Love, Laughter & Happily Ever After: A sweet romantic comedy collection

by Ellie Hall

  No summer camp was complete without a good ghost story, but mine was a bad one I didn’t want to resurrect. Yet every single one of my senses kept pulling me back into the past, back to when I’d been happiest.

  And every single time, my mind danced away from the edges of the memories about Adam, and how we’d gone up in flames like old wood on the last-night-of-camp bonfire.

  I fetched my bags from the porch and dug for the clothes I needed. As counselors, we’d taught the kids over and over that gear was king. You needed to be dressed correctly for every activity for your own safety. And I needed to find the perfect outfit for a séance.

  Fifteen minutes later, I was back at the original dock. The wood that had led to multiple splinters every summer had been replaced with some non-wood composite. It felt sturdier, and I suspected it would probably hold up far better than the old dock had.

  And yet…it was also weirdly the same? Like when I sat at the end of it, dangling my bare feet in the water, it felt exactly like the countless times that I had sat down here with Natalie, Adam, and Ben.

  I closed my eyes and went ghost-hunting, looking for the spirit of memories past.

  2

  Twelve Years Ago

  “Hey,” a voice called, and I tensed before I realized it was a touch too deep and four days too early to be a camper. It might be my first year as an Oak Crest counselor, but I’d been here as a camper for six years, and I knew how demanding the campers could be. I wasn’t ready for the first-day chaos to start a minute before it had to.

  I turned and spotted a guy standing at the end of the dock, still on land. A large duffel lay beside his feet, and he held his hand over his eyes like he was trying to see me better.

  “Can I help you?”

  “I hope so,” he called. “Do you work here?”

  “Yeah. Do you?” He had to, even though I hadn’t seen him in the new counselor orientation. He was taller than most of our campers with broader shoulders than even our older boys had yet. The numbers thinned as the kids got older. They got pulled away by school stuff: cheer or band camps, other clinics to prep them for fall sports.

  “I hope I still work here. I missed my flight, so I’m late.”

  Ah, that explained it. I climbed to my feet and walked down the dock to meet him. “Are you Adam?” I asked when I was close enough to see him clearly. He was a couple inches over six feet with dark, shaggy hair and dark eyes. His skin was pale enough to make me frown. He’d have to shellac himself in sunscreen the first couple of weeks until he built up some base color.

  “Yeah. Sorry I’m late.”

  I wasn’t sure why he was apologizing to me until I realized I was still frowning. Must have made me look official.

  “No worries. I’m just a junior counselor. Been coming here as a camper since I was a kid, but this is my first time on this side of things.” I held up the whistle on the string around my neck. Every counselor got one.

  “Shiny,” he said, his tone uncertain, like he wasn’t sure what response I was looking for.

  I let the whistle fall. “I’m torn between vowing to never use it and wanting to use it immediately. I hated the sound of these things when I was a kid, but it turns out that power corrupts.”

  A half-smile peeked at me. “You’re a tyrant in training?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe? Natalie—that’s one of the other counselors—could probably tell you. I guess I’ll find out when the campers come. Did you check in at the office?”

  He shook his head. “No. I mean, I poked my head in but no one was there.”

  I rolled my eyes. “No doubt Director Warren is ‘checking on’ Nurse Debbie.” I gave the phrase the sarcastic air quotes it deserved.

  “Sorry?” he said, confused.

  “You’ll see. Come on, Stretch. I’ll show you where the boys’ cabins are.”

  “Stretch?”

  “Yeah. You’re tall, so…Stretch. Your new camp nickname. We’re super original around here. I’m Tabitha. Guess what they call me.”

  He considered it for a second. “Something to do with witches or cats.”

  “Ding ding ding. Tabby Cat. So you’re either going to be Stretch or Tardy. I did you a favor.”

  “Yep, Stretch. Stretch is great. Love it,” he said.

  “Smart guy. Now let’s get you settled in.”

