Page 37 of Summer Skin

TWENTY MINUTES LATERhe bursts into Chase’s bedroom, throwing himself at the other man as though a bomb’s about to take down the entire house.

“What?” Chase asks, cupping Aven’s face and trying to get a look at him. “What’s going on, sunshine?”

“You left me a note!” Aven wails.

Chase’s forehead wrinkles. “A note?”

A deep breath in, and then, “When you signed with Paranormal Romance, when you left the island, you wrote me a goodbye letter.”

“Right,” Chase says, stiffening in his arms. “So?”

“So?” Aven’s brows stretch for the sky. “So?”

Chase scrubs a hand over his face. “You really want to talk about this now?”

“Hell yes, I want to talk about this now!” Aven scrambles up, pulling the letter from his back pocket and tossing it onto the bed. “Because I only now read what you had to say for the first time.”

Chase’s hand flutters over the paper, it’s like he’s seeing a ghost. “You kept my letter? After all these years?”

“Babe, you’re not hearing me,” Aven says slowly, rubbing at the back of his neck. “My mom brought over a box of shit from my bedroom, she’s letting my dad turn the room into a zoo for wooden birds, but never mind—our notebook was inside.”

“I’ve come to think of it more as a songwriting journal than a notebook,” Chase points out.

Ignoring the purely pedantic phrasing, Aven carries on. “I never once opened the writing notebook—”

“Journal—”

“—after you left. It would have felt like punching myself in the gut.”

There are a few long beats of silence, and Aven lets them stretch on as Chase clues in to what he’s been trying to say all along.

“You mean …” Chase begins, trailing off like he must be reading this wrong.

“Yeah,” Aven says, drawing the word out. “What you’re thinking is exactly what I’m trying to tell you—I had no idea you asked to meet me on July 15th, the summer after you left. Did you ... Chase did you wait for me? At the old mill where we first kissed?”

He nods slowly. “I waited for hours that night, but I knew …”

“Knew what?”

“That it’d been a year. That you’d probably moved on.”

“I hadn’t.”

“You never read the letter,” Chase says, a little dazed. “You never knew why I left.” The full realization settles in of what Aven must have suffered through. “Oh jesus, Aven,” he groans mournfully. “I’m so sorry. I left the letter peeking out of the journal, I thought for sure …” His hands go to his face, all color draining from his cheeks.

An instinct to comfort kicks in, but Aven’s frustrated as hell. An avalanche of pain could have been avoided with one conversation. “Why couldn’t you say just say these things to my face?” he wonders. “I had no friggin’ clue you thought you were doing this as a way for us to be together. I thought you … fuck, Chase, I thought you’d been sleeping with Trent the entire time we were together.”

Chase’s head jerks back like he’s been slapped.

“You made me doubt myself.” Aven’s brows draw together. “And you made me doubt the love we shared. Why couldn’t you tell me how you were feeling before you left?”

“Aven—”

“Did you not trust me?”

“I trusted you.” Chase shakes his head. “But I didn’t trust myself to not completely break if you tried to talk me out of it. And at the time, it was the only way I could see us working out. I would have risked anything to be with you, would have even risked losing you if it paid off in the end.”

“But you couldn’t risk saying goodbye?”

“I did say goodbye. In the letter.”

“That you hid inside a notebook, Chase.”

His face crumbles into this mix of agony and regret, and he doesn’t have an answer for that.

“Okay, okay, okay, baby. Alright.” Aven puts a finger beneath Chase’s chin, lifting it up. “Look, I wish you’d been able to talk to me. To spare both of us these miserable years apart. I wish I’d gotten the letter so you weren’t left on that beach waiting for me all night. But that shit is all dead in the past, and I only need to know if you can be honest with me now.”

Chase blinks back at him, a faraway look in his eyes.

“You’re not hearing me.”

“I am, Aven,” he promises. “But it’s a lot to take in at once.”

“Can you … Chase, I need you to get that it’s okay to tell me what you’re going through. To ask me for what you want. Otherwise,” he points back and forth between the two of them, “this long-distance thing we’re planning on? It’s never going to work. Are you going to be able to do that?”

“I don’t … I don’t know how to answer that,” he says weakly. “Aven, I need some space. Everything I thought I knew about our break-up has shattered and I need a second to catch up. I’m trying, here. Please?”

Aven exhales in understanding. “Yeah, yes. Of course. Just … find me when you’re ready.”

***

Passing through the living room on his journey upstairs to spend his time in healthy ways, such as tearing his hair out, Aven finds Ellie sitting cross-legged on the couch doing tarot, an old fashioned, paper-rolled joint in one hand. She’s wearing Ben’s Sasquatches Do It Better t-shirt, and a pair of boxers that ride low on her hips, and nothing else.

“Pants are a thing,” he tells her with a scowl.

“You don’t need to explain clothing to me, Aven Sinclair.” The way she says his name sounds musical. He still can’t forget the chills he got watching her sing, every time he hears her voice.

“What are you doing out here?” he asks, plopping down next to her on the couch. It’s been such an emotionally draining night, but he can’t shake the tug under his skin begging him not to be by himself right now.

“Ben’s asleep.” She blows a thin stream of smoke up into the air.

Curiosity forms over why she doesn’t wander home if Ben’s gone to bed, but she’s been spending more and more nights over here anyway. “I didn’t know you smoked,” he says, making pointless conversation.

