18
“YOU HAVE GOTto be fucking kidding me.” The words came out garbled, fighting with my turkey sandwich for room in my mouth.
“What’s wrong?” Sam asked from the porch swing, her purple sundress billowing around her feet.
We were spread out across the Sunrise deck, feasting on sandwiches that Mack and Linus had picked up from the General Store deli counter. It was late afternoon now, closer to dinner than lunchtime. I had one hand shoved inside a bag of salt-and-vinegar potato chips. The other was tapping furiously at my phone screen.
“My assistant,” I said, passing it over to Sam so she could see for herself. “Lydia.”
“You mean, my new best friend,” she clarified.
“Yes, that one. She removed every meeting from my calendar!”
“And filled it in with…” Sam used her fingers to zoom in on the screen, her mouth falling open as she read. “Oh my god.”
“I know!”
“What?!” Eloise’s braid whipped like a tail as she looked back and forth between us.
Next to her Linus painstakingly divided up a sandwich and bag of chips between the two of them. “I want to know too.”
“She’s filled Clara’s calendar with one appointment for the week called, ‘Nice try, boss, you’re on vacation,’” Sam cackled.
“Wow. I hope she’s paid well,” Eloise cracked as she reached for her half of the shared sandwich, planting a kiss on Linus’s cheek as a thank-you.
Phone back in hand, I swiped over to my email, which luckily had not been shut down.
“You’re addicted to that thing.” Mack’s voice was light, but I could still hear the judgment lingering in his tone.
He’d finished his food in one graceful inhale and was now leaning against the wall that ran around the perimeter of the wooden porch. He was so tall he could perch on the edge of it and still stretch his legs out long in front of him. At some point, after the game, he’d lost his shirt, and it had been hard not to notice how his shorts precariously perched on the edge of his hips.
“So?” It was not my best comeback, and I could tell by the way his brows twitched upward that he was reveling in my rhetorical failure.
“So, I thought you were here to chill out, Millen. Isn’t that what Nick said yesterday?” He shifted, crossing his legs as his hands steadied him. He’d always oozed confidence, which still, apparently, irked me. It was also undeniably sexy, and my checklist and letter—which were now both tucked safely inside of my notebook—seemed to whisper “take a lover” in my ear.
“Knowing what’s coming up on my work calendar helps me focus,” I said, steering all my attention to a hard-to-reach chip in the bottom of my bag, which was suddenly way more interesting than the smattering of dark hair dotting his sun-kissed chest. “I know it’s hard to imagine me out in the real world, but I have clients and a team who depend on me. Responsibilities. A job.”
“I have a job, and you don’t see my phone superglued to my hand,” he said, that sensuous smile still lingering.
“I mean an actual job. Not just floating around on a lake during the summer, and then sitting around keeping an eye on an empty camp all winter.” I lobbed the words at him like a joke, but they came out as anything but playful.
“Oh, boy,” Sam muttered under her breath, and next to me, Linus shot Eloise a confused look, his eyes magnified in his glasses.
“Damn, Millen, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to hurt my feelings.” Mack’s jaw tightened ever so slightly. “Was that also on your schedule of traditions you wanted to relive this week?”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” I said, analyzing a chunk of tomato that had fallen out of my sandwich, anything to avoid eye contact with him now. I hadn’t intended to insult him, but an angry edge had taken over, one I couldn’t quite put a finger on but could feel pulsing through me.
“Eh, you’re right. I do float around on the lake a lot.” He pushed himself off the railing to stand, and I flashed back to the other night, when he’d pulled that leaf out of my hair and almost knocked the wind out of me. “It’ll be good for me to rejoin the real world.”
Mack jogged down the stairs and gave us a wave over his shoulder, and I concentrated on chewing my food instead of watching him go or looking back up at my friends, who I could feel staring at me.
Behind us, the door creaked open, and Nick emerged from inside the bunk, sunglasses inexplicably still on, Trey behind him. They had been hovering on a bed, deep in conversation, when I’d wandered into the bunk to change after the game, and I hadn’t seen either of them since, until now.
“Where’d Mack go?” Nick asked, studying our group before sitting down in our half-assed circle, reaching for a sandwich.
