Summer's Song: Pine Point, Book 1 (6 page)

His head snapped up. “No. Just saying.”

“I’m sorry,” she said again. “I know it’s a lousy deal.”

“Yeah.” He paused. “You ever think about keeping it yourself?”

She kept her eyes on the grass. “Makes more sense to sell it. I mean, I guess my father bought it for me, but he made a mistake.”
There’s no way I could live in Pine Point again.

She shifted on the step and wondered if the warmth on her cheeks bloomed from the fire or from something else.

“I’m sorry about your dad,” Damian said after a minute.

“Don’t be.” She closed her eyes. “He wasn’t…close to anyone. Didn’t want to be. He had cancer for a while, a couple of years at least. But he didn’t tell anyone until the end. He spent the last week in intensive care, over in Albany.” She paused. “So I heard.”

“You weren’t in touch with him?”

“My mom died when I was really young, and Dad and I…” She took a deep breath. “We didn’t talk after I left town.”

“After your brother died?

Ah, so he’d heard the story. “Yeah.”

Damian stretched out his legs. In the firelight, the blond hairs on his ankles glowed. “Can’t imagine going through something like that.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“How old was your brother?”

“A week past thirteen.”

He blew out a long breath. “Wow.” He didn’t ask anything else, and for that she was glad.

She reached down and picked up a twig, twisting it until it shredded. “That’s another reason I have to leave. It’s too hard to be here.”

“I’ll bet.”

But Damian didn’t know the worst of it, which was that now pieces of the night kept coming back when she least expected them to. She couldn’t guess when the next anxious moment might strike, or the next corner of the past might peel away before her eyes. She was headed for a nervous breakdown unless she got out of Pine Point, and quickly.

She glanced over. “What about you? You didn’t grow up around here.”

“Nope. Try a place called Poisonwood, ’bout a hundred miles west of Philadelphia.”

She wrinkled her nose. “There’s nothing west of Philadelphia but farmland.”

“Exactly. Which is why I think of Pine Point as a thriving metropolis.”

Summer laughed.

“Oh, come on. It has a movie theater, two grocery stores, a separate elementary and high school…classy place, I’m telling you.”

“Sure. Classy. So how’d you end up here?” It was a strange place to make a home if you hadn’t been born in Pine Point. Single twenty-somethings—especially those who looked as good as this guy did—didn’t exactly flock to its county seat.

His expression sobered. “Long story. Save it for another time, maybe?”

“Oh. Okay.” Summer rose and inched her way toward the fire.

After a minute, Damian came to stand beside her. “What is it you do, anyway?” He held his hands above the flames.

She studied his fingers and the way they threw shadows in the dark. She thought of how he’d touched her with them, feeling her wrist after she fell, and a lump of desire rose in her throat. “I—um—I’m the director of the Bay City Museum in San Francisco.”

“Mm…I don’t think I’ve heard of it.”

“Probably not. It’s pretty small. But it has a lot of great artifacts from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—the Gold Rush, railroads, stuff like that. Plus we display traveling exhibits from all over the country.”

Damian’s eyebrows lifted. “Sounds like a cool job.”

Her elbow brushed his, and electricity radiated up to her shoulder. “It is. I just love it. I could spend hours reading about the past—lost civilizations, cities and empires and the way one person, or one event, changed everything…”

“I know what you mean. Makes you wonder how different our lives would be if, say, just one thing had ended up different. If the South had won the Civil War. Or JFK had lived. Things like that.”

Summer stared at him. “Exactly.” The same crazy wonderings about the world kept her up many nights. She’d flip through the archives at work and think,
What would the world be like if we were still a colony of the British Empire?
Or she’d stare at a piece of needlework in its glass case and wonder about its creator.
Who were you, really? Did you love? Did your heart ache at a sunrise? What was the world like, then?

A breeze lifted the hair at her neck, and she shivered. Faint shouts floated up from the lake. The flames burned lower.

“Course, present day has its moments too,” Damian said. “Tomorrow, next week, next year, all this is history too. Keeps shaping itself while we’re just passing through.”

“I know. But somehow it’s different when you’re living in the middle of it.”

He cocked his head, and Summer wondered if she’d said something wrong.

“You involved with someone back home?”

Her heart skipped inside her chest. “No. I mean, I was dating a guy a few months back, but—”

Damian caught her mouth with his before she could finish the sentence. She lost her breath as his hands wound themselves in her hair, and she staggered against him, tingles in her palms. He smelled like soap and sawdust and the faint spice of aftershave. She ran her hands along his biceps, iron beneath her fingertips. Something inside her wanted to peel away his T-shirt and feel skin against skin.

