So, we’re not a couple? God, maybe we should have had the talk. You’re leaving, Olivia. I have to remind myself it’s a moot point. I’m not going to wish for bad things for Aunt Sarah, and I’m not going to be around for a long-term relationship. I’m not getting too attached. It makes me a little sad that I won’t get to do boyfriend-girlfriend stuff with Aiden though. There won’t be a first Christmas, with overthought presents, or Valentine’s Day. I bet Aiden would give really thoughtful gifts—things that have meaning and significance, or something he made himself. But we won’t make it to Labor Day, let alone Christmas.
Unless.
Maybe I really can get Emma’s parents on board. Maybe if I offered to watch the twins whenever, and Aunt Sarah paid for all of my food, and I somehow got a car, so they didn’t have to worry about taking me places.
“Olivia?” Aiden pulls on the pole in my hand and I let go. “What are you thinking about?”
“Carpooling.”
He laughs, and threads the pole into the edge of the blue mesh. “Of course you are.”
I smile and tell him what he’s told me so many times. “I’m weird.”
“Yeah.” He adjusts the pole and the front of our tent takes shape. “Are you nervous about what I told you? Because it’s not like I’m never going to drive again.” He doesn’t sound as comfortable talking about this as he did at the ruins. “So you don’t have to worry about chauffeuring me around forever.”
“No, I was thinking about how I was going to get around senior year when I don’t have a car.” I pick up the next pole and hand it to him.
“I’ll drive you to school and stuff.”
“Yeah?” I probably shouldn’t be surprised by Aiden’s kindness, but I am.
“Sure. You have good taste in music, and you smell nice.” He smiles. “You’re welcome in my car anytime.”
I scrunch my nose up. “I definitely smell better than your car.”
“Hey.” He shoots me a hurt look. “It’s really aired out now that I don’t have smelly cleats in there. By the start of school I bet it will smell like … you.” He smiles and laughs. “Silver lining, huh?”
“You don’t think you’re going to miss it?”
“The smell of feet?” He shakes his head. “No.”
He walks past me and bends down to get the next section of tent. I reach out to smack his back as he walks by, but he moves and I hit his butt.
Oh god. Maybe I can pretend like it didn’t happen. Maybe he won’t notice. “The baseball, not the smell.”
“I mean, I don’t really have a choice.”
My nerves start to settle.
“I probably will miss all the guys smacking my butt after the game though.” He gives me the tiniest wink and smiles. “Luckily it seems like you’re volunteering to fill that void in my life.”
AIDEN
Olivia looks mortified, and she isn’t making eye contact with me. “But you said your vision’s going to be better by the time school starts. That gives you six months before practice even starts.” Her eyes dart between me and the tent, and she’s really cute when she’s trying to act like she didn’t just smack my ass.
“Just pretending it never happened?” I tease.
“Yep.”
I laugh. “The thing is, my vision could go to hell again. Dr. Shah said flare-ups are common and I’ll probably be dealing with them for years.” I put my hand out and Olivia hands me the last tent pole. “It’s not fair to anybody if I take a spot and then can’t deliver for half of the season.”
“But maybe you could.”
“But probably I couldn’t.” I’m trying not to be annoyed, but I hate that she brought this up. “I quit, Liv.” And I don’t want to quit again. Does she think she’s dating Emerson the baseball star? Is everyone going to forever see me as that guy, even when I’m so far from it? Are we dating?
“Sorry.” She sounds like she means it, and it takes some of the sting out of my voice.
“It’s fine.”
“Can we just pretend it didn’t happen?”
I smile. “Kind of like the butt smack?”
“No, I’ve decided that was kind of fun.” She smiles, but she still looks shy about it.
I laugh, and pat my butt dramatically. “Anytime, Liv. Anytime.”
She waves a hand at me to stop, and laughs. “You’re weird.”
“Only with you.”
OLIVIA
Ellis might be right. We might be one of “those” antisocial couples now. Even if we’re not an actual couple. But either way, we’re paired off, sitting on the beach together, a line of empty glass bottles nestled into the sand between us.
Aiden puts the brown glass to his lips. “What’s the weirdest thing you’ve ever written?”
