38. Summer
Summer
FRIDAY
On my knees in front of a toilet bowl, brush in hand, I wonder when exactly my life took such a sharp turn.
Behind me, Maya mops the floor, Kai scrubs a sink, Miles wipes a mirror, and Sierra empties a trash can while holding her breath.
“Summer, this is the worst idea you’ve ever had,” Miles says.
“Trust me, it’s not. Not even close.”
The worst idea of my life was sleeping with Jace Walker.
“We’re scrubbing toilets for a guy who won’t even come to the party,” Miles sighs. “Charity work, zero return.”
“You’re a bartender, Miles. You spend your nights wiping down a counter. It’s not that different.”
“Marine biologist,” he corrects, pointing the rag at me. “The bar’s temporary.”
Sierra snorts. Kai shakes his head without a word, but the corner of his mouth lifts.
The restroom door opens. Noah walks in and stares at us. Us, the mops, the brooms, the buckets, the cleaning supplies.
“The hell… What are you guys even doing?”
“Making sure you don’t have any excuse to bail and go hide in your cabin,” I say.
His jaw tightens. He takes in the scene—Maya giving him a little wave with her latex glove, Miles polishing a mirror with feigned concentration, Sierra tying off a trash bag like everything’s normal.
“You’re insufferable, Summer.”
“I’ll take that as a compliment.”
He grunts, turns on his heel. The door swings shut behind him.
I smile and go back to my toilet bowl. He’ll come. I’m starting to know this version of Noah—the one who grumbles first but does the thing anyway.
This morning, when I went to get him for a run, his cabin was unrecognizable. Emptied out, cleaned. All his clothes were at the laundromat. “Don’t count on it lasting,” he muttered.
“He’ll come,” I say.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” Sierra says, peeling off her gloves.
But she’s smiling too.
The pool glows electric yellow.
The lights shift color every thirty seconds and the water throws back reflections that are too bright. Above the pool, string lights hang between the palm trees and the main building, casting a golden glow.
Music spills from the bar’s speakers, loud enough to fill the space without drowning out conversation. The air smells like chlorine, sunscreen, and the salt-and-vinegar chips Kai spilled across the table.
It’s crowded. Lodge guests, people from town, a few tourists. Near the bar, Luke’s chatting with Evan. His gold chain glints when he talks with his hands. Chiara sits on a lounge chair, feet tucked under her. Ruby drinks straight from her flask.
Maya hands me a drink.
“Here. Miles made a watermelon cocktail.”
I take a sip. It’s good—cool, a little sweet, not too strong.
“He should open his own bar,” I say.
Harper shows up in a bikini and sarong. She scans the deck for someone, doesn’t find them. Her lips press together for a second.
I wonder if it’s Noah she’s looking for.
Jace, though, is here.
A drink in his hand, he sits at the far end of the long table. Boardshorts, white T-shirt… and he made an effort. Clean-shaven, hair pushed back. Nothing major—just enough for me to notice.
I hate him.
No. What I hate is finding him gorgeous.
Flip lies under a lounge chair, muzzle resting on his paws, one eye open, watching the comings and goings. Pickles prowls between the tables.
Then Noah appears on the deck in dark jeans, hair still damp. He stands stiff, ready to turn and leave. Luke is the first to react.
“Cazzo, he’s alive!”
Whistles break out. Miles raises his glass, Maya claps, Harper straightens. Jace stares at his brother for a moment, then smiles.
Noah grabs a chair, sits, crosses his arms.
“Happy now?” he grumbles. “You done?”
“Everybody’s here,” Miles says. “Now we play.”
Miles is a born host. The second there’s a group and a game, he takes charge without anyone asking him to.
He claps his hands to call everyone around the table. Then he opens the Time’s Up box, forms the teams, deals the cards, explains the rules to the ones who’ve never played.
The pool lights shift to neon pink. The reflections ripple across the lodge walls.
First round: descriptions. Chiara goes first:
“The kid with glasses who talks to snakes and has a huge problem with a bald wizard.”
“Harry Potter!” Ruby shouts.
Second round: one word.
“Playa,” Maya says.
“Bikini?” I offer.
“Surf?” Kai says.
“No, no…” Maya groans.
“Miami!” Miles says without missing a beat.
“That’s cheating,” Sierra protests. “You’re not even playing!”
Third round: miming.
Miles stands up. He sways, rolls his shoulders, runs a hand through his hair. Nobody reacts.
He doubles down, starts rolling his hips, shoots an intense look.
“A penguin!” Luke yells.
Miles lets out a strangled sound.
“No…”
He starts over, even more committed. Arms out front, chest out, a solemn walk.
“Frankenstein!” Harper shouts.
