sixteen
Second Summer
I hated that I felt the smallest bit happy to see the taillights of Laurel’s car fading on Sunday morning. Hated even more
the lie I told her to keep me here two more days, that I was interviewing with a potential client tomorrow. It was based in
some reality. There was a woman with a house down here who was a friend of a friend of a family I’d cooked for this spring
who had reached out, wondering if I did any live-in work. But I’d told her I wouldn’t be available this summer weeks ago.
“At least you’ll have Everett to keep you company,” Laurel had said when I told her. He’d said he was staying behind to catch
another weekend of surfing before leaving for his next project that was filming in Georgia. She’d leveled a pointer finger
at me, added playfully, “Remember the pact.” It only made me feel guiltier.
But it didn’t have me getting in the car with her.
It didn’t have me changing my mind. I don’t think anything could have after that day by Everett’s car, after the surfing lesson.
It awakened something in me I’d been keeping locked down since our kiss last summer.
I wanted Everett Bridges, plain and simple.
In a move surprisingly out of character for me, I wasn’t concerned with how flimsy my willpower was when it came to him.
There was something exciting about giving in to it. In some decision that was just ours.
He was washing breakfast dishes when I walked back in and I pushed myself up onto the counter opposite him, watched his shoulders
move as his hands did.
“I don’t think anyone has ever watched me wash a mug so closely,” he said after a while, without looking at me.
“You’re being very thorough,” I commended him. He laughed and set the mug in the drying rack and grabbed another. I kept watching.
“Everyone’s gone,” I finally said.
At this Everett turned off the tap, grabbing a dish towel and drying his hands as he turned to face me. “Sutton Hale,” he
said as I swung my legs, hands tucked under my thighs. “Did you run in here to tell me we’re alone?”
“Me?” I said, loosing a hand to press it to my chest in mock surprise. “Of course not. I came in here to supervise your dishwashing.”
“And?” Everett said, tossing the towel over his shoulder and walking over to me, my knees parting for him to step between
like some cause-and-effect question on a test. If Everett Bridges approaches you, what is the most natural response? His hands raked up the outside of my thighs, my skin tingling in their wake.
“Like I said, very thorough.”
We both smiled just before he kissed me. Any remaining guilt fled from my body as one of his hands came up so he could settle
his fingers in my hair, hold my jaw with his thumb.
It was always like that with Everett. He kissed me, and the rest of the world turned off for a minute.
It was part of the reason I gave in to our secret so easily, this sort of ease around him.
We were simple, and there was a kind of joy in that, in two perfect, hazy days that I could look forward to each year without any long-term consequences.
I was reaching for the hem of Everett’s shirt, his hands already exploring under mine when he pulled away from me. I let out
a disappointed sound.
“Come on,” he said, waving me off the counter.
“What?” I asked.
“Come on,” he said again. “We’ve got to go do something.”
I hopped down, hand quickly sliding into his waiting one. “What do we have to do?”
“I don’t know,” Everett said. “Something.”
“I thought the whole point of these two days was to do something here,” I said. Everett laughed as he pulled me through the living room toward the front door.
“Isn’t it about hanging out with each other too?” he asked. I felt my cheeks go pink as Everett grabbed his keys from the
hook by the door and pocketed them. He turned to me, took my face in his hands, and kissed me once, long and slow, again.
“Let me at least buy you dinner or a coffee or those weird marzipan things you like so much from the candy store first.”
I felt one corner of my mouth tug down as I tried not to smile. “Sorry I was only thinking about getting you into bed.”
Everett grinned at this, throwing an arm around my shoulder and walking us outside. “Don’t ever apologize for that,” he said.
The rest of that first day was exactly what Everett talked about: coffee, and the candy store, where we filled a bag with two of each of their overpriced bulk options.
We wandered around the same streets we had with everyone else just a few days ago, sucking on extra-sour pineapple twists and trying to land chocolate-covered peanuts in each other’s mouths.
We stopped at the bougie market on the corner and bought two mini bottles of some fancy premixed cocktail and snuck them and the rest of our candy into a matinee of Stand by Me at the tiny theater down the street.
