Page 7 of That Summer Feeling

“There you are,” he yelled. “I was getting worried.”

“I’m sure you were!” Stevie called back. “That’s my brother Mason,” she whispered to me. “Consider this our first alliance information session. Mason is the biggest shithead in the world.”

Mason ran up to meet us. With every long stride he took in our direction, his face became a little clearer. Once he was close enough for me to make out specific features, my bones began to liquefy.

I stopped walking. Stopped breathing.

He lookedexactlylike the man from the airport—the man I’d had a premonition about when our hands connected on my heart-promise bracelet. I’d long ago convinced myself thathadn’t been real. I sometimes saw that face late at night, right before I fell asleep, when my mind liked to play tricks and make me think I’d missed out on an opportunity with my soulmate or something.

It couldn’t be the same guy. There was no way.

When he reached where Stevie and I stood, his broad, friendly expression morphed into something like shock. “Wait,” he said to me. “I know you.”

I opened my mouth to speak. No sound came out.

Instead, I fainted. Right at the feet of the man of my dreams.

2

My favorite kind of daydreaming used to be imagining all the people I could love. I did it with movie stars. Strangers on the street. Casual acquaintances. I closed my eyes, and for a brief, beautiful moment, our life together played out for me. That was how I’d moved through the world before Ethan. Then I met him the third week of my freshman year of college, and the sweet little scenarios I made up in my mind actually happened, which was how I’d decided he had to be the one.

I’d first seen him standing in another aisle of a used bookstore a good fifteen miles away from campus. For a fleeting moment, I imagined the two of us bumping into each other and falling in love, living a beautiful, uncomplicated life together where we spontaneously picnicked in the park on a random Tuesday afternoon or built a pillow fort in our living room whenever it rained. The thought was gone as fast as itcame, and I kept browsing, pleased with the small dopamine hit I got from the miniature fantasy I’d created.

I’d squatted down to pet the store cat, not realizing Ethan was beside me, about to do the same thing. Our hands accidentally grazed as we both reached for the tabby. We looked at each other and laughed.

Ethan held up another copy of the book I was holding. He said, “I saw you with this, and I figured I should read it too. We can talk about it on our first date.”

We quickly realized we were both students at UCLA who had happened to take a random Thursday-afternoon trip to the valley to visit a used bookstore. There was no way it was a coincidence. It was too specific and strange to be random. It had to be fate.

We got married in a small ceremony on the beach in Malibu, surrounded by loved ones. We had a beautiful honeymoon in Cancún. We bought a craftsman in Pasadena for way too much money (all Ethan’s), and he let me paint the walls dark green and buy more plants than any human should ever be allowed to house indoors. It was lovely. Exactly the kind of relationship I’d always thought I should have. Aspirational. Picturesque. Safe.

Then he surprised me with a divorce over Valentine’s Day dinner, and all the little head-in-the-clouds quirks about myself I once saw as wondrous now seemed like a burden.

I’d spent years wincing at the sight of surfer types. When I came across tall white men with blond hair in public, I turned in the other direction. My entire marriage to Ethan depended upon me ignoring what had happened when astranger once brushed hands with me in the airport. What I’d experienced that day never felt like a figment of my imagination in the way my other daydream scenarios did. It felt instead like a pivotal moment of my life being revealed to me—a slip in the timeline where I glimpsed my future a little earlier than I was supposed to—and I decided that was something I could reject altogether. Not all future paths set out for me were ones I had to walk.

If anything, choosing Ethan seemed like the most romantic thing I could possibly do. I’d seen a lovely life that had nothing to do with him, and I’d turned it down in favor of the man I already knew. The steady presence I thought I could rely on. Then he told me I romanticized everything. He said I put a filter over my struggles to make them more palatable, and it prevented me from showing up to the life I had.

When I came to, sitting under the shade of a gigantic white oak tree in the middle of the mountains, it seemed possible I’d somehow escaped reality altogether and gotten trapped inside the one daydream I’d ever hid from—the man from the airport I’d seen for half a minute, several years ago.

Mason.

He stood a few feet away, gaping at me. He couldn’t be real, but he was. And his sister sat directly to my right, pressing a cool compress to my forehead.

“She’s awake,” she said to someone I couldn’t yet see. She handed me a bottle of water.

I unscrewed the lid and took a delicate sip.

Dara appeared, squatting down in front of me. “Shit, Garland. Are you okay? I’ve never seen you do that before in mylife.” She looked impressed, confused, and a little angry, which wasn’tthatfar from her usual expression, but I knew the difference.

“I don’t know what happened,” I lied.

My airport vision was the one thing I’d never told Dara about. If I’d shared it with her, she’d have taken me too seriously. She’d have treated it like it mattered, and back then, the visioncouldn’tmatter to me. It didn’t match the life I’d already established for myself.

For as practical as she seemed to everyone else, Dara still believed in the magic the world could possess. Not even my divorce had gotten her down. She wasn’t one of those people who evangelizedThe Secretor anything, but she did make wishes on eyelashes and coins she tossed into fountains, and she treated those wishes as law. She thought angel numbers guided her, and that randomly noticing a detail she hadn’t perceived before meant she was destined to see it at that exact moment. Both of us were in our thirties, single, and living in an apartment together, and she saw it all as part of some big, beautiful cosmic plan.

I used to believe all the same things. Then Ethan served me divorce papers, and every single iota of the self-made wonder I’d dusted over my life got wiped away, revealing nothing but disenchantment. I had no interest in trying to love someone new ever again. Over and over, the only constant message the world had given was that romantic love failed me. The worst part was, I still couldn’t let go of Ethan. If he were to call, I’d answer. If he wanted me to move back, I’d go. I lived my life in waiting mode, holding out for Ethan’s return.

And now here I was, with the man from the airport a few feet away from me.