Page 26 of The Summer You Were Mine

“Oh,” she said.

Cris stopped walking, thinking she was going to say something else. She didn’t.

“Are you busy? Can I talk to you?” he asked, edging forward.

She didn’t turn toward him but waved her hand at the tiny space on the bench next to her and her enormous tote bag.

He sat down and followed her gaze out over the marina.

The glossy boats bobbed in the shimmering water, their masts tilting back and forth.

The clanking of the halyards joined the seagulls crying out as they dipped across the water in search of snacks.

A breeze ruffled the hem of Ellie’s dress, exposing a few inches of tanned thigh.

His vision blurred. “I know that I am not making this easy, and I am sorry.” He paused, turning to face her.

“No, actually, you’re making this very easy,” she said after a second or two. “It turns out you are exactly what I figured you might be from the beginning. It’s great for me because I can still say my initial instincts were correct.”

“What do you mean? What happened to all of that ‘open mind’ stuff?”

“Well, I was wrong.”

“Good, that means we can fix it.”

“No. I mean that I was wrong to think I could do this. I can’t.

That doesn’t mean I won’t do the interview.

It means that I will accept the facts for what they are and stop trying to like you.

If people had to like their interviewees in order to get a good interview, Christiane Amanpour would have been out of a job long ago. ”

“Wait a minute, wait a minute,” Cris said, holding up his hands to halt the conversation.

Was it weirder that she was trying to like him?

Or that she was trying to like him but failed?

“Look, I know I haven’t always been the best person, but I am trying to be better.

Do you know what I mean?” He leaned over slightly, attempting to get her attention, but she stayed staring at the boats.

“Ellie. Can you look at me for one second?”

“I don’t need to look at you to understand what you are saying.”

“Okay, fine. But I need you to look at me at some point, because I am not as good as you at understanding someone without seeing their face,” he said.

Ellie turned slowly, and he was so grateful she didn’t have sunglasses on, even though it made her squint in the midday light.

Her eyes blazed that honey-brown color he knew so well.

Even if he wasn’t supposed to know her, he knew there were more dark-brown flecks in her right eye than her left.

“I know I deserved that email all those years ago. I know you were right to cut things off between us. You said all of those things about me needing time even though I didn’t know it.

And you were right. But I should have never accepted it. I should have fought you.”

“Fought me? For what? You just said half an hour ago that you follow through on everything important in your life. So I know where I stand—where I stood.”

“No. You don’t. And that’s my fault. I should have told you how I really felt. I was scared and stupid. I just couldn’t figure out what to do with you,” he said, flinching at how ridiculous his teenage thoughts sounded coming out of his thirty-two-year-old mouth.

“What to do with me? We were friends first. You could have at least been a friend,” she said.

“I don’t know if I understood how to be just your friend after that summer,” he said.

It was the truth. But even he knew that wasn’t good enough.

“The night I saw you at the ESPYs—I was a mess after that. I could barely read the teleprompter, and I sweated right through my suit. I came back to find you after that, but you were gone.”

“I left. I told Omar I was getting a migraine and I got a cab back to my hotel. I felt like such an idiot.”

“Why did you feel like an idiot? I was the idiot!”

“I’m the one who let a ten-year-old kiss kill me. Do you want to know the worst part? I didn’t even realize how much it hurt until I saw you. So I guess we can both be idiots.”

Their kiss that summer was tattooed on his brain.

It was pouring rain and the Ping-Pong table seemed like the only option for shelter.

Her lips were warm, but her nose was cold.

Kissing her felt so good that it confused him, almost as if the feeling of excitement in his heart was a betrayal of the heavy rules of mourning that had hung over him for months.

But he did it anyway and would have stayed there all night if the storm hadn’t blown out as quickly as it blew in.

That feeling stayed with him from the summer clear through his first semester, and he’d wanted to see her, too.

