Chapter 82 Summer
EIGHTY-TWO
SUMMER
ONE MONTH LATER
Somewhere, an alarm is beeping, and it’s making me want to die.
“Summer.” A hand shakes my shoulder. “Wake up. Everyone is calling you a dirty slag online.”
I groan and roll over. And promptly fall onto the floor, because I’m on a sofa, not my bed. I flip over onto my back and stare at the ceiling of my studio. When Alec installed the lighting, he bought tulip-shaped lightshades. I smile at them happily.
“Hello?” Lulu appears in my frame of vision, squinting down at me. “Did you hear what I said? Hi, by the way.”
“Er. Hi.” I sit up and look around me, disorientated. My studio looks like a bomb has hit it. There are piles of fabric everywhere.
I scrub my eyes and pick through my memories.
Last night, Alec was working, so Fraser and Cameron took me to the Dewdrop for dinner.
Isla and Emmy were both there, and I helped them party plan for their joint hen do.
We had a couple of drinks, and everything got a bit giggly and blurry.
Eventually, Fraser and Cameron kidnapped me and brought me back home.
I was fed toast and water and tucked safely in bed between them both, but as the hours passed, I couldn’t turn my brain off.
So I came down here to sew. I must have crashed on the sofa. And then…
I squint up at Lulu. My best friend is standing over me in Chanel tweed trousers and a ruffled Dior top, smiling slightly. I haven’t seen her in a month.
“Lulu, I’m sorry, I meant to meet you outside.” I fumble for my phone, turn off the alarm, and hop up to hug her.
She laughs. “It’s fine. I didn’t exactly need directions to the bright-pink cottage.”
I breathe in the sweet scent of her perfume. “Thank you for driving up here. You didn’t have to.”
Lulu called me a few days ago and announced that she would be spending the week in the Highlands. The men offered to let her stay on the farm, but she informed them that she “didn’t do farms” and booked into the luxury lodge I was meant to do a brand deal with. The irony is not lost on me.
She shrugs. “I needed an excuse to wear tweed. I look like if Sherlock Holmes was hot. And, you know…” She pokes my cheek, “I wanted to see how you are.”
My heart immediately melts. “Lulu.” I pull her into another hug.
She bats me off. “All right, all right. You know I’m an emotionless husk, please don’t cry on me.” She sweeps across to my desk. “You look like you’ve been busy.”
“Er, yes.” I look at the racks of clothes lining the room.
In the past four weeks, I’ve sewn more than I have in my entire life.
I’ve made cotton floral sleepwear sets. Gingham microskirts.
Babydoll dresses rimmed with ribbon. Everything is soft and sweet, in petal pink, primrose yellow, mint green, cornflower blue.
There are ribbons and lace and tiny embroidered details.
One could say it’s almost a full collection.
“Sit.” Lulu pats the chair next to her. “I have so much to catch you up on.”
I grimace. “Because everyone is calling me a slag?”
To be honest, since I moved back to Lochview, I’ve completely ignored my socials.
The last month has been a blur of lazy sex, playing with animals, and sewing in my new studio.
I swim, I eat good food, I get cuddled to death every night.
Cameron quit his new job and moved back onto Lochview to take up his old position.
With the three men, I feel supported and surrounded by love for the first time in my life.
Lulu shrugs. “It’s been a month. You got romantically whisked away by three men at your own party, and then you went silent.” She opens her bag and dumps a pile of papers onto the desk. I try not to be alarmed. “Good news is you’re literally drowning in deals. Congrats on six mil.”
“What?”
She looks at me oddly. “You really haven’t been online at all?”
I shake my head. I’ve tried, but every time I open my Picturegram, I start to panic and need to find a man to sit on.
“Well, we have a lot to catch up on then, babe.” She pulls out her tablet and starts to detail the long list of deals I’ve been offered.
As she talks, I feel my heartbeat rising.
I try to hum and nod at the right points, but my chest keeps getting tighter.
The lights seem too bright. I fumble for the remote to dim the overheads and accidentally drop it.
“Icons Only has doubled their offer again—” Lulu stops. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine,” I mumble. Whenever I breathe in, the air can’t seem to get past my mouth and into my lungs. “I just, um…feel like I’m dying a bit?”
She processes that. “Want a hug?”
I let her scoop me up into her arms. She puts her pointy chin on my shoulder. It takes me a couple minutes to convince my body that I am not in mortal danger. Eventually, my breaths level out. I stare at the pile of contracts like they’re an unexploded bomb.
“Do you think,” I say slowly, “that the fact my nervous system thinks it’s being chased by a leopard whenever I think of going back to influencing again is, like, a bad sign?”
“It doesn’t bode amazingly,” Lulu agrees, pulling back. “I’m sure you could get therapy and push past it. But, like…do you want to?”
“I…” My mouth is dry.
It’s wrong. My brain screams at me. Don’t do it. It’s all wrong. “I really don’t,” I realise. “I’m sorry.”
This job used to be all that I wanted. Now it feels like an impossible step backward. If I take those deals, those companies will want me to be a version of Summer that I’m not sure exists anymore. The thought of having to pretend all the time again feels suffocating.
