Our Hearts Knew Better (Our Hearts #1)

You’re Going to Lose Her

Levi

There are two times with Summer that have put my body through the worst sort of exertion.

The first was the night I let her go.

The second was just minutes ago, when she walked out of that water like my own personal siren, set to kill me.

She was bared to me, radiant in the sun and unbelievably beautiful, and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do.

I could feel the suction from my pockets as they trapped my hands from being a piece of shit friend, acting on a possession I don’t have a right to and trying to touch her.

My best friend’s girl.

My best friend, who told me he told her about my involvement with her father, when I asked him to let me tell her.

She hasn’t asked me herself yet, and Floyd’s already asking about her. How soon she’s coming to see him. He’s getting better at balance but needs more practice with patience.

But Adam giving her the bomb that detonated on us back there half makes me want to shove Summer baring herself to me in his face, if it wouldn’t just put more problems onto her plate, and I’ve already been the bad guy in our story.

And she wasn’t baring herself for me. She had to get her clothes. I didn’t offer them up, giving her privacy, like I should have. I was suspended in a moment, unable to even help myself from wondering, wanting to see her, making that moment our privacy.

She loves Adam. She’s with him. And I have to be a friend to both, which means shutting my mouth on everything I have to shut my mouth on.

Two reasons for the tone I did have. Both involving Summer but not aimed at her.

Two reasons my hands are white on the wheel, both of us bobbling over bumps in the road.

Two reasons I might be the one who kills us.

If she notices the terrible job I’m doing driving, she doesn’t say so. The photo of my dad swings from the mirror, a terrible time to get his thumbs-up encouragement, saving he’s ready for us to meet him on the other side.

I’m not.

And just imagining Summer. . .

I hit the brakes, quick enough to slow the truck but still smooth enough to ease us into the stop without jarring us forward. Much.

“Need me to drive?” Summer asks as an offer, as I start the turn onto the next street, a new tone I don’t like that divides my attention from her to the road, like someone’s trying to unscrew my head from my neck. It’s indifference, with just a tinge of worry, like she’s not ready for the other side, either, but she also wouldn’t try to escape the truck if I was speeding for a cliff.

I’m careful with almost everything. I’m careful behind every wheel, but she’s about to make me more careless with the depth her sadness shreds me.

I blow out a breath through another surge of my white-knuckled grip, but keep a secure handle on the wheel, my foot a light touch on the gas. “I’m good,” I manage to say, a little too late. We’re almost to my mom’s, and Summer’s now looking back out her window.

Adam once fixed what I broke. She had him . Now those pieces he fixed are broken again.

He’s broken.

My mom’s broken.

I’m—

Fuck.

I’ve always tried to keep everything together, just like my dad. Now everyone has been falling apart and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do to stop it.

Summer runs her fingers over the photo of my dad once I’m parked in Mom’s driveway, my hands released to my lap and my key ring around my finger.

“I miss him,” she says low, her eyes shining with tears, and my hands do one last clench, my keys making an impression in my palm.

“Summer,” I say, a clog in my throat around her name, and I clear it, wanting the prod I’m about to give her, as I’ve given her over the phone, to be as clear as what I heard her saying without telling me the actual words back there on the road. “If you ever need to talk—”

“About what?” She blinks the tears from her eyes as they meet mine, dried up and pointed. Every curve of her face is already memorized, but I reacquaint myself with her this close, as she shreds me once more. “The guy who’s continuously breaking my heart to the guy who already broke it? He’s your best friend who became my boyfriend because I couldn’t have you.” My swallow sticks to my throat at the questioning in her voice. But she’s having mercy, not asking me. I don’t know what I’ll tell her when she does. “We can’t talk about that,” she finishes, and I hear, we can’t talk .

She stares out the windshield, and I know what she’s studying and what she’s aiming for before she even climbs from my passenger seat.

