Back in the hallway, I closed the door behind me and followed Luke down the hallway toward the stairs. He never turned around to look at me, and he didn’t speak.
When we passed through the lobby, I moved next to Luke and led him along the sidewalk, not knowing where I was taking him until I realized we were heading toward the pond. It was early and campus was so quiet. We hadn’t been together since that hot, humid night at the ferry, which felt so far removed from the crisp morning air and crimson leaves now littering the sidewalk. The trees overhead formed a canopy of autumn colors, so different from the lush emerald green trees in the marina’s parking lot but no less beautiful.
“You were there yesterday,” Luke said.
I nodded. “How’d you know?”
Luke took out his phone and showed me a text. It was a photo of an almost-empty Friendly’s parking lot, and below it were the words She waited. I glanced at the top of the screen and saw the sender’s name. TJ. He must have driven by the parking lot on his way home and taken the picture.
“I didn’t ask him to send that,” I told Luke.
He put the phone back into his pocket. “I was pretty sure you didn’t.”
“But you came here anyway?”
“I gave a guy on the lacrosse team twenty bucks to let me take his car and promised I’d return it full of gas.”
“I could help you pump that, if you’d like,” I joked, and he gave me a brief, polite smile.
“I thought about turning around. I had no idea what I was going to say to you when I got here. I sat in the car for an hour. I can’t tell you how many times I put the key in the ignition and almost took off.”
“I’m glad you didn’t.” I watched Luke’s face to see if he was glad, too, but I couldn’t tell.
“I was just about to leave, and then I got your voicemail.”
“Why didn’t you answer when I called?”
“Like I said, I didn’t know what I wanted to say to you.”
“And now you do?”
Luke let out a small laugh. “No, not really.”
“Then maybe I should start.”
Luke stopped walking and sat down on a wrought iron bench overlooking the pond.
I took the seat beside him. I left enough space between us so that our legs didn’t touch but I could still smell the scent of coconut from his shampoo. “I’m sorry. I made a mistake.”
“You made a choice, Emily.” Luke was quick to respond, almost as if he’d prepared for this exact conversation.
“Maybe sometimes they’re the same thing,” I suggested.
Luke reached down and picked up a parched leaf, its edges curling up into themselves. He twirled the long stem between his fingers as he spoke. “You wanted to hurt me with Nolan. You didn’t know I’d see you do it, but I know you, Emily. You went out of your way to hurt me. On purpose.”
“It was stupid. I thought if I did something to hurt you back, then we’d be even, that what you did wouldn’t hurt so badly.”
“See, that’s the thing, Emily. This wasn’t some game where we keep score.”
“I know that now, but at the time, I just wanted know I could make you feel as horrible as I felt.”
“Well, I guess you succeeded.”
“I wish I hadn’t.”
Luke nodded at the ground. “Me, too.”
Maybe how a relationship starts, in some way, also destines how it ends. Maybe the way Luke and I began—with agendas and rules and motives and untruths—meant we could never end up any other way.
As much as I wished we could magically erase everything that had happened over the summer, I knew it wasn’t that easy.
Luke was here, but I think we both knew that this was the end. We had nowhere to go, nothing to salvage from who Emily and Luke were before. There was so much between us, and yet the complexity of our relationship was what kept us together and then drove us apart. This was the period at the end of our story. The end.
The end used to scare me. The finality of it, how you could never go back to what you knew, what made you feel safe. It wasn’t just scary, it was sad. It was like watching the people and places you love in a rearview mirror as you pull away, the memories of everything you shared diminishing the further away you get, growing smaller and blurrier until you’re so far away they fade completely.
But endings also made room for beginnings. And that was when you got to start over.
I held out my hand to Luke. “Hi, I’m Emily. I’m not perfect, and I probably won’t ever be, but I’m trying to learn from my mistakes.”
Luke hesitated, and my outstretched hand lingered, alone, in the space between us.
Instead of pulling it back, I went on.
“I can tie twenty different types of nautical knots, my quads are looking pretty good from biking more than two hundred fifty miles this summer, and sometimes I try too hard to make things exactly like I think they should be because I’m scared of what will happen if they aren’t.”
