Page 123 of Summer Love

My eyebrows go up.

“Skate?”

“She’s really good,” he says. “She’s starting to get noticed.”

I look back at the screen. Elena glides across the ice, arms open. I think about Avery on a wave somewhere, and Jace bent over his phone so he won’t miss a thing.

“She must be happy you watch her,” Jace says.

“She doesn’t know. We haven’t talked in three years.”

“Why?”

I look for the right answer, can’t find it.

“People drift apart,” I say finally. “Life takes care of the rest.”

Jace says nothing. He stays standing, hands in his pockets, watching the screen.

Elena picks up speed and throws a backflip in the middle of the ice. She lands on one foot, without a wobble. A gala move. Spectacular, pointless.

Jace whistles and sits down next to me. Not pressed against me—but already too close. He crosses his arms, eyes on the screen. I nudge my phone into the space between us.

I freeze. What did I just do?

We end up sitting side by side at the edge of this pink pool, my phone between us and my half sister skating a hundred and twenty miles away.

The crowd rises before she’s even finished her program.

The evening breeze makes me shiver—or maybe it’s not the breeze. The thin cotton of my dress is no help at all.

“You cold?” Jace asks.

“No.”

Another shiver runs through me, longer this time. I set my phone down behind me and cross my arms over my chest.

“You were always cold when we watched movies on the beach,” Jace murmurs, as if to himself.

The beach. The phone propped on the cooler. The warm beers nobody liked but we drank anyway—except Evan—because we were seventeen and it felt like freedom. Noah always falling asleep first, curled up in his towel. Luke and Miles fighting over the movie. Sierra defending romantic comedies tooth and nail. And Jace next to me, close enough that I could feel the heat of his arm without touching it.

The night before he kissed me, we’d put on an old romantic comedy, She’s All That. Jace said it was lame. I laughed and said, “Yeah, it is.” I wanted him to kiss me, and I told myself it would never happen.

The next day: the pebbles against the window, the yellow board, the kiss in the salt water.

And when I found out about the bet, I thought back to that movie. An ordinary girl, a popular boy, a bet. I was nothing but a fucking bet too.

The pool lights shift to yellow. I blink. The water turns gold. So does Jace’s skin, sharpening the line of his clean-shaven jaw. I lift my eyes to his. Too green, too close.

The music recedes into background noise. The laughter fades. Jace leans in, barely. I don’t move.

His breath is on my cheek, warm, steady. His gaze drops to my mouth, lifts, drops again.

Jace hasn’t been this close to me in six years.

I close my eyes.

“Cannonball!”