Next Summer (12 page)

“You’re bringing me here for some sort of weird sex thing, aren’t you?” Kelsi asked, pulling her wrist out of Tim’s grip.

He’d talked her into going on a nature walk so that they could check out these unusual boulders on the outskirts of town. They’d been strolling through grass, wildflowers, blueberry patches, and ungainly rocks for the last twenty minutes.

And now they’d stopped in a spot so secluded that if Kelsi had fallen like that proverbial tree in the woods, no one would hear her scream.

Tim gave her a sideways glance and a smirk. “Please, Kelsi. You wish.”

She spotted a NO TRESPASSING sign that had a picture of a large dog biting off some poor guy’s arm and was suddenly terrified. “Holy shit, we’re going to die.”

“Do you want the good news or the bad news?” Tim
asked, crossing his arms over his chest and eyeing her the same way she’d been eyeing the sign.

“Both.”

“Fine. The bad news is, yes, we’re going to die. That’s what happens when you’re not immortal. But the good news is, we probably won’t die today.”

“That’s so comforting,” Kelsi said, rolling her eyes.

“Watch out for the rocks,” Tim warned as they started off again. “Sometimes they move when you least expect it.”

“It’s so cool,” Kelsi observed. “The boulders were dropped here so long ago. Like footprints or something. They’ve been here forever.” Longer than anyone she knew had been alive. Longer than Pebble Beach had even existed. So long ago, in fact, that the things people did just a year before suddenly seemed trivial.

Tim’s smile now seemed warmer and less smirky. “My theory is that a glacier covered all of this. It would explain why it’s still so cold most of the year.”

He led her down a path that seemed to be a figment of his imagination. It zigged and zagged its way down the rockstrewn cliff, and abruptly led them into a perfect, private cove. It was absolutely breathtaking.

“This is beautiful,” Kelsi said in a near whisper.

“It’s a secret,” Tim said. His eyes were bright when he took off his shades and looked at her. “You can’t ever bring anyone else here. There’s a pirate curse. Maybe more than one.”

“Like I could ever find that path again!”

“I saw Johnny Depp,” Kelsi retorted.

“Trust me,” he said with that likable, arrogant tone of his. “I’m way more fun than him.”

Not that she was counting, but Kelsi had completely lost track of how many times she’d laughed that day.

It turned out that Tim knew all kinds of secret places in and around Pebble Beach. Kelsi had spent every summer she could remember there, and she’d never even heard of the secret cove. Much less the equally hidden inlet he took her to the following afternoon—complete with a picnic lunch he claimed he’d packed for himself anyway so he might as well share it with her. The day after that, Tim rowed them out in a dinghy to one of the tiny, rocky islands that dotted the coastline. The island he chose was hardly more than a large sandbar, with rocks and a few trees.

“How do you know all these places?” Kelsi inquired. “Are you a tour guide or something?”

“Can’t I just have an interest in something besides
you
?” Tim asked, pretending to be offended. “Maybe I appreciate nature.”

“Uh, you’re a frat boy,” Kelsi said. “Doesn’t your world revolve around beer and football?”

“Prejudice is so unattractive,” Tim chided her. “I should make you swim back.”

“Oh, I would definitely dare,” Tim corrected her. “But I won’t.”

He led her up to the highest point of the tiny island, where they sat and looked at the cluster of the town back across the bay. The pier jutted out into the water, and people milled around on the stretch of sand to each side. Behind them, the quaint little buildings lined the main streets and the evergreens framed everything. The whole scene looked like a perfect picture postcard of a Maine summer town. Like Pebble Beach was a place where nothing bad ever happened and no one ever got hurt.

Kelsi must have made a slight sound, because when Tim looked at her, his face was without any trace of its usual smirk.

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

Maybe she just needed to talk to someone. Maybe she was unprepared for the obvious concern in his gaze. Maybe she’d been lulled into believing that a guy like Tim really
could
be sensitive. Kelsi didn’t know. But she took a big breath, and then everything spilled out. Ella, Peter, last summer, the fight—everything.

“Wow,” Tim murmured a long while later. He was sitting propped up against the nearest tree. “That’s some serious stuff. I’m sorry you had to go through that.”

“I don’t even know what I feel about any of it,” Kelsi said, her shoulders hunching forward.

“Except shitty.”

“Except that,” Kelsi agreed.

“Your ex-boyfriend sounds like an ass,” Tim said matter-of-factly. “I don’t know what your sister was thinking, either.”