  3

  Now

  A chittering bird swooped close enough to startle me out of the memory. I blinked back to the present.

  If someone is going to be a major figure in your life, you should know the first time you see them. Like when you’re watching a show and an actor comes on in a minor part at first, but they’re so famous that you know they’re going to end up being a major character.

  Adam should have come with that kind of warning.

  But I had no idea when I’d walked him over to the boys’ cabins that he and Ben would be some of my best friends by the end of that summer.

  I had no idea that we’d become the reigning pranksters in Oak Crest history, or that my story with Ben and Natalie would burn for years with a steady glow while my story with Adam flamed out.

  Exactly like that.

  I stood and brushed the seat of my shorts, pausing when I caught movement across the lake on the new dock over by my cabin. A man stood at the end like he was going to dive, and something about his stance made me catch my breath. It was hard to tell from this distance, but maybe it was the slope of his shoulders that reminded me so much of Adam.

  He disappeared into the lake in a flash of white trunks, and his dive too, reminded me of Adam.

  This whole place did, and it was driving me a little crazy.

  I made my way up to the office and poked my head in, noting that the interior had gotten the same glow up as the rest of the camp.

  “Hey,” Natalie said, smiling from behind the front desk. “Did you get a nap in?”

  “No, but I don’t need one. Remember, I’m used to a kitchen pace. I’m good to go. Where’s Juniper?”

  “Helping Ben. By which I mean Ben is trying to get things done while keeping Juniper from eating more than her daily allotment of dirt and rocks. But it’s his turn.” She gave me a shrug like, “Them’s the breaks.” “Want a tour of the rest of the place?”

  “Of course. But I’m telling you if the kid cabins have gotten the royal treatment, I might have to burn everything down.”

  “Right. Because they should live in the same crappy conditions we did,” she said wryly.

  “You get me.”

  She smiled. “We made some improvements, but I think you’ll be okay with them.”

  She walked me over to the girls’ cabins first, where the old metal bunkbeds with squeaky springs had given way to sturdy pine berths.

  “Nice,” I said.

  “Come see the counselor cabins.”

  Each counselor cabin housed only two counselors, which had sounded like the height of luxury when we were campers sharing with seven other girls. Each counselor cabin was situated with a camper cabin on either side.

  “Holy guacamole,” I breathed when Natalie let me into the closest one. “Can I be a counselor again?”

  If I’d thought the two-person cabins were luxurious as a kid, these would have floored me. In addition to a full twin size bed instead of a narrow cot, there was a little sitting area in front of them with an armchair for each counselor, plus an end table and lamp.

  “Prepare to have your mind truly blown.” Natalie pointed to one of the windows.

  “Holy…” This time I didn’t even finish the thought, just walked over and touched the compact window air conditioner.

  “I know it’s tempting to worship it as a god but pull yourself together.”

  I looked at her over my shoulder, unwilling to let it go. “What I wouldn’t have given for this back in our counselor days.”

  “Believe me, I know. That’s why we put them in the counselor cabins. Come on and I’ll show you the kitchen.”


  As we walked to the mess hall, I listened as she talked about other upgrades and improvements they’d made, but she had half my attention, at best. Something about opening the lid on the box of old Adam memories had let him out completely, and suddenly I was seeing him everywhere.

  There was the field where I’d led my cabin of girls to victory over his boys in the color wars. And that was the old fire ring where we’d always spent the last night with the other counselors after a long day of cleaning up the camp and packing to leave in the morning. I remembered how he’d always take two or three songs to relax while Ben played on his guitar before he’d join in.

  I caught sight of the trail that led up to Moon Rock. For a trail no one was supposed to know about or use, it had always been the most well-beaten one.

  I tore my eyes away. That was where I had fallen in love.

  “So what do you think?” Natalie asked. “And you can be honest. I can always tell when you’re lying anyway.”