Their tongues met and one hand slipped from her hair to the small of her back. She could feel him against her, his want hard and making her own grow in waves the longer they stood there. After a long moment, he moved his lips to her cheek before resting his forehead against hers.

“I’ve wanted to do that since yesterday.”

“Yeah?” She laughed, a ragged, breathless sound in the silence. “Trying to make me change my mind about the house?”

He pulled away from her and frowned. “No. Is that really what you think? ”

“I was kidding.”

He stuck his hands in his pockets and backed away. “Sure about that?”

“Damian, please. I didn’t mean—” Somehow she’d ruined things. Her mouth ached with the absence of his.

“Listen, I should probably go. Early day tomorrow.”

“Wait. Let’s talk about this. Please.” But he was gone without even a glance over his shoulder.

Summer crossed her arms as disappointment flooded her. Sparks jumped in the dying fire, and a piece of wood toppled into ash. For a few minutes, she thought maybe he’d come back and let her explain. She’d been joking. She’d just made a stupid comment to fill up the nervousness inside her stomach. He’d see that. Wouldn’t he?

But Damian didn’t return. After a while, Summer laced her hands behind her head and stared at the stars. Maybe her father had been right. Maybe the farther away she went from Pine Point, the better for everyone.

Chapter Six

Sunlight poked its yellow fingers through the blinds and prodded her awake.

“Summer?” Rachael rapped on the door of the guest room.

“Mmph.” She rolled over. “What time is it?”

“Little after ten.” Her friend sat on the edge of the bed and began to bounce.

“You let me sleep that late?” She sat up, disoriented.

“Figured you needed it. I thought a party and conversation with a certain good-looking someone would be good for you.” Rachael crossed her legs. “So? Tell me what happened last night.”

Clad in a tank top, Summer tossed off the sheet, swung her feet to the floor and reached for her overnight bag. “What happened? I came to your party, had dinner, watched while you and some other fools ran around naked. Then I went to bed.”

Rachael looked around the room. “So where is he?”

“What are you talking about?” Summer slipped off her shirt and pulled on a clean tank top and shorts. “Where’s who?”

“Oh, please. Did you sleep with Damian?”

“Damian? What?” She shook her head, but the edges of a memory began to sharpen behind her eyes. Smiles over firelight. Damian’s hand reaching across a step and touching hers. A heart-breaking kiss and a mistake on her part. Then nothing. “Of course not. I barely know him.”

“Bummer.” Rachael sighed. “That never stopped me, you know. Best way to get over sadness is a friendly little romp with someone who looks as good as Damian does.”

“Well, I’m not you. And I’m not sad.”

“Whatever. Did you at least kiss him?”

“God, do I have any privacy around you?”

“Not since I showed you how to use a tampon back in seventh grade, no.”

Summer picked up her toiletry bag. She needed to fix her face, head back to the motel and meet with Sadie in less than an hour. She couldn’t sit here with her best friend and debate the finer points of kissing Damian Knight. “I’m not telling you. Use your imagination.”

“Geez, lighten up.” Rachael vanished down the hall, and a moment later Summer smelled coffee brewing.

Summer ducked into the bathroom and splashed water on her face.
Take your own advice and
stop thinking about him. So he kissed you. So what?
She pulled her hair back from her face and dabbed concealer on the circles beneath her eyes. She had more important things to worry about than the lips of the guy she was about to evict.

* * * * *

Less than a half hour later, Summer rounded the curve in Sycamore Road. She adjusted the radio station and hummed along. “Ooh, don’t you got what I need now baby…”

Damian’s face popped into her brain. Again.
Makes you wonder how different our lives would be if, say, just one thing had changed…
Her cheeks grew hot and she had to tell herself to unclench her hands before she squeezed the steering wheel in two. Sometimes when she told people what she did, they looked at her as if she were crazy to dwell in the land of yesterdays and make her living among ghosts. But not this guy. He got it. The hairs on her forearms lifted at the memory, at his expression as he watched in her firelight.

She slowed at the stop sign where Sycamore met Main. A dangerous intersection shrouded by woods on both sides, this crossroads witnessed a few accidents every year as drivers blasted past the sign half-hidden by bushes. One winter when she was a child, a group of teenagers had collided with a snowplow. Four deaths, all under the age of eighteen. Pine Point had mourned for months.

“Summer? It’s Donnie…I can’t find him…I can’t…Summer?”

Blackness. A sliver of moon. Stars that hung too low and burned her eyes when the blood ran into them.

