Every Summer After

by Carley Fortune

I didn’t care about him. I didn’t care about any of them. There was only the one. And that one is long gone.

He gave me a lopsided grin. It was a quiet smile, but it was a great smile, his blue eyes glinting like sea glass against his sunny skin. I did that, I thought, a thrill running through me. I wanted to do it again.

Sometimes I felt sure he was—like there was an invisible, unbreakable string that ran between us, stretching vast distances and keeping us joined.

I am fun! I just don’t want to talk about what keeps me awake at night.

“Persephone, Persephone…” He rolled my name around in his mouth like he was trying to figure out how it tasted. “I like it.”

A summer away from everything, where I could read my books without worrying about being called a freak and swim whenever I wanted to, felt like heaven.

“You’re just weird in general,” he added, holding back a grin, and I lobbed a cushion at him. He raised his hands and laughed, “But I like weird.”

“I don’t understand why you hate your freckles so much,” he said. “I like them.”

He was beautiful at eighteen, but adult Sam is so devastating I could cry.

The lopsided grin that curves his mouth is a drug I’ve never kicked.

He grinned. “I pay attention to a lot of things about you, Percy Fraser.”

Boys are for fun. Lots of fun. But don’t let one stand in the way of your greatness.”

I found Sam. And I felt it. The pull between us. The one that had been there since we were thirteen, the one that only got stronger as we got older, the one I tried to deny twelve years ago.

“You’re still the most beautiful woman I’ve ever known,” he says, and it sounds like coarse sandpaper.

“You and me are special,” he started. “There’s no one else I’d rather spend time with than you. There’s no one else I’d rather talk to than you. And there’s no one else I’d rather kiss than you.”

At sixteen, Sam was it for me. I knew it then, and I think I knew it that night three years ago when Sam and I sat on my bedroom floor eating Oreos and he asked me to make him a bracelet.

“I loved you,” he whispers. “I know,” I say. Hurt eyes move across my face. “You broke my heart.” “I know that, too.”

I lean in to give him a hug, and it feels like coming home and saying goodbye and four thousand days of longing.

They knew. Some people are lucky like that. They meet their best friend, the love of their life, and are wise enough to never let go.

“I don’t take things for granted anymore. I don’t take people for granted. And I know time is not infinite.”