Page 15 of Hot Summer

You would’ve thought they were in some kind of Olympic sprinting competition to get back to the garden. Sienna paused only long enough to kick her shoes off—“I’m going to trip and die if I keep running in these things”—and the other girls followed suit, shoes flying wildly across the bedroom as they stumbled toward their phones. Ada managed to get her shoes off first and grabbed her phone and Cas’s off the bedside table separating their beds. Ada tossed the phone to Cas, howling with laughter as Cas shrieked and turned away, her phone falling with a clatter to the floor.

“You’re such a baby,” Ada said as she slid past Cas toward the garden door. “It’s a phone, not a spider.”

“I’ve never been good at having things fly toward my face,” Cas said, snatching her phone off the ground.

“Good luck on this show then, mate.”

Things were still high energy when Cas and Ada made their way back into the garden. A few of the boys were jostling each other in the grass, kicking around some ball one of them had found, and Sienna and Femi were sitting on the pool deck, laughing their heads off about something. At the sound of their footsteps, Sienna turned around, her smile growing when she spotted Cas and Ada on the stairs.

“Hey!” She patted the edge of the chair she was sharing with Femi. “Come sit with us!”

Cas grabbed a seat on the pool lounger next to Sienna and Femi, careful to leave enough space for Ada to join her.

“We were talking about what we want in a relationship,” Sienna said.

Femi raised an eyebrow. “Were we?”

“We were about to be,” Sienna said. She smiled at Femi, and the corner of his lip twitched.

“Okay, then. What are you looking for?”

“I want something serious,” Sienna said. “I want to be able to have fun with them, I want us to have the same goals, and they need to be someone I can introduce to my mum. And they should be someone she actually likes this time... haven’t been great on that front.”

Cas and Ada laughed, but there was a new softness in Femi’s expression that hadn’t been there a few moments before. “That’s what I want, too. Someone who makes me laugh and that I can bring home to my mum and sisters.”

Christ, she was going to sound like such a monster compared to these people.

It wasn’t that Cas hadn’t dreamed—once—of meeting someone who she could introduce to her friends, who were her true family by any meaningful definition of the word. She just knew well enough now that that introduction wasn’t going to make someone stick around if they didn’t want to.

“I want a laugh and everything, but really, I want someone that I can trust,” Ada said. She turned and looked at Cas as she said it, and there it was again, that rush that ran straight through Cas’s middle. “And someone who cares enough to notice things, you know? There’s been a serious lack of both in my last few relationships and it’s getting exhausting.”

Cas knew she was supposed to speak up next, but there was no way for her to answer this question honestly and not seem like a complete arsehole. I’m not looking for anything serious was the truest answer, but to say that out loud? She might as well sign her death warrant with the public herself.

“I...” Cas shifted so she could lean back on her hands, startling when she realized her hand had brushed up against Ada’s hip. Ada muttered a little “sorry” and Cas looked up to tell her she didn’t need to apologize, when their gazes caught.

“I guess, I want trust, too.” Cas was speaking to the group, but her eyes were locked with Ada’s. Focused on the way Ada’s dark brown eyes seemed liquid, golden in the sunshine. “Trust is hard to come by, you know, I’ve—”

She barely caught the words before they came tumbling out of her mouth. She wasn’t ready to reveal all this, not until she could find a way to talk about it that didn’t make it sound like she was still desperately recovering from the one time that she’d fallen in love. She supposed that there was no way to make it sound “not sad,” because it was, in fact, incredibly sad that she was still recovering after someone broke her heart so many years ago.

It wasn’t that she was still in love with Saoirse. Cas didn’t even spend any time thinking about her. They’d broken up years ago; Cas had long since moved on, because there was no other choice when Saoirse had decided to move, permanently, back to Ireland. It was just that if Cas believed that you learn lessons from every relationship—and Cas did believe that—it made sense that the lesson she learned had stuck with her.

That getting attached to people before you knew that they were going to stick around was dangerous. And you could never predict, even when you’d made a commitment, that anyone would stick around, so what was the point in getting attached at all?

Her friends thought it was a desperately sad way to live, but Cas had a good time. She had a lot of great sex, had some really amazing first dates, and she hadn’t had her heart broken once in the last four years.

She could feel the words on the tip of her tongue, begging to be said. It would be good to let the audience see this about her. They’d feel like they knew her better, like they had something to root for. Cas finally “overcoming” her trust issues, finally “finding love”... it would be a story for the ages.

But she couldn’t talk about it yet. It was too much, too messy, and to excavate it now...

The silence sat, thick, between them all for a beat before Ada turned to look at Sienna.

“I’m really hoping that I find someone here,” Ada continued easily, as though Cas’s almost confession had never happened. “I love the success stories.”

Finally, something Cas could talk about without putting her foot in her mouth.

“The Yousefs and Amanis,” Cas said, and Ada nodded.

“They never would have met if it weren’t for this show, and there’s something about that that I think is really just... maybe ‘magical’ is dramatic, but really nice.”

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