Millie
“Ethan!” I call his name, but my voice drifts away in the night sky, drowned out by the crashing waves. Footsteps are etched in the beach in front of me, and I know he ran toward the dunes. The wind picks up, pushing me forward, sand flying up against my legs.
I don’t have to take off after him, but Lucy doesn’t want comfort, and after all that Ethan’s been through this summer, the idea of him alone out here at night frightens me, like one wrong step could send him into the sea—or worse, toward someone who might want him to meet the same fate that took Billy. We can’t lose him. I can’t lose him.
“Ethan!” I shout again, though no one responds. I stumble ahead, away from our homes. Finally, a few hundred yards down the sand, I see him, walking away from me, hunched as he trudges toward a dune.
I pick up my pace, calling his name, until he turns around and his eyes widen with surprise as he registers me.
The way he looks at me—with relief and gratitude, like he can’t believe I would come after him—sends an electric shock through me, but it doesn’t slow me down, doesn’t stop me from running right at him so fast that in an instant, we’re both on the ground, his limbs tangled in mine.
“Sorry,” I say, pushing myself to sit. “I didn’t mean to tackle you.”
“It’s all right,” he says, shaking out his hair.
“I saw Lucy and heard what happened. I wanted to make sure…I was worried about you.” I try to compose myself and tuck my hair behind my ears, but the wind whips it right back up again.
“God, what a nightmare,” Ethan says. His voice is hoarse, and he makes no motion to stand, instead hugs his shins to his chest and rocks back and forth.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
He lifts his head up, and I get a good look at him. His cheeks are pink, and his hair is disheveled, grains of sand sticking to his curls that fall away from his face.
“Did you know?” he asks.
“About what?”
“About Penn?”
I blink and pull my head back. “Penn?”
“She got in. She’s going.”
“Are you serious?” I ask, heat spreading to my face.
“Yep.”
“She didn’t tell us.” I glance up at the stars. They appeared so quickly, thousands of them up there in a matter of moments, and now they’re so bright they nearly blind me. I’m surprised to find tears filling my eyes. She doesn’t trust me.
“It’s weird, but that makes me feel better.”
“That’s so fucked up,” I say, the words biting as they come out of my mouth.
Ethan’s eyebrows raise. “Damn, Millie.”
I press the heels of my hands into my knees. “Sorry,” I say. “I’m just…I’m pissed. She should have told me. She should have told you.” Ethan nods and lets out a puff of air. Together we’re aligned in a way I never thought we would be. Against Lucy. “Is that why you broke up?”
Ethan shakes his head. “No,” he says. “There were a million reasons.”
I know how to comfort him. I can put my hand on his back and offer him soft words of encouragement, but there’s a tickling in my stomach, a bubbling warning that indicates whatever he’s saying—and not saying—is for a reason.
“How did she seem?” Ethan asks.
“She wanted some space, but she’s okay.”
Ethan’s face falls for a moment.
“Should I say she was sobbing and heartbroken?”
He laughs, a small one but still a laugh. “Yeah. Yeah, you should.” He shakes his head. “Pathetic, huh? That I want her to be upset? I guess it would prove she actually cared about me.”
“Of course she did. Still does.”
Ethan toes the sand. “Doesn’t feel that way. Doesn’t feel like anyone cares about me.”
“Hey,” I say. “Don’t say that. So many people do.” My heart thrums, a stampede in my chest gaining steam. I reach for his hand, and when he doesn’t pull away, I hold it between both of mine, enveloping his fingers that flex beneath my grasp. “I care, Ethan. I care about you. A lot.”
A burst of adrenaline rushes through me, but what quickly follows is the realization that I’ve said too much.
As I drop his hand, I watch his face take shape in the moonlight, his eyes stopping at my shoulders, my collarbones, my chin.
They move up to my face—stopping at my lips, my nose, and finally, my own eyes, where his gaze holds me.
“I know,” he says softly.
It occurs to me in this moment that I would let this boy do just about anything to me. I would wreck my whole life to feel the palm of his hand sturdy against my neck, his fingers winding through my hair. To experience the graze of his lips on mine, his thumb running over of the curve of my jaw.
Now’s the time to stop. To get up and walk away and laugh this whole thing off and say, Maybe you should talk to Trevor or Alex or literally anyone in the world besides me about this.
But I can’t bear to turn away from him, to do anything else except wait.
Wait for the pounding in my heart to slow, wait for him to blink and realize that we’re sitting too close together on the sand, that our thighs shouldn’t be pressed together.
Neither of those things happen, and instead Ethan ducks his head toward mine.
“Millie,” he says, my name sounding like a spell cast from his lips. “Do you want me to kiss you?” Ethan asks, his voice a whisper.
Everything in my body aches. Everything I have ever wanted right here in front of me, in this boy who is looking at me like I’m made of stars, of fire, of magic. The answer is obvious. It has been so my whole life.
“Yes,” I say, and as soon as I breathe the word into the air, his mouth is on mine, a shock, a wave of pressure, like being shot out of a cannon or thrown from a horse.
One of his hands is on my shoulder, and the other rests in the bend of my neck, and I blink my eyes open to know for certain that this is really him, that this is really happening, and I have to force myself not to think about anything except the fact that Ethan Silver is kissing me.
I kiss him back, press my lips against his, and as his tongue slips into my mouth, my stomach lurches, and—wait.
Wait.
This is all wrong.
It takes all my strength for me to nudge him away, to stand and take a few steps back and catch my breath and wipe my mouth and shake my head. “Ethan, we can’t.”
Ethan blinks like he’s in a daze, still on the ground, shaking his head. “I thought you wanted this.”
“I do,” I say. “I did. I mean, I desperately do. I’ve been thinking about this forever.
” I squeeze my eyes shut, barely able to comprehend that I’ve said the words out loud.
“But not like this. Not when you’re five seconds out of a breakup with Lucy and not…
” My throat is suddenly raw, like I’ve swallowed half the sand on the beach. “Not when I’m the consolation prize.”
Ethan sucks on the inside of his cheek, his head turned down to the sand. “Not what you thought it would be, I guess?”
“That’s not what I mean,” I say, panic rising in my throat. I messed this up—all of it—and yet I can’t seem to find a way out.
“Both you and Lucy, you project this idea of who I am onto me.”
“What are you—”
“I knew you had a crush on me.”
His words knock the wind out of me, and I want him to stop talking. I want to turn back time.
“It’s sweet, Millie. But you don’t know me. You don’t like me. You think you do based on some image you have of me in your mind. But what if that’s not the real me?” Ethan drops his head into his hands, and his words morph into sobs.
“I do know you.”
“No, you don’t.” He looks up at me through tears, his eyes rimmed with red, his jaw tense in a way that makes me step back, move aside.
“That’s not fair,” I say.
“Yeah,” Ethan says. “Nothing that’s happened this summer is fair.
Life isn’t fair.” He pushes himself to stand and drops his head back, looking up at the sky.
An enormous dark cloud sails by, obscuring the moon and in a moment, we’re plunged into darkness, the stark shadows of the waves dancing behind him.
“You’ll learn that when you grow up, Millie,” he says, his words piercing, and for a moment, I wonder if they’re a threat.
And then Ethan walks back to our homes, away from me and what we’ve done.