Last Year's Mistake - Gina Ciocca Page 0,1

uniform.”

He gave mine a squeeze and I smacked his arm. Kissing and hand-holding and other tame forms of PDA were fine, but I had no interest in being groped in front of our entire high school. Nor did I appreciate him teasing Candy about her butt. As someone who’d spent the better part of puberty hiding its traitorous effects behind shapeless T-shirts, I didn’t take kindly to body comments.

Nothing fazed Candy, though. She and Ryan sparred all the time, and as usual, Candy didn’t miss a beat. Not that I knew what she came back with, because I didn’t hear a word of it.

I happened to glance over her shoulder at that moment, right as one of the glass double doors at the end of the hall opened. Bright sunlight shone through, and for a second I could only make out the outline of the person who stepped inside.

But it was all I needed to see.

My heart froze as I took in his broad shoulders, his dark hair sticking out in all directions. He was taller than I remembered, more built, the angles of his face sharper. Evidence of the time that had passed since I last saw him.

It can’t be.

I might have said it out loud as I pulled myself from Ryan’s arms, my legs turning to mush beneath me.

“Who is that?” Candy said, just as Ryan asked, “Are you all right?” But they sounded a million miles away.

My pulse quickened as the person at the end of the hall took a step forward, and even as the words It can’t be repeated over and over in my head, there was no room for doubt. This morning in the car, I’d felt my past shift in its grave. Now the piece I’d wanted to bury deepest stood right there in front of me, breathing the same air.

I took a step forward, and he stopped. He’d seen me, too.

The beginning of a smile curved his lips. Lips I knew all too well. Lips I hated.

But that didn’t stop me from taking another step forward. And another, until I stood right in front of him, still not convinced he wasn’t some sort of hallucination. It wasn’t until he reached out and slid hesitant arms around my rigid body that I knew he was real.

I had no intention of hugging him back, but my body had other ideas. The second my face pressed against his shoulder, every lie I’d told myself for the past year dissolved into the scent I’d know anywhere. I closed my eyes and wound myself around him, burying my nose in his shirt. The stiffness in his embrace melted away, and he crushed me against him.

“Hey,” he whispered against my hair. “It’s been a long time.”

Two

Rhode Island

Summer before Freshman Year

I lifted my foot to the bumper of my parents’ car and braced myself as I wrestled my suitcase out of the trunk, anxious to start my vacation. A cloudless blue sky stretched above me, and a salty breeze tempered the August heat. The perfect way to begin an end-of-summer getaway.

Every August my family made the two-and-a-half-hour drive from our home in Norwood, Connecticut, to stay with our (loaded) uncle Tommy and aunt Tess at their summerhouse. They were right at the heart of everything that the pristine, manicured beach town had to offer: the ocean; the preserved Gilded Age mansions; and Thames Street, Newport’s main drag. We spent two weeks each year enjoying the fruits of my aunt and uncle’s good fortune, wishing we’d come across some of our own.

That summer, I was fourteen, and my family was broke. My dad—Uncle Tommy’s brother—liked to refer to himself as a “starving artist.” He’d been a teacher at Norwood’s local high school until a few years earlier when he’d been unable to dodge a hailstorm of layoffs.

Once he’d lost his job, he had this epiphany that he should pursue his long-forgotten dream of publishing a novel. Sure, he’d put in job applications when my mother reminded him that his unemployment check and her paralegal salary weren’t enough to put two girls through college, but nothing over the past three years ever seemed to pan out. Including the novel.

So we were all ready to forget about life for a while when we pulled up to Uncle Tommy’s cabin that summer. It was nothing like a cabin, of course, but that’s what we’d always called it. Originally built in 1902, it had been a Victorian before various additions and build-outs turned it