Always Have Summer | We-ll

Leo was standing at the stove, stirring a pot of mussels he’d pulled off the rocks that morning. His shoulders were pink from three days without a shirt, and a curl of steam stuck to his temple. The cabin—his grandmother’s cabin, the one we’d been stealing for ten years—smelled of garlic, tide, and the particular melancholy of August 31st.

The plums fell that week. The first storm came. And I stayed.

And there it was. The three words that aren’t those three words, but might as well be a knife. We-ll Always Have Summer

“I’m always thinking it.”

“We’ll always have summer,” he said. Leo was standing at the stove, stirring a

“She said it wasn’t. She said she got seventy summers in her head. She said that was more than most people get of anything.”

“No, listen.” He stepped closer, close enough that I could see the tiny scar above his eyebrow—bike accident, age eleven, he’d told me the first night we ever spent here. “Not forever. Just… through September. Through the equinox. Through the first storm that brings down the last of the plums.” The plums fell that week

He smiled. It was the same crooked smile from the dock, from nineteen, from the first moment I ever saw him and thought, Oh. There you are.

“I want you to stay for the plums,” he said quietly, “and the slow rot of the dock, and the morning the loons leave. I want you to stay for all the ugly parts no one puts in a postcard.”

“Then let’s not waste this,” he said.

“You could stay,” he said.