Page 36 of Cruel Summer

So she did something that felt brave. She did something that felt like a risk.

More so than getting up on that platform at the zip line.

Because at least there she’d had a harness.

Something to catch her if she fell. There was nothing here.

Nothing but this. Nothing but them. And hundreds of people crowding the streets, but they didn’t matter.

How long had it been since nothing but the moment mattered?

It was a rush, her heart pounding fast, and she took his hand.

She felt him jolt, but he didn’t let go.

Instead, he let her lead him to a side street, where there were no people.

Where there was nothing but the lit gas lamps, casting an orange glow onto the bricks.

She could only just hear the chatter of the people around them over her heart pounding in her temples.

That was when she did it. She reached out and grabbed the collar of his shirt and pulled him up against her. At the same time, she stretched up as far as she could on her toes, used her free hand to curve her arm around his neck, and kissed him.

It was like fire. Like the sensation of striking a match against a rough surface. Igniting an instant and deadly flame that couldn’t be controlled or contained.

She had meant only to test the waters. A simple press of her lips against his, but there was nothing innocent about the contact.

Nothing at all. It was an uncontained, raging explosion.

The heat that she felt at the press, the firmness of his mouth on hers, was unlike anything she could remember.

It burned everything else away. She found herself releasing that clinging hold on his T-shirt and moving her hand to his shoulder, down the back of his shirt collar, shuddering as she felt his skin beneath her fingertips.

He was still for a moment, and then the kiss was his.

He wrapped his arms around her and pressed her against one of the brick walls in the alley, the hardness of his body a welcome sensation.

She had been waiting for this for three years. Maybe she had been waiting for it her whole life. This kind of passion. Not a frightened, desperate, teenage kind of passion, but something exceedingly adult. She knew what she wanted. She could imagine it. She needed it.

He parted his lips, his tongue sliding against hers, and a rough groan escaped her. She couldn’t control it. She wasn’t even certain if she wanted to. She wanted to surrender. She wanted this, and everything that could come with it. She wanted to be new. This was the way. This was it. Him.

She was wrapped in him, enveloped in his strength, his heat. And it wasn’t enough. She wanted more of him. She arched herself against him, desperate to take it there. To take it further. Faster.

They parted, for just a moment, their breath harsh and jagged. His blue eyes contained something wild in them. Something she had never seen before.

Logan. This was Logan. This man that she had known—in some capacity or another—since she was in high school.

This man she had watched love another woman.

Marry her. Bury her. Care for his beautiful daughter all on his own.

This man who had vexed her from the moment looking at him made her feel a tension, excitement, heat that she could not explain away.

She couldn’t put into a neat little box.

Because she was a married woman. The feelings that she’d had for him, they didn’t have a place.

Not in her world. Not in her scope of morality. Not in her life.

Now in this moment, she wondered if none of it mattered.

If it had been inevitable. From that moment their eyes had met on the lanai in Hawaii, and it had become clear, exceptionally clear, that there was more between them than there should be.

She had resisted this, but maybe it had been pointless.

Fruitless. A delay of something that had been destined.

She moved back in, desperate to touch him again, but he stopped her, holding her apart from him, his grip on her shoulders hard.

“Are you still going back to him?”

“I…”

“Answer me. Yes or no. Are you done with Will?”

She faltered. She had just accepted that there was a need to open herself up to the possibility that they wouldn’t end up together, but how could she say that definitively about the man she’d been married to for twenty-two years, in this moment, in an alley? How could she even think of Will?

It was like trying to swim through some kind of sensual fog. She was trying to accurately think of him. Think of his face, think of their life.

Will was the only man that she had ever kissed, but she hadn’t compared him and Logan when Logan’s mouth had touched hers.

It hadn’t even occurred to her to do so.

Because kissing Logan had been its own experience.

New and intense, and the only thing she wanted to live in.

She didn’t want to think about the future.

She just wanted to have him. She just wanted to have the experience.

“Logan, I… I don’t know. I… I feel like this was something that had to happen. This thing between us, it needs to happen, right? Because why else is it so… For so many years, why else has it been there? I think we need to see. I think it’s an experience we have to have.”

His face went hard. Cold. “I am not a zip line, Samantha. And I am not a tattoo. I am not an experience for you to have, or a rebellion against your mother, or a fuck-you to your husband. If you want me, you can’t want him. It’s that simple.”

She couldn’t speak. Part of it was out of fury, fury that he was holding this over her head right now, when she had been living in the moment, and he wasn’t letting her have that.

And fear. Because how could she promise him something like that when she didn’t know if it was true?

She had no idea what she wanted. She had no idea where this summer was going to take her, and it had been a step to let herself not know.

He was asking for certainty. She didn’t want certainty right now.

She wanted to revel in not knowing. She wanted to follow whatever path she saw. He wasn’t being fair.

“What? You can hook up with any random woman in a bar, but you can’t hook up with me?

I have to be able to give you answers? Do you ask the twenty-eight-year-olds that you take back home with you at night what they want for their future?

Or is that just something you’ve reserved for me, because you think that my life should just be hard? ”

“You’re not them. You’re you. You know that. Don’t fucking insult me.”

“Fine, then, what about you? You get all this time, all this space to sort out your life without your marriage, but I can’t be uncertain?”

“Don’t.”

He turned away from her and started to walk away.

She knew that she was safe. She didn’t need him to guide her back to the hotel that was only a few blocks away, especially not with all these people around.

So she didn’t follow him. She just stood there.

Marinating in her hurt. In her anger. In the absolute disaster of that moment.

She had put herself out there. She had thrown her body against his.

Had shown him how attracted she was to him.

It was embarrassing. Humiliating. He didn’t seem to care.

He was demanding more things of her. Nothing she did was right for him. Good enough for him.

Her denial wasn’t right. Flinging herself headlong into it wasn’t right.

She refused to go back to the hotel. She wandered around the crowded streets until she couldn’t decide if she was ready to cry or ready to fall asleep, went to an Italian bakery, waited in an endless line and got herself an Italian pastry with a name she couldn’t pronounce.

The man who owned the bakery had made her try, and then had laughed at her, though not unkindly. He had given her two for her trouble.

She took the pastries back to her room, and she did not text Logan.

Instead she ate them in bed with an ill-advised cup of coffee, and then stayed up far too late reading an e-book on her phone.

She wanted to write down some of her feelings, her fantasies, her fears.

The feverish idiocy that had overtaken her when she’d kissed that man.

But she had determined that she wasn’t going to write about this.

Anyway, she didn’t really want to remember it. She felt awful. Hollowed out and small. An absolute wreck of a person. This summer was a disaster, and so was she.

Why would she hasten to commemorate that? She wouldn’t. That was the simple answer.

When she woke up in the morning, very late, she went to Logan’s room and knocked on the door. She decided that she needed to try and talk to him about what happened, because if she didn’t, then she was just…reverting.

Reverting for a while was understandable. Fine even. A few hours of pastry and hiding was acceptable. But now she needed to be an adult.

Except he didn’t answer.

She texted him and didn’t get a response.

She went to the reception desk at the hotel.

“Can I leave a message for Logan Martin? In room 380?”

“Oh,” the woman said, tapping at the computer for a second. “It appears that Mr. Martin checked out at about six o’clock this morning.”

She laughed. She couldn’t help it.

She picked up her phone and typed in two words: fucking coward.