Page 26 of That Summer Feeling

“What happened up there?” Mason asked me, his breath hot in my ear.

“I don’t know,” I said.

He placed me down, then put a hand on Stevie’s head. “Sorry about last place. That sucks.” When he looked at me, he smiled with utmost sincerity. “This is why Stevie could never beat me. She’s too soft. I would have carried you on my back across the ropes.”

Stevie’s hands clenched into fists.

Something otherworldly possessed me. A courage I’d never felt before straightened my spine. “Absolutely not,” I said.

Mason’s cheeks got as red as his team shirt, and his eyes lit up. “You don’t think I could?”

“I’m sure you could. But I wouldn’t have let you,” I told him. “It wasn’t Stevie’s fault I didn’t do the course. It was no one’s fault but mine.”

Mason looked at his sister. “I don’t know. I think I could’ve convinced you to make it happen.”

The casual dismissal of her made my blood boil. “If anyone in the world was going to get me across that course, it would’ve been Stevie. So if this is a competition between you two, she wins. Every time.”

He put on his poutiest puppy-dog eyes. “I don’t win? Not even once?”

The vision I’d had of the two of us laughing in the mess hall seemed miles, if not oceans, away from where we were. He may have been attractive to someone else, butIwasn’t attracted to him. I wondered how I ever would be. If the difference this time was that the attraction was meant to sneak up on me. Become something that just existed, not something I could see by imagining little vignettes of our life together.

“Not even once,” I told him.

I wasn’t going to lie to him about my allegiance to Stevie. If I’d done anything with Ethan, it was lie. I kept quiet when I was nervous. I didn’t say what bothered me. That day in the grocery store, I hadn’t wanted him to interject. At least not in the way he had. He’d gone about it all wrong, and I’d never said anything about it.

This would be how I’d practice getting better. Saying the tough things out loud. For Mason, or Ethan.

No.

Formyself.

Mason took my comment as a challenge, which was a common thread among the Magnusson family. “We’ll see about that,” he told me.

Andrew appeared. “C’mon. We’re booked for the Jet Skison the lake in fifteen minutes.” He called up to Frank, who still stood at the top of the bleachers. “Let’s go!”

The three of them headed toward the water.

“You really are perfect for Mason,” Stevie told me once they were out of earshot. The rest of the competitors around us had already left, leaving us completely alone. “I’ve never seen anyone stand up to him like that before.”

“I did it for you,” I told her.

She paused for a long while, staring at the ground. Then she started nodding to herself. “Yeah. This will be very good for him.”

“What?”

She gave me that look again. The spotlight-onto-my-soul look. “Dating you.”

“Oh.”

Every discussion of Mason turned my thoughts into a desert. Any concept of what I should say shriveled up. It was so much easier to talk to Stevie about literally anything else. The quality of the soil under our feet would have interested me more. Ethan worked at the landscaping company his family owned, and from the secondhand knowledge I’d picked up, I thought the dirt seemed to be well hydrated.

“This isn’t an apology,” I said as a precursor. “But you need to know it all the same. I promise that tomorrow, whatever the challenge is, I’m gonna make sure our team wins. I know I let you down at the ropes course, but I plan to show up for you as much as I can everywhere else.”

Stevie didn’t seem to hear me, despite looking right at my mouth. “He doesn’t have enough people to give him perspective.”

We were the only two people talking, and we were having two different conversations. To test it, I asked, “Does he think birds are real?”

She didn’t even smile. Her focus on me had become something that went beyond words, so I gave up trying to use them. I became hyperaware of my feet on the well-hydrated soil. The sounds of the maybe-real birds up in the trees. She would know their names. What it was they sang to us in that moment. Fast, trilling melodies I’d never paid attention to before, matching the chaotic beat of my heart.