“Ella’s never been big on thinking about anything other than herself,” Kelsi said bitterly. “That’s why I can’t ever speak to her again.”

“You need a plan,” Tim said.

“To do what? Murder her?” Kelsi smirked. “I have several.”

“Easy, Terminator,” he said. “I mean a plan to deal with all this. You can’t avoid your sister for the rest of your life.”

“No, but I
can
avoid her for the rest of the summer,” Kelsi said. “After that, I’ll be in college.”

“That’s one way to play it,” Tim said thoughtfully. “Except eventually you’ll have to deal with her, so why not do it sooner rather than later?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, you figure out how to deal with her so it’s on
your
terms. Why should you hide from her? You didn’t do anything wrong.” Tim flipped a twig between his fingers. “She’s the one who should be ashamed.” He said it very deliberately, like he wanted Kelsi to hear that part the most. She felt her face heat up again.

“You don’t know Ella,” she said wryly.

“Oh no,” she said. “I totally spaced on our trip to Amherst. I can’t do it. That’s a recipe for disaster.”

“Not if you bring me along,” Tim said, smiling slightly.

“Forget it,” Kelsi said. “I’m gonna e-mail my cousin today and tell her it’s not happening.”

“Think about it this way,” Tim suggested. “I come along and act as a buffer between you and your sister. You get to see your cousin at Amherst, I get to U Mass orientation. Everyone wins.”

Kelsi stared at him and blinked a few times.

“You want to be my buffer, huh? Why?” she asked him.

“It’s simple. You need me and I need you,” he replied.

Kelsi got the odd sense that it
wasn’t
as simple as that. But, in that moment, she was grateful for how Tim had phrased it.

“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not sure I can bear to talk to Ella long enough to tell her I still want to go.”

“Sure you can,” Tim said, with a self-assured smile. “And then I’ll deal with her. It’ll be great.
I’ll
be great. I promise.”

Kelsi frowned.

“Listen,” Tim said, leaning forward and taking her hands between his. “You have to show her that even though what she did sucks, you’re okay.”

“But you will be.”

Maybe it was all the sunshine, or the sea air, but she believed him.

And maybe it was crazy, but she was starting to realize that she liked Tim. She liked him a lot.

Late that night, and Kelsi woke up when she heard Ella creep into the room they shared. She heard the click of Ella’s bedside lamp and the creak of the floorboards. She cracked her eyes open just enough to watch her sister shrug out of her clothes and kick them out of her way. God only knew what Ella had been out doing.
Or, more likely, who,
Kelsi thought with a smirk.

Watching Ella made Kelsi feel unexpectedly sad. There was something so defeated and still sort of brave about the way she carried herself. It made Kelsi want to comfort her—and
that
made Kelsi so mad she wanted to kick something.

“We’re leaving for Amherst early Thursday morning,” Kelsi spoke, enjoying the way Ella jumped at the sound of her voice.

“Um,” Ella said, and coughed a little bit. “Uh, yeah…Okay.”

“A friend of mine is coming,” Kelsi continued. “I want to leave exactly at nine thirty. Not whenever you feel like getting up.”

“Sure, right. Whatever you want,” Ella said quietly. She
looked very young then, her eyes big and fixed on Kelsi as if she thought Kelsi might leap up and attack her. Kelsi refused to feel even a drop of sympathy.

“And I don’t want to talk about any of this while we’re there,” Kelsi said. She rolled over so she faced Ella fully. “Jamie doesn’t need to know, so let’s just pretend nothing happened. Do you think you can do that?”

Ella looked as if she might say something, but she just swallowed and nodded, picking at her gingham bedspread with one hand.

“Yes,” she said softly.

“Good,” Kelsi snapped, and pulled her comforter over her head.

She heard Ella take a few deep breaths, and then it was silent for a while. And then, much later, she heard Ella climb into bed and settle down for the night, shutting off the light so the room was filled with darkness and the far-off gleam of moon and stars.

Kelsi imagined that she and her sister were separated by much more than the space between their single beds as they lay wide awake in the darkness for hours.

It wasn’t as if Adam did anything deliberately. Neither did Beth. She showed up at her usual time on Wednesday, and when he came down the beach for his break, neither one of them mentioned what had happened. It was like everything was still wonderfully platonic. As if they both hadn’t felt the wild heat of their kiss.

