The Summer We Fell (The Summer, #1)

by Elizabeth O'Roark

“Luke will be there. And he’ll still feel like the tide, sucking you out to sea.”

Luke is already in my bloodstream, already poisoning me. Making me want all the wrong things, just like he always did.

It’s funny, the way you get what you want and just start wanting something else.

Danny is almost willful, at times, in his re-envisioning of my past.

I’d believe in his goodness slightly more if he wasn’t always milking the misery of others to prove it.

“Go fuck yourself,” I reply under my breath. His eyes lighten and his mouth twitches. “There she is,” he says, only for me to hear. “I knew she was in there somewhere.”

It’s like hitting a wall. But his hands wrap around my wrists to stop me, pinning them to his chest…and the towel he was holding falls. My gaze drops reflexively and I stare for a moment in shock. He’s hard. And if I didn’t understand why those girls fight over him at night before, I definitely do now.

I shrug off his grip, horrified, and recognize for the first time what he seems to have already known: I want something I’m not supposed to want.

“If you even breathe in her vicinity again, I’ll fucking kill you and I won’t think twice. I’ll beat you until you can’t fight back, then I’ll hold you under water until you’ve taken your last breath. That’s a promise.”

All that kindness he aspires to seems to have disappeared the moment it was put to the test.

Someone finally took my side. Someone knows what happened and took my side. It allows for the possibility that I can be stained and poisonous but, someday, be loved in spite of it. It almost feels like I already am.

“There’s nothing wrong with being a wife and mom,” Danny argues. “No, but that isn’t what she fucking wants from life. That’s just what you want from her.”

It feels like a lie—it’s not as if I seriously thought about it. It was a dream, not so different from my dreams of attending Hogwarts when I was small. But maybe the only difference between a dream and a plan is how committed you are to making it happen.

I wait for him as if he means everything to me.

“You look like something rare and wild,” he whispers, pushing the hair back from my cheek. My breath catches at the feel of his fingers on my skin. “Something they locked up in a cage. And I think you were so relieved to find a safe place to land you didn’t even realize it happened. I thought I could save you if I came here this summer, but even if someone opens the cage, you’ve got to be willing to fly away, too, Jules.”

“By this time next year, you’d better be off on the pro tour, Luke Taylor. Don’t come back to Rhodes.”

Thirty seconds of intercourse, no foreplay, and you’re trying to say you did it for me? Jesus Christ.

“I thought I was going to die, and the only thing that mattered, the only thing I wanted, was you,” he says against my mouth. “You were all I fucking thought about.”

“You’re something wild and magnificent, and he has no idea how to take care of you, so he spends all his time making sure your cage is secure because he has no idea what else to do. And that’s why this kills me, Juliet. Because I think I do know how to take care of you, and I want to take his place so bad that it fucking hurts to look at you sometimes.”

“I haven’t loved many things in this world,” he says, “but I loved you from the minute I saw you, and whether it’s today or seventy years from now, I’ll love you with my dying breath.”

“Choose me, Juliet,” he whispers. “Please fucking choose me.” And then he walks away and doesn’t look back.

“Juliet, you don’t have that feeling because it’s not going to work out. You have that feeling because you still don’t believe you deserve a happy ending. Just this once, for me, have a little faith.”

And then Donna, the former pastor’s wife, winks at me. And Libby, the current pastor’s wife, stands behind her with wide eyes, mouthing, “Oh my God”…before she gives me a thumbs up.

“Don’t try to tell a man who’s waited ten years for you that you love him more.”

“I’m so fucking mad at you right now,” he says, his hand fisting my hair to jerk my head up to his, “and I’ve also never loved you more.”