nineteen
This Summer
Cooper calls me Thursday morning to ask if I want to grab lunch that afternoon and talk about the cookbook. We’re all gathered
around the table out back drinking coffee, and Laurel waggles her eyebrows at me, urging me forward as soon as I say “Hi,
Cooper!” in an overly cheery falsetto.
“I’d love to get together today,” I tell Cooper. Laurel claps her hands together across from me, and despite a conscious effort
not to, I glance at Everett sitting next to her. His eyes slip away from mine as soon as I look at him and he takes a long
drink of his coffee, expression inscrutable.
Still, I can’t shake the half second our gazes locked for the rest of the morning as I sit on the beach with Gabe and look
at the pictures he showed Everett on the boat, as I rinse the sand off my feet, as I slip on a green dress that makes me technically
a little overdressed for this lunch place and swipe on mascara before heading downstairs to leave for lunch with a man who
is very much not Everett. Which is a good thing, I remind myself as I say goodbye to Davi where he’s on his computer at the
island and grab Laurel’s keys from the table in the entryway. Because Everett and I are not something, and we haven’t been
for a long time.
But it’s him I see as soon as I walk out of the villa, shutting the door to his car, surfboard sticking out the back. His hair is still damp, a towel in one hand.
“Good waves?” I ask as I approach him.
“Pretty decent,” he says.
“At least you remembered to put a shirt on for the drive back this time,” I say. I don’t know what it is, this need to say
things like that to Everett, small comments delivered in a barbed tone. We agreed to a truce, but after last night, standing
so close to him on the stairs, it somehow feels easier to talk to him this way than to be altogether friendly. That would
be too close to inviting him back in.
He’s in my path when I reach him. When he doesn’t move I tilt my head back, squinting up at him. “Where are you going?” he
asks, not unkindly, but with enough intention behind it I know he’s trying to delay me.
“I’m going to lunch with my future husband, if you don’t mind,” I say, stepping around him. He turns sideways as I do, letting
me go.
“Send my best to Mr. Pascal,” he says.
“Oh, I’ll let him know the director sends his regards,” I say over my shoulder.
I expect Everett to respond. Want him to, so I can prove to myself that we’re both feeling the same way. We toed some line
last night that we need to steer clear of. But he doesn’t say anything. When I get into Laurel’s car, he’s still standing
there, watching me as I drive away.
It would make things so much easier if Cooper could be the great love of my life.
And maybe that would be possible, if my mind weren’t so stuck on the way Everett—who Cooper does want to spend a fair portion of our lunch discussing—watched me drive away from the house.
I can feel the spreading cracks in the dam I’ve put up when it comes to Everett, pressure mounting behind it the longer the sun bakes down on my shoulders, the more Cooper and I discuss recipe testing and award-winning movies and his daughter.
I’m a terrible date, I’m sure of it. I’m distracted and a little annoyed and by the time we’re hugging goodbye in the parking
lot, I’m positive any interest Cooper might have had in me has to have waned. But he surprises me, asking if he’ll see me
at Laurel’s divorce party tomorrow, says that he’s looking forward to it.
I drive back to the villa in silence, windows down, stewing over a problem that still feels nebulous to me, a storm cloud
I can’t seem to penetrate.
I drop Laurel’s keys on the table in the entryway and kick off my sandals. The house is quiet as I walk into the kitchen and
grab a glass from the counter, fill it at the sink.
“How was lunch?”
The rim of the glass clinks against my teeth as I jump nearly out of my skin. I slam the cup down on the counter and turn
to where Everett is sitting in one of the armchairs in a corner of the living room, his finger holding his place in the book
balanced on his knee.
“What—have you been lying in wait or something?” I ask, heart hammering in my chest.
Everett lets out a sound somewhere between a scoff and a grumble, like his larynx can’t make up its mind, and doesn’t answer
my question.
“Lunch was fine,” I say as he stands up from his chair, tosses his book back onto it, and walks over to stand on the opposite
side of the island, arms crossed in front of him.
