Chapter 29
SUMMER
Dinner was over but I didn’t want him to go.
Not yet. My family had accepted him. I was pretty sure my dad liked him.
But my dad liked most people. Dad took River and Ocean for a walk on the beach.
Becca decided she was going to go with them, something she rarely did. They were purposely leaving us alone.
That left me and Colt standing at the kitchen sink together. He rinsed the dishes while I loaded them in the dishwasher. It felt dangerously domestic. It felt like something I could get used to, which was exactly the kind of thinking I had promised myself I wasn’t going to do.
“You don’t have to help,” I said. “You’re our guest. You don’t have to do the dishes.”
“I know. I want to.”
He handed me the next dish. “Your dad is something else,” he said.
“He really is.”
“He loves this place the way I should have been loving it.” He handed me a few forks.
“It was something he and my mother had in common,” I said. “She planted everything in this yard. Every single thing. She used to say a yard without flowers was just a yard. A yard with flowers was a home.”
“She sounds like she was extraordinary.”
“She was.” I smiled thinking about her. “She was the loudest person in any room and somehow also the most calming. I never understood how she managed both at once.”
He leaned against the counter beside me, drying cloth in hand, waiting for me to continue.
“She taught me to surf,” I said. “Everyone assumes it was my dad because he was a beach bum in his day. But it was her.” I closed the dishwasher.
“She was surfing before it was fashionable for women to surf. Before people really took it seriously as a sport for anyone who wasn’t a teenage boy.
” I leaned my hip against the counter and looked at him.
“She was so graceful out there. Born to be on the water.”
Colt was just listening. I had his full attention.
“She used to let the boys on the beach think they were teaching her things,” I said with a smile.
“You know the type. The guys who’d swagger up and offer to show the older lady a few pointers.
She’d go along with it. She’d act uncertain, a little wobbly, ask questions.
She had this whole routine.” I shook my head, laughing.
“And then she’d get on the water and just absolutely destroy them. ”
Colt grinned. “She didn’t.”
“Oh, she absolutely did. She’d wait until they were watching and then she’d catch the most impossible wave and ride it like she’d been born on it.
And these guys would just stand there with their mouths open.
” I laughed and shook my head. “She never rubbed it in. That was the thing. She’d come out of the water and just smile at them very pleasantly and say something like ‘oh, I think I’m starting to get the hang of it. ’ They never knew what hit them.”
“A sleeper,” Colt said.
“Exactly. She looked like an average middle-aged woman and surfed like a professional. She could have competed. She chose not to because she said she wasn’t interested in anyone judging her. She did it for herself.”
“She sounds just like you,” he said.
I’d been compared to my mother before. It always made me feel good. I opened my mouth and then closed it again. I turned back toward the counter and started to wipe down the counters. I needed something to do with my hands.
“That’s a very generous thing to say,” I managed.
“I mean it.”
“Thank you.”
There was no greater compliment anyone could pay me.
Not ever. I had spent years trying to be even a fraction of what she was.
Trying to be half as brave, half as graceful, half as generous with the people around me.
I fell short constantly and I was always aware of the fact I wasn’t living up to her high standards.
Hearing Colt, someone who knew me very well, say those words meant a lot. He wasn’t talking about my looks or my surfing skills. He was talking about things that truly mattered.
My breath caught. A little hiccup as my cheeks burned.
“Summer,” he said softly.
“I’m fine,” I said with zero conviction.
He moved behind me and turned me gently by the shoulders. I let him, which was my first mistake. He looked at my face with those eyes that saw too much and the patient expression of someone who was not going anywhere.
“You’re flushed,” he observed.
“It’s warm in here.”
He winked. “Yeah it is.”
I was mortified and embarrassed and so full of something I couldn’t name that I thought I might burst. September. I had to remind myself it was coming too fast.
“Stop looking at me like that,” I said.
“Like what?”
“Like you’re going to have your way with me right here in my kitchen.”
He grinned. “It’s like you read my mind.”
I stared at his shirt collar because looking at his face was going to have me breaking a lot of rules.
“You’re so fucking gorgeous when you’re turned on,” he whispered close to my ear. “You get flushed. Lips part. Sexy as hell.”
“Cole, you’re so cruel.”
He chuckled. “Thanks for inviting me tonight,” he said in that husky voice.
“I’m really glad you came to dinner,” I said.
“Me too.”
He didn’t move away from me. In fact, he moved closer. I could smell his cologne. Feel his breath on my face.
“Colt.”
“Summer.”
“I think I’m glad you’re back in Surfside,” I murmured.
He chuckled. “I didn’t think I’d ever hear you say that again.”
“Oh, don’t get too comfy,” I said. “I could still change my mind.”
“You won’t.”
“You’re very confident.”
