will be like, with his mom sleeping across the hall. The situation is temporary anyway—a stopgap until we leave this fall. The church has agreed to let Donna set up an orphanage in Nicaragua. There have been objections to it, people lobbying the church not to send “hard-earned American dollars elsewhere”, and deep in my evil little heart I’m hoping they succeed. Because what am I qualified to do in Nicaragua? Nothing.

So I’ll have to cook, clean, and do the laundry all day for the kids, and at night I’ll have to sit with Danny and Donna, pretending I’m grateful to God for letting me do it.

“The room is amazing,” Danny says to Harrison when we get back upstairs. “Way bigger than anything Juliet and I will ever have.”

Luke pales. Swallowing hard, he walks back to the sliding doors. “You ever try jumping off that?”

he asks Harrison, nodding at the cliff to the south.

Harrison laughs. “No. I actually enjoy my life. I’d like it to continue.”

A muscle flickers in Luke’s cheek. “If you jump with your board at just the right moment and angle it right, I bet you could get past all that and paddle out.”

“Luke,” I say before I can stop myself. “No.”

There’s way more anxiety and desperation in my voice than I want to betray, but everyone is too busy agreeing with me to notice. I step toward him but catch myself before I go farther.

“She’s right, man,” says Beck. “Think about it…Even if you survive the jump and even if you manage to paddle out and don’t get swept into the rocks, how do you get back in? You’re still facing the same problem you were on the way out.”

Luke swallows. “I think if you rode in through the center of the channel and timed it right, you’d be fine.”

“That’s a really big if,” says Danny.

Luke glances at me, and before he even says a word, I already know exactly what he’s thinking and what he feels: that he wants to surf, and that he’s angry about so many things, and that if it doesn’t work out…it just doesn’t fucking work out.

“I can do it,” he says.

“Please,” I whisper.

He looks at me for one long moment. Too long. “It’s good, Jules.”

A simple thing, those words. Only I know what he’s really saying: that he understands the risks, and that I’ve made my decisions and now he’s making his.

He grabs his wetsuit out of his bag and goes to change.

“Someone needs to stop him,” Libby says. “This is stupid, even for him.”