Page 45 of Summer Love

His eyes, dark brown and deep, are the same. But the look in them has changed—closed-off, tired.

He takes the cigarette from his mouth, slow, and tucks it behind his ear.

“Summer.”

No surprise in his voice—someone must have told him I was back.

Noah. The boy who’d wanted to be a doctor since he was eight. Who read anatomy textbooks in a hammock while Jace and the others surfed. The gentlest of the group, the most serious. My best friend. With a toilet plunger and a stinking trash bag in his hand.

He catches the look on my face, and his face closes a little more.

“Your foot hurt?”

It’s so abrupt it takes me a second to get it. His eyes have landed on my shoes, on the way I’m carrying my weight on my left leg.

Of course he saw it right away.

“Metatarsal fracture,” I murmur.

Why I answer him with a medical term, I have no idea. Or rather, I do: because it’s Noah, and Noah understood words like that.

He doesn’t ask for details: when, how, whether it’s bad. He nods.

“Heels are a bad idea. Put ice on it if it swells,” he says, flat, like he’s reciting instructions.

He sets the trash bag at his feet and pulls a blue plastic lighter from his pocket, turning it over between his fingers.

Despite the belly, the dark circles, the neglected stubble, he’s still good-looking. Not like his brother. His beauty is quieter, almost damaged.

I hesitate, then ask the question I’ve been dying to ask.

“I thought you went off to med school…”

Noah’s fingers tighten on the lighter.

“Sometimes life decides otherwise,” he says, his voice even, no anger or regret.

The gold medal missed by a hair. The foot giving out on a jump landing. The student loan. The career you swap for another, then another, each time a little further from what you wanted. Everything that was supposed to happen and never will.

“Tell me about it,” I mutter.

Noah really looks at me. No warmth, just a dry clarity. Then he slips the lighter back in his pocket, snatches up the trash bag.

“Night,” he says, without turning around.

He walks off down the hallway, shoulders the door open, and disappears into the night.

Noah Walker. Handyman.

My fingers find my pendant, the little gold wave warm against my skin.

I limp down the empty hall. The gravel on the path crunches under my heels all the way to Bungalow 17.

I let myself in. The bedside lamp is still on—a yellow halo over the rumpled sheets, over the Dani Heart book closed around Ryan’s business card.

I sit on the bed to take off my pumps. The right one first. The leather sticks to my skin; the strap has left a red mark on my ankle. I pull, I wince, my foot comes free. Of course it’s swollen. A faint puffiness across the top of the foot, where the bone broke three years ago. It reminds me it’s there every time I do something stupid—like wearing three-and-a-half-inch heels to grab a drink with a handsy real estate agent.

I massage the arch with my thumbs. The skin is hot, tight. The pain eases bit by bit.