“The weirdest?” I shake my head.
“Yeah. I’ve drawn some pretty weird things over the years. I went through a phase where I only drew fingers. I’d draw pages and pages of them. My sisters thought it was super creepy.”
“That is weird. Why fingers?”
Aiden shrugs and smiles. “We had to draw them in art class one day and I was just really good at drawing fingers.”
I know what I should say, but I don’t want to. Because for all of Aiden’s little comments about being weird, I’m not quite ready to embrace that just yet. Of course, there’s a little—slightly drunker—voice in my head that tells me not to care. The one that’s always reminding me that this is just for the summer. I don’t need to impress him, or make myself something I’m not. Aiden never makes me feel like I need to, anyway.
“I wrote a short story once—early middle school, maybe—about a girl whose mom gets turned into a dog, and then she takes her mom-dog to the pound.” I cover my face with both hands and let out a strangled groan. “I never finished it. Which was probably good, because it could have gotten pretty dark.” I take a drink from the little pink bottle covered in strawberries. “I was working through some things.”
“Obviously.” Aiden laughs and I don’t know if it’s him, or my impending departure, but it feels good to just be myself. To not feel like I have to try too hard to be a certain way, a certain kind of person.
Zander didn’t even know that I hated his cologne. Hated it. I loved the way he smelled right out of the shower—the freshness of his shampoo, the coolness of his soap. He loved that cologne. So much that he wore it to the Christmas dance last year, even though I told him it gave me a headache. We danced to this song about running away to Paris, and he kissed me in the middle of the courtyard, and it should have felt really special, but all I felt was annoyed. And nauseous. When we got back to his house I took two Tylenol, and then I took his stupid cologne.
I can’t help but think of all of the other ways he never listened to me, never cared. All the times I didn’t say anything because more than anything I wanted him to want me. I wanted to belong—with him, with his family. I pull out my phone and I start typing. I’ve thought of a million different things I could say to Zander to tell him how shitty he made me feel sometimes, but at this moment I can’t stop myself. So I tell him about the cologne. I tell him that it’s in his closet, hidden behind the boxes of comic books he pulls out every summer when his mom has a garage sale and he debates selling them. I don’t know why I’m suddenly so mad about Zander. Maybe because it feels like I wasted so much time being that, when I could have been this.
I don’t care if you wear it now, I type.
As I’m about to hit send, Aiden’s voice distracts me. “Who are you texting?”
Duh, Olivia. Hot guy. On the beach. Put your phone away. I click send and slip my phone back into my shorts pocket. It feels good, like I’ve taken another step toward closure. It also feels like nothing. The feel of the cool air brushing across my hot face overshadows everything else. It’s all I can feel, all I want to feel. Except for maybe Aiden’s lips. So I lean over, and I do what I’m thinking about. Because I’ve waited long enough for this, and now I don’t h
ave any time to waste.
* * *
Ellis decides if we won’t come to him, he’ll come to us. The number of bottles between me and Aiden has doubled, and so has the number of bodies in the sand.
“Stars are kind of underwhelming,” Ellis says from where he’s wedged in between me and Aiden. Jaz is on the other side of me. We have miles of deserted beach and all four of us are squished into this tiny square of sand, body-to-body. “Don’t you think? I mean … I don’t get the appeal. They’re just … so far away.”
I laugh. Only Ellis would be underwhelmed by a celestial wonder that took billions of years to form.
“Hell. No.” Jaz twists next to me, like she’s trying to see Ellis over me, and she sounds personally affronted. “Stars are crazy romantic. Like, show-me-a-sky-full-of-stars-and-I’m-taking-my-shirt-off levels of romantic.”
We all laugh, and I half expect Jaz to start stripping down, but she just lies back down and lets out an exasperated sigh.
“I can’t see the stars anymore.” Aiden sounds a little sad, and I’m tempted to reach over Ellis and pretend he isn’t there. “It’s all muddy, like they’re hiding behind a curtain. Or it’s like I’m seeing stars on top of stars on top of stars.” He sighs. “Too many stars.”
