More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?
“Do you have any plans before your friend gets here?” Maybe it was the beer or the buzz of being somewhere new, but I wasn’t usually so forward, so sure about what I wanted. “No,” I told Felix. “I’m wide open.”
Some of my happiest memories are set on this gorgeous crescent of green land. Some of my biggest mistakes, too. But I won’t repeat them. Not this time. For once, this summer will be different.
Rule number three: Don’t fall in love with her brother.
“All clothing makes a statement,” my aunt used to say. “And I like mine to speak loudly.”
setbacks can be chances if you look at them from the right angle.”
Opportunities don’t fall in your lap because you want them to. You have to work to make them happen.”
My eyes caught on the small silver scar on his wrist. “Someone distracted me,” he said, tapping his knife on the mark. I lifted my gaze to his. “It was worth it.” “She must have been cute,” Bridget quipped from behind me. He smiled at me. “The most gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen.”
“Live your life for you, and no one else”
Felix glances my way. “I’m very clean.” I don’t know what it says about me, but I find these three words intensely sexual.
I had never craved another person the way I craved Felix.
It’s not like Bridget had told me explicitly not to sleep with him. The rule that we had agreed on was that I wouldn’t fall in love with him. I had no interest in falling in love with Felix. Having his mouth and hands all over me, however, I was very much in favor of.
“I haven’t been able to stop thinking about you. How you look when you’re naked. How you sound when you come. I’ve had a hard-on like a fucking fourteen-year-old since I walked in the door.” His nose slid along mine. “You’re a goddamn wonder.”
Felix’s hands on my body are one of the things I want the most and need the least.
“You should have a partner who sets you on fire.” I pictured Felix instantly.
“And it’s hard to resist a woman in a tablecloth who tells you she’s wide open.”
“You don’t think if you were keeping something from me, I’d respect that there was a good reason, and let you tell me in your own time?” My stomach lurches. It’s a familiar feeling, the one I get when I think about the secrets piling up between us.
“Try not to stab yourself.” He winks. “No promises.”
Many of those who stop him are women. Many of them beautiful. I watch a brunette put her hand on his chest, over his heart. My belly pinches strangely. Which is silly. I have no claim on Felix.
“No guy is worth losing a friend over.” I glance at Felix at the side of the stage, and then at Zach. He gives me a pointed look. “No,” I tell Bridget. “They’re not.”
Felix lifts his gaze. He finds me in an instant, and I’m right back in the restaurant where we met five years ago, with Felix looking at me from across the room, a shock of electric blue beneath black lashes.
We stare at each other, and I’m hit with a feeling so powerful, I put my hand to my chest. My heart is screaming at me. Him, it says. More.
He faces me, bringing our joined hands to his mouth. With his eyes on mine, Felix presses his lips to my knuckles. Everything fades away. The cheering. Bridget’s gasp. Even my pulse, a booming drum, is silenced. My awareness is isolated to my fingers, to the sliver of skin beneath Felix’s lips.
In the darkness of the back seat, I feel Felix’s gaze on me. When I meet his eyes, he reaches across the bench, linking our fingers together. He rests his head back and falls asleep moments later. I stare at our joined hands. It would be all too easy to get caught up in the feeling of his hand in mine, to grow used to it, to miss it once I’m gone. But after last summer, I know what it’s like to feel the warmth of his attention and then go without it. Every part of himself that Felix offers up, every piece I allow myself to savor, is just another thing I’ll have to say goodbye to. Because even
...more
His palms coasted over my skin, and I closed my eyes. It was unfair how good his hands felt, how his touch sent blood flowing from my head to between my legs. But I needed to ignore how his body did things to my body. I didn’t want to mess with what we had going. This tentative friendship that began when he visited Toronto, that I believed had grown with every book I’d sent him, every package of seeds he’d mailed to me.
The beach was busy, but when he emerged from the ocean, I forgot about everyone around us. He walked through the surf, water running down the tanned expanse of his torso, orange swim trunks clinging to his hard thighs. This friend thing would be easier if he didn’t look like that. I stared at Felix, my dress slipping from my fingers, as he made his way to me. He glanced at the lilac fabric swirling around my legs, and then up at me, a smile growing when he caught the red blaze across my chest.
My aunt thought I should be open to a meaningful relationship, but the only man I seemed to be drawn to time and time again was sitting next to me. And he lived eight hundred miles away and seemed as reluctant to commit as I was. I could never have him.
Felix had become so much more to me than a casual hookup, but I didn’t know what to do with this knowledge.
The first time was slow, Felix’s forehead on mine, his kisses like confessions. His words, too. You, he kept saying. You. Felix, I kept saying. More.
I turned it over in my hands, opened it to a random page. My breath caught at the sentence he’d underlined. “I loved her against reason, against promise, against peace, against hope, against happiness, against all discouragement that could be.” I quickly tucked it back on the shelf, feeling like I’d been caught reading Felix’s diary.
I heard my aunt’s voice, the night she met Felix. That gorgeous creature is smitten.
I may have liked Felix more than any man I’d known, but he was an impossibility.
It was like being doused in cold water. A good time. That’s what this was to Felix. That’s all it ever was. Felix hadn’t lost control. I had.
“I’ll pick you up before your flight tomorrow,” Felix said, leaning out the truck window before he pulled away. “I’m holding you to that breakfast.” But it wasn’t Felix who arrived at the cottage the next day. “Something came up,” Zach said when I opened the door. “Wolf can’t make it.”
“It’s incredible,” I say eventually. “But it looks strange—tides shouldn’t come together like that.” It’s like an optical illusion. “And yet they do,” Felix says,
“They’re pulled together,” Felix says, voice low, eyes latched on to mine. “They can’t help it.”
Mine, my heart says. Felix.
Mine, my heart keeps saying. Felix. More.
I don’t want to come home to an empty apartment. And I don’t want to be without Felix. I want to be back on the island.
Once we arrive, I load her luggage onto a cart and lift her suitcases onto the baggage scale, because Bridget is six weeks pregnant.
One morning in early January, Bridget FaceTimes me to tell me she’s having a girl. I cry with happiness. I cry because she’s so far. I want to hold my best friend’s baby in my arms.
“I own this land.” Felix stops walking. “You what?” I turn to face him. “I bought it,” I say. “For my farm.” He blinks like he’s misheard me. “For your farm?”
“Felix, I brought you here to tell you that you are in every one of my dreams. I came here to ask whether I’m in any of yours, too.”
I’m ready to live our dreams instead of talking about them. I want to build our house.” “Our house. I like how it sounds when you say it.”
Felix will be my home, and I will be a place for him to return to. He’ll be my oasis, and I’ll be his. He’ll save his best words for me, and I’ll save mine for him.
It’s the kind of night where I can feel something lock into place. This is it, I think. This is everything I want.