It was Beyoncé. It takes us a while to recover.
Noah gets up reluctantly. He hesitates for a second, then spreads his arms wide, perfectly straight.
“Jesus?” Jace says.
Noah inhales, slowly turns his head toward him.
“Seriously?”
He goes back to his pose.
“A statue?” Harper guesses.
“An angel?” Sierra tries.
Noah lets his arms drop and rolls his eyes.
“Titanic,” he says flatly.
“Ah…” Jace says.
“You should’ve smiled, too,” Miles says. “DiCaprio didn’t look half-dead. That was more crucifixion than Titanic.”
We switch teams. Jace still isn’t on mine. I don’t know if it’s chance or if he arranged it so we’d be on opposite sides. He doesn’t come after me, doesn’t throw jabs. He just plays and glances up—sometimes—in my direction.
It’s worse.
Because the little war, at least, was familiar ground. Since the wave we caught together, he hasn’t done anything. No blasting music, no needling.
We move on to Jungle Speed. Miles deals the cards into piles in front of everyone, taps the table twice to start the game.
The totem sits in the center. The game falls apart in under three rounds. Luke and Kai lunge at the same time, knock over a glass. Evan just reaches out and grabs the totem, expressionless.
“This guy’s a robot,” Luke declares, shaking out his sore hand.
Harper’s settled in next to Noah. Sometime between Time’s Up and Jungle Speed she slid from one chair to the next, and now her elbow brushes his when she sets down her cards. Noah doesn’t pull away, doesn’t move closer either.
Harper touches his arm to show him a card. Noah’s eyebrows lift, barely. This time, he gets it—and he looks surprised that it’s happening to him.
Pictionary.
Miles hands out the markers and the pad. The drawings are a disaster. Kai draws a circle with two lines and waits for us to guess the Eiffel Tower. Maya draws some kind of alien that turns out to be a cat.
Jace grabs the marker. He’s fast and good. The outline of a wave, a surfboard…
“The beach!” Sierra yells.
“Surfing!” Kai says.
Jace shakes his head and adds a girl on the board, long hair.
“Blue Crush!” Harper says.
The old movie with the Hawaiian surfer girl. Jace and I watched it together, that summer.
Jace points the marker at Harper. Got it.
Then he looks at me.
The lights shift to pink. I look away.
Noah and Harper team up for Pictionary. He draws, she guesses. At one point he leans toward her to whisper a hint—it’s cheating, but nobody calls it out. Across the table, Sierra watches them, jaw tight.
Uno.
Miles kicks off the game by dropping a +4 on Jace—house rule—who drops one on Luke, who drops one on me, and I end up with twelve cards while everyone laughs.
“This is a coalition,” I sigh.
“It’s Uno,” Jace corrects.
It’s the first thing he’s said to me all night. He’s not smiling. But his eyes are.
Flip wakes up, stretches, and crosses the deck in slow motion to the table. Miles tosses him a too-salty cracker. Flip snaps it up, licks his chops, then goes to drink from the pool, dunking half his muzzle in.
“Flip, no,” Jace says without looking up from his cards.
Flip ignores him. Sushi comes out of nowhere and darts between the chairs. The dog’s head snaps up, ears pricked, then he tears off after her, knocks over a chair on the way, and disappears into the dark beyond the deck.
“Your dog’s a public menace,” Luke teases.
Jace doesn’t answer. He lays a +2 on Maya.
After a while, I stand up.
“Sorry, I’ll be back in fifteen.”
Nobody asks questions. Maya waves at me. Miles is miming a flamingo for a new round of Time’s Up and doesn’t hear me.
I move away from the group and follow the edge of the pool, the deep end, where there’s no one. The lights shift to blue and the water becomes a rectangle of liquid neon.
I sit at the edge, slip off my sandals, and let my feet slide into the warm water. I hike my light cotton dress up over my thighs.
The night is mild. Behind me, the laughter and music form a reassuring wall of noise. In front, the palm trees, the pool house wall, and the cloudless sky.
I take out my phone and type “Pacific Ice Showcase San Francisco.” I find the stream and tap the link. The image takes a few seconds to load, then a rink lit up in blue fills the screen. Rows of half-empty seats line the ice: it’s a summer gala, not the World Championships.
After a few minutes, Elena steps onto the ice. I recognize her high ponytail, her posture, the line of her back that my mother sculpted for years. She’s wearing a silver skating dress and she strings together spins with a fluidity that makes it look like gravity doesn’t apply to her.
I haven’t spoken to her in three years. I don’t know what music she listens to, or whether she has a boyfriend, or whether she sleeps enough. But I know her double axel, her triple lutz, the way she drops her shoulder just before setting up a jump.