He grinned. “I am.”
“Come on, stay for our fire.”
“I’d love to.”
Everyone got back from their walk. The kids went inside to clean up and Dad started prepping the fire.
River came barreling out the back door in her pajamas before the fire had even caught.
Her hair was damp from her bath. Ocean was right behind her, wearing his favorite shark pajamas.
Becca appeared in the doorway long enough to hold up five fingers at me, which meant she needed five minutes to get the kids’ things sorted before she came out. I gave her a thumbs-up.
Dad looked up from the fire pit when he heard the kids coming. “Get the marshmallow sticks,” he told Ocean. “You know where they are.”
Ocean changed direction and went back inside. River planted herself directly beside my father and watched the fire spark and do its thing.
“I’ll blow on it if you need me to,” she told him.
“Not yet,” he said. “Patience.”
I settled onto one of the low wooden chairs we kept circled around the pit and relaxed. I loved our backyard fires. The sky above us was quickly fading to black. I could hear the ocean on the other side of the low dune at the edge of our property.
Colt took the chair beside mine. We were acting like platonic friends in front of my family, but I knew they knew there was more to the little dinner invitation.
Ocean returned with the roasting forks.
Becca came out with a bag of marshmallows and a sleeve of graham crackers tucked under her arm.
She dropped into the chair across from us and looked at me and Colt sitting side by side.
I saw the corner of her mouth pull up just slightly before she looked away and started opening the marshmallow bag.
“S’mores?” she asked the group.
Chaos erupted, two children both trying to put marshmallows on their sticks at the same time while talking about who burned theirs worse. Dad settled into his chair with a smile. He reached over and helped River get her marshmallow on without making a production of it.
This was the thing I had never been able to adequately explain to anyone who hadn’t grown up with it.
This was what we were fighting for. I watched River and Ocean toast their marshmallows before handing them off to Becca to smash them between the graham crackers.
She’d broken off small pieces of chocolate from a Hershey’s bar, keeping it minimal.
River took a bite, getting goo all over her face.
“Do you know the constellations?” River asked Colt.
Colt looked at her with complete seriousness. “Some of them,” he said. “Do you?”
She nodded and sucked the chocolate from one finger. “I know the Big Dipper. It’s a pot.”
“That’s how I identify them. Start with the ones that look like something you already know.”
“What ones do you know?”
He leaned back in his chair and tilted his head up toward the sky. The first stars were just becoming visible, faint against the deepening black. He pointed up and slightly south. “You see those three stars in a row?”
River craned her neck back. “Yep.”
“That’s Orion’s belt.”
“Cool!”
“Now follow the line they make toward the horizon. See that bright one? Brighter than the others around it?”
She squinted but I wasn’t entirely sure she knew what she was looking at. “I think so.”
“That’s Sirius. The Dog Star. It’s the brightest star in the whole sky.”
Ocean had abandoned his marshmallow stick entirely and was now standing beside Colt’s chair with his own head tipped back. “Why do they call it the Dog Star?”
“Because it’s part of a constellation called Canis Major,” Colt said. “Canis means dog in Latin.”
I was impressed, but because I knew very little about the constellations, I had no idea if he was just making shit up or if it was real. Something told me he really knew what he was talking about.
“Is there a cat constellation?” River asked.
“Nope.”
River looked offended on behalf of cats everywhere. “That’s unfair.”
“I agree completely,” Colt said.
I pressed my lips together to keep from laughing. Again, I wasn’t entirely sure he was telling the truth. I watched him with the kids, the way he gave each of them his full attention. Ocean was practically vibrating with excitement.
“What about the really bright one?” Ocean pointed to the southeast. “That one’s been there every night.”
“That’s actually Jupiter,” Colt said. “Not a star. A planet. Cool, huh? You can see a planet without a telescope.”
Ocean sat down and stared at Colt. He was genuinely impressed. “How do you know all this stuff?”
“I grew up in Texas,” Colt said. “When you grow up in a place where the sky goes in every direction and there are no city lights for miles, you tend to spend a lot of time looking at the stars.”
Dad was watching Colt. I knew that look. He was making up his mind about Colt Anderson.
I looked back at the fire and held my marshmallow over the edge of the flame, turning it slowly. I liked mine golden. I had the patience for it. Becca’s kids did not.
“Tell me about another one,” River said.
He pointed up again. “See the bright star almost directly overhead? That one, there. The lonely one.”
Both kids looked up.
“I see it,” Ocean said.
“That’s Vega. It’s the second brightest star in the northern sky after Sirius. And in about twelve thousand years, it’s going to be the North Star instead of Polaris.”
I could have listened to him all night. He was loving this. Was it enough to make him stay? Or was he destined to go back to the ranch and the life he’d built there?