Page 44 of That Summer Feeling

I stared at her. God, her face was perfect. Even when I could hardly see it. I knew the sweet slope of her nose. The hollows of her cheeks. Her smile lines, crinkling in the corners of her mouth when she grinned. I’d been so flustered when she found me, I hadn’t processed the honor of witnessing her. Now the heat of her sunshine spread through me, moving like a fast-acting drug, waking up every nerve in my body.

“Okay, yes, youhavecomplicated my life. But not in the way you think,” she admitted.

“You’ve complicated my life too,” I blurted out.

“How have I complicated your life?” The frustration in her voice lowered, stretched out. Lingered on the verge of something different.

The two of us were fixed on each other, an exchange of dares between our gazes. Who was I to her? Who was she to me?

“You have to tell me how I’ve complicated yours first,” I hedged.

She backed up even more, making herself small. “I can’t.”

“Because of Mason?”

She looked away.

“Stevie,” I said, the force in my voice pulling her attention back to me. “I can tell you with complete, one hundred percent certainty that I willneverdate your brother. Call down the fake birds and take that information straight to the government. Tell the camp ghosts to post it on the front page of their gazette. I do not care if my own brain conjured an entire world where I ended up with him. It isnevergoing to happen.”

If Dara could throw out the rule book, so could I. I wasn’t ignoring my vision anymore. I was outright rejecting it. Staring it in the face and sayingNo, that’s not who I plan to be. It didn’t matter if that life was assigned to me by the magic my sister and I had created all those years ago. We’d both grown past those versions of ourselves. If she didn’t have to want that anymore, neither did I.

Stevie stepped forward. “You really don’t like him?” she dared to ask, after I’d all but cut my thumb and made a sacrificial pledge to Mother Nature that I’d never go near him romantically.

“Stevie,” I whispered, her name a secret for the stars to unravel.

After throwing out the rule book, the first decision of mynew life was accepting that I didn’t have to move like the universe was keeping score of my generosity at every single moment. I could do the reckless thing intentionally. I could do it withpurpose.

“I have no idea how I made it three whole days convincing you that I wanted to know Mason more,” I continued. “Ever since you crashed into me at our doorstep and I saw the little freckles on your face, you’ve been the only person I’ve thought about that way.”

If she didn’t understand before, she got it then. Her eyes softened, and in them I saw the kind of hope I’d always chased. My bold, confident Stevie had been protecting herself from letting me in. I’d made her think she needed to do that. There was nothing in the world I wanted more than to change that.

“I like you,” I continued. “And I know your ex-girlfriend is here, and you guys have some big history that I could never possibly understand, so I totally get it if you do nothing with this information. I’ve never told a woman I liked her before, and I have to be honest and say that if this is the wrong way to do it, I’m not going to apologize, but as my alliance partner I hope you’d tell me. That way if another woman ever comes along who shines as bright as you, I’ll know what to do.”

Stevie stepped closer to me. There it was again. The feeling of falling. Standing on the ceiling of the world and tipping over. And I wanted to fall. Because I wanted her to catch me.

“You’re doing pretty great,” she said, giving me the very grin I loved the most. The light-beam smile.

“Is that alliance information, or ‘you’re charmed by what I’m saying’ information?”

Now she laughed. The bottle-rocket kind that sent birds out of trees. The other campers could probably hear her over the music in the main hall. They’d know her laugh as the purest concentration of joy that existed. “You know, for such a smart person, you’ve really let all of this go right over your head.”

“What do you mean?”

“Garland,” she whispered in her favorite way. Theyears of history between uskind of way. “I think that the floorboard outside our cabin got loose because the earth shifted when I saw you.”

She said things in a way that sent my pulse into my toes. I was feverish. Lit up and terrified and so completely hooked on her every word.

“There’s a thing a lot of people say about women when they date other women,” she continued. “I’m sure you’ve heard it. We fall in love too fast. We rent the U-Haul and move in together after a week. And that’s always annoyed me, even though to be perfectly honest, it’s happened to more than one of my friends. I still thought it was a boring generalization and that people lacked imagination. Until I met you.” She laughed, remembering. “I saw you and thought,Oh yes. Wherever she asked me to go, I’d follow. And then you told me my fucking brother was your soulmate.”

“To be fair, I didn’texactlysay that,” I joked, so flustered and overwhelmed and unbelievably charmed, I truly believedI had a fever. I thought back to the moment I’d told her. How she’d instantly folded her arms. Backed away from me. The way she’d agreed to help with a wobbly, curious uncertainty.

“Yes, you did,” she argued, another tiny laugh slipping out of her. “And all week I’ve been losing my grip on reality because of it. Especially after we slow danced last night. I haven’t been able to look at you since. Because I just couldn’t take it anymore. I’ve competed against Mason for many, many things in my life, but we’ve never competed over a girl. Not that I thought I had a real chance with you.”

I almost laughed in return. In that moment, it felt comical that she’d ever doubt it, even though I hadn’t known it for myself. But it had always been her. From that first second. And there was no question about it.

“So I’ve been going to his cabin multiple times a day, pretty much every time I’m not with you, and telling him every fascinating thing about you I can think of, just to be sure he could see every single detail about you he needed to see,” she continued. “Because if he fucked it up, I was going to disown him.”

“He would’ve been the biggest shithead in the world,” I joked.