But it seemed like their hands bumped together more often that day. Their boards seemed to crash together more regularly than usual, and Adam had to steady both of them, which also required touching. Every time she felt his skin against hers, Beth had the same thought:
I should tell him to stop
. But then she thought that mentioning their touching would draw attention to the fact that she was
noticing
it in the first place.

So she said nothing.

That afternoon when she said good-bye to Adam, Beth
noticed that they both seemed to linger in the grass by the edge of the dunes. Adam looked as if he was thinking of something else to say while she kept forcing a smile.

“So,” he said finally. “Feel like dinner tonight?”

They’d been having dinner together practically all summer. Now, of course, it meant something different. But Beth couldn’t bear to say no.

“Okay,” she said. “As friends.”

“Friends,” he echoed.

She could feel him watching her as she walked away.

“I’m not sure what the deal is,” George said on the phone that evening. “There’s a slight chance that I might have to sub for this other guy, but if that happens, I’m definitely coming up
next
weekend. Oh, and I asked for time off, so we can spend most of the week together when I do make it up there.”

“Okay,” Beth said. It was one of those “okays” that came out sounding more like “that sucks.” Such a pissy girlfriend noise. Normally, it would have made both of them laugh.

George sighed. “What?”

“It’s just that I was supposed to go to Amherst this weekend,” Beth reminded him. “Kelsi and Ella are leaving tomorrow morning. But I canceled because you were coming…” Everything about her tone was weird and wrong, she thought, but she couldn’t seem to help herself.

“As far as I know, I still am.” George’s patience sounded like it was waning. “I’m just saying that
maybe
something might come up.”

“Okay.”

“Great,” Beth snapped. And then there was another silence, which Beth broke by sighing. “I should go,” she said at last, failing to mention that she’d be meeting Adam for dinner.

“I can’t wait to see you,” George said, his voice cajoling, perhaps in hopes that she might soften a little bit. “It’s been so long.”

“I know,” Beth said, and she felt herself soften, despite herself. “I think I’ve forgotten what you look like.”

“Don’t worry,” George said, and Beth could hear the smile in his voice. “I’ll remind you.”

Beth didn’t know if she felt miserable or nervous. Maybe it was the same thing.

“You know what?” Adam said abruptly. He came to a dead stop. “I think maybe I should go home.”

“Um, okay,” Beth was confused, and also, stupidly, hurt. She didn’t want to stop being with him so soon, even if things were so weird.

“I just can’t pretend this isn’t awkward,” Adam said. “It’s easier for you, obviously.”

Beth’s emotions were traveling at light speed, and she knew that even if she pulled the emergency brake, nothing would change what was happening. She wheeled around, determined to get as far away from him as possible, as quickly as possible. She charged up the street, her long legs eating up the distance, but she could hear that he was right behind her.

“Look,” he said a few minutes later, following her to the dirt road that forked back toward the cottages. “I’m sorry. What do you want me to say?”

“I…want things to go back the way they were!” Beth cried, whirling around. “Back at the beginning of the summer. I just want to hang out and laugh and have fun without all this…” She didn’t know what to call it. “You know!”

“I don’t know how to do that,” Adam said softly, his eyes intent on her face. “Beth…” His voice trailed away, ending almost in a question. He took a step closer to her.

On the dirt road, the trees cocooned them in darkness. In the shadows, Beth felt as if Adam could see right through her, into her soul.

He reached out with one hand and wrapped it gently around her shoulder. She felt the heat of his palm soak into her skin and travel along her body.

She meant to say something—anything—but then he was so close, and she trailed her hands along his chest and tilted her head back so she could look up into his face.

He whispered her name.

They kissed again, and again. Like they’d been saving up all summer, and were pouring all those days of longing into each new touch of their mouths and tongues. This was what she’d been wanting for so very long. Beth ran her hands along his shoulders, and down his strong arms, and then around his waist, and then over the back pockets of his jeans. Her breath quickened as she felt his lips slide down her neck, and his hands grip her hips.

Adam backed Beth up so she was leaning against the nearest tree and moved his hands slowly down her side until he got to the hem of her shirt. He pulled it up, inch by inch. She felt exposed, but her skin was flushed with heat. Adam gently cupped her breasts with his hands, still kissing her neck. Beth was so overwhelmed by desire, she was surprised she had the sense to stop him by grabbing his wrists.

“I’m sorry,” he whispered.

“Not here,” Beth whispered back, looking toward the cottages. “Someone might see.”

And then she took his hand and led him deeper into the forest.