“Summer?”

Can’t find him?
Summer blinked. That was Gabe’s voice. She pressed one hand against her forehead and tried to catch her breath.
What does that mean? Were we looking for him
? That didn’t make sense. They’d all stayed in the car until the cops came. Hadn’t they?

Her hands shook.
Stop it. Stop thinking about it.
She pressed her lips together until she tasted blood. After a long moment, the thoughts and the voices receded again. But God, how long would it haunt her?

Today the sun blazed in the bluest sky and both roads stretched to the horizon without a car in sight. She forced herself to breathe. This was not the same intersection, and this was not ten years in the past. She was twenty-eight, stable and strong. She was not a girl lying in a hospital bed trying to understand why her brother wasn’t standing beside her cracking jokes.

Summer turned right and headed for the motel. After her meeting with Sadie, maybe she’d try to find Damian at the house. She’d explain away her stupid comment of the night before. She could probably give him his last month rent-free to make up for the hassle of selling the property. Maybe that would calm him. Or convince him to kiss her. Or—

Out of nowhere, a red sedan careened into the lane in front of her. A horn blared. Summer choked on her breath, and adrenaline poured into her veins, triple-time. With her heart frozen, she stomped on the brake pedal and slammed it to the floor.

“What the—”

She didn’t have time to honk her own horn or check her mirrors or wonder who the driver was or where he’d come from. With both hands clutching the wheel, she held her foot to the floor and prayed.

Time slowed. Every movement of her car seemed magnified a hundred times. The distance between them closed. She wasn’t stopping fast enough.
Oh God.
She was going to hit the car square in its rear bumper. She glanced to her right. Could she pull off? Swerve around? Thick oaks lined the road, with almost no shoulder. The metallic tang of fear rose up on her tongue. The distance between her hood ornament and the red sedan narrowed to a few feet. Bracing herself for the impact, she bit her lip, and her back teeth ground together in panic.

Crashing glass and the blunt smack of metal against metal filled the air around her. Her car jolted to a stop. Then everything went silent.

Breath whooshed out of Summer’s lungs. She’d smacked her funny bone against the armrest, and the tingling brought tears to her eyes. A sharp pain shot through her right ankle. The beginnings of a migraine began to pound behind her eyes. She tasted fresh blood and when she raised a hand to her mouth, she saw red.

For a minute, panic engulfed her.
I hit someone. Or maybe hurt someone.
She couldn’t bear to look. She closed her eyes and counted to ten, then twenty. She heard nothing. After another moment, she forced her eyes open and ordered herself to breathe.
In. Out.
She wiggled her toes. All there, all accounted for. She touched her forehead, her chest, both arms. All okay. She eyed her car, assessing the damage. No cracks in the windshield. The hood seemed smooth, with no splintered metal.

Summer frowned. She
had
hit the other car, hadn’t she?

Wait a minute…

As she looked around, she saw not the smashed bumper of her own convertible, but the dented bodies of two other cars, one the sedan, the other a large extended-cab pickup truck which had collided with it. Glass covered the road. Steam poured from the hood of the truck. Her own car had stopped after all, short of hitting either vehicle.

Relief made her hands shake all the same. When she was sure she could look without throwing up, she climbed from her car and stared at the mess in front of her. Silence. Skid marks. Horribly crunched metal. She closed her eyes for a brief moment. This stretch of road never saw much traffic, certainly not on a Sunday morning. She rubbed both temples and forced herself to squint at the sedan and truck. No one emerged from the car or truck. She took another look in both directions. No one was going to show up. She would have to deal with this on her own.

“Are you okay?” Rachael asked. Static on the phone buzzed her words into an echo.

Summer turned away from the accident scene and listened for the ambulance siren’s wail. “I’m fine. Just a little shaken up.”

“Do you want me to come down there? Wait with you?”

“No. Don’t bother.” She couldn’t keep her eyes from returning to the two hunks of metal sitting in the middle of the road like injured monsters, unable to crawl away and hide themselves from the oppressive sun.

“Can you see anything? Do you know who it is?”

Summer shook her head before she realized she hadn’t answered. “I don’t…no.” She couldn’t bear to walk over there.

“Well, listen, call me later when you get back to the motel, okay?”

“I will.”

As she hung up and tucked the phone back into her pocket, the first police car came screaming up the road from town. A rescue vehicle followed thirty seconds later. Behind them, a smaller pickup truck with a blue flashing light in the front windshield pulled to a stop. It parked perpendicular to the road, a few feet beyond the accident. Two men hopped from the truck and within a matter of minutes they had placed orange cones and lighted flares in a long, sweeping line.

