That Summer by Jennifer Weiner (free e reader txt) 📗

in on themselves like a salted slug at the thought that this is the end, when he says, casually, “Maybe I’ll see you here tomorrow?”

She nods. “Tomorrow,” she says. She can still feel her ankle tingling. Strolling back, she feels shiny, and beautiful, tall and strong as the breeze blows her hair and sunshine warms her shoulders, and she falls asleep picturing his face.

Every afternoon for the next week, she and Poe meet at Great Hollow Beach. “Ahoy!” he calls when he sees her walking toward him, and she feels her heart rising in her chest, fluttering like a bird. One day he asks if she’s thirsty, and passes her a water bottle that says EMLEN on the side when she nods. She puts her lips on the bottle, right where his had been, one step away from kissing, and she can feel his eyes on her mouth and her throat as she swallows.

Most of their talk is banter, teasing and big-brother-y. He asks if she’s ever had a boyfriend (no), or if she’s learning how to drive (not yet). When she asks him, after taking a day and a half to work up the courage, if he’s dating anyone, he tells her that he’d dated the same girl for the winter and spring of his senior year, but that they’d agreed to break up after prom, so that neither of them would be tied down when they went off to college.

“Do you miss her?” she asks. He’s piling sand on her again, handful after handful, until her feet are just vague lumps at the end of her legs.

“Sure,” he says. Then he looks at her, right into her eyes. “But I can’t say I’m sorry to be single right now.”

Diana knows she isn’t beautiful, not like Marie-Francoise, with her high cheekbones and her gray-blue eyes, not like Tess Finnegan at Boston Latin, who has a perfect hourglass figure and dark-brown hair that falls in ringlets to the small of her back. But when Poe looks at her, she feels radiant, like a sun-warmed berry, with her thin skin pulled taut over the sweet, juicy pulp of her insides.

Sometimes, she’ll realize that she doesn’t know very much about Poe. She knows that he is handsome and likes to play pranks, and that the other Emlen boys look to him as their leader. She knows, or can intuit, that he comes from money. He wears leather dock shoes, Brooks Brothers shirts, and Lacoste swim trunks, and, when she’s close, he smells like good cologne.

She doesn’t know what he does at night, when she’s back at the house, reading or watching Masterpiece Theater and eating ice cream out of a mug. Maybe he’s at parties, or at the bars in Provincetown; maybe he’s meeting other girls, older ones. She wonders if he thinks about her, if he sees her as a little sister, or as a potential girlfriend, and what will happen as the summer draws to a close.

He occupies her thoughts every minute they’re not together. She thinks of him when she’s locked her bedroom door, when she’s directing the flow of water between her legs, or using her fingertips to touch herself, gently, then more urgently, until she’s gasping and trembling. The boys at home all seem like children, like outlines of the people they’ll eventually become. Poe is a finished portrait, filled in and vivid, every detail complete. In bed at night, she pictures the way his shoulders pull the fabric of his shirt taut, the dusting of hair on his forearms and the pale hollows behind his knees. She thinks about how it would feel if he were to pull her close, until her head rested on his chest; how it would feel for him to kiss her, how his lips would be firm and warm and knowing, how his touch would be possessive and sure. I love you, she imagines him whispering, and her stomach flutters and her toes curl, and she falls asleep with a smile on her face.

Too soon, it’s the last week of August. In four days, Poe will be going home, to pack up and start college orientation at Dartmouth. On Friday, she and Poe are lounging on his towels at the beach when he sits up straight and whispers, “Look! It’s the nudists!” She peers across the sand to where he’s pointed and sees an elderly man and woman, in matching white robes, holding hands as they make their way slowly around the curved lip of the beach.

“Oh my goodness,” she says. Poe has told her about them—an elderly husband and wife who walk to a deserted inlet and lie naked in the sand—but she’s never seen them before.

“They’re cute,” she says. “They look like matching wallets.”

Poe looks at her admiringly. “Good one,” he says, and she flushes with pleasure. She hopes he’ll bury her feet again, but just then one of the other boys comes trotting across the sand with a volleyball in his hand.

“Hey, lovebirds, wanna play?”

Lovebirds. Diana feels her face get hot, and she ducks to hide her smile.

“What do you think?” Poe asks.

“Sure,” she says, and lets him pull her to her feet.

Her gym class did a unit on volleyball the previous year. Over nine weeks, Diana barely managed to get her hands on the ball, but that afternoon, she is unstoppable. They play three games, and win all three. Twice, she sets the ball, and Poe spikes it, sending it rocketing over the net and into the sand. The first time, he high-fives her, but the second time he grabs her in a bear hug, lifting her up, holding her so that they’re skin to skin, chest to chest. She thinks that he’s going to kiss her, and that it will be perfect, an absolutely perfect first kiss at the end of the day at the very end of summer, but instead he sets her back, gently, on her feet.

When the game is over, he