I need to move. I hop up and cross to the racks of clothes lining the wall.
Lulu watches as I trail my fingers over the finished pieces.
“I know maybe in the grand scheme of things, it wasn’t that big of a deal that everyone online called me a massive hot mess,” I say.
“It was just a viral moment, it’s passed, whatever.
But, um, that’s also sort of the most painful thing anyone could ever call me?
It’s hard enough to convince myself that I’m not oversensitive or dramatic, without literally thousands of people starting hashtags about it.
I don’t really want to be the face of fashionable meltdowns, you know?
I don’t want to do Sad Girl Glam. I want to move on now. ”
“Yeah.”
“Do you think…” I bite my lip. “Do you think if I started making clothes instead of modelling them, we could use my platform to promote them?”
“Yes,” she says bluntly.
I tug at a dress. It’s pink and knee-length, made of layers of translucent dreamy fabric, patterned with tiny red strawberries. “My clothes aren’t…too much?”
She snorts. “Yeah, for the beige bitches. But the pastel girly girls will eat it up with a spoon. There’s a niche there, for sure. Not one I know a lot about, but I can learn.”
“So you think it’ll work?”
“I don’t know. Changing directions is always a risk.”
I feel sick. “It might fail.”
“Yes.”
“People might hate the clothes. Or not be interested. It might…” My throat tightens.
“It might be too hard for me.” I think back to my time in fashion school.
The awful feeling of slipping behind no matter how hard I tried to keep up.
If I started my own fashion line, I could so easily get in over my head. What if I can’t deliver?
“Maybe,” Lulu agrees mildly. “Maybe not.”
A knock on the studio door jolts me out of my anxiety spiral. “Come in,” I call, and Alec steps inside. His hair is ruffled, and there’s mud on his boots. Everything in me melts.
“Hello,” he says softly. I’m suddenly in his arms, like we’re both magnetised. He takes a deep breath, tucking back my hair.
Lulu pretends to wretch violently. “God, you two are disgusting. Please contain yourself, man, you light up like a Christmas tree whenever you lay eyes on her.”
“Hi, Lulu,” Alec says calmly. “Do you mind if I borrow Summer for a moment?”
“You can have her.” She stands and picks up her bag. “I’m going back to the lodge, Summer. You need to make a decision before we look at any of these contracts.”
I frown. “I’m sorry I’m not more decisive. You came all the way up here, I feel bad—”
Lulu snorts. “Don’t. I met this masseur at the lodge called Andrew. His hands are bin lids. Anyway, I’m staying at least a week. Call me if you want to talk. Bye, Tall One.”
Alec nods at her.
“Tall One?” I can’t help but ask as she gives me a quick hug.
She nods. “Tall One, Grumpy One, Big Butt One.”
“…Lulu, they have names.”
“Do they?” she asks, uninterested. “See ya.” She breezes past.
When the door has shut behind her, I frown up at Alec. “Why are you here? I thought you were helping Isla make wedding favour boxes.”
After we saved Lochview, Alec finally gave Isla a proper apology for being such an absent friend.
Isla said she would forgive him, on the condition that he agreed to be her best man.
She’s texting him about napkin colours and dragging him to taste tiny slivers of cake.
I think she’s testing him. There is no way she hasn’t worked out what cake or colour scheme she wants just a few weeks before the wedding.
If it is a test, though, he’s definitely passing; Alec is doing all of his Best Man tasks with the focus and determination he has for every other job on his to-do list.
“We finished early. She said my fingers were too big to tie the bows properly.” He looks troubled.
“Is everything okay, then?”
“I don’t know.” His hands run down my arms. “Your mother is here.”
My heart stops in my chest. For a moment, I can’t speak.
Shit.
I shouldn’t really be surprised. My mum has been calling for weeks now. Ever since the pictures of me and the three men in the club went viral. I’ve been ignoring her calls. I know that she’ll just criticise me, and I’ve been so happy. I haven’t wanted to deal with it.
Alec nods, his gaze intent on my face. “She just drove up a few minutes ago and demanded to speak to you. Cameron and Fraser are with her in the kitchen now. If you want me to ask her to leave—”
“No,” I say quickly. I’ve hidden away for long enough. I should handle this. “I should get it over with.”
“We should go now then. She seems…impatient.”
I nod. He starts pulling me to the door, but I stop him. “Hey.”
“Hm?”
I touch his chest. “I love you.”
The change in his face is subtle, but very familiar. It happens every time I tell him I love him. His eyes darken. His expression softens. His shoulders relax slightly. He looks almost…surprised. Like he never believed someone could love him.
He really didn’t. He found a therapist in the local town a few weeks ago.
He’s only seen her three times now, but she dug that out of him pretty quickly.
After what happened five years ago—the blame he felt over Cameron, and Mr Gray, even his mother—he genuinely felt like he didn’t deserve a family. Like it was fundamentally impossible.
It breaks something in me whenever I see that flash of shock. I want to tell him over and over and over again, until it stops happening. Until all he feels when he hears I love you is peace.
He holds my eyes as he lifts my hand to his mouth, kissing my fingers. “Thank you,” he says, and I smile.