Chapter Seven
Summer
Our thirty dayscame and went. I don’t know what I expected. Maybe I expected the bulldozers to come on that first day after our thirty-day grace period was up and raze the place to the ground whether we were in it or not. Maybe I expected him to have us all forcibly removed. Maybe I expected him to come after me and demand me to come back with him.
My throat catches at that last thought. Maybe I’d half wanted him to do that?
I don’t know, but none of that happened.
In fact, I didn’t even hear about anyone getting a thirty-day notice to move out. I know Mom didn’t get one.
And then one day a construction crew showed up. They began renovating the building.
So it looks like Dane took my suggestion after all.
And that completely puzzles me because I didn’t keep up our end of the bargain.
Is he going to raise the rent on all of us? We won’t be able to afford to pay it if he does. Is that his retribution for me breaking our deal? To give us a glimpse of how nice we could be living and then force us out with an insanely high rent? That seems too cruel, even for a cutthroat businessman like him.
I still haven’t found another job. Jobs are scarce around here, and I lost the part-time one I had when I didn’t show up for a couple of weeks. Dane had said he’d take care of it, but my boss still hadn’t liked it when he was told I wouldn’t be there for a month. I guess he took it as me taking a month-long vacation without his permission.
Whatever. I hated working there anyway. But it makes things harder on my mom since there’s no extra money coming in. She tells me it’s okay in that brave, motherly way of hers, but I see how tired she is working longer hours at the condo she cleans at.
I also see the way she looks at me so tentatively sometimes. She wants to ask me more about where I was those two weeks, but she knows I won’t answer. I never tell her anything. I can’t talk about it.
I don’t know what conclusions she’s drawn, but it doesn’t matter. I simply can’t talk about Dane and the way he makes me feel so cherished and so confused all at once. He tore my world apart, and I don’t know if anything will ever be the same again.
I don’t think I will.
I want to hate him, but I don’t.
Instead, I think of him.
I think of him a lot.
One night I wake up from a dream where I was in his arms. His green eyes were holding me captive, his lips where branding my skin with hot kisses.
I’m covered in sweat, and my body is thrumming with arousal.
I have to fight back the tears of disappointment when I realize it was all a dream and he’s not here. I’m suddenly aching to be in his arms.
There’s a hole in my chest that feels like it’s going to rip me in two, so I go to the only place I’ve ever been able to escape.
* * *
Dane
I can’t sleep. All I can do is think about her. Summer. My Summer. Like the season, did she just come into my life for a time and fade away?
But no, she’s not faded away at all. The memory of that night is vivid in my mind. I see the way the water clung to her wet eyelashes, spiking them around her seafoam-colored eyes. I can still feel her arms wrapped around me as she held on while I drove into her, her sweet pussy sucking and milking me tighter than I’ve ever been gripped before.
Fuck, why do I torture myself this way?
I walk onto the balcony and watch the moonlight glinting off the waves, thinking about her smile, her laugh, the way her hair felt softer than silk under my fingertips.
And then my heart stops within me when I see a tiny form walking across the sand.
I’d know that form anywhere.