“Lovers’ quarrel,” Sam said as she ran a hand through her curls. I shot her a look, but she just shrugged me off in response. “He knows.”
My eyes widened an inch, and I swiveled to face Nick, who nodded back. “He didn’t tell me, but I figured it out this morning. He was, as my students like to say, acting extremely ‘sus’ when I asked him about your little swim last night.”
“Oh, come on,” I said, certain that Mack must have said something—and at once relieved and livid that he might have done so.
“Even if I hadn’t figured it out, it was extremely obvious the second I heard the two of you bitching at each other about Capture the Flag strategies,” he said, plopping down next to me. “It was like something out of a Hallmark movie.”
“It was one kiss,” I clarified, my voice firm. “We are just friends.”
“Two, if you count the one from the last year of camp,” Sam said diplomatically.
“Oh, right!” Nick said. “That one he did tell me about.”
“Clara and Mack, sitting in a tree,” Trey started to sing. “K-I-S-S-I—”
“Okay, and that was like, one hundred years ago!” I interrupted, voice rising slightly.
“So that’s why you were just such an asshole about his job? Because you kissed?” Eloise said, picking a chip out of Linus’s stack and giving it a crunch. “That seems like something someone does when they’re trying to convince themselves they want to be friends with someone who they definitely want to keep making out with.”
I opened my mouth to protest but was cut off by Linus.
“Yeah, I realize I only met you twenty-four hours ago, Clara, but I agree with Eloise,” he said matter-of-factly, reaching over to pat Eloise on the knee affectionately. “She’s almost always right about everything.”
“Mill-en, hey, come on, look at me take my shirt off and do a swim race with me.” Nick lowered his voice with a slight SoCal twang, puffing his chest up in what was the worst Mack impression I’d ever seen.
“Ew, Mack, no, I’m too busy doing very important smart things,” Eloise crooned, flipping the tail of her braid with her hand. “You work at a stupid little camp and I do important, fancy marketing things.”
“Branding,” I interjected, but no one was listening to me now. They were too focused on their impromptu theater production unfolding on the porch.
“Let’s make out,” Nick said, wagging his tongue back at her as Sam cackled from the swing in the corner.
“Jesus, guys,” I said, crunching up my lunch trash in between my hands, channeling my nervous energy into balling up the wrappers as small as I could get them. “I think you’re reading too much into things. We got into some dumb argument over Capture the Flag. So what.”
“Excuse you, that was an extremely passionate argument over how to play a game where you literally just run around and find a square piece of cloth.” Nick pushed his sunglasses up, revealing tired, bloodshot eyes.
“Oh, come on, it’s nostalgia!” I said.
“Sexual tension,” Linus agreed solemnly, before biting into a chip. “I could feel it the whole game.”
“It’s probably why you lost,” Trey added with a chuckle.
“Okay, that’s enough, thanks.” I hopped up off the floor, antsy, my skin suddenly feeling as tight and claustrophobic as a wetsuit. “I have a therapist I actually pay to talk to about this stuff.”
“Where are you going?” Sam asked, reaching her arms out toward me for a hug. I bonked her gently on the head with my crumpled-up paper bag and then smushed myself next to her on the swing, inhaling the cinnamon-y warmth of her skin as she wrapped an arm around me. Thank god at least one of my friends wasn’t giving me crap about kissing Mack.
“That wasn’t cool, what I said just now to Mack.” I sighed, giving her a quick squeeze back. “I’m going to run down to the boathouse and apologize.”
“With your mouth?” she asked, breaking into a grin.
“Oh my god, not you too!” I shrieked at Sam. “I’m leaving now.”
“Break a leg, honey,” Nick said with a chuckle.
I gave them all one final hearty eye roll before heading inside to toss my trash. It was hard to know exactly what I’d meant by “experience real joy” at fifteen, but now, as my friends’ voices drifted in through the screen windows, peals of laughter peppering their conversation, I knew.
It was the comfort of that laughter outside, the tenderness of old friendships, and the way they changed shape through the years but never truly lost their original form. It was the thrill of competition—not of winning, but of believing wholeheartedly that you could.
It was leaping headfirst without thinking of what came next.