Medics clambered over the scene like ants, attending to the sedan and pulling open the pickup’s door. Summer leaned against the hood of her own car and licked her lips.
I should probably wait and give them some kind of statement
. After standing in the sun for nearly twenty minutes, though, her throat felt parched, and perspiration slid from her neck to the small of her back. One policeman took down plate numbers. The other walked over to her. She didn’t recognize him.

“You the one that called this in?”

She nodded. “I was following the—” She pointed with a shaky finger. “The red car. Actually, it pulled out in front of me. I didn’t see what happened. I didn’t even see the truck coming from the other direction.”

The officer flipped open a notepad and began to write. Her name? Address? Details of what she’d witnessed? Summer answered his questions as best she could and tried to avert her eyes as the medics pulled the unconscious driver from the truck’s wreckage and loaded him into the waiting ambulance.

“Are they going to be okay?”

The officer glanced behind him. “Well, it’s a nasty accident. Looks like the truck driver took the steering wheel and the windshield pretty good with his face. Couple broken ribs and a fractured nose, probably. Maybe a concussion too. Good thing you were following. They might have been out here for a while before anyone else came along.”

Summer tried to nod. Right now she couldn’t feel glad about that. All she wanted was to go back to the motel and get on with the rest of her day. She didn’t have a strong stomach for blood. Or car accidents. “Do you need me for anything else?”

He shook his head. “Don’t think so. I have your phone number, anyway, just in case.” A yell from one of the other men interrupted him, and she turned away.

Summer wiped sweaty palms on her shorts and reached for her car door. Then she stopped. The man, the one who had yelled, jogged over to where the policeman stood. Dressed in his standard-issue blue shirt and pants, he looked like one of the many volunteer firefighters and medical technicians in town. Yet something about the way he crossed his arms and cocked his head made her squint. Hard. Then he opened his mouth and spoke.

“Dammit, it’s Lonnie Perkins in the car. I went to school with him. He’s banged up bad.”

Lightning bolts jumped from the sky into Summer’s skin. For an instant, the sunlight bouncing off the pavement distorted her view, but it didn’t matter. The tugging in her heart knew, if her eyes weren’t certain. Gabe Roberts—
her
Gabe Roberts, dark-haired and square-jawed, the boy she’d fallen in love with a lifetime ago—stood mere yards away. The pavement tilted beneath her feet. Her throat closed up. She stood there in the heat, frozen.
I don’t—I can’t—

Gabe glanced past the policeman’s shoulder and saw her. “Summer?”

She could only stand there and stare.

He ran the back of one hand across his brow. “Well, hi there.” Three words rolled off his tongue, and a decade unfolded in a heartbeat.

“Hi.”

He walked toward her with an uncertain smile, and for a minute she stood again in the sickly yellow light of Lou’s Fifty Flavors ice cream stand as a brash teenage Gabe crossed the parking lot with his eyes on her.
Hi there
. He’d said the same two words back then, and she hadn’t heard anything else the rest of the night.

“Welcome home.” Something dark moved across his face, a shadow of something she imagined he saw on hers as well. “Sorry it’s under such lousy circumstances.”

Home. Is that where I am?
Summer felt more like she’d tumbled down the rabbit hole, flown up to the moon, vanished into another dimension where everything upside down and backwards was now normal. She wondered if she were hallucinating, or if the accident had thrown her into shock. After two or three years, she’d learned to put away the hurt of losing Gabe. And after two or three more, she’d forced herself to forget about him and move on. Only one scrapbook sat on a shelf back in her apartment, with pictures of their summer together and a few melancholy poems she’d scribbled when her father sent her away for good.

“Hey, you okay? You look a little—”

“I’m fine.” Summer reached for the car to steady herself. “I just…”

Gabe nodded. “I know. Been working as an EMT for close to five years. Never gets any easier.”

“You—you do this? All the time?” She stared at him. “How?” In God’s name, after everything they’d been through, how?

He studied the man with the flares and didn’t answer. “I heard you were coming back.” He raised his gaze to meet hers. “Scared the shit out of me, you want to know the truth.”

She could have asked why, but she already knew the answer.
Seeing you again makes it real. Reminds me of what happened. Makes my heart ache all over again.

“You look good,” he said after a minute. “Not so scary after all.”

She laughed and lifted a hand to her hair. Strands had fallen and stuck to her cheeks. “So do you.”

He shrugged.

“I sort of own a house here now,” she went on.