She blows a perfectly formed ring in his direction like they’re chilling together at a Willie Nelson concert. “I don’t.”

“Obviously.”

She prods him with the tip of her big toe, a sharp jab into the meat of his thigh. “Late night, big worries?” she asks.

He crosses his arms over his chest, chewing at his bottom lip. Half of his mind is stuck in the past, fervently wishing he’d known about the letter, and the other half can’t quit racing ahead, anguished over what’s to come.

“If you could jump through time to any point in your past or future, which would you choose?”

She stares over at him, taking a few seconds. “Would I have to stay there forever?”

“No. But you can have one whole day.”

“Past,” she answers, no hesitation.

“Why?”

She turns a card over, showing him the 13th Major Arcana, Death. “Someone I want to hang the moon with one last time.”

Aven leans towards her a little, the smell of sweet smoke filling the air. “It’s hard to lose people,” he agrees.

The corner of her mouth lifts, reading his play at getting her to open up. “Chase is leaving soon. That why you’re really sitting here with me?”

He gives her a cautious smile. “Ellie.”

“Hmm?”

“I know … we sort of got off on the wrong foot—”

“That’s not how it went.” She flicks ash into a can of Cherry Coke. “I liked you. But you were suspicious of me. So, you started a war you could never win.”

“Okay, fine.” He lets out a small huff of air. “If that’s how you see it. But I want to ask—can I trust you? If I spill my guts, can you keep it to yourself?”

She slides her bare feet beneath his thigh, wiggling her toes. “I’m not a teller of secrets,” she says. “If that’s what you mean.”

He believes her. Ellie is the master of keeping things to herself. He taps his thumb against the arm of the couch for a few beats, then, “I love him,” he blurts out.

She nods at him. “You mean Chase.”

“No, it’s the Easter Bunny.”

She lifts a foot from beneath him to deliver a quick poke into his side with lavender painted toenails.

“Ow!” he complains, rubbing at the spot. “But anyway, yeah. I mean Chase.”

Ellie stubs out the joint on the lid of the Coke can, considering him. “You’ve been in love with him for a long time.”

“Since high school.”

“First love?” she wonders.

“Oh. Well.” He blinks. “Only love.”

“Ouch.”

“I feel like … like I’m losing him all over again. Like all of the pain I stuffed so deep down is going to spill out and I have no fucking clue how I’m going to deal with it this time around. I can’t go back to getting lost in nameless bodies, and bars, I don’t want that. I want him. I want Chase.”

With a sudden start, he realizes there are tears tracing the lines of his face.

“I don’t want to go through my life without him.”

Ellie curls forward, smoothing a hand across his back. “I’m sorry,” she says, in a tone so gentle it’s hard to believe it came from the same girl who once replaced the framed photo of him and Andi on his nightstand with a picture of Pennywise the Dancing Clown from It. Try waking up to that after a long night with tequila.

“It hurts,” he admits out loud, his voice raw.

“I know.”

She runs her fingers through his hair, humming softly under her breath. A fae song to the wind. It’s oddly the most comforting thing he can imagine in this moment, the beat of his heart slowing down to match the rhythm of her lullaby.

“Thank you,” he tells her, once he’s solidly back on earth.

Ellie slides away without comment, picking up her tarot cards and casually shuffling the deck, as if the emotions they experienced together were never there. But it’s too late, he felt the tenderness of her heart, and it’s a heart that’s been as bruised as his own.

She’s lost someone before.

“Someone left you?” It slips out before he can catch it.

She watches him with those big, unblinking cat eyes of hers. “Nobody dumps me. I leave first.”

“Okay,” he quickly agrees.

But he knows he’s not wrong. Someone’s damaged her greatly.

She settles back into a corner of the couch. “Have you asked him to stay?”

“Nope.” It’s not that he hasn’t thought about that very thing a thousand times a day. But he can’t let his own selfish desires stand in the way of the significant career Chase has carved out for himself.

“Why on earth not?” Her brow wrinkles. “You think he doesn’t feel the same?”

“It’s not that. More that he’d say yes to please me and then regret it. I can’t ask him to stay on my account. Slither Fox is a big deal and we’re talking more money on this tour than I’ll ever make playing music in my lifetime. To ask him to give that up for me … we’re still so young. There’s time for us later on.”

It’s what he keeps telling himself. That Chase should make as much money and as much of a name for himself as he can, and then, in a few years, they can revisit what it would look like to be in the same place at the same time.

“You’re aware there are other things in life other than money.” She cuts the deck of cards. “Or why don’t you go with him?”

He scoffs. “And what, trail around the world after Chase like some sort of groupie? When I can’t manage to make it in this industry on my own? Give up my room here only to have nowhere to land once Chase figures out having me following him around like his personal lap dog is a plan that sucks dirty ass? It’d be fucked all the way up.”

“Don’t,” she tells him. “Don’t give up on what you want. You’ll find a way to be together. That boy’s never going to let you go twice.”

“Why do you say that?”

She taps the card in her hand, smiling. “The Lovers,” she says, facing it in his direction.

Honestly, Aven has no clue about tarot. “What does that mean?”

“It means everything is going to be more than alright.” Pushing up from the couch, she places the card in his hand. “Goodnight, Aven,” she says, swaying down the hallway towards Ben.

The funny thing is, as Aven watches her go, he’s not sure if she pulled the card for him or for herself.