Written before Endless Summer, Book 2 ended.
Sometimes, she wonders if it was all a dream (nightmare).
Not always, not when she’s with Diego or Estela or Jake and the memory of the island that weighs over all of them. They’re like her, still sort of stuck there long after leaving.
The others have moved on. Or at least it feels like they have.
And then there’s Sean. It’s complicated with him. If she didn’t know otherwise, it would be as if they hadn’t lost a year. He’s still the Quarterback, still on track to be drafted into a professional team. He begins his (delayed) senior year as though nothing has changed.
Everything’s changed.
She’s not sure how she feels. It’s his steadfastness, his focus, that drew her to him on the island – that made her love him – and she admires how he’s so easily redirected that focus back to normal ambitions.
(She’s been aimless since they got back.)
As crazy (terrifying) as the island was, at least she’d felt important there. She misses it. (No she doesn’t. She can’t.) It feels like here, now, she’s just ‘Sean Gayle’s girlfriend’, and before, back there, she’d been so much more.
Shouldn’t it have been harder to be on La Huerta than to be at home?
She’s meant to be at Sean’s football practice, but she doesn’t go. She walks past the field, past the noise, and keeps walking until she reaches the sandy banks of the nearby river. It’s warm – not humid and unpleasant like the island – and she takes her shoes off so she can feel the sand between her toes as she traipses along the shore.
Minutes along the river, she stops. She lies down in the sand, ignoring how it gets in her hair, and closes her eyes. She can almost pretend she’s back there, the cool breeze just the wind that blew over the hotel roof at night, the rush of the water like the tide.
And Sean’s hand, brushing down her arm, his fingers linking with hers.
She doesn’t open her eyes even as she feels him settle down beside her. For a moment, everything’s perfect.
“How did you find me?” she asks quietly.
“This is where you come,” he says, his thumb stroking the back of her hand. Soft, gentle. “When you miss the island.”
She opens her eyes. Sean’s lying beside her, facing her, his eyes as warm and caring as they always are. She lets go of Sean’s hand and rolls closer, settling on his chest, his arm around her, holding her there. “Do you miss it?” she whispers, one hand cupping his cheek. “Are you lost too?”
(Whatever she feels – lost, aimless, alone – being with Sean, just Sean, is always easy.)
“I don’t miss it.” He starts to play with her hair, twisting strands between his fingers. “But it’s okay if you do, you know? I know you didn’t have much to come back to.”
It’s true. She didn’t have much she could pick back up, nothing that she could use to lull herself back into normalcy. “Don’t you find it strange?” she asks. “That you’re here, playing football, when you know that there’s so much more? That you’re one of only eleven who know just what’s possible?”
He’s quiet, her hair tangling in his fingers. “Sometimes.”
“And you’re okay with that?”
“We have to be,” he says, “don’t we? We can’t go back. I wouldn’t want to go back.”
She sighs and settles into him, her forehead pressed to his chest. Tears tickle her eyes, too close to falling, the way they have been since coming back, since everything started to feel so wrong.
“I don’t think you’re lost,” he says suddenly, voice a whisper. “You figured things out on the island, you’ll figure things out here. It might just take a bit of time.”
When he kisses her – his mouth warm, gentle, steady – she can almost believe it.