Every Summer After

by Carley Fortune

I thought I was doing a good job of giving the relationship a real chance, but in the end Sebastian recognized my indifference, and he was right. 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.

The voice is deep and soft. It’s one I haven’t heard in more than a decade, but so familiar I’m suddenly thirteen years old and slathered in SPF 45, reading paperbacks on the dock. I’m sixteen and peeling off my clothes to jump into the lake, naked and sticky after a shift at the Tavern. I’m seventeen and lying on Sam’s bed in a damp bathing suit, watching his long fingers move across the anatomy textbook he’s studying by my feet. Blood rushes hot to my face with a whoosh, and the steady, thick pumping of my heart invades my eardrums. I take a shaky breath and sit, stomach muscles seizing.

Now he’s a painful memory I keep hidden deep beneath my ribs.

It’s been twelve years. Twelve years since I’ve made the drive north to the place that was more like home to me than anywhere else has been. Twelve years since I dove, head-first, into the lake. Twelve years since my life crashed spectacularly off course. Twelve years since I’ve seen Sam. But there’s only one answer. “Of course I will.”

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.

It’s like I’ve woken from a twelve-year coma, and my head throbs in anticipation and terror. I’m going to see Sam.

I would have been thankful for any friend that summer, but finding Sam was like winning the friendship lottery.

I remember when he knelt over me in his bedroom, running those fingers along my body like he had discovered a new planet.

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

We stand staring at each other silently, and then he takes three giant strides toward me and wraps his arms around me so tight it’s like his large body is a cocoon around mine. He smells like sun and soap and something new that I don’t recognize. When he speaks, his voice is a deep rasp that I want to drown in. “You came home.”

I squeeze my eyes shut. I came home.

He searched my face, and the prickling where his leg pressed against mine became a campfire blaze. He tilted his head and pursed his lips. The bottom one was fuller than the top, a faint crease bisected the pink crescent. I hadn’t noticed that before.

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

I’d just had my first kiss, but my mind was stuck on the fact that Sam didn’t want to kiss me. Not even on a dare.

“What I’m trying to say is that it doesn’t matter what other people think about you, because if they don’t like you, they’re clearly morons.” He was so close I could make out the darker flecks of blue in his eyes.

“But you’re not other people,” I whispered. His eyes flicked down to my mouth, and I leaned a tiny bit closer. “I do care what you think.” “Sometimes I think no one gets me the way you do,” he said, the pink of his cheeks deepening to scarlet. “Do you ever get that feeling?”

I am suddenly one thousand degrees hotter and hyperaware of the dampness under my armpits and how my bangs are stuck to my forehead. There’s probably a cowlick up there. I try to push them off my face.

We’re looking at each other, unblinking. The tightness in my chest is almost unbearable. The temptation to lean into him, to show him what he means to me with my hands and my mouth and my tongue, is almost impossible to ignore. But I know that wouldn’t be fair. My heart is a stampede of animals escaping the zoo, but I sit still, waiting for his response.

I didn’t break it. I broke us. I can fix it.

Sam swallows and meets my eyes again. I’ve seen this look from him before, stormy and focused and completely consuming, like I could fall into his eyes and never get out. His fingers move slightly at the back of my hip, just under the edge of my bathing suit. His other hand runs up and down the back of my thigh. What is happening?

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

My instinct is to tell him it’s going to be okay, to soothe him, but I let the grief wash over him instead. Waiting it out with him. Once his body is still and his breaths are steady, I pull my head back and brush away some of his lingering tears.

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

“And I never laughed with anyone like I laughed with you. I’ve never been friends with anyone like I was with you.” He takes my hands and puts them around his neck, pulling me up so we’re

both kneeling. I want to tell him we need to talk before we head down this path, but he hugs me tight to his chest, and my bones and muscles and all the bits holding them together liquefy so that I melt into him. He releases me enough to brush the hair back from my ear and whisper into it, “I’ve tried to forget about you for more than ten years, but I don’t want to try anymore.”

“I fell in love with you when I was thirteen, and I never stopped. You’re it for me.”

And later tonight, when everyone has left and it’s just Sam and me in our pj’s in the basement, there will be popcorn and a movie playing in the background and a ring in an old wooden box with

my initials carved on top. It will be made from twisted threads of embroidery floss that match the faded bracelet on my wrist. And I will get down on one knee and ask Sam Florek to be with me. To be my family. Forever.