Page 13 of That Summer Feeling

Mason approached us, snapping his fingers as he walked up. “Our fainter!” he said to me. “You good?”

The heat of the embarrassment that crawled up to my cheeks could’ve cooked an egg. “Oh yeah! All good! Better than ever.”

Mason nodded. “We do know each other, right?”

“You gave me my jewelry back in the airport once.” It felt odd to leave out the details now that Stevie knew them too, but the prospect of explaining to Mason that we might be destined to be together seemed like something that should come after we’d learned the color of each other’s eyes, at least. Anything more than what we had.

He scratched his head. “Nice! Well, it’s good to see you again.”

If he’d had the same vision as me, he was much better at making it seem insignificant. All the same, there was kind of an exquisite simplicity to his friendliness. It seemed earnest and unpolished.

“You too,” I said to him.

I prided myself on being able to hold a conversation withanyone. Finding the briefest thread of connection with a complete stranger was something I enjoyed being good at. It was not often, if ever, that I lost my ability to think. Standing there with Mason—nursing a vodka cranberry after having had a shot of tequila, already knowing I was making mistakes with my alcohol intake and, more broadly, with my life—any idea of what we should talk about completely left me. The task of getting to know someone from the ground up was daunting under normal circumstances. But the extra layer? The unexplainable vision and our potentially intertwined fates made me overthink everything. I didn’t know how to downplay it enough to make sure he knew I didn’t want anything serious, because what could sound more serious than telling a perfect stranger you’d seen your future with them?

“You know, Garland has her own coffee maker here,” Stevie offered up to fill the silence. “I think it’s the same as that one you asked for last Christmas.”

Mason’s eyes—it was too dark to really be sure, but they seemed to be green, if they were anything like Stevie’s—lit up. “No way! A Ratio Eight pour over? No one in my family would get it for me.”

“It was almost six hundred dollars, dude. Get it for yourself,” Stevie said. “Or... maybe you can borrow Garland’s?”

Stevie had so generously attempted to open the door to a connection between Mason and me, but she’d picked the one topic that led us further away from territory I knew.

“It’s actually my sister’s,” I explained. “She couldn’t fit it in her bag, so I had to pack it in mine. She was really concerned that the coffee up here wouldn’t be any good.” I pointed toDara, who was being her typical self, standing in a back corner watching everyone else. When I waved at her, she returned the favor by throwing up the middle finger.Come over here, I mouthed, to which she repliednoand kept on standing alone.

“Doyoulike coffee?” Mason asked me.

All I could think to say back was “Absolutely. It’s so good. Coffee rocks.”

Stevie choked on her drink. Vodka cranberry shot out through her nostrils in shocked laughter.

Mason—sweet, oblivious Mason—looked around for some kind of clue as to what was so funny. When he couldn’t find it, he said, “I’m gonna get a drink, I’ll be back in one sec.” Then he did the very slick thing I’d always admired in confident men—he patted my shoulder and squeezed it before walking off.

“Coffeerocks,” Stevie teased once Mason was out of earshot. She could do a great impression of me. It made me feel understood in a different way than I’d ever felt before. Most people picked up on my optimism. Stevie captured my vulnerability. The worries I hid behind the hope I projected.

“Why did I say that?” I asked, laughing with her. “I’m a mess. I haven’t had to flirt in years. It makes me want to die inside.”

Stevie tapped her pointer finger against her tooth, then rested the same finger against her nose. Whatever she was thinking about, she was thinking it very intensely, until finally she offered, a little cryptically, “Mason’s not a complicated guy.”

She switched to staring at her brother. She was very goodat looking at people. She had no qualms about where she focused her attention. It was forward, like her. Honest.

“He likes you,” she continued. “I can tell because he’s doing his cool-guy thing. Like the shoulder grab.”

“The shoulder grab,” I echoed, feeling the burn of where his hand had touched my skin. It embarrassed me that she’d noticed. That they had a sibling shorthand she could pick up on that told her how he felt.

“Plus, I may or may not have told him to pay closer attention to you,” she admitted.

It was my turn to choke on my drink. “You didwhat?”

“Don’t worry, I didn’t tell him about your vision. He wouldn’t know what to do with that kind of information anyway. Mason’s not really down with the universe sending us signs or anything like that. In fact, most of the time he can’t see what’s right in front of his face. So I did a little pointing on your behalf. That’s all.”

It made me feel like a baby fawn, stumbling through the world. Somehow Stevie, a stranger by all metrics, kept anticipating the paths I was going to take and clearing away any debris that might make me fall on my face. I didn’t know how to feel like I’d earned that when all I’d done in return was talk to her.

“Just be yourself with him. That’ll be more than enough,” she said.

“You’ve really got a lot of faith in me. Even after ‘coffee rocks’?”

She found my eyes again—just once, fleetingly—beforelooking down at her drink. “Having faith in you is a part of our pact, isn’t it?”