Still, Luke avoided my hand.
I thought I saw a small smile beginning to make its way across Luke’s lips, which made me charge on even though all I wanted to do was move my hand closer to him and lay it on his chest to feel his heart beating—let it travel up to his neck until I could feel the two days’ worth of stubble on his cheeks.
“I can be silly and serious, quiet and loud, confused and still absolutely one hundred percent sure of myself even when I shouldn’t be. Also, I can get a five on an AP English exam, but I really shouldn’t attempt to write my own how-to books. Ever.”
This time, he really did smile. “Is that everything I need to know?”
“There’s one more thing,” I told him. “I think I’ve finally figured out that I can’t keep trying to change how something started, but I’m hoping I can start over and change how something ends.”
Luke set the leaf down on the bench and reached for my hand, his palm warm against mine as he shook it. “Well, it’s nice to meet you, Emily. I’m Luke. I’m the guy who thinks you’re nuts. And I’m also the guy who thinks he still loves you.”
I drew my hand away from Luke’s and touched my fingers to my lips, feeling the heat of his skin, warm like our first kiss. “I can’t believe you’re really here.”
Luke nodded. “I’m really here.”
“What now?” I asked.
“Well, I don’t normally do this with someone I’ve just met, but how about we—”
“I think I’d like that.” I grabbed Luke’s hand and stood up. It didn’t matter what he was about to suggest, my answer was yes.
Instead of standing, Luke sat back on the bench and looked at me. “You know, for two people who just met, it feels like we’ve known each other forever.”
“Funny how that can happen.”
The thing is, he was right. We knew the best and worst of one another, and yet we didn’t know anything. There were new things I wanted to tell him, about my classes, about TJ appearing in the parking lot after Luke didn’t show, and about Kaitlin, who was going to come back from the campus center looking for her ID and find a leather-bound journal on her bed with a bunch of blank pages waiting for her tips on long-distance relationships. She was way better at it than I was.
But I was in no rush. We weren’t on a clock. We could take our time, without any guarantees or promises that we might not be able to keep, because we weren’t the people we were when we first met, or the people we were when we first ended. Every day we were together or apart, we’d change a little—morph into new people who could be different and yet still feel the same about each other.
It’s not easy, and there are no assurances that it will work out. When you’re in a relationship, sometimes cracks appear, and, instead of working together to fix them, we begin to fill them with words and actions that push us further apart. So many things can go wrong, so many things can change, but at the end of the day, we love who we love. As long as that didn’t change, maybe Luke and I had a chance.
> Read on for a sneak peek at When We Were Summer,
Jenny O’Connell’s first book in the Island Summer Series.
Available now.
closed my eyes and inhaled just long enough to recognize the first sign of summer. Luckily, I opened them again in time to see the four-way stop ahead. But as I pressed my foot on the brake and came to a stop at the intersection, I inhaled again, leaning my head out the open window. I knew that scent even before I could see where it was coming from. The smell of summer. Skunk.
I glanced at the clock on the dashboard: 8:49. Mona’s ferry would be arriving in eleven minutes. Almost ten months of waiting and I had just eleven minutes to go.
After looking both ways, I dropped my foot on the gas pedal and headed toward the ferry. Even without spotting the skunk, the slight burning in my nose told me I was getting closer, until there it was, pushed just off the road toward the bike path. Mona always complained when I lowered the car window at the first whiff of skunk. She’d crinkle up her nose and then pinch it shut, her index finger self-consciously rubbing the bridge of her nose and the invisible bump that wasn’t noticed by anyone but her. Still, I always kept the window down and breathed deep, even knowing how much it bugged her, because eventually she’d always end up laughing, a nasally laugh that turned into a snort when she finally unpinched her nose.
But now, I avoided looking at the black-and-white mound next to the bike path and instead looked straight ahead at the sign announcing I’d entered Vineyard Haven.
