Page 75 of The Book of Summer

Evan leans in for a hug. Bess startles as if he’d grabbed her breast. Her hands fly up and she accidentally punches herself in the face.

“Don’t hurt yourself,” Evan says.

“Sorry, it’s just…” Bess tries to find the words. “Like I said. I’m ‘off.’”

“Stop kidding yourself. You’re more ‘on’ than you know. After all, you’re Bess Codman.”

“DoctorBess Codman,” she says, kidding, though it comes out sounding pompous as hell.

Thank God Evan’s dad isn’t around. Chappy Mayhew would use this as exhibit A as to why every single person in the Codman family is a Summer Person to the core.

“Yes, well,” Evan says with a smirk. “The doctor part goes without saying.”

He has enough manners to let her obnoxiousness dissolve into the gloom.

“I’m shocked you can still look me in the eye,” Bess says. “After everything I’ve told you. I’m such a wreck.”

“Everyone’s a wreck,” Evan says. “Most are way worse than you. Admittedly, you’ve been through some tough shit. But it’s temporary. You’ll move on from here. Bess Codman can do anything. She knows what she wants and goes after it.”

“Let’s agree to disagree.”

“The girl I knew,” Evan says. “The girl who beguiled a poor, young local with her beauty and smarts, the one who scrambled him up for years—”

“Gimme a break!” Bess chirps. “If anything, I was the one mixed up.”

“The girl I knew also had a hard time figuring out when to shut the hell up and listen.”

Evan gives one of his earth-cracking smiles.

“And she always understood exactly what she wanted, even when she couldn’t say it.”

Evan reaches out and places both hands, gently, on her shoulders. He pulls Bess in and gives her a whisper of a kiss on the forehead, another on her nose. Bess tilts imperceptibly forward, waiting and hungry for a third.

“Good night, Lizzy C.,” he says, stopping at just the two. “It’s great to have you back.”

Bess watches as Evan returns to his car and drives away. She half expects him to pull into Chappy’s drive, his old home.

Insides churning with some unsavory mix of giddiness and flat-out insecurity, Bess shuffles through the front door of Cliff House, which she’d left unlocked, secretly counting on a robbery. It’d be one way to move all that junk.

“Evan Mayhew, huh?” Cissy says, emerging in the hallway with a cocktail in one hand, a rolled-up yoga mat in the other. “That explains where you’ve been all night.”

“WhereI’vebeen?”

Bess wishes her heart would stop pounding to this great degree.

“Well, Evan’s not too bad,” Cissy says. “At least compared to that father of his. He’s crazy handsome and a real ladies’ man, from the sounds of it. I’m referring to Evan. Because Chappy…”

Cissy makes a face.

“I’m not really interested—”

“Kinda assumed you’d gotten him out of your system in high school.” Cissy sighs. “Don’t get any ideas, missy. You’re not permitted to marry anyone with the last name Mayhew.”

“Who said anything about marriage? And anyway, nothing’s going on.”

“He has a fairly serious girlfriend, far as I know.”

“Good for him,” Bess says as her insides collapse at the thought.