The cocktails tasted a lot like the watered-down cosmos they used to serve at a dive
bar I frequented with Laurel and Zoey in college. Everett knew which one I was talking about, and it was another tiny reminder
that we’d been orbiting, never getting close enough to touch, for a while now.
“You know what would be a perfect double feature with that?” I asked when we swung out of the theater. “Now and Then.”
“Great movie,” Everett said. “Agreed.”
Everett did buy me dinner, at a pizza place down the street. We sat out back, at a little table on a mosaic-tiled patio, under
globe lights strung between trees. Around us, people in bikini tops and shorts sat next to women in boxy linen dresses, tennis
bracelets winking in the fading light, dads in board shorts picking up orders for the families waiting back at their rentals,
groups of friends not so different from ours.
“Dating or friends?” I asked, nodding surreptitiously at a couple sitting a few tables away from us. Everett glanced askance
at them, eyes roving casually over the other tables until they returned to me so the couple wouldn’t notice him looking.
He shrugged. “Maybe they made a pact with their friends not to date each other, so they have to spend two secret days here
together after everyone else has gone.”
“I hear it’s a pretty common practice,” I said. Everett grinned, and for a minute it was quiet between us, just the sound
of muted conversations and the cool indie music the place was playing drifting in. “I’m glad Gabe chose you,” I finally said.
“For kickball in the third grade?” Everett asked.
“Well, that, obviously,” I said. “And then to replace Zoey last summer.”
Something flickered over Everett’s face, quick, before the same calm, lazily happy expression he usually wore slid into place again. “I am too,” he said.
It felt so much like that first night we’d met as we drove back to the cottage, the briny evening air whipping in through
the windows. There were pieces of Everett that still felt new, exciting, that were distinct from who he was with everyone
else.
The bedroom I’d shared with Laurel that week became ours for the next two days, and maybe I should have cared about that,
but I didn’t. The only thing I cared about was the golden glow of the sunset against the white sheets, Everett’s skin against
mine, for once just giving in to something. Not thinking about any next moment. Everett’s hand pressed into my hip, his head dipped between my legs, and nothing else mattered.
I wore his T-shirt while we made breakfast the next morning and turned on the Food Network in the background, yet another
microtradition we’d established. We ended up tangled together on the couch, breathless and fast compared to last night’s drawn-out
exploration of each other. Afterward, we changed and ran across the warm sand to the water, splashing in and ducking under,
replacing the sweat dried on our skin with salt water. We warmed up on the beach and swam again, over and over, until our
stomachs and the dipping sun dragged us back to the house.
On our last morning together, I turned onto my side to look at him. He was already awake, hair rumpled from sleep and where
I’d dragged my fingers through it. “Can we do this again next summer?” I asked.
Everett smiled slowly, eyes still a little tired. “Of course,” he said.
Neither of us acknowledged the pact or other people. Not just our friends, but other partners, potential relationships that couldn’t be further from our minds in that moment.
I wasn’t sad saying goodbye to him when he dropped me off at the airport that afternoon. We’d spent the drive from Malibu
talking about what was next for us, no mention of when we’d talk again or what this meant. We both seemed to tacitly agree
that, as soon as the door to the cottage closed behind us, we were back to our usual selves. Friends, or something like it.
Just two parts of a larger group.
“See you in the group chat,” I said as Everett hauled my suitcase out of the back seat, setting it on the sidewalk next to
me. He had his sunglasses pushed to the top of his head, and for a minute I thought about him driving home from here, pictured
him in his life. Traffic and film sets and flights to new places. It was a good image, but one that was quickly replaced by
Everett shaking ocean water out of his hair, laughing across a bonfire, moving around a tiny kitchen with me. Summer Everett.
The only piece of him I’d ever really known. Funnily enough, summer was just beginning, still around the corner on the calendar.
We were each other’s shoulder season.
We hugged each other goodbye, friendly, familiar. “Pencil me in to your calendar,” he said as we pulled away. “Two days next
summer.”
“Already have you down in pen,” I said. Everett smiled at me, that brilliant flash that I’m sure had hearts skipping all over
LA. It had caught my eye at a party two years ago, after all. He nodded toward the airport. “Get out of here, Hale.”
I grinned. “Bye, Bridges.” I waited for the guilt to show up then, rear its head now that we were back to real life. But it
didn’t come.