Page 18 of Summer Romance
Ethan pushes the gate open just wide enough for us to get through, and I grab his arm. “Again, single mom. Not really up for prison time.”
“We’ll be fine.” He’s looking down at me and it feels like he’s daring me to follow him. Daring me to do something incredibly reckless that might end up wonderful. I notice I’m still holding on to his arm and quickly let go.
“Seriously. Look. There are two security cameras, one on each side.” I wave at them for good measure. “Let’s just get out of here.”
“I really want you to come with me. My big apology isn’t going to land right if you’re not there.” His tone is light,but his eyes are pleading with me. “Would it make you feel better to know that when I was sixteen, I reoriented those security cameras so that they miss the exact spot where we’re standing?”
“You did not.”
“Look at them.” And I do. They’re trained on the edges of the gate.
“No one’s ever noticed?”
“Well, no one’s ever moved them back. See? I’m a problem solver. Come on.”
We push through the gate and close it behind us and let the dogs run ahead down the path. We turn into a row of maple trees that touch branches overhead so that the path is darker but speckled in sunlight. I stop and look up at the canopy. I want to spin around in that space. I want to lie down in the path and be speckled myself. I turn and he is watching me, a smile on his face.
“It’s amazing,” I say.
As we walk through the leafy tunnel of green, the water appears in the distance. Our dogs race ahead and then back. I thought I’d seen every corner of Beechwood, like I’d worn this place out until it was threadbare. I know every street, and I know most of the people. I have never seen this patch of heaven before.
When we emerge from the trees, we are at the water. There’s a small crescent of beach maybe twenty feet wide, covered in white sand and shells. We are enclosed on both sides by tall beach grasses. The sky is a dark July blue, and ahead of us is a perfect view of the Manhattan skyline.
“Wow,” I say. Because,wow. “This is beautiful. I’ve never seen it from here. I knew the city was right there, but I’ve never…wow.”
I turn to him and he’s watching me take this in. “Yes, beautiful,” he says.
We sit down at the center of the crescent of beach, and I feel like we are two pearls in the center of an oyster. We are close enough to the lapping waves that I can feel the cool air off the water on my legs, but we’re not close enough to get wet. The sun is warm on my face, and the only sounds I hear are gulls, the waves, and the splashing of dog feet.
“Did you and your friends hang out here in high school?” I ask.
“I usually came by myself.”
I still can’t picture this man being an awkward teenager. “And what did you do?”
He nods at the skyline in the distance. “I daydreamed about getting out of here. So escape fantasies mostly.”
“I had those too.” He turns to me as if he wants to hear my escape fantasies. “I just wanted to go and become my own person.” I needed to go out and see who I was separate from my mom. I wanted to know I could take care of myself.
“You were always your own person, Ali.” He’s looking out at the water and then turns back to me. “I remember one Halloween you and your friends came into the diner for late-night pancakes. Your friends were a sexy nurse, a sexy vampire, a sexy cat, and you were a pumpkin. Do you remember that?”
“I do.”
“Not a sexy pumpkin either. Like a big orange one witha black toothy grin. I just remember thinking you were the coolest girl ever.”
I love hearing this. I love that I was once that person and that someone remembers. I want to tell him about how my mom convinced the tailor at the dry cleaner’s downstairs to let her use his sewing machine for that pumpkin, but I don’t. I’m not good at mentioning my mom casually—my voice always breaks.
“So was the city what you hoped?” he asks.
“Yep. I went and got a grown-up job and everything. Accounting. It was like organizing someone’s mudroom times a thousand. I loved it.”
“Why’d you come back?”
“It’s kind of a long story. I was dating Pete for about a year and got pregnant, so we got married. I kind of panicked because Greer was born prematurely, and I quit my job. And then I had Iris a year later. I thought coming back here might make my life easier, with my mom here to help.”
“That wasn’t that long of a story,” he says.
I smile at the water. “I guess not.”
