Second Summer
I hated that I felt the smallest bit happy to see the taillights of Laurel’s car fading on Sunday morning. Hated even more the lie I told her to keep me here two more days, that I was interviewing with a potential client tomorrow. It was based in some reality. There was a woman with a house down here who was a friend of a friend of a family I’d cooked for this spring who had reached out, wondering if I did any live-in work. But I’d told her I wouldn’t be available this summer weeks ago.
“At least you’ll have Everett to keep you company,” Laurel had said when I told her. He’d said he was staying behind to catch another weekend of surfing before leaving for his next project that was filming in Georgia. She’d leveled a pointer finger at me, added playfully, “Remember the pact.” It only made me feel guiltier.
But it didn’t have me getting in the car with her. It didn’t have me changing my mind. I don’t think anything could have after that day by Everett’s car, after the surfing lesson. It awakened something in me I’d been keeping locked down since our kiss last summer. I wanted Everett Bridges, plain and simple. In a move surprisingly out of character for me, I wasn’t concerned with how flimsy my willpower was when it came tohim. There was something exciting about giving in to it. In some decision that was just ours.
He was washing breakfast dishes when I walked back in and I pushed myself up onto the counter opposite him, watched his shoulders move as his hands did.
“I don’t think anyone has ever watched me wash a mug so closely,” he said after a while, without looking at me.
“You’re being very thorough,” I commended him. He laughed and set the mug in the drying rack and grabbed another. I kept watching.
“Everyone’s gone,” I finally said.
At this Everett turned off the tap, grabbing a dish towel and drying his hands as he turned to face me. “Sutton Hale,” he said as I swung my legs, hands tucked under my thighs. “Did you run in here to tell me we’re alone?”
“Me?” I said, loosing a hand to press it to my chest in mock surprise. “Of course not. I came in here to supervise your dishwashing.”
“And?” Everett said, tossing the towel over his shoulder and walking over to me, my knees parting for him to step between like some cause-and-effect question on a test.If Everett Bridges approaches you, what is the most natural response?His hands raked up the outside of my thighs, my skin tingling in their wake.
“Like I said,verythorough.”
We both smiled just before he kissed me. Any remaining guilt fled from my body as one of his hands came up so he could settle his fingers in my hair, hold my jaw with his thumb.
It was always like that with Everett. He kissed me, and the rest of the world turned off for a minute. It was part of the reason I gave in to our secret so easily, this sort of ease around him. We were simple, and there was a kind of joy in that, intwo perfect, hazy days that I could look forward to each year without any long-term consequences.
I was reaching for the hem of Everett’s shirt, his hands already exploring under mine when he pulled away from me. I let out a disappointed sound.
“Come on,” he said, waving me off the counter.
“What?” I asked.
“Come on,” he said again. “We’ve got to go do something.”
I hopped down, hand quickly sliding into his waiting one. “What do we have to do?”
“I don’t know,” Everett said. “Something.”
“I thought the whole point of these two days was to do somethinghere,” I said. Everett laughed as he pulled me through the living room toward the front door.
“Isn’t it about hanging out with each other too?” he asked. I felt my cheeks go pink as Everett grabbed his keys from the hook by the door and pocketed them. He turned to me, took my face in his hands, and kissed me once, long and slow, again. “Let me at least buy you dinner or a coffee or those weird marzipan things you like so much from the candy store first.”
I felt one corner of my mouth tug down as I tried not to smile. “Sorry I was only thinking about getting you into bed.”
Everett grinned at this, throwing an arm around my shoulder and walking us outside. “Don’t ever apologize for that,” he said.
The rest of that first day was exactly what Everett talked about: coffee, and the candy store, where we filled a bag with two of each of their overpriced bulk options. We wandered around the same streets we had with everyone else just a few days ago, sucking on extra-sour pineapple twists and trying to land chocolate-covered peanuts in each other’s mouths. We stopped at the bougie market on the corner and bought two mini bottlesof some fancy premixed cocktail and snuck them and the rest of our candy into a matinee ofStand by Meat the tiny theater down the street. The cocktails tasted a lot like the watered-down cosmos they used to serve at a dive bar I frequented with Laurel and Zoey in college. Everett knew which one I was talking about, and it was another tiny reminder that we’d been orbiting, never getting close enough to touch, for a while now.
“You know what would be a perfect double feature with that?” I asked when we swung out of the theater. “Now and Then.”
“Great movie,” Everett said. “Agreed.”
Everett did buy me dinner, at a pizza place down the street. We sat out back, at a little table on a mosaic-tiled patio, under globe lights strung between trees. Around us, people in bikini tops and shorts sat next to women in boxy linen dresses, tennis bracelets winking in the fading light, dads in board shorts picking up orders for the families waiting back at their rentals, groups of friends not so different from ours.
“Dating or friends?” I asked, nodding surreptitiously at a couple sitting a few tables away from us. Everett glanced askance at them, eyes roving casually over the other tables until they returned to me so the couple wouldn’t notice him looking.
He shrugged. “Maybe they made a pact with their friends not to date each other, so they have to spend two secret days here together after everyone else has gone.”