“This man is supposed to be your future husband,” he says. “And lunch was fine?”
I start walking around the island, not looking at him. “I just said that because I was mad at you.”
“That seems to be our main motivator this week,” Everett says. The space between the kitchen and the living room is narrower
than I realized, and when I meet Everett in the middle of it, he doesn’t immediately step aside, just like he didn’t at his
car earlier. I cross my own arms and lock eyes with him, ready to win whatever face-off he’s decided to drop us into.
“Where is everyone?” I ask.
“They went into town,” he says.
“Why?” I ask.
“Lunch,” he says, and I’ve never heard such a mundane word quite so charged. Everett makes lunch sound like a slap in the face and
an innuendo all at once.
“You didn’t want to go?”
“I had some reading to catch up on.”
I glance at the chair. “Right. Movie research couldn’t wait.”
“Why was lunch just ‘fine’?” Everett asks.
It catches me off guard. I want to have some perfect comeback, but the one that shoots to the forefront of my mind, like a
lightning bolt launched out of that storm cloud and aimed directly at my psyche, is inconveniently I wasn’t with you. That, more than his question, stymies me. It’s so far from what I’ve been thinking about Everett this week that I almost
wonder if my mental health has taken a sudden hard left and I’ll just have to live with intrusive thoughts forever now.
But it’s not out of nowhere, I know, deep down.
The place Cooper took us to was a restaurant that had moved into a spot where Everett and I grabbed dinner once, during our third summer here, and the entire time all I could think about was him across from me on that deck, looking like he was made for this environment with his sun-golden hair and well-loved T-shirt, the endless stretch of the ocean behind him.
When Cooper excused himself to run to the restroom, I tried fruitlessly to tamp down what had happened after that dinner, but it kept coming back to me with every wave that crashed on the sand.
Hands clasped as we walked back to his car and later on the way into the house, sheets pulled over us and drying sweat and some twinge in my chest that I hadn’t felt before.
I shrug one shoulder. “Cooper’s great,” I say. “But he might just not be the guy for me. No big deal.”
I try to step around Everett, but he catches my hand and pulls me back to face him. I look down at where he’s touching me,
our first real contact this week, save for the way he tried to comfort me on the boat. “Then why was it such a big deal for
us?” he asks. When I don’t answer, too frozen to think of what to say, he continues. “Why can’t we move on from what happened?”
I’m still silent, all the things I want to say to him trapped at the back of my throat. There must still be some lingering
irritation on my face because Everett drops his hand from mine and tugs it through his hair.
“Come on, Sutton,” he says. “Why are you so mad at me?”
“You’re mad at me too,” I point out, deflecting.
“I wasn’t,” Everett says with a shake of his head. “Until I showed up and you were clearly still just as angry with me as
you were five years ago.”
“It was a big deal to me,” I say, unintentionally reinforcing his earlier point, that whatever this is—or was—between us matters.
“It was a big deal to me too,” Everett says. “But I thought we’d at least be able to talk about it by now. I thought we could
at least be civil this week.”
“We are being civil.”
“We’re pretending to be civil.”
“Same difference.”
“Sutton,” Everett says, looking almost desperate to fix this. “I’m sorry for my part in things, but we’ve had five years to
try to move on. So why, again, are you this mad at me?”
“Because it ruined everything!” I burst out. Everett’s brow draws together. “Because our lie broke apart the most important
group of people in my life.”
When he answers me, his voice is soft. “We all grew up. We got busy.”
“But we were the nail in the coffin,” I say. “We never came back here after that argument.”
“No one could come back here,” he says. He takes a cautious step closer to me. “Come on, you know that. We floated the idea for two summers
after what happened. Everyone had something else going on. Is that really the only thing you’re mad about?”
