Joe nudged her knee with his. “You’re better than fiction.”
Nora grinned, then leaned over and kissed him, soft and slow. Not because of the record. Or the famous signature. But this sunlit, music-filled, wild, impossible summer that felt more like a dream than anything she could’ve written.
And the boy who, somehow, kept making it feel more real.
Because clearly, this summer hadn’t given her enough to remember already. The truth was, it had already tattooed itself across her bones. She was pretty sure this summer was going to shape the rest of her life.
“Thank you,” she said softly, still staring at the signed record like it might disappear.
Joe shifted beside her, cracking open the sleeve. Inside, in the upper left-hand corner, was a ten-digit number scribbled in pen.
“Jimi gave me his phone number?” she teased.
Joe chuckled. “It’s mine,” he said casually. “In case you want to call.”
Her heart hiccupped. The way he said it, either this was the softest breakup in history or hope hanging on a telephone wire.
“Do you want me to call?” she asked.
Again, he smiled, and there it was, that dimple in his cheek, like punctuation on a promise. “I do,” he said. “But I didn’t know if you wanted me to stick around long enough to see where the story goes.”
She glanced down at her notebook, suddenly hyperaware of how she’d been borrowing little bits of him—his jokes, eyes, that smile—and filtering it through fictional characters. He didn’t know. Couldn’t know.
Right?
“The story of us?” she asked, voice soft.
“Something like that,” he said. “I mean, you’re headed off to Yale. And I’ll be in school. So…”
So.
So this might be it.
A summer song.
A long, slow fade-out.
Her fingers curled around the edge of the record sleeve, grounding herself.
She wasn’t naive. She knew how these things went. People went to college. They grew, changed, and moved on. She’d probably meet a brooding philosophy major with shaggy hair and bad posture and fall head over heels just because he quoted Kerouac at exactly the wrong time. Because Kerouac was French Canadian, and knowing he spokeFrench would probably only remind her of Joe, and she’d be looking for a rebound.
But when she thought about never seeing Joe again, never hearing him say something ridiculous just to make her laugh, never watching him scribble notes in the margins of his notebook like his life depended on it, her chest ached.
Joe Dumas had certainly left an imprint.
And she didn’t want to erase it just yet.
“Well, enough of the sadness,” she said, giving the record a fond pat like it was a friend she wasn’t ready to say goodbye to. “I think we should just enjoy ourselves for the rest of the day. What do you think?”
Joe raised an eyebrow. “I think that sounds like the perfect plan.”
There was still one final day of music left, and Nora had a feeling her mom wasn’t going to let them miss it. Her grandmother wasn’t scheduled to perform again, but Eleanor had made them promise not to leave until the very last chord was strummed, the last body swayed, and the last guitar wailed. This was the finale—the exhale at the end of a wild, wonderful, unexpected adventure.
And truthfully, Nora wasn’t ready for it to end either.
She wasn’t ready for reality to swoop back in with its structured schedules, meal plans, lectures, and internships. A reality where Joe wouldn’t be one of the first people she saw in the morning, grinning over a bowl of questionable muesli with Santana playing in the background.
Though she was absolutely looking forward to a toilet without a line and air that didn’t constantly smell like smoke and herbs.
