Page 63 of The Summer I First Saw You
I raise a brow. “You’ve never eaten naked?”
He raises a brow right back. “Youhave?”His eyes are dark. I suspect he won’t be happy with my answer.
I lean over the sushi to kiss him. “Not with anyone who made me come three times first.”
“Well, I guess there’s that,” he grumbles. “It had better not have been with the guy you dated at age fourteen.”
I laugh. “It was not. And please don’t tell me you’re jealous of a high school senior I dated seven years ago.”
His grin is sheepish. “It’s a guy thing. We always want to believe we’re the first to land somewhere.”
“It’s apeoplething, not a guy thing. But it would be pretty hard for me to believe I was your first when I know the last person you were with. Or…was she?” I wince at the line of questioning I’ve introduced—I’m not sure I want the answer—but persist with it anyway. “Did you not even have, like, a one-night stand?”
He blows out a breath. “I thought about it. I thought about it alot. But I knew I was going to be a little fucked up over the divorce for a while, so I didn’t want to give someone the wrong idea.”
“The wrong idea?”
He shrugs. “The impression that it meant something.”
I swallow and pretend I’m focused on swirling wasabi into my soy sauce so he doesn’t notice how much that hurt. It’s notsupposedto hurt. We both know this will end in August, and I guess that’s the perfect situation for him: time-limited, without expectations.
But I’d thought he was going to be the one guy I didn’t have to play a role for, and it isn’t true.
I’m playing the role of someone who doesn’t mind that this is going to end, and I do.
I already do.
33
HARRISON
The following weekend, the waves are mush, and Daisy talks me into going for a run instead of surfing.
She gets an ice cream cone once we reach the wharf, and we walk along the beach. It pisses me off, the way men look at her when she walks past. I want to announce to every last one of them that she’s taken, which is a problem because she’s not.
She needs those post-college years to make the same dumb mistakes I did, to figure out what she actually wants from life. The person you are at twenty-one is entirely different from the person you’ll be a decade later. She can’t possibly know what she’ll want by then.
“You know what you need in your dumb mansion?” she asks, licking her ice cream cone.
“The dumb mansion where you live for free?”
She gives me a lopsided grin. “Yes, that’s the dumb mansion I was referring to. A sauna.”
“Why the fuck would I get a sauna?” I ask, my hand linking with hers. “I hate saunas.”
“They’re good for your quality of sleep, which is highly correlated with longevity.”
“I’m too young to worry about how long I’m going to live,” I reply. “I’d say the last few years felt a littletoolong.”
She elbows me. “Don’t say that.”
I swoop her up in my arms. “You’re a very violent little thing, did you know that?”
She looks up at me from beneath her lashes and takes another lick. “I’m pretty sure you like it when I’m violent. I’m pretty sure what made you come so hard last night was my nails on your back.”
“I think we should put that to the test,” I begin, but before I can say another word, there are two children running at us, one of them shouting my name.
I set Daisy down so quickly that she stumbles and drops her cone into the sand.
