The Summer You Found Me

by Elizabeth O'Roark

“I’ve seen those girls you hook up with. They’re the type who dig your whole half-man, half-beast thing, and you look like The Incredible Hulk at the moment.”

“If you’d ever loved anyone deeply,” I snap, “I wouldn’t have to explain it to you.” His jaw is set hard, but there’s something sad in his eyes when he looks at me. “Yeah,” he says,

No one is friends with a girl who looks like that. Suzanne bothers me because she’s simply not worthy of Beck, but Rachel might be. She’s not a one-night-stand kind of girl—she’s a move-in kind of girl. And I don’t have to question her interest in Beck—you’d have to be dead not to be interested in him.

don’t deserve him. No one does. “Yeah, I know.”

He wasn’t just hot—he was a black hole, absorbing the light around him until he was all I could see. The mere sight of him was enough to wipe my mind blank.

I guess you’d just given up hoping Caleb would change his mind.” “Yeah,” he says, ushering me in front of him and wrapping himself around me as the crowd surges forward. “I guess I did. Except I wasn’t waiting for him to change his mind. I was waiting for you to change yours.”

Beck might be the most tempting, dangerous drug I’ve ever considered trying.

She has such an oversized personality that I forget, sometimes, just how tiny she is.

“I don’t understand why it’s so easy to discuss this with you. I can tell you things I can’t say to anyone else.” She’s not ready to hear the answer to that and I doubt she ever will be.

Kate and I are the same on the inside—nothing but jagged pieces held together by raw hope.

how many times in your life will you ever meet someone who was made for you? And how do you possibly walk away if you find her?

And nothing about any of it is new. It’s always been this way with us, hasn’t it? I just wasn’t willing to admit it until now.

“Fuck,” he grunts, his eyes falling closed. “I knew it would be like this.”

I’m making the situation worse. The way I always do. The way she does, too. There’s no way this will end well.

“Funny how every guy who shows an interest in me is a douchebag, yet those whores you go home with are just fine. Why is that?”

He’s jealous. He’s so fucking jealous. Good. He should be.

How does she not understand that she needs this? That she’s someone who wants to be thrilled and scared and challenged, and that these are things Caleb not only wouldn’t provide, but would go out of his way to make sure she didn’t get? He told me before I ever met her that he didn’t want me to take her anywhere on my bike. “She’ll like it too much,” he warned.

I’ve spent my entire life feeling as if I don’t belong anywhere. And I don’t know if I necessarily belong in the wilderness either, but when I’m with Beck, it doesn’t matter. I know I’m not lost, and that’s enough for

That’s why it’s better to go through the hard things than to avoid them...because it’s going through that makes you grateful for what you have.”

“You. Scared. Me,” he says. “That doesn’t mean I think you’re a child or incompetent. You fucking scared me because that’s what happens when you care about someone and they disappear.”

Kate has ruined everything for me by making my life so much better for a while that I’ve realized how shitty it was before.

“Does she know you love her?”

“You may be nearly as stupid as she is then,”

And I loved him too.

There’s a hole in me Caleb can never fill—he never did in the first place. It was only Beck, the one person who saw anything good in me. And even he can’t find it anymore.

I got clean for the wrong reasons, and that I now want to stay clean for the right ones.

I never made Caleb happy the way she does, and he never made me happy the way Beck does.

I knew I missed him, but I had no idea just how much until this moment. His is the face I’ve had in my head as I fall asleep every night for three months. Seeing him now is like seeing a ghost brought to life.

“Jesus, Kate,” he says. “Why’d it take you so long?”

You always were. I want everything now. And I only want it with you.”

But I can say that sometimes from darkness a beautiful thing emerges, something you’ll call your own. And the man in front of me, and the future we share, is mine.