  “It looks amazing.” That was the truth. “I can’t believe what you’ve done with the place. And there’s no hidden meaning there. I mean that it looks like exactly the summer camp I would hope to find if I was coming here for the first time.”

  “Thanks,” she said, her smile tinged with pride, but her forehead wrinkled as we passed the flagpole and my gaze lingered there. “Doing okay with the memories?”

  The flagpole. That was the site of one of the most epic pranks in camp history, and I’d come out the winner that time. I smiled as I remembered the look on the campers’ faces when they’d found Adam tied there before breakfast one morning.

  “I know that’s where…” she trailed off.

  “It’s fine. Adam isn’t a dirty word, and it was a long time ago. What’s he up to, anyway?”

  Her eyes widened. “Whoa. You’ve never asked about him.”

  “Of course I have.”

  “No, you haven’t. I would have noticed.”

  “Oh. Okay, but that’s not out of trauma. Just lack of interest. But I’m here now and thinking about old familiar faces. So how is Adam?” I’d gone out of my way not to keep up with him, but now I was curious. Almost painfully so.

  “He’s good. We’ve been seeing him a lot lately.”

  “That makes two of us,” I mumbled, remembering the man on the dock.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Anyway, he’s good. He went into business.”

  “What kind?”

  “Flipping properties. Like those shows? Maybe you’re not obsessed with them like we are, but right now we can’t get enough of those shows on the home channels. Renovations, yard makeovers, interior redesign, doesn’t matter. We’re into it all. Constantly on the lookout for ideas.”

  But I was still caught on the idea of Adam doing house flipping. He’d never liked talking about his life outside of camp, but I got the sense he’d had a tough upbringing, and I sort of thought he wanted to get into something that made major money. Like be an investment banker or something.

  “You look surprised,” Natalie said. “Trust me, if you ever buy a property, you’ll be just as obsessed with these dumb shows.”

  “It’s not that. I sort of expected to hear that Adam was in middle management and climbing the ladder at some big Atlanta corporation, on his way to becoming the CEO of Coke or Delta or something.”

  “Is that a bad thing?”

  “Of course not. I mean, the lesson of that final summer was that I didn’t know him when it came right down to it.”

  In a lot of ways, that summer before my senior year of college had been the most golden one. The previous summer, Adam and I had started a flirtation, kind of, not edging into full-blown lovebird territory like Ben and Natalie had by the time we were twenty. But there were little looks and touches, times I thought he was going out of his way to make sure his campers were scheduled in the same area as mine, times when I definitely found a reason to wander past the boys’ cabins if I thought he’d be there.

  Normally, at the end of each summer, we all kept in touch via Instagram, liking or commenting on each other’s posts. Well, not Natalie and Ben. Ben transferred to UVA so he could be closer to Natalie at Virginia Tech. But the rest of us…it was pretty casual. We caught glimpses of each other’s lives throughout the year, then showed up the first day of pre-camp and picked up like we’d never left.

  But that summer, Adam had texted me about a month after we got home from camp. Soon we were texting and IM-ing a few times a week, then every day. By the time the old shuttle—the van we’d called Rust Bucket—had dropped me off in front of the camp office, I had a level of excitement for seeing Adam that was beyond anything I’d ever felt about seeing Ben or Natalie. In a normal year, I couldn’t wait to run and fling myself at each of them, giving back huge hugs, everyone talking at once as we caught up.

  That year…that year I didn’t know if I wanted to puke, run away, or jump on Adam and kiss his face off. Because that would definitely have been a new development between us, and the overwhelming urge to kiss him wasn’t one I was sure I could fight, which is why I was half-ready to escape to the safety of my cabin before I had to face him.

  We walked in silence for a couple of beats before Natalie spoke again. “Adam has changed a lot. And not at all. It’s interesting. It’s like the best parts of him are better and the broken ones…I don’t know. He’s done a lot of work on himself. He grew out of them, I think.”

