Page 88 of One Summer

Hot after all that panic and running, I think about splashing my face and wrists with seawater. I haven’t run that fast since a very intense personal trainer started at my gym.

‘What’s the water like?’ I ask.

‘Why don’t you come in and see for yourself,’ he says, floating on his back and rising and falling with the swell of the waves.

I roll up my jeans, just past my ankle. ‘I’ll have a paddle.’

He dives into a small breaking wave and comes up with his hair plastered to his face. He flicks it back in one slick, well-practiced move, like a hero from a romcom movie.

‘Do you want me to look at your stings?’ I shout. ‘Make sure all the stingers are out?’

It’s crazy, but I think I want there to be a stinger in his skin, just so that I have a reason to touch him.

He takes his shirt off, revealing red welts over his neck and arms. But on his back, there’s something else. Old injuries, as if from some a terrible attack, and neat surgical scars, raised and inflamed from the wasp venom.

‘Wasps don’t leave stingers,’ he says. ‘Only bees do that.’

‘I’m really sorry,’ I say.

I know he realises what I’ve seen, and why I’m sorry for him.

‘Don’t be. I made my own choices,’ he says. ‘It’s on me.’

JUNE

Seventy-Two

Sandcastle

My finger itches to visit Max’s mudlarking channel. I haven’t checked in for a week – my record. He will have posted a new video by now. Maybe more than one.

I could just have a quick look… It feels suddenly impossible to not look, and I feel my jaw tense up with anxiety.

Caleb appears at the door, holding a new duck-shaped dog toy for Ted and a feathery cat toy for Nemo.

‘What’s wrong?’ he asks, immediately concerned by the sight of my face. Like he doesn’t expect me to have emotions. As if he’s found the Tin Man crying.

‘Bad break-up,’ I say. ‘I need to get over it, but I can’t seem to.’

He nods, as if he understands.

‘Would a walk help?’

‘It might.’

We walk Ted together down to the beach, and spot a gigantic sandcastle at the water’s edge, which Ted regards with deep suspicion. A huge group of tourists, who don’t appear to know each other, are working together to build walls in front of it. They’re trying to defend it from the tide. Ultimately pointless, but the effort gets them cooperating, cheering each other on. It feels like a moment.

I expect Caleb to turn aside from them, but he doesn’t. He gets straight in there, working with a group of men – wannabe engineers and construction specialists, the lot of them. He installs a moat to direct the first waves around the castle, diverting the damaging flood of seawater.

He’s rolled up his sleeves and I stare at the muscles of his forearms as he widens the channel with his bare hands.

Before, I assumed it was just the weed, skewing my perspective, but is Caleb actually hot?

No. I can’t think like this; Caleb is my annoying neighbour, not my love interest. If anyone’s my love interest, it’s going to be Joshua.

But maybe Caleb and I don’t have to be annoying neighbours to each other. After all, even Gilbert Blythe and Anne Shirley became friends.

I try not to think about how in the later books they got married and had kids.

---