Our Hearts Knew Better (Our Hearts #1)

Legendary

Levi found me sprawled out on the sole of his dad’s boat, grinning up at the stars, when I was several swallows into the bottle. My limbs, muscles, organs, tissues, veins were all loose as my brain was loopy and lively, my skin clammy and flushed.

“Summer.” He said my name like relief, like he had been searching, and I closed my eyes with my grin as I swayed to the sound.

Then he cursed. Not the one that put a spicy image of us in my head, but it scorched its way in and I laughed, sighing at my hotter flush.

“How deep are you?” he asked, the tips of his shoes pressed into the bare part of my thigh, and I felt him bend down to inspect the bottle in my grip.

I tilted my head toward him, my eyes still closed, my grin stuck. “Not deep right now.”

Then suddenly so deep, emotions, my feelings for this boy, crashing around my heart, magnified, as my breathing picked up between us and I blinked him back into my sight.

He was bent down, close, his gaze so intent on my face.

“You knew,” I breathed.

“Good timing,” he said low, and my stomach turned.

“No—it’s not good timing. We know each other. I found you, remember? I find you. And you find me.”

He only looked at me, but there was the flutter in his lids. Then he tapped at the bottle through my finger, the touch springing back my grin. “Just a little more.”

I groaned at the cut off warning, but I’d never had alcohol before, and I didn’t know when to stop. I also felt like I didn’t want to. “Have you been drunk before?”

He nodded with a half smile. “I think it’s every teenager’s rite of passage.”

I chuckled. “Like fireworks on the bay.”

He nodded again and it was dreamy. He was dreamy. The night was dreamy.

“This is my dad’s,” I told him with a wave of the bottle. “He saw me take it.” And he didn’t have it anymore. I considered returning the bottle to him, empty. Like I was always returned to him, empty in the heart.

I sat up too quickly and breathed through a wave of dizziness as Levi perched on a bench seat, answering his concern over what happened to get me wined up. I told him most of what my dad told me, including the part where my own father admitted he didn’t want me to be born.

And Levi’s jaw jerked, setting tighter and tighter.

“It’s been hard for him without Mom,” I said, my inebriated state only allowing me to mock, but after a sip of more wine, I was questioning. “I should feel bad for him, right?” I had sympathy for single parents. I saw in many ways what it was like to be one, real and not real. But I never gave my dad any trouble. Never. While all he made me feel was troubled.

“When it comes to your mom, yeah. But not when it comes to you.”

I raised the bottle in cheers to Levi and swallowed another sip. Single parent and Floyd Kinnison couldn’t be synonymous. He wasn’t a parent or a friend. Remember, Summer?

“I hate that this is true but he deserves to lose you,” Levi added, and my heart stretched, reached, as I held his blurred blue gaze.

“Do you want to lose me?” I asked as I scooted closer to him, a staticky feeling shooting straight to my head.

His mouth moved around an answer he didn’t say as I asked another, a bit more pressing. “Do you want me?”

His back met the back of the bench with a sigh like it knocked the air out of him. Or I did. He made some noise into his hands and I didn’t know what he meant.

“What do you mean?”

A chuckle, still into his hands, but when he lowered them, he studied me so seriously. My grip slid down the bottle as my heart raced like it was about to break again tonight.

“No,” he finally breathed, inconclusive, and I brought the bottle to my chest.

“For which?”

He wiped his hands on his shorts, a pause, more studying. “The first one.” His voice was so low, but at least my next swallow went down smooth and warm.

Then I was laughing, my body bouncing in place to the tune of his voice and words in my head.

When my two means of intoxication took over, I stood and danced.

Then I started singing when I heard Ten Decembers croon through the space, the bottle my microphone.

Levi, on the bench, was my rapt audience to my drunken concert, lifting his hand to catch the bottle in case I stumbled and stained his dad’s boat. He was making faces. His face was changing, as he watched me. It reminded me of those theater masks, so tragic and so tickled.

“What’s this face?” I asked, breathless, pausing the show to bend over him and touch the tragedy lines.

“It’s my face,” he teased, one hand securing me by the wrist and his other hand securing the bottle, the lines back to tickled.

“What nickname would you give me?” I asked him through my liquid courage. “Like in a book,” I added to the bend in his brows.

He released a small laugh, glancing to the side in thought, before getting this stilled light bulb look that gave me an anticipating bounce.

But he said, “I don’t know,” and I just groaned, my energy suddenly fizzling.