Then he choked at the meet. Again. Gio had called to him outside the locker room after he’d exited with his head down, and he was actually surprised to see her standing there.

He had blocked her visit out somehow in the mix of fear and sadness and anger.

He’d awkwardly hugged her hello, and she hugged back. He hadn’t known what to say.

“That kiss didn’t make us idiots.”

“Then what did it make us?” She glared at him.

“I don’t know—emotional?”

“A momentary delusion, apparently! That night after your meet, I pulled out my phone to look at our messages, because for a minute I thought I imagined them. And I saw you get into that car with those guys and the booze in the back parking lot. I hadn’t even left yet, and you were already partying.

My heart was all gas, no brakes, but I trusted you.

And I trusted you until I watched you get into that car.

Then there I was, alone in a stupid hotel room, until I couldn’t stand it and ended up at Palo Alto Creamery to eat a slice of blueberry pie.

By myself! I was crushed. It was hard enough, you know?

Do you know what it took me to convince myself that it wasn’t a huge risk to have real feelings for you?

But I should have given you time. You were not ready, and I pushed you. ”

He closed his eyes, mortified. It was worse than what he had thought.

He didn’t know that she’d seen him. He remembered how wrong that night went, the feeling he’d had when his teammate Jacob said they had a handle of bourbon and a thirty-pack of beer waiting in his car.

It was like being on the edge of a cliff, feeling the edge give way and doing nothing to stop the fall.

He’d been too much of a coward to face anything or anyone, least of all himself.

“Ellie, I swear I didn’t know what I was doing.

I wanted to not think. And I was afraid, okay?

I didn’t trust myself to take care of you, of us.

After that, I read your email and figured it was better that you ended things.

You were so clear, so resolved. I never thought I would have a single chance to change your mind.

I wasn’t even sure if I should. I don’t know how to tell you how sorry I am that it happened that way, how sorry I always will be.

I never would have let you eat blueberry pie alone. I loved… pie.”

“I thought I was doing you a favor! Myself a favor. And you know what? You could hate pie. You could love pie. You could be a pie. What do I know? And now I have to find a way to tell the world nice things about you, and all I have to go on is a couple of walkathons and a cool mom.”

He did make mistakes, all the ones she mentioned and several more she didn’t know about.

Anyone who saw him on a daily basis would have known that he was hanging on by a thread after Ale died.

No one who knew him would have counted on anything he said or did at that moment.

But that was no excuse. He’d run away from her back then.

He ran away from his own career by taking that supplement.

He was trying to run away from sharing who he was right now.

How long was he going to keep hiding from things that were uncomfortable?

His phone rang. It was an American number with a San Francisco area code, and he was pretty sure he knew what it was.

This was the absolute worst timing to get the best news.

“I have to take this. Please. I’ll explain.

I promise. But I have to take this,” he said.

He slid his finger across the screen and began to walk toward the older section of the lungomare .

“Sure,” said Ellie, shaking her head as he walked away.

Ellie couldn’t hear what Cris was saying, but the tense shape of his body as he held the phone to his ear and tried to buffer the breeze with his other hand gave her the sense that it was important.

Maybe. Maybe he answered just to stall and it was the dentist reminding him he had an appointment for a cleaning next week.

Whatever. Was any of this conversation going to change her opinion of what happened?

The better question was whether or not she needed it to.

She could go on as normal, not thinking that things could have been different, not wondering if she had been the only one lying awake and turning everything over in her head.

She had gone on the trip with her dad because even though his interview was in LA, they were close enough to drive to Cris’s meet in a reasonable amount of time.

Of course, she could never admit that she was more excited to see Cris than to spend quality time with her dad.

She was crushed when it turned into a disaster and was crushed even worse when she had to hide her feelings so her dad wouldn’t catch on.

She told Gio she had cramps to get out of going to dinner with him and the Stanford coach, but the hotel room had been too quiet and her mind had too much space to wander off into.