“What would it be like?” he asked.
We never said I love you . We said See you in June. We never fought about the future. We fought about who finished the good coffee, who left the screen door unlatched, whether the tide was high enough for swimming. We kept it small. We kept it safe.
“We’ll always have summer,” he said. We-ll Always Have Summer
I looked at him. The candle on the table made his eyes look like two dark, warm ponds.
And there it was. The three words that aren’t those three words, but might as well be a knife. “What would it be like
He turned off the flame. The silence that followed was the loudest sound of the whole summer—louder than the Fourth of July fireworks over the inlet, louder than the gulls fighting over a crab shell. He set the pot aside and leaned against the sink, wiping his hands on a dishrag that used to be a towel.
“If I stay,” I said, “it can’t be like this.” We never fought about the future
Or so I told myself.
“You know I can’t,” I said.
Leo was standing at the stove, stirring a pot of mussels he’d pulled off the rocks that morning. His shoulders were pink from three days without a shirt, and a curl of steam stuck to his temple. The cabin—his grandmother’s cabin, the one we’d been stealing for ten years—smelled of garlic, tide, and the particular melancholy of August 31st.
My throat closed. Outside, the light was turning gold and then amber and then the particular bruised violet that only happens over water. A motorboat puttered somewhere far off—someone’s father, someone’s husband, someone who knew exactly where home was.