I think that maybe he’s right, even if I’m not totally convinced. We did try to make the trip work again, but it had been
nearly impossible to get everyone here that last summer. People had been falling off for years, and I hadn’t wanted to admit
that it meant anything. That we couldn’t hang on to what we’d once had. Our lives were expanding in ways I looked forward
to in college, but couldn’t have predicted the consequences of. Jobs and marriage and homes and successes beyond our wildest
dreams also led to settling down, getting used to places, moving to new locations that were better for work, establishing
ourselves in them. And it shouldn’t have been an insane ask, one week with the people I’d once thought of as my family, but
maybe it was. Maybe all our effort was never going to be enough, in the end.
I look up at Everett, something hard lodged in my throat that makes it a little difficult to talk. “I trusted you,” I say. “And we let each other down.”
I can see how it hits him, and a not-small part of me wants to take it back.
“I’m sorry,” he says, and I can tell he’s going to say more, but I jump in before he can.
“I don’t want you to be sorry,” I say, which is the truth at the center of all of this, the thing I won’t admit. That it has
far less to do with everyone else than I’ll ever let myself acknowledge. “I want it not to have happened.”
Everett stills at this. I didn’t realize how much the distance between us has shrunk. We’re standing closer than I think we’ve
intentionally been this whole trip, and I can feel it in all of me. The heat radiating from his skin, the way the air starts
to spark and pop between us. It crawls from the soles of my feet and trickles down from the top of my head, meeting in the
middle, drawing me even closer to him.
Everett’s hand finding my waist hitches my breath, makes my head go a little woozy. I try to steady myself, to not get lost
in this. In him. It’s always been so easy to.
“All of it?” he asks. “You wish none of it had happened?”
I shake my head, pulse jumping as he bends closer to me, two magnets pulled ceaselessly together. “Not all of it,” I say.
I know what’s about to happen. Could—should—stop it right here. But I don’t want to. “Just the last part.”
Everett’s lips against mine are a revelation, every good thing my anger let me forget about in the last four years.
I remember the taste of him so well that some sleeper agent part of my brain whirs to life like it’s a trigger phrase.
He hooks his arm around my waist and pulls me into him, his other hand wrapping into my hair, and I remember all of it so well, how it’s always felt a little like we were made for this.
How I don’t respond to anyone the way I do to Everett.
He turns us so we’re against the counter, lifts me deftly onto it and steps between my parted legs. My fingers are clawing
into his shirt, his hair, some cocktail of every emotion I’ve ever felt toward Everett spilling out of me. I want him aggressively,
have been starved of this and haven’t even let myself entertain the thought of having it again. I tilt my hips closer to the
edge of the counter and feel his length press against me, bask in the rough, breathless sound that comes out of him.
“Lunch was only fine because it wasn’t with you,” I say, crazily, when he moves his lips to my neck, my collarbone, my hands
in his hair. “I want someone like you.” Having Everett this close to me again has me confessing things.
“There’s no one like you, Sutton,” he says. Which is a much better confession than my clunky one, and at it I’m pulling him
back up, kissing him again, chasing that same taste, feel, the friction between our bodies.
Everett urges me toward him with a hand on the small of my back, my dress hiking up around my thighs, and I think I’d let
him lie me down right here if it weren’t for the beep at the front door, the lock whirring.
There isn’t any time to do more than jerk away from each other. Everett walks over to the fridge and opens it, pretending
to inspect the contents as I slide off the counter and race back to my water glass, filling it at the sink again and trying
to keep the rise and fall of my breath out of my shoulders.
“Hey,” Laurel says, dropping her bag onto the island loudly enough that we both turn to her. Everett looks a little dazed,
just how I feel. “Better get ready. We’re going out tonight.”
“We are?” I ask, rifling mentally through the plan for the week as my pulse pounds in my throat. “I thought we were laying low tonight.”
“We were,” Laurel says, something mischievous sparking in her eyes. “But I found an outdoor movie night. Sounds more fun than
hanging here.”
“Great,” I say. I’m convinced she knows, that my voice comes out two pitches higher than usual. “What movie?”
Laurel’s focus narrows on Everett, a rabbit in a wolf’s path as she grins. “Cooney.”