I watch her as if through glass.
“Is that Elena?”
I jump.
Jace is behind me. I didn’t hear him come up. He’s looking at the screen over my shoulder. The purple light from the pool catches one side of his face.
“Yeah,” I say. “She’s doing a gala in San Francisco.”
Elena links a double axel into a triple toe loop.
“You could’ve gone…” Jace says.
He’s right. San Francisco is less than four hours away. I could’ve left at noon, been there tonight, sat in the stands and seen her for real. The thought never even crossed my mind.
“I do the same thing with Avery,” Jace goes on.
“You watch her competitions?”
“All of them. Surf, skate. Streamed, or in person when I can.”
My eyebrows go up.
“Skate?”
“She’s really good,” he says. “She’s starting to get noticed.”
I look back at the screen. Elena glides across the ice, arms open. I think about Avery on a wave somewhere, and Jace bent over his phone so he won’t miss a thing.
“She must be happy you watch her,” Jace says.
“She doesn’t know. We haven’t talked in three years.”
“Why?”
I look for the right answer, can’t find it.
“People drift apart,” I say finally. “Life takes care of the rest.”
Jace says nothing. He stays standing, hands in his pockets, watching the screen.
Elena picks up speed and throws a backflip in the middle of the ice. She lands on one foot, without a wobble. A gala move. Spectacular, pointless.
Jace whistles and sits down next to me. Not pressed against me—but already too close. He crosses his arms, eyes on the screen. I nudge my phone into the space between us.
I freeze. What did I just do?
We end up sitting side by side at the edge of this pink pool, my phone between us and my half sister skating a hundred and twenty miles away.
The crowd rises before she’s even finished her program.
The evening breeze makes me shiver—or maybe it’s not the breeze. The thin cotton of my dress is no help at all.
“You cold?” Jace asks.
“No.”
Another shiver runs through me, longer this time. I set my phone down behind me and cross my arms over my chest.
“You were always cold when we watched movies on the beach,” Jace murmurs, as if to himself.
The beach. The phone propped on the cooler.
The warm beers nobody liked but we drank anyway—except Evan—because we were seventeen and it felt like freedom.
Noah always falling asleep first, curled up in his towel.
Luke and Miles fighting over the movie. Sierra defending romantic comedies tooth and nail.
And Jace next to me, close enough that I could feel the heat of his arm without touching it.
The night before he kissed me, we’d put on an old romantic comedy, She’s All That. Jace said it was lame. I laughed and said, “Yeah, it is.” I wanted him to kiss me, and I told myself it would never happen.
The next day: the pebbles against the window, the yellow board, the kiss in the salt water.
And when I found out about the bet, I thought back to that movie. An ordinary girl, a popular boy, a bet. I was nothing but a fucking bet too.
The pool lights shift to yellow. I blink. The water turns gold. So does Jace’s skin, sharpening the line of his clean-shaven jaw. I lift my eyes to his. Too green, too close.
The music recedes into background noise. The laughter fades. Jace leans in, barely. I don’t move.
His breath is on my cheek, warm, steady. His gaze drops to my mouth, lifts, drops again.
Jace hasn’t been this close to me in six years.
I close my eyes.
“Cannonball!”
The shout tears through the night. Luke comes running across the deck, shirtless, in red boardshorts. He brushes past us and jumps into the pool, knees pulled to his chest, arms around his legs.
A wall of water hits us head-on. My dress, my arms, my face—everything’s soaked. The splash is so loud the whole party goes quiet.
Jace straightens. I jerk back.
Luke surfaces, hair slicked back, with a triumphant grin.
“Eight out of ten,” he assesses, looking at the group.
“Three,” Evan corrects, unmoved.
My heart is pounding—and not because of Luke.
Without a glance at me, Jace slides into the pool, shorts and T-shirt and all. The water closes over him. He resurfaces six feet away, hair in his eyes, and swims toward the middle like it’s normal.
“You’re dressed, Walker?” Luke calls.
“Yumi’ll make an exception for me,” he shoots back.
I raise an eyebrow. Since when does Jace break the rules?
From Miles, it wouldn’t have surprised me.
But Jace… The guy who never let anyone go surfing without warming up.
The guy who showed up fifteen minutes early everywhere—Noah used to gripe that he made him wait in the high school lot every morning…
Jace reaches Luke, grabs his shoulders, and dunks him under. Luke disappears for a second and comes up sputtering, laughing. Some kids jump in the water. The party picks back up like nothing happened.
But my dress sticks to my skin and my hands are shaking. My gaze goes to Jace, in the center of the pool, white T-shirt plastered to his back.
We almost kissed. How did we get here?