It was near the end of June, and a Sunday, which meant there would be two types of cars at the ferry—the tourists leaving the island after a week’s vacation, and the tourists arriving. The thing is, if it weren’t for the fact that they were facing different directions, you probably wouldn’t be able to tell which was which. But as someone who has lived on the island her entire life, I could tell. It wasn’t the stuff they packed in their cars, because coming or going, the SUVs and sedans were layered to the roof with duffel bags, pillows, beach chairs, and boogie boards. If they were really ambitious, and unwilling to trade their expensive ten-speeds with cushy leather seats and spindly rearview mirrors for an on-island rental, there were always the bike racks hanging off the backs of trunks, wheel spokes slowly turning as they caught the breeze off the harbor. And it wasn’t their license plates, because just about every other car was clearly labeled “tourist”—Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, and even a few Pennsylvanias tossed in for good measure. No, it was the difference between the shiny, sparkling cars with their polished hubcaps, and the cars coated with dirt and sand, their once gleaming exteriors dusted on-island like powdered donuts.
I made the left onto Water Street, following a BMW with wash me handwritten in block letters in the layer of dirt on the bumper. I patiently waited for the cars ahead of me to pull into the Steamship Authority parking lot and line up single file between the painted rows so they could board the ferry. Then I veered left and pulled Lexi’s car into the row of spaces for people like me.
My sister knew I’d wanted to meet Mona at the ferry, and since she was planning to be at the deli early to let in the last of the contractors, she’d offered me her car. Even though July Fourth was almost two weeks away, which meant the worst of the summer traffic hadn’t even started, I left the house early. Not as early as my parents and Lexi and Bart, who just had to be at the deli by seven, but early by a seventeen-year-old’s standards, and especially early for someone whose last day it was to sleep late.
Mona’s ferry wasn’t in sight yet, so I walked to the edge of the water, where waiting families shared overpriced muffins from the Black Dog. They were all there, the Vineyard vacationers you saw in travel brochures and websites. There was the little boy who’d undoubtedly whined until his mom purchased the stuffed black lab puppy now clutched under his arm. His brother with the shark-tooth necklace. The girl with the rope bracelet. A mom in Lily Pulitzer Capri pants.
They might as well have been wearing the same T-shirts—i went to martha’s vineyard and all i got was everything i asked for.
“Kendra!”
I turned toward the voice calling my name and recognized Ryan Patten down by the gazebo. He waved and started walking toward me. When you lived on the island, you didn’t really expect to see people you knew at the ferry this time of year. Maybe in November when you were heading off-island to Target, or in March when everyone was going stir-crazy from the long, gray winter, but for three months during the summer the ferry was for strangers.
“What are you doing here?” Ryan asked, pulling a leash, and a very large dog, behind him.
“Mona’s on the nine o’clock.” I pointed to the golden retriever sniffing the grass and flicking his tail against Ryan’s leg. “Who’s that?”
“Dutch. He’s along for the ride. My cousins and aunt and uncle are coming for a visit. You know how it is.”
I nodded as if I did, but I didn’t. Nobody in my family ever moved off the island. “So, what are you doing this summer?”
“Renting bikes at Island Wheels. What about you?” Dutch pulled at his leash and I followed along as Ryan let him continue sniffing the trail of whatever he thought he’d found.
“Working at the Willow Inn. We start tomorrow.”
“We?”
“Me and Mona,” I told Ryan, lowering my voice as if there was any chance she could hear me from the ferry.
I hadn’t told her yet. The job was my surprise. We’d always talked about working at one of the inns for a summer. It met all three of our criteria. One, no lines. The idea of scooping ice cream while a line of exhausted parents and their demanding kids impatiently shouted out orders for Oreo cookie frappés wasn’t exactly appealing, no matter how much free ice cream you could eat. Two, no retail (see number one, but replace pissy parents and their whiny kids with pissy women who don’t understand why there are no more size 6 Bermuda shorts on the rack). And three, no nights. Serving breakfast at the Willow Inn was perfect. Technically, there could be times when people would be anxiously waiting for their morning coffees, but with only nineteen rooms, it wasn’t like there’d be a line for the blueberry muffins. Besides, we’d always figured people were still optimistic that early in the morning, and therefore nicer to be around. By the end of the day they’d be sunburned, cranky from spending twenty minutes in traffic on Main Street, and downright rude after driving around for an hour, looking for a parking space, only to discover a ticket on their windshield when they returned. The Willow didn’t serve dinner, just breakfast and picnic lunches for guests. Spend three minutes with a hostess trying to placate families who have been waiting over an hour for a dinner table, and you’d understand why.
