Page 130 of Summer Love

It hadn’t even crossed my mind. Embarrassed, I fight the urge to cross my arms.

“Jace, what happened?”

His eyes come back to mine. Hard.

“Stop acting like you give a shit.”

I step back.

“What do you mean?”

“You weren’t there,” he spits.

“I was there, Jace. I jumped in the water, I⁠—”

“I’m not talking about tonight.”

His voice breaks. His fists clench against his thighs.

I think back to the hitch in his step when he carried me after the wipeout. To his limp in the hallway of the house, Flip in his arms. To the way he tugged his shorts down at the gym. To cover his thigh?

“Jace… does this have something to do with you never going pro?”

His face freezes, like I just slapped him.

“Are you fucking kidding me?”

“No, I⁠—”

“You show up at my place after six years, and you ask me if it has something to do with me never going pro?”

He steps back. His hands are shaking.

“Jace, wait…”

He turns and disappears inside. I follow him.

The space is cramped. The bed takes up half of it, the counter’s cluttered, it smells like wax and neoprene. Flip is lying at the foot of the bed, his head lifted toward me.

Jace has his back to me. Head down, he braces both hands on the counter.

“Explain it to me, Jace!”

“There’s nothing to explain.”

“Yes, there is. Because I don’t understand why you’re talking to me like this, I don’t understand what happened in that pool, and I don’t understand what you’re blaming me for.”

“You abandoned me, Summer,” he throws over his shoulder.

“I was seventeen, Jace. I found out about the bet and I left. It’s not⁠—”

“The bet,” he says with a dry laugh. “The fucking bet.”

The drawer under the bed is still open. Cables and chargers tangle among crumpled papers. In one corner, a little cherry-red wooden board sticks out, with a sun, a palm tree, and the word California.

The memory surfaces: that last summer, Star Park, the shooting gallery. Jace won it for me. On the back, he’d written in black marker, in slanted letters:

Future Olympic Champion