It's Not Summer Without You (Summer, #2)

by Jenny Han

When a person you love dies, it doesn’t feel real. It’s like it’s happening to someone else. It’s someone else’s life. I’ve never been good with the abstract. What does it mean when someone is really and truly gone?

I used to believe. I used to think that if I wanted it bad enough, wished hard enough, everything would work out the way it was supposed to. Destiny, like Susannah said. I wished for Conrad on every birthday, every shooting star, every lost eyelash, every penny in a fountain was dedicated to the one I loved. I thought it would always be that way.

Everything in me went abuzz. I could hear the ocean in my ears. The rush, the roar in my eardrums. It was like a high. It was golden. I had waited, and this was my reward! Being right, being patient, never felt so good.

It was peacefully, blissfully silent. Just the sounds of the TV and the air conditioning kicking off and on.

Susannah had left both Steven and me some college money. She’d also left me jewelry. A sapphire tennis bracelet I couldn’t picture myself ever wearing. A diamond necklace for my wedding day—she’d written that specifically. Opal earrings and an opal ring. Those were my favorite.

This, this was heartbreak. The pain in your chest, the ache behind your eyes. The knowing that things will never be the same again. It’s all relative, I suppose. You think you know love, you think you know real pain, but you don’t. You don’t know anything.

I knew the right thing to do was to walk away. I knew that was what I was supposed to do. In that moment, it was like I was floating above myself and I could see me and how everybody in that room was looking at me.

“Jere, you’re, like, the funniest person I know.” It was one of the best compliments of my life. But that wasn’t the game-changing moment.

When I was near her, I just wanted to grab her and hold her and kiss the shit out of her. Maybe then she’d finally forget about my asshole of a brother.

Ew

And I had this fantasy of prom in my head, what it would be like. How he would look at me, how when we slow danced, he’d rest his hand on the small of my back. How we’d eat cheese fries at the diner after, and watch the sunrise from the roof of his car. I had it all planned out, how it would go.

It was infinity.

Conrad had a way of making impossible things make sense,

“I just—want to always know that you’re okay. It’s important to me.”

Just like always, he could devastate me with a look, a word.

I wanted to memorize it all in case I didn’t get to come back again. You never know the last time you’ll see a place. A person.

I knew it because when we were little kids, we used to practice ESP on each other. Belly was convinced I could read her mind and she could read mine. The truth was, I could just read Belly.

My mother didn’t have one. I knew the contents of her makeup bag, one of those plastic green Clinique gift-with-purchase bags. It had a Burt’s Bees chapstick and an espresso eyeliner, a pink and green tube of Maybelline mascara, and a bottle of tinted sunscreen. Boring. Susannah’s makeup case, though, was a treasure trove. It was a navy snakeskin case with a heavy gold clasp and her initials were engraved on it. Inside she had little eye pots and palettes and sable brushes and perfume samples. She never threw away anything. I liked to sort through it and organize everything in neat rows, according to color.

It was one of the last times I remember them being happy. I really wish I had enjoyed it more.

I didn’t want my love to fade away one day like an old scar. I wanted it to burn forever.

He smiled, a real smile, and a real Jeremiah smile was the kind that could melt ice cream.

I was pissed at him, but I had to admit I was relieved, too. No matter how many times he hurt her, I knew that if he wanted her back, she was his. She always had been.

And I wished there was something I could say to take that look away, but sometimes there just weren’t words.

I will never look at you in the same way ever again. I’ll never be that girl again. The girl who comes running back every time you push her away, the girl who loves you anyway.

This was who he’d always been. He’d never lied about that. He gave and then he took away. I felt it in the pit of my stomach, the familiar ache, that lost, regretful feeling only he could give me. I never wanted to feel it again. Never, ever.