“What?” I gushed.
“Just watching you watch the sunset. It was like you were watching an intricate scene in a movie and you didn’t want to miss anything.”
I bit my lip. “I just love them, I guess.”
He looked at me with something like endearment. “Wanna get going?”
“Sure.” I pushed myself up from the arms of the chair. “Luke?”
He turned his attention from the cooler back to me.
“Thank you. For this, for what you said. I—” I sucked in a fortifying breath, and then released it. “I feel like I can talk to you about things I don’t usually feel comfortable discussing with anyone else.”
“Me too.” His gaze held onto mine for a heartbeat after he said it, and warmth filled my veins despite the chill in the air.
Something shifted between us tonight. I spent the whole car ride back wishing I could reach for his hand. Before I got cell service back and got Max’s text—which said he was sorry and asked if we could hang out this week—I’d already made up my mind. I needed to break up with him.
I had real feelings for someone else.
I just hoped everything Luke said tonight meant he had them, too.
26
Iclimbed into bed that night playing and replaying what Luke said in my head, excited butterflies dancing low in my stomach. I wanted to write it down. All summer, he had made me feel so comfortable. I never felt like I had to put on appearances for him. I cared that he felt I was being responsible with Luna, but beyond that, I’d been completely present with him. Completely myself. When I was with him, with both of them, I wasn’t in my head. I was justthere.
The rattling of my phone on the wooden surface of the nightstand assaulted my senses. I snatched it up, my naive heart hoping the name on the screen would be Luke. It wasn’t, but a smile still found itself on my face when I saw it said Natalie.
I rubbed my eyes and answered the FaceTime call. “Hi!”
“You know how I told you that thing Max said to you about the shooting star sounded familiar?”
“Yesss.” I scooched up to lean against the headboard.
“It’s because it’s word-for-word pulled fromNever Forget Me!” She flashed the paperback copy of one of our favorite Edward Phelps novels in front of her camera.
“You’re kidding.”
“Wish I was, babe.”
“I’m sure it’s only a coincidence? I mean, I didn’t remember that part of the book.”
“Tell me some of the other romantic things he’s said to you.”
“Hmm.” I wracked my brain for examples. Max’s courting style was flattery.The quickest way into my insecure little heart,I thought darkly.
“There was the shooting star thing. The other night he said, ‘Sweet dreams, I hope they’re about me.’” I combed through our conversations in my head, trying to remember the times he’d made me blush. “When he talks about the day we met, he says he thought I was the prettiest girl he’d ever seen, and he’d regret not at least finding out if I was single. But that’s kinda standard flattery, right?”
“True. Anything else?”
I told her about the time he said to learn to take a compliment because there was more where that came from, that time he said he was in the company of a gorgeous woman on a gorgeous night, and let’s pretend tomorrow is far, far away. My embarrassment climbed with each example I shared.
Natalie jotted the keywords down on her phone.
“Which Ed Phelps books do you have there?”
I climbed out of bed with a groan and padded over to the bookcase in the corner of the bedroom. “I haveThe Impossible Dream,The Rest of Our Summers,Something In The Water, andHope Against Hope.”
“Okay, you take those. I think I have the rest.”
