Page 35 of That Summer Feeling

Stevie and I were on the ropes course again. Except this time it was me who could provide a safe path to the other side.She stared at the shake in my fingers. I couldn’t say if it was the cold or nerves that made me tremble. Maybe both.

I told myself it would be okay if she rejected my offer. After all, I hadn’t actually gone across the ropes with her. She had every right to ignore my request to whisk her back to the very place she’d stormed away from barely two minutes agobecauseof me.

But Stevie, brave Stevie, grabbed on to me, tucking her palm into mine.

“Okay,” she said, so soft it nearly broke me.

Stepping past Allison without granting her a single moment of acknowledgment, I led Stevie back to our spot on the dance floor. The slow song hadn’t yet ended, though I swore we’d lived an entire lifetime outside just then. Sparkles from the disco ball moved in a lazy circle around us, swirling with the easy beat of the music.

The shake in my hands stopped once I had Stevie in my arms. I thought of how she’d grabbed on to me when she tripped at our doorstep. The way she’d been so careful, so exact with me, even while stumbling. She’d found a way to cushion my fall. I needed that cushion again, because I’d never held a woman in a slow dance. Not even jokingly. At least not that I could remember. Not likethis.

Stevie had give to her that made me warm. I liked pressing my fingers into her flesh and feeling her skin make room for me. And the smell of her only got better up close. I could learn it now, break it down from the inside out, so I could put something new along with it in my brain, forever associating it with Stevie’s head on my shoulder. Her arms around the small ofmy back. The heave of her chest, breathing deep against my own. It would go into my catalog of best scents, beside a blown-out birthday candle or the sky after rain.

I didn’t like Mason. I never had. Not for a single second.

I liked Stevie.

No.

That wasn’t enough.

I had a full-on crush on her. A heart-stirring, hands-shaking, forget-how-to-breathe crush.

I didn’t like her freckles because they were cute. I liked them because they were hers, and I liked every single thing about her, and in fact I’d spent two days straight thinking of only her, and oh god, I had never felt less prepared to continue existing, because the framing of my entire world had changed in a millisecond. She was so delicate, so precious and fragile, and I was the one holding her, not knowing exactly how much care I needed to take until it was too late.

The song ended, and she whispered a gentle thank-you to me. Then she walked through the open doors and out of the hall, leaving me alone in the middle of the dance floor.

I had to let her go. I’d spent the last two days following her everywhere, and if I went after her then, I didn’t know what it would mean. Only that it would mean too much. Way more than I’d planned to have anything mean here.

Instead I stood with disco lights swirling against me, wondering who the hell I was anymore.

Day Three of Summer Camp

15

Stevie’s bed was three feet from mine. Thirty-six inches. One long jump, really. Not that I’d spent all night fixating on the distance, tossing and turning, judging my every movement. That was not how any rational adult with a crush behaved. Adults didn’t even have crushes. They had attractions. Sensations. Arousals? Something way more sophisticated than me, heartsick and overwhelmed, obsessing over the woman sleeping a baseball bat’s length away from me. (At 4:41 a.m., I’d spent an embarrassingly long time forcing my phone to find Wi-Fi, holding it skyward like an offering toward the gods of reception, until I could google things that were three feet long.)

Stevie’s alarm went off at six on the dot. Like the gloriously beautiful early riser she was, she obeyed it without even hitting snooze. I lay in bed with my eyes half-open, workshopping ways to be casual. What did I usually say in the mornings?

Oh. Hey. How’d you sleep?

Mm. Nice beds here, yeah?

Do you think we go somewhere real when we dream?

She left the room before I could decide, and a boulder of my anxiety walked out with her. For the first time in hours, I could breathe.

Then a heaping dose of longing moved right into the vacancy. I missed her already.

Crushes—or attractions, or sensations, or arousals, orwhatever—did not get any easier with age. If anything, I felt even less prepared for the revelation that I liked Stevie than I would have been in seventh grade. I thought I knew everything there was to know about myself, when in reality I’d been ignoring my own truth in favor of keeping things from getting too complicated. Now it had all come crashing down on me, and I was thirty-two years old and I had a crush on a woman at summer camp, and it seemed like the most intense thing to ever happen in my entire life.

If I really thought about it—and I had all night, every agonizing hour in my twin-sized bed that was all of one golf club away from Stevie—when I imagined hands on me, they were a woman’s. When I saw myself struggling and I pictured the shoulder I would most want to cry on, it was a woman’s. When I asked myself who I liked to travel with, or who took the best pictures of me, or who made experiences the most fun, it was a woman. I’d tricked myself into thinking that meant friendship, because sometimes it did. But I’d spent my whole life muting the part of myself that wanted more from women. Now that part of me was screaming, a speaker turnedup so high the sound almost hurt—wild and sharp and very, very loud.

Eventually the sun hit my face in the same way it had the morning before. The blinds had those gaps in them that seemed to align with my irises. This time, the sun reminded me of Stevie, and Stevie was beautiful, and I’d never been so desperate for a confidant to talk me down, because at this rate I was going to pretend to sleep until the day ended, if only because thinking of Stevie caused me physical distress.

I couldn’t tell Dara I was betraying the vision. She’d been so hurt when she found out I’d kept it from her in the first place. It would only be worse if she knew I was actively going against it now. Her pain was the last thing I needed on top of all my other sensations bearing down on me.

My options were the twins or Michelle. The twins already knew Stevie, which compromised them in this situation.