Page 47 of The Edge of Summer
I take a moment to carefully swipe under my eyes, and then I move back to the porch. Luke meets me at the bottom of the steps, blocking my path.
“What are you doing?” I ask. My voice comes out shakier than I would like. “I should go back inside.”
The last thing I want is for his family to think of me as ungrateful. They threw a whole birthday party for a woman they met a month and a half ago. The least I can do is sit through it, even if guilt and grief threaten to swallow me whole.
“No.”
I balk. “Excuse me?”
“No,” he repeats. “Not until you forget about what you think youshoulddo, and do what you need.”
“But your family?—”
“My family is fine. Just worried about you.”
I try to step around him, but he blocks me again. I frown. “All the more reason for me to go back inside.”
Crossing my arms, I stare up at him. He stares right back. The unwavering attention begins to tug at the frayed edges of my emotions until I can’t stand it any longer.
“Why do you even care?” I snap.
His laugh is a chill down my spine. “Shutterbug, I have been asking myself that question since you landed on my island in those barely-there denim shorts of yours.”
“And?” I ask. “What’s the answer?”
He’s silent for a moment, like he might not give me one. And then he says, “When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”
I scoff. Luke simply leans a shoulder against the column supporting the porch’s overhang. He crosses his own arms, putting his strong biceps on display in a way I’m not entirely convinced is accidental.
“If you need a minute, Delilah, then take it. I’ll wait.”
To his credit, he does. The tears threaten to spill over again and I have to look away. I bite my tongue to give myself something else to focus on. I can feel him watching me, but I surprisingly don’t feel rushed under his gaze. Like I truly can take a minute to breathe.
“Our parents died. Nine months ago,” I admit quietly.
There isn’t a day that goes by where I don’t think about that, but I think this is the first time I’ve ever actually hadto say the words aloud. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be. The admission is freeing, in a way.
When I peek up at Luke, he isn’t wearing that pinched expression that everyone else adopts when they find out the reason I have custody of my siblings. Instead he stands just as he has been, waiting like he said he would.
“They were in a car accident at the end of August. It was— It was raining really badly.”
I leave out the reason they were even out of the house that day. If it hadn’t been for me and the pictures I allowed to be used against me, my parents wouldn’t have been on their way to meet with their lawyer. I don’t want Luke to look at me differently—the way everyone back home did.
“And this is your first birthday without them,” he surmises. His voice has adopted a gentle quality that doesn’t right away seem to fit the man in front of me.
I nod, and then I let my head hang. For a moment, I allow myself to be perplexed by his softness. Everything about him before today has been hard edges. But Luke is a fixer—I’ve witnessed it firsthand. He takes on others’ problems like they are his responsibility to manage.
My breath is ripped from my lungs when he suddenly takes hold of my chin. He tilts my face up until my eyes collide with his. “If this is too much, tell me, and I’ll shut it down. No mention of birthdays. Just a normal Sunday brunch.”
My heart squeezes. Or rather, it feels like something is clutching at the organ. His hand, maybe, trying to steal it right out of my chest.
“It’s not too much,” I say. I sound out of breath, like I’vejust finished a hundred metre dash. “Not anymore. It hurts a bit, but it’s a good kind of pain.”
The bittersweet melancholy of missing someone. The yearning for a past time and place where things were nowhere near as complicated. The kind of pain that affirms you of life.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.” I worry my lip as I inhale a steadying breath. It’s hard when he still holds me so close. “You were right. I just needed a minute.”
