Page 7 of One Last Summer
“Wait. Do you think I’m burnt out? Fried? Seriously, you can tell me.” I swiveled myself back around to face her, leaning closer as she squinted her eyes, apologetic.
“A little?”
“Crap.” I collapsed back in my chair, which wobbled in all its ergonomic, supportive glory. I spun around in panicked thought, letting out a giant yawn.
“See?” she said pointedly. “I don’t think it’s crazy that you could be, you know, burnt out. You’ve had a really hard year.”
“Don’t you think I would know if I was struggling?” I huffed, turning back to examine my checklist. I hated feeling defensive, but digging into this felt way too exposed. I forced a breath through my lips, trying to slow down my pounding heart.
“Let’s just try to get through this and call it a night,” I continued more gently.
“Oh, shit, he’s cute.”
My feet tip-tapped as I turned back around to face Lydia again, only to find her holding her phone within an inch of her face. She flipped it around to show me her screen, and there was Mack, grinning, a wet suit unzipped down his chest, the ocean a blur in the background. He still had that disheveled, sun-kissed, light brown hair, and the same bump in his nose from when he broke it playing in the boys’ soccer tournament the summer we were twelve.
I’d long ago just accepted that the sight of him, in person or on a tiny screen, would flick on some sort of switch inside of me. It didn’t matter that I’d changed so much since we first met as kids. This one thing had stayed exactly the same.
She looked up and made a perplexed face. “He can’t be that bad.”
“He’s not bad,” I replied finally. Mack was a lot of things: cocky, pointedly funny, often obnoxious, and, fine, occasionally kindhearted—with tousled hair that was one beat away from being a tangled mess and soft lips that curled into a mischievous grin at even the slightest hint of a joke. Once, he’d even been a boy I thought I loved, before I understood what love was and wasn’t. And now?
“He’s just… Mack.”
“You’re supposed to tell me about the kiss.” She wiggled her eyebrows at me.
“Oh my god, it was just stupid teenage drama.” I tried to keep my voice light, brushing the conversation aside. She gave me a look that very clearly signaled that she didn’t buy it, but she didn’t push it either.
“Come on,” I said finally, stretching my arms over my head. “Let’s give Amaya what she wants and go… sabbatical. That’s a verb, right?”
She laughed and tapped at her phone. “Listen to this. The internet is telling me that the word ‘sabbatical’ comes from the Greek word ‘sabatikos’ and the Hebrew word ‘Sabat,’ or Sabbath, which is a day of rest.”
“Great, thank you, internet,” I said, shoving work files into my tote bag. “I’ll rest then.”
The only problem was, I wasn’t quite sure I knew how.
5
THE TO-GO MARGARITAS had been Lydia’s idea, grabbed at the Mexican restaurant around the corner from the office.
“Nothing says rest like tequila!” she toasted before popping her straw through the top of the plastic cup. The drinks sloshed in our hands as we walked across the Congress Street Bridge toward my apartment, navigating the usual sidewalk traffic that made up Boston’s crooked cobblestone streets on a Friday night.
“You don’t need to walk me home, you know,” I said with a raised brow to Lydia, who met my skeptical look with her own, enhancing it with a loud slurp of her drink.
“And you don’t need to tell me what to do,” she replied, booze-sass mode activated. “Technically you’re on a micro-sabbatical right this very second, remember?”
“What a terrible, made-up word.” My eyes rolled as I sucked up another ice-cold gulp, the tequila going down easy. “She should have called it a playcation, or something cute that actually makes you want to do it.”
“Wow, playcation.” Lydia nodded, giving me an approving look. “I like it. See? This time off is already doing you some good.”
“Shh, you sound too much like Amaya,” I said, and she let out a cackle. “I can still work even if I’m not in the office, you know. You’ve seen how much we have left to do for Alewife.”
“Clara, I know it’s hard to believe, but the pitch will survive without you for one week,” she said as we crossed the street in front of the Old State House building, lit up in all its ancient, redbrick glory. This time, there was not a trace of sarcasm in her voice.
“Maybe I can convince her to let this sabbatical thing wait until after the pitch,” I offered, a reasonable compromise. “I’m going to email her this weekend once she’s sobered up.”
“You already told Sam you were coming!” Lydia said.
“I’m sure she’d understand,” I reasoned. “She knows how important this job is to me.”
