Page 186 of Summer Love

The hallway smells like fried food from the Thai place downstairs and cheap lemon cleaner. The stairwell is narrow, painted a dingy beige, bare bulbs on the ceiling. A TV blares somewhere above us—a sitcom, probably.

We climb to the third floor. My right foot throbs with every step. I ignore it.

“This is it.”

I push open the apartment door. The hall is cluttered, dim. We pass the kitchen and living room and the bathroom, then three closed doors—my roommates’ rooms—before we reach mine, all the way at the back.

The room is tiny. The mattress, right on the floor, takes up almost all of it; my laptop and a fan share what’s left. On the wall, a jury-rigged shelf sags under a stack of marketing books and the internship binder, a clip-on lamp hooked to the edge. The window faces a blank brick wall.

Jace sets his backpack down, then goes to the window and looks out.

“The view’s better in Coral Bay.”

“You think?”

He turns and smiles. The corner of his mouth still tips up a little higher on the right than the left. I’d forgotten that detail—or made myself forget it.

I sit cross-legged on the mattress. I don’t have it in me to stay standing. Jace takes off his shoes and sits across from me, back against the wall, legs stretched out. Our knees almost touch.

One question’s been gnawing at me since the diner.

“How did you find me?”

“Elena.”

I think back to her call yesterday, her questions about New York, my internship, the diner. So it wasn’t a coincidence.

“I reached out to her on Instagram,” Jace says. “She was willing to help.”

I smile. He asked my sister for help—someone he barely knows, someone he knew I wasn’t close to anymore. An almost absurd lead. He followed it anyway.

“The bet…” he starts.

He clears his throat.

“A hundred bucks. Miles and me against two guys from Venice, met them on the beach the day before. We were talking surf, it got heated, and we bet we’d go out under the cliffs. At The Last Ride.”

“That’s it?” I say, barely a breath.

He holds my gaze.

“Yeah. Nothing to do with you.”

“Why at night?”

He manages a sad smile.

“To get that bullshit over with fast. And be back before you woke up.”

He’s talking about the night before, at Star Park. The fair, the whole crew, the string lights, the music. How he’d arranged for just the two of us to ride the Ferris wheel alone. The kiss at the top, when the car stopped. The question he asked right after—whether I wanted to be his girlfriend.

“Noah was in the car below us,” Jace says. “He saw us.”

“He never said anything…”

“No. That night, in your room—it wasn’t a bet, Summer. There was never a bet about you.”

He already said it at the diner, two hours ago. Here, I really hear it.