We'll Always Have Summer (Summer, #3)

by Jenny Han

Looking up at him, I had this sudden thought. Oh my God. I still love you. I’d thought my feelings for Conrad were safely tucked away, like my old Rollerblades and the little gold watch my dad bought me when I first learned how to tell time.

But just because you bury something, that doesn’t mean it stops existing. Those feelings, they’d been there all along. All that time. I had to just face it. He was a part of my DNA.

Maybe that was how it was with all first loves. They own a little piece of your heart, always.

“Yeah, but the timing is kinda suspect,” she said slowly. “I mean, it’s really sudden.”

For those couple of seconds, I forgot everything.

He was marrying my girl, and I couldn’t do anything about it. I just had to watch it happen,

He knew almost everything about me and he still loved me.

I didn’t have an answer to that question. There hadn’t been one specific moment. It was like gradually waking up. You go from being asleep to the space between dreaming and awake and then into consciousness. It’s a slow process, but when you’re awake, there’s no mistaking it. There was no mistaking that it had been love.

I would rather have had someone shoot me in the head with a nail gun, repeatedly, than have to watch the two of them cuddling on the couch together all night. After they went to dinner, I got in my car and drove to Boston.

But I had to do it. For her.

“I want her to be happy.”

I wanted to stop, but I didn’t say so. I guessed Conrad could tell, because he asked, “Want to go back?” “Nah, that’s okay, we already passed it,” I said. He made a U-turn on the one-way street. The fruit stand was a couple of wooden crates of peaches and a sign that said to leave the money in the container.

Conrad reached out and wiped my chin with his shirt. It was maybe the most intimate thing anyone had ever done to me.

Just one look, one touch from him, and I

was shaking. It was madness. I was marrying his brother.

“He was always your man,”

When he was nearby, my body hummed. When he was away, there was this dull ache. With him near, I felt everything.

I saw red. Under the tables, I clenched my fists. I wanted to hit something.

“It’s not all of a sudden,”

“It’s always.”

“I didn’t have it in me to love you the way you deserved.

“Don’t marry him. Don’t be with him. Be with me.”