Page 42 of One Last Summer
“My assistant,” I said, passing it over to Sam so she could see for herself. “Lydia.”
“You mean, my new best friend,” she clarified.
“Yes, that one. She removed every meeting from my calendar!”
“And filled it in with…” Sam used her fingers to zoom in on the screen, her mouth falling open as she read. “Oh my god.”
“I know!”
“What?!” Eloise’s braid whipped like a tail as she looked back and forth between us.
Next to her Linus painstakingly divided up a sandwich and bag of chips between the two of them. “I want to know too.”
“She’s filled Clara’s calendar with one appointment for the week called, ‘Nice try, boss, you’re on vacation,’” Sam cackled.
“Wow. I hope she’s paid well,” Eloise cracked as she reached for her half of the shared sandwich, planting a kiss on Linus’s cheek as a thank-you.
Phone back in hand, I swiped over to my email, which luckily had not been shut down.
“You’re addicted to that thing.” Mack’s voice was light, but I could still hear the judgment lingering in his tone.
He’d finished his food in one graceful inhale and was now leaning against the wall that ran around the perimeter of the wooden porch. He was so tall he could perch on the edge of it and still stretch his legs out long in front of him. At some point, after the game, he’d lost his shirt, and it had been hard not to notice how his shorts precariously perched on the edge of his hips.
“So?” It was not my best comeback, and I could tell by the way his brows twitched upward that he was reveling in my rhetorical failure.
“So, I thought you were here to chill out, Millen. Isn’t that what Nick said yesterday?” He shifted, crossing his legs as his hands steadied him. He’d always oozed confidence, which still, apparently, irked me. It was also undeniably sexy, and my checklist and letter—which were now both tucked safely inside of my notebook—seemed to whisper “take a lover” in my ear.
“Knowing what’s coming up on my work calendar helps me focus,” I said, steering all my attention to a hard-to-reach chip in the bottom of my bag, which was suddenly way more interesting than the smattering of dark hair dotting his sun-kissed chest. “I know it’s hard to imagine me out in the real world, but I have clients and a team who depend on me. Responsibilities. A job.”
“I have a job, and you don’t see my phone superglued to my hand,” he said, that sensuous smile still lingering.
“I mean an actual job. Not just floating around on a lake during the summer, and then sitting around keeping an eye on an empty camp all winter.” I lobbed the words at him like a joke, but they came out as anything but playful.
“Oh, boy,” Sam muttered under her breath, and next to me, Linus shot Eloise a confused look, his eyes magnified in his glasses.
“Damn, Millen, if I didn’t know better, I’d think you were trying to hurt my feelings.” Mack’s jaw tightened ever so slightly. “Was that also on your schedule of traditions you wanted to relive this week?”
“I didn’t mean it like that,” I said, analyzing a chunk of tomato that had fallen out of my sandwich, anything to avoid eye contact with him now. I hadn’t intended to insult him, but an angry edge had taken over, one I couldn’t quite put a finger on but could feel pulsing through me.
“Eh, you’re right. I do float around on the lake a lot.” He pushed himself off the railing to stand, and I flashed back to the other night, when he’d pulled that leaf out of my hair and almost knocked the wind out of me. “It’ll be good for me to rejoin the real world.”
Mack jogged down the stairs and gave us a wave over his shoulder, and I concentrated on chewing my food instead of watching him go or looking back up at my friends, who I could feel staring at me.
Behind us, the door creaked open, and Nick emerged from inside the bunk, sunglasses inexplicably still on, Trey behind him. They had been hovering on a bed, deep in conversation, when I’d wandered into the bunk to change after the game, and I hadn’t seen either of them since, until now.
“Where’d Mack go?” Nick asked, studying our group before sitting down in our half-assed circle, reaching for a sandwich.
“Lovers’ quarrel,” Sam said as she ran a hand through her curls. I shot her a look, but she just shrugged me off in response. “He knows.”
My eyes widened an inch, and I swiveled to face Nick, who nodded back. “He didn’t tell me, but I figured it out this morning. He was, as my students like to say, acting extremely ‘sus’ when I asked him about your little swim last night.”
“Oh, come on,” I said, certain that Mack must have said something—and at once relieved and livid that he might have done so.
“Even if I hadn’t figured it out, it was extremely obvious the second I heard the two of you bitching at each other about Capture the Flag strategies,” he said, plopping down next to me. “It was like something out of a Hallmark movie.”
“It was one kiss,” I clarified, my voice firm. “We are just friends.”
“Two, if you count the one from the last year of camp,” Sam said diplomatically.