I follow, meeting her at the front, unable to look anywhere but at her. Again, I’m making her privacy ours, as my eyes stalk along the rebellious strands of her drying hair, curling around her face. The sliver of skin at the short hem of her shirt. Although now I’ve seen more. I’ve seen everything , and can’t help wondering if the bow around the waistband of her shorts is decorative or if I can make those shorts fall with just one tug of the ribbon.

The thought has me falling back against my truck and I do stop myself from following her as she keeps trekking toward the honeysuckle bush, taking in every breath that only she can give me. I took in my first one when I saw her back at the bay, like I haven’t been breathing at all since she left this town. Her presence here, the thunder under her feet, shaking my world back on its axis and releasing another brick that’s been sitting on my chest.

Summer picks off one, then two of the flowers, more of that pressure releasing from my chest as she smiles down at them.

Sulking talks with Adam run through my head about how he doesn’t see her smile anymore, and seeing that upward tilt now, when it’s been so long for me, too, is a tether for me to be back at her side.

“I missed that,” I say, a low fervor on that soft curve of her lips, and I have to put my hands back into my pockets.

She glances up at me, a slow side look, and in that second our gazes connect, everything else does, her and me, a mended bridge for us to meet in the middle.

But we don’t make it there, as her smile dwindles in a parted O , then to a scowl, like she’s now noticing the wrong guy is standing at the other end.

Adam should be in my place. His place. He should be saying this. Craving her and missing her.

My jaw tenses as I observe that frown in her mouth, the tired rims of her eyes, not entirely realizing she’s deposited the second flower on my rebellious reaching palm until she’s brushed past me for the house, and I plummet into the memory of bringing her two of them during our night out at the fire tower.

I was so worried they’d be crushed in my pocket, and the moment I surprised her had to be perfect. I was shaking with how I had to keep those honeysuckles perfect so she could taste them. So I protected them in one of the boxes my dad used for hook storage.

I had to replace the box, but being told that from Dad, while getting teasing jabs of his elbow about this girl , was worth seeing Summer so happy to have something of her mom returned to her.

A life I’ve too had to take on board.

I lick the nectar, although she’s not next to me anymore, hearing again what she was saying now without telling me.

What I give her, she’ll give back to me.

I follow the ghost of her steps, following her everywhere, through the grass and the cobblestone to the house, with more turbulence in my heart that I have to moor myself against, strapped down to the picture in front of me when I stop inside the door.

Mom has Adam and Summer in a tight hug, one on each side, their eyes closed as they hold each other. My mom’s and Summer’s cheeks both are shining with tears.

My family loved her from the beginning. My parents got to know her first through me, and they could tell I was falling for her too.

A shudder starts through my body as I walk a few more steps, needing closer, with the same sort of feeling I had when I was present for Summer having something more of her mom returned to her in my mom’s banana nut bread.

We all felt so freed that summer. Now we’re clogged up by loss, and the one man who would know just what to tell each of us is gone.

My head goes back to words he told me then, guidance that holds half the weight it did.

You’re a good kid, Levi. And you’re gonna be a good man. Keep your eye on that, have some patience, and this will all work out how it should.

Everything comes back like a landslide. How I let Summer go. Why I let her go.

I was young and had no choice.

I was doing what I thought was the right thing.

Now, I’m still doing what I think is the right thing, but what’s right can get blurry. What’s right can change faces.

Summer leans in for more of my mom’s hug and Adam pulls back to let them cling to each other. My jaw tenses again when he meets my stare, an involuntary defense for offenses against Summer. He can’t help the offenses against himself, but helped or not, he’s not holding onto her like he should be.

The downward tilt of his head as he eyes me through his lashes tells me he knows what I’m thinking.

You’re going to lose her.

He lifts his chin slowly, a kink in his brows. Is that a threat?

I blink, a pointed tilt of my head. It’s a warning.

The sigh in his shoulders puts a slack in my defense, and looking into his eyes now, I see the guy I’ve known since we were kids. We know each other better than anyone, and I give him a nod when he glances at my dad’s metal pirate ship hanging on the wall, with his own nod at me, making plans to finish this talk in a way we haven’t done since we were teenagers.

Beer and boat.