Page 60 of Forever Summer

“Did I wake you?”

I sat up straight in bed, pulling the phone away from my ear to look at the screen, and sure enough I wasn’t hallucinating. “Tess?”

“What, were you expecting Megsy?” Tess joked. It was a good sign to hear the lightness in her voice.

“Oh God, no,” I said, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

“Listen,” we both said at the exact same time, that had us both laughing.

“You go,” Tess said.

“Listen, I’m sorry, I should have told you about the whole Adam thing. I was just, I don’t know, in denial, I guess.”

“I’m sorry too. I am the last person that should be lecturing anyone from keeping secrets, and Adam told me about last night.”

“WHAT?”

He did what?

“He said that he told you about his mum.”

My shoulders physically slumped. “Oh, yeah.”

That!

I threw myself onto my back, relief washing over me.

“Which is so good, everything out on the table now. No more secrets.”

I grimaced, hearing Tess’s words.

Yeah, no more secrets.

“Yeah, um, about that,” I said.

“Whaaat? Please don’t tell me Sean and Amy have organised a surprise wedding; that’s where I do draw the line.”

I laughed, not putting it completely past them. “No, this is a whole other kind of crazy.”

“Should I be sitting down?”

“I think so.”

I didn’t know how Tess would take it, so the long, drawn-out silence on the other end of the phone wasn’t a complete shock.

“You still there?”

“Huh? Oh yeah, sorry. Just processing.”

“Take your time,” I said, pacing back and forth in my bedroom, trying not to look for too long at my bed, because every single time I did a sordid flashback would appear in my vision. I didn’t have time to think about that.

“I mean, not that it changes anything. It was just something that happened.”

Multiple times.

“I mean, everything is as it was: zero weirdness.”

Kind of. Sort of.

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