I sank to the sole. I was more drunk than I thought. I wasn’t blackout drunk. Levi cut me off here before I lost the light. Him . I didn’t lose him. Not tonight. I was just drunk enough to be more brave or reckless or anything I wanted to be.

A ringing sound jolted me back to lying down, my laughter rivaling the non stop sharp chiming.

Levi was staring down at his lap, at his phone screen, stalling, like our first night. This night, I groaned over the interruption.

“Adam?” I guessed.

The ringing stopped and Levi said, “Yep.”

I sprang up and breathed through another wave of dizziness, telling myself I needed to move slower from here on out, while knowing I was too overtaken with clumsiness. “Why didn’t you answer?”

Levi’s thumbs tapped the screen. “He’ll text me.” Then he eyed the screen like he was reading the text he knew Adam would send.

Adam was coming back soon. Summer flying by. He’d been texting me more again, so he was less busy, the games wrapping up.

“What’s he want?” I asked through a sigh, my head dropping to my shoulder.

Levi’s laugh was just in his exhale, the lines of his face a bit lighter but still. “He’s looking forward to not having his dad breathing down his neck in a year.”

I hummed toward the sky and raised my empty hand in a cheers to that. Though I’d guessed my true cheers came the night I was caught. The only breath on my neck was the breeze.

Good. Good.

Good.

I dropped back to lying down. “I had a best friend, too, you know, the night I met you.” I flopped to my side, my hand landing near Levi’s foot, and I tapped at his shoe as he pocketed his phone with his intent eyes on me. “Her name was Clara. She lived in Adam’s house before he did and we drank there together.”

Levi’s smile was soft as he slid to the sole with me, my hand tucking in to give him room as he perched up on his elbow.

“That’s gonna hurt soon,” I warned with a tap at where his elbow met the hard surface below us.

“Well, it’s not yet,” he said as a light tease. Then he prompted, still smiling, hazy and warm, “Clara?”

I laughed, another hum as my answer.

“What else did you do?”

I laughed again, smacking at the little space between us, my flush spreading. “It wasn’t real.” I blinked at his fading smile. “Not like this. This is real.” My heart slammed against my chest in a jolt of panic. “Right?” My hand was fisted in Levi’s shirt, holding on to him, to this summer, to my discoveries, like this had all been a vivid, still out of reach dream, and I was going to wake up not knowing this life anymore.

“Yeah,” Levi assured me, his hand wrapping around mine in a squeeze as desperate for me to believe this reality as I was. “Everything’s real.”

“” was the Ten Decembers song playing now. The band said in an interview the song was about the journey of their career, but written in a way that anyone could apply the song to anything romantic and revered and unforgettable.

This moment with Levi was legendary .

“I want to be overwhelmed by you,” I whispered with closed eyes, and I felt his chest rise big beneath my hand, still wrapped in his.

My lids were heavy when I blinked them open, and he was so still as he watched me, drawing my gaze and centering my thoughts to his mouth with the smallest lick of his lips. “How many girls have you kissed?” I knew by simple logic, by simply Levi , it was more than zero.

His grip on me loosened just enough for my weakened arm to slip down, but I caught the fall with another fist around his shirt.

His cheeks were colored as he said, “A couple.”

I closed my eyes one more time and saw two green fireworks.

“Do you want to kiss me?” I tried to stress me, Summer , but my voice was weakening too. My desire was a fighter, though. “The girl in front of you. Do you want me?” I repeated. “We could try other things I’ve read in books.” I touched him with the flirt, a bob in his throat as my finger took a tipsy trail down his chest.

His exhale was a gust. “Fuck, Summer.” That was the one.

He took my aimless finger, lost in the grooves of his abdomen, and wandering lower, and returned it to my own body. “You’re drinking.”

I shook my head, an ache forming where my skull pressed into the sole. “Not anymore.”

“You’re drunk.”

“I’m not that drunk.” As I denied this, the drunk was closing my eyes again. Sleep, sleep, sleep.

“You’re still drunk,” he argued again. Then a pause, my pulse thudding like a lullaby. “Ask me…ask me when you’re not.”

I grinned in my sleep, sleep, sleep. “So tomorrow?”

A laugh. So low, a piece of the lullaby. His next words my dreamland. “Tomorrow.”

Little orphan Annie had nothing on me.

I heard him flop over to his back with another gusted breath, like he hadn’t taken one since I went all suggestive.

And my grin went with me as it became tomorrow in my slumber.