Page 123 of Summertime Friends

How long has she been standing there?

They were trying to warn me and prevent me from pushing my foot farther into my mouth.

This can’t be happening.

Callum gives me a nod, a nudge to do something. I didn’t realize how frozen my entire body had gone.

“Emerson, I didn’t mean it that. . .”

I turn to look at her, but she’s already heading out of the entrance. In a rush, I push my chair back and chase after her. I was always the fastest out on the football pitch, and I know from running with her this week that she isn’t quick. I hope that I can catch her on the street before she’s gone forever.

If I don’t, that’s what she’ll be—gone forever.

Please, let me catch her.

“Emerson!”

The wind outside hits me, tussling my hair back. On the street, I swivel my head left and right to find her.

“Emerson!”

“Emerson!” I call out again.

To the right, I glimpse the top of her head. Even with the people on the street and the briefest snippet of her head, I know it’s her. I take off in her direction.

“Emerson, wait. Please!”

She’s moving quickly.

“Emerson!” My voice cracks.

She climbs into the backseat of a black car.

I know she can hear me. I’m close enough that there’s no way she isn’t hearing me call out her name repeatedly, begging her not to go.

Emerson doesn’t acknowledge me when she closes the door. The windows are tinted, and I can’t tell if she’s looking at me, but she probably is.

She’s probably glaring at me, on my knees and in tears like the idiot I am.

Emerson won’t shed any tears. Why should she? What I said was the nail in the coffin of our relationship and confirmed everything she feared.

50

EMERSON

Three Summers Ago

Every minute I spend with him rearranges my life. Which is ironic because in the years we’ve known each other, we’ve spent barely two months together. Sixty days. One thousand four hundred and forty hours. Eighty-six thousand four hundred minutes.

But what about the time we weren’t together?

That’s one million five hundred-seventy-six thousand eight-hundred minutes that he’s been changing me.

Everything I thought I believed and wanted is slowly changing. He’s changing it. My trajectory is shifting, spinning, and re-aiming, pointing at him as if Liam, loving him, being with him, everything with him is supposed to be the trajectory of my life.

It might have taken me this long to realize that.

But it only took five minutes to ruin it all.

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