It's Not Summer Without You

My mother freaked out when I wasn’t home that morning. I missed two calls from her because I was asleep. When she called the third time, furious, I said, “Didn’t you get my note?”

Then I remembered I hadn’t left one.

She practically growled. “No, I did not see any note. Don’t you ever leave in the middle of the night without telling me again, Belly.”

“Even if I’m just going for a midnight stroll?” I joked. Me making my mother laugh was a sure thing. I would tell a joke and her anger would evaporate away. I started to sing her favorite Patsy Cline song. “I go out walkin’, after midnight, out in the moonlight—”

“Not fu

I hesitated. There was nothing my mother hated worse than a liar. She’d find out anyway. She was like a psychic. “Um. Cousins?”

I heard her take a breath. “With who?”

I looked over at him. He was listening intently. I wished he wasn’t. “Conrad,” I said, lowering my voice.

Her reaction surprised me. I heard her breathe again, but this time it was a little sigh, like a sigh of relief. “You’re with Conrad?”

“Yes.”

“How is he?” It was a strange question, what with her in the middle of being mad at me.

I smiled at him and fa

“Good. Good,” she said, but it was like she was talking to herself. “Belly, I want you home tonight. Are we clear?”

“Yes,” I said. I was grateful. I thought she’d demand that we leave right away.

“Tell Conrad to drive carefully.” She paused. “And Belly?”

“Yes, Laurel?” She always smiled when I called her by her first name.

“Have fun. This will be your last fun day for a long, long time.”

I groaned. “Am I grounded?” Being grounded was a novelty; my mother had never grounded me before, but I guess I had never given her a reason to.

“That is a very stupid question.”

Now that she wasn’t mad anymore, I couldn’t resist. “I thought you said there were no stupid questions?”

She hung up the phone. But I knew I had made her smile.

I closed my phone and faced Conrad. “What do we do now?”

“Whatever we want.”

“I want to go on the beach.”

So that’s what we did. We got bundled up and we ran on the beach in rain boots we found in the mud room. I wore Susa

I laughed and said, “That’s because you’re coldhearted.”

He put my hands in his coat pockets and said in a voice so soft I wondered if I heard him right, “For everyone else, maybe. But not for you.” He didn’t look at me when he said it, which is how I knew he meant it.

I didn’t know what to say, so instead, I got on my tiptoes and kissed him on the cheek. It was cold and smooth against my lips.

Conrad smiled briefly and then started walking away. “Are you cold?” he asked, his back to me.

“Sort of,” I said. I was blushing.

“I’ll build another fire,” he said.

While he worked on the fire, I found an old box of Swiss Miss hot chocolate in the pantry, next to the Twinings teas and my mother’s Chock full o’Nuts coffee. Susa

As I sat on the couch and stirred my cup, watching the mini marshmallows disintegrate, I could feel my heart beating, like, a million times a minute. When I was with him, I couldn’t seem to catch my breath.

Conrad didn’t stop moving around. He was ripping up pieces of paper, he was poking at the embers, he was squatting in front of the fireplace, shifting his weight back and forth.

“Do you want your cocoa?” I asked him.

He looked back at me. “Okay, sure.”

He sat next to me on the couch and drank from the Simpsons mug. It had always been his favorite. “This tastes—”

“Amazing?”

“Dusty.”

We looked at each other and laughed. “For your information, cocoa is my specialty. And you’re welcome,” I said, taking my first sip. It did taste a little dusty.

He peered at me and tipped my face up. Then he reached out and rubbed my cheek with his thumb like he was wiping away soot. “Do I have cocoa powder on my face?” I asked, suddenly paranoid.

“No,” he said. “Just some dirt—oops, I mean, freckles.”

I laughed and slapped him on the arm, and then he grabbed my hand and pulled me closer to him. He pushed my hair out of my eyes, and I worried he could hear the way I drew my breath in when he touched me.

It was getting darker and darker outside. Conrad sighed and said, “I’d better get you back.”

I looked down at my watch. It was five o’clock. “Yeah . . . I guess we’d better go.”

Neither of us moved. He reached out and wound my hair around his fingers like a spool of yarn. “I love how soft your hair is,” he said.

“Thanks,” I whispered. I’d never thought of my hair as anything special. It was just hair. And it was brown, and brown wasn’t as special as blond or black or red. But the way he looked at it . . . at me. Like it held some kind of fascination for him, like he would never get tired of touching it.

We kissed again, but it was different than the night before. There was nothing slow or lazy about it. The way he looked at me—urgent, wanting me, needing me . . . it was like a drug. It was want-want-want. But it was me who was doing the wanting most of all.

When I pulled him closer, when I put my hands underneath his shirt and up his back, he shivered for a second. “Are my hands too cold?” I asked.

“No,” he said. Then he let go of me and sat up. His face was sort of red and his hair was sticking up in the back. He said, “I don’t want to rush anything.”

I sat up too. “But I thought you already—” I didn’t know how to finish the sentence. This was so embarrassing. I’d never done this before.

Conrad turned even redder. He said, “Yeah, I mean, I have. But you haven’t.”

“Oh,” I said, looking down at my sock. Then I looked up. “How do you know I haven’t?”

Now he looked red as a beet and he stuttered, “I just thought you hadn’t—I mean, I just assumed—”

“You thought I hadn’t done anything before, right?”

“Well, yeah. I mean, no.”

“You shouldn’t make assumptions like that,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” he said. He hesitated. “So—you have then?”

I just looked at him.

When he opened his mouth to speak, I stopped him. I said, “I haven’t. Not even close.”

Then I leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. It felt like a privilege just to be able to do that, to kiss him whenever I wanted. “You’re really sweet to me,” I whispered, and I felt so glad and grateful to be there, in that moment.

His eyes were dark and serious when he said, “I just—want to always know that you’re okay. It’s important to me.”

“I am okay,” I said. “I’m better than okay.”

Conrad nodded. “Good,” he said. He stood and gave me his hand to help me up. “Let’s get you home, then.”

I didn’t get home that night until after midnight. We stopped and got di