“No such thing,” Jaz mumbles.
“Sorry, bud.” Ellis sounds almost as sad as Aiden. “Getting old is hard.” Ellis laughs and throws his empty bottle behind him in the sand. A little spray of liquid showers over us.
“Shut up, you’re nine days older than me,” Aiden fires back.
“Yeah, but you see worse than Grandpa Tate, so…”
I tense up—I hate that Ellis is picking on Aiden right now, when he’s sharing something that he obviously doesn’t talk about much. Aiden laughs, and I relax a little. Boys are so weird.
Next to me, Jaz is shifting around. She jabs me with her elbow and when she sits up, she’s in only her bra. She wiggles her shorts off and stands. “I’m going in,” she says, already barreling toward the water. It’s a still night, the kind where the water shimmers like a pane of black glass in the moonlight. Ellis is up next, stripping off his shirt and sandals and t-shirt until he’s just a blur of underwear tripping toward the water.
Bathing suits and underwear are basically the same thing. Somewhere deep in my brain, I know this. They cover the same parts—hell, my underwear covers more than some of my bathing suits. So why does it feel like I’m about to get naked in front of Aiden? It’s just the two of us left on the sand, but we have a gaping hole between us now, where Ellis’s body used to be. Aiden turns his head to me and reaches for my hand. “You wanna swim?”
There’s no pressure behind the words, no note of irritation at the idea that I may not want to. And I really wish we were alone, because lying this close to him in the sand, our fingers barely touching, I want to pull his shirt off myself. Feel the warm skin underneath, touch mine to his. But not with an audience. So instead I sit up and I pull my shirt over my head. My bra isn’t the prettiest one I own, but it’s black and covers everything important. Aiden pulls his shirt off while I stand and push my shorts down to my ankles, kicking them off along with my flip-flops.
I sprint for the water as soon as my foot is free of my sandal and don’t slow down until the water is to my knees. I’m up to my waist, my blue underwear just under the water’s dark surface, when I look back to Aiden. He tosses his phone on top of the pile of his clothes, and strides toward the water in nothing but his underwear. My eyes need a distraction, because I can’t stand here and watch Aiden’s slow strut out into the water like this. I look back out toward deeper water, where Ellis and Jaz have found the sand bar, and are once again in knee-deep waters. I’m thinking about how good the cool water feels against my sticky, overheated skin when I feel arms wrap around me from behind.
It’s the first time we’ve been skin-to-skin like this—his chest to my back, his arms pressed against mine—and I wish we didn’t have an audience. Ellis glances at us, then plunges back into the water, and part of me wishes he would swim all the way back to shore, and just disappear, like some sort of freshwater merman. I feel tense under Aiden’s touch, not because I don’t want it, but because I feel like we’re in an endlessly awkward situation as the only couple. We don’t even have Beth and Troy here to paw all over each other as a diversion. Aiden’s breath is hot against my ear when he whispers, “Turn around.”
I do what he says, and then we’re chest to chest. Just for a second, before he turns and the water rushes around me as he plunges underwater. His arms rise up out of the water and grab at me, so I take them, realizing he wants me up on his shoulders. Oh god. I take hold of his hands and pick my feet up, letting him back into me until my legs are over him. His hands move from my hands to my legs as he rises up out of the water. I sway a little, and then steady myself when his hands come back up to meet mine.
“You good?” he asks, letting go of my hands as I rise up into the night air.
“Yeah, it’s—” But before I can get the words out, Aiden is sinking under me and I’m falling back into the water. I come up with a gasp. “Aiden Emerson!” I push the wet hair out of my face and look around for Aiden but he’s nowhere. I think about the dark water and the beers he drank, and something inside of me sinks. “Aiden?” I’m trying to keep the panic out of my voice, but Ellis must hear it, because he’s swimming toward me. We know better than to swim in the dark, especially out here, where we’re away from everything, totally at the mercy of the darkness. Ellis has closed the gap by half when I feel a flutter against my legs, and then Aiden rises out of the water behind me, wrapping his arms around my waist and pulling me toward him. I give him a little jab with my elbow. “You scared me.”
