The Summer We Fell (The Summer, #1)

by Elizabeth O'Roark

I wish someone had said, “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.

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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