  “Is that your professional assessment?” I said it as a joke to lighten the mood, but she answered me seriously.

  “Yeah. It is.”

  Another thought struck me. “Hey, he isn’t staying away because of me, is he? I know you guys have kept in touch, and I don’t want to be the reason he can’t come celebrate this weekend with you.”

  She stopped and put a hand on my arm, probing my face. “You really are okay with him?”

  “I’ve grown up a lot since I was here, it’s fair to think that Adam could too. Maybe I need to bury those old memories and make some new ones with you in the next few days.”

  Her eyes twinkled at me. “Maybe we need a fire ceremony?”

  I laughed. We’d held those during the last week of every session for the campers, a chance to symbolically throw whatever they wanted in the fire: fears, grudges, misbeliefs. It was an empowering experience for them, but for the counselors, it took on a kind of shorthand where we joked about throwing every small annoyance into the fire. Cook Marge snapped at you? Throw it into the fire. That one tween girl giving you enough attitude to choke a moose? Throw her into the fire. “I’ve got a few things I could burn,” I admitted, grinning.

  “Let’s do one for old times’ sake. How about tomorrow? I’ll put Juniper down for bed and we’ll do it.”

  “Sounds perfect.”

  “But also, as far as Adam goes, I can promise you that he’s not staying away because of you. Don’t worry about it.” She slid her arm through mine to tow me the last remaining steps to the mess hall. “Now let’s go survey your new kingdom!”

  4

  I pedaled my bike to the cabin in the gathering dusk, my stomach full of the excellent meal their camp cook, Lisa, had made us. I’d gone back to congratulate her in the kitchen, and to reassure her that I was there to collaborate with her, not take over. Even though she had to be at least ten years older than me, it was a case where my fame had preceded me, and she’d stammered and blushed until I convinced her that the dinner really was great.

  I studied the other cabins closely to see if any of them had a light on that would tell me which cabin the man on the dock this afternoon was staying in. They were dark. I’d meant to ask Natalie and forgot. I’d ask her about it in the morning if I hadn’t figured it out by then.

  There was still about an hour of light left, and I wanted to explore this new part of the camp. I parked my bike and grabbed a flashlight from my cabin. I hadn’t forgotten my woodcraft, and I was definitely smarter than to head out at dusk
without one.

  I walked the row of the cabins to the end and found a new trail leading into the woods. This one looked as if it had been deliberately cleared rather than worn down by people over time as they found the path of least resistance to the lake.

  Interesting. I stepped onto it, curious where it would go. I wondered if it had been sold off to whoever had built the house further up, but there were no warning or trespassing signs, so I moved ahead. It took about ten minutes before I could see the trail lightening up ahead and soon I reached the edge of a clearing.

  It wasn’t that I hadn’t expected to find a house standing in it. I had.

  I just hadn’t expected to find Adam Reed sitting on its porch.

  I ducked and scuttled to the side of the nearest tree even though he hadn’t looked my way.

  The house was as big as the largest cabin down on my beach and the front faced the lake. He was on the side deck, complete with a hot tub and patio furniture. At the moment, he was sitting at the table in shorts and a tank top, typing so fast on a laptop that his fingers looked like they were on fast-forward. The slightest turn of the head would give him a clear view of the trail.

  What was he doing here?

  I barely dared to breathe even though there was no way he would have heard me. Not with at least twenty yards between us.

  Even in the gathering dusk, I could see him clearly. The set of his shoulders was so familiar that it made my stomach both swoop and ache at the same time. His hair was shorter than he’d worn it in college, and though I doubted he’d gotten taller, he was definitely bigger, but in the way that boys become when they grow into their bodies.

  He’d become a hotter version of himself.

  Dang it, Adam.

  And that aside, why was he here?

  My mind scrambled for the possibilities. Ben and Natalie had to know he was here. There was no way he was practically living in their backyard without them knowing about it.