Luckily, the guy who sold Lexi the cash register for the deli knew someone who knew the new owner of the Willow, and two weeks after Lexi placed an order for the Sam4s register with integrated credit card capabilities, I had secured jobs for Mona and me.
“Does Kevin know she’s coming back?” Ryan asked.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. She e-mailed me with her ferry time and that was it.”
Mona hadn’t seen Kevin since she left, that I did know. She only came back to the island once after she moved, last October for her grandfather’s funeral, and I’m sure I would have known if Kevin had gone to Boston to visit her. Kevin went out with Melissa Madsen for a few months this winter, but I was still sort of hoping they’d get back together when Mona returned, and then everything would be just like it was before she left. At least for the summer.
“It’s here.” Ryan pointed past the houses hugging the shores of the harbor and I could see the ferry come into view, white peaks of water cresting on either side of the bow as it made its way toward us.
“Hungry?” Ryan asked, and then pointed to the hand I had clutched against my stomach.
What could I say? That seeing the ferry coming toward us, the ferry with my best friend on it, had turned my stomach upside down? That all of a sudden the idea of seeing Mon
a again made me nervous because I didn’t know what to expect?
“Yeah,” I lied, and rubbed my stomach as if all I needed was a good bowl of cereal. “Starving.”
We started walking toward the dock. “Where are you meeting your cousins?” I asked.
“Where they walk off. They got to Woods Hole late and missed their ferry, again. Couldn’t get another reservation for the car until Monday, so they’ll have to go over tomorrow and pick it up.”
Ryan began telling me how his cousins missed their ferry every year, but even though I nodded in all the right places as if I was listening, all I really heard was the ferry engine revving loudly as it slid into place against the dock.
“You know what I mean?” Ryan finished. He looked to me for a response.
“Exactly,” I answered, even though I had no idea what I was agreeing to.
We stood there with Dutch and watched as the front door to the boat’s belly opened up to expose rows of idling cars. Once the guys working the controls for the ramp gave them the go-ahead, the cars slowly moved across the steel incline, forming a steady, orderly procession as they took turns driving off the boat and past the ferry building before accelerating in the direction of their rental house or relative’s house or, in Mona’s case, their new stepfather’s summer estate.
I stood on my tiptoes trying to see if I could spot Malcolm’s black Range Rover inside. Last summer, when Malcolm married Izzy in the backyard of his house overlooking South Beach, Mona and I wrote “Just Married” along the side of the car with a bar of Ivory soap. The soap was from Mona’s grandfather’s house. We couldn’t find a bar in Malcolm’s six-bedroom summer “cottage,” where every bathroom had a bottle of L’Occitane almond shea soap on the sink and a matching bottle of body wash in the shower but not a bar of Ivory soap in the whole place. L’Occitane seemed to be the soap of choice in Malcolm’s house, and it smelled amazing. It was actually the second thing I noticed the first time I went to Malcolm’s house with Mona. The smell. It wasn’t sweet like the air fresheners my mother seemed to have inserted into every electrical outlet in our house. And it wasn’t comforting, like the lavender sachets the Willow Inn placed on the guests’ pillows every night. The only way I could describe it was manly, like a combination of fresh-cut grass, seawater, and limes. Even though Malcolm had hired an interior designer from Vineyard Haven to decorate his summer home, it was definitely a house that had been occupied by a man. Malcolm didn’t have any kids, even though Izzy told Mona he was married briefly to his college sweetheart. By the time Malcolm met Izzy, he’d been divorced for way longer than he was married, which is why the first thing I noticed about Malcolm’s house was that it was way too big for a single guy with no kids.