“Sorry,” he says, just as his lips fall on the bare skin of my neck. “You looked hot, like you needed to cool off.”
Ellis mutters something and swims back toward Jaz and the sand bar.
I laugh and turn back toward Aiden. I loop my arms around his neck and he picks me up by my hips until I wrap my legs around his waist. Everyone else is still in the water, but in the dark, with Aiden’s arms around me and the water covering us, I can’t make myself care anymore. The strawberry wine is still warming my stomach, but being this close to Aiden is its own kind of intoxication. When I press my lips to his, I’m not thinking about anything but the way it feels to be wrapped around him like this.
* * *
Hours later, when our skin is wrinkled and the drinks have worn off, Aiden’s face is against mine on the soft blanket. The vinyl tent is sticky and noisy, and we only brought one blanket, so we’re lying on it. It’s July, and hot even at night, but I feel strange and exposed, curled up with nothing on top of me. I still have my damp bra and underwear on, because it’s too awkward figuring out how to take it off. “It’s really hot in here,” I huff.
Aiden makes a little snorting sound. “No comment.”
“You don’t think it’s a million degrees in here?”
“I think I’m not commenting, because the only suggestions to fix that problem will make me sound like a creeper.”
Oh. “Right.”
In the corner of the tent, where my clothes lay in a crumpled pile, my phone buzzes. What time is it? It has to be one, maybe two in the morning. Aiden reaches over and passes it to me. It buzzes twice more, as I slide the screen open. Three new texts.
From Zander.
I roll onto my back, so Aiden isn’t looking over my shoulder, and I open the box.
Zander:
Are you drunk?
Where are you?
Drunk? I look at the text I sent him a few hours ago. Oh god. It’s missing two words, and three more are misspelled. I drunk-texted Zander. I reply, because I can’t have him blowing up my phone all night.
Olivia:
I’m camping. And no.
Zander:
Bullshit. You don’t camp.
Olivia:
No, WE don’t camp
>
I don’t know what has come over me, but I feel the uncontrollable urge to show Zander how little he knows about me. How everything he thinks he knows is wrong. I open my notes, and copy and paste all the little rants I’ve been saving. All of the snarky little jabs I convinced myself not to send.
The words form a giant bubble that snakes down page after page along my screen. Aiden clears his throat, and I shake off the urge to read through the message one more time before sending. My finger hovers and I do it. I hit send. There’s a sort of exhilaration that sweeps over me as my finger makes contact with that little blue button. And it’s immediately followed by an all-consuming wave of panic and regret. Oh my god. What did I do?
“Everything good?” Aiden asks.
My first thought is that he knows what I’ve done. That he read every word as I scrolled through. But he’s still lying on his back. No, it’s just what a nice guy says when you get an unexpected text at 2 a.m. Because this is when bad things happen. You lose fifty IQ points when the sun goes down; that’s when bad decisions happen. That’s what my mom said to me on my sixteenth birthday, when she was giving me an uncharacteristically motherly pep talk about keeping my pants on. She was barely older than that when she got pregnant, so the sentiment wasn’t lost on me. But I’m not her. She is right though—bad decisions happen when the sun goes down. Like that text.
“Yeah, everything’s fine.”
I stare at the screen a few minutes longer, but it’s just my message staring back at me. There’s no reply. And finally, it feels over.
Chapter
Sixteen
OLIVIA
Aiden still owes me night three of our epic art adventure, and no matter how much I beg, he won’t tell me what it is. Even though I take every opportunity to harass him about it.
“Just tell me what it is,” I whisper, as I wrap my arms around his chest. Click. Click. “Fasten all three of the buckles,” I say to the group of boaters in front of us. Aiden and I never could decide who would do the live demonstrations, so we entertain ourselves by doing them together. Aiden stands straight faced in front of me, doing his best mannequin impression. “I know it’s more comfortable but don’t skip the bottom buckle,” I say, fastening the last buckle of Aiden’s life vest. We rotate who has to be the dummy. I circle around Aiden and face him. “Then tighten all of the straps,” I say, pulling on the first of three. “Not too tight,” I tell the boaters.
When Summer Ends Page 18