Page 2 of Summer Love

Well, shit.

I open the trunk. Spare tire, jack, lug wrench—I’ve never touched any of it in my life.

I look at the tire. Then the wrench. Then the tire.

I went to Columbia. I survive an agency internship in Manhattan on five hours of sleep a night. I serve burgers at a diner on the Lower East Side with one foot on fire. But nobody—not my parents, not my teachers, not one of the mentors supposed to prepare me for real life—ever taught me how to change a tire.

I set the jack on the ground, try to slide it under the car—no luck. I try again. Metal scrapes asphalt. Three tries, and my nails are already black.

I rub my palms together—bad idea: the grease smears across both. Out of options, I wipe my hands on the car’s floor mat. I pull my phone off the mount stuck to the windshield.

No service. Figures.

I sit back down behind the wheel, the door open. The light has dropped again. The mauve has given way to ink-blue, and the cypress trees are just black shapes now, cut out against the sky.

And I wait. A long time. The cold settles in. My phone still isn’t picking up anything.

9:15 p.m. Three cars have gone by since I stopped, but none of them pulled over.

I’m still in mine, engine off, doors locked now. I rub my arms through my denim jacket—perfect for a summer night in Brooklyn but ridiculous here, on this cliff road hammered by the wind off the Pacific.

People think California is warm. But not on the coast, not at night, not here.

The sound of the waves carries up from the rocks below. I’d forgotten that sound—the slow breathing of the water drifting into my room through the open window on summer nights. The night when…

No. Don’t think about that.

I catch headlights in the rearview mirror. A car’s coming, slower than the others. It slows down even more.

I tense up. I’m alone, on a deserted road, at night, with no signal. Everything women are taught to fear.

The vehicle stops behind mine. The headlights blind me. I squint… and make out the light bar on the roof and the lettering on the hood:

Police

Relieved, I lean back against the seat and close my eyes for a second.

The doors open and two figures take shape in the glow of the headlights. One comes toward my car, a flashlight in hand. The other hangs back, fingers on the holster at his belt.

I roll down the window.

“Evening, ma’am. You having some trouble?”

I blink, raise a hand to shield my eyes. And behind the beam is a face I haven’t seen in six years.

The square jaw, the straight posture, the broad shoulders under the uniform, that almost rigid control that makes it seem like nothing could ever rattle him.

“Evan?”

He lowers the flashlight. His hazel eyes go wide.

“Summer?”

Without thinking, I rush out of the car. Six hours on a plane to San Francisco, three hours on the road, a flat tire, an hour alone in the dark—and the first person I run into on this coast I ran from is Evan Carter, eighteen the last time I saw him, in a police uniform instead of the boardshorts I always knew him in.

I throw myself into his arms—exhaustion and relief have blown through every filter. He doesn’t push me away, doesn’t hug me back either.

I hear a metallic click behind him. The other officer has stepped forward, hand on his weapon.