Her Hottest Summer Yet

by Ally Blake

  And then it hit her, like a smack to the back of the head. She might want it enough for the both of them. But—as proven by events on the other side of the planet—it would never be enough.

  “This can’t be it,” she said, the words tearing from her throat.

  “Honey,” he said, and this time it felt so much like a real endearment she opened her eyes wider to halt the tears. He saw. Right through her, as always. But instead of doing what the twitch in his jaw told her he wanted to do—to run his thumb underneath her eye, to slide his big hand over her shoulder, to haul her in tight—he sniffed out a breath of frustration and ran two hands down his face. And said, “This summer has been a blast. But like every summer before it has to end. It’s time for you to go home. And soon you’ll look back and thank your lucky stars you did.”

  Avery shook her head, her fingers biting into the hot metal at her backside.

  Not having Jonah in her life would not be better than having him in it. She hadn’t needed to hear her mother say it to know that for sure. But he looked at her with such clarity, such resolution.

  “How can you just switch off like that? Tell me. Because I really want to know how to make this feeling—” She slammed a closed fist against her ribs, the surface hurt nothing on the tight ball of pain inside. “How can you make it just go away?”

  “Avery—”

  “I’m serious. Can you turn it off? Just like that? Honestly?”

  He looked at her. Right into her eyes. As tears of frustration finally spilled down her cheeks. He looked right into her eyes, not even a flicker of reaction to her pain. And he said, “I can.”

  Then he leaned over, wrapped an arm about her shoulders, kissed her on top of her head, lifted himself from the back of his car, grabbed his surfboard, and took off for the water at a jog.

  ELEVEN

  He couldn’t.

  The night of the party Jonah had convinced himself that the only way not to feel like crap at being left was by doing the leaving himself. As if that was the common denominator of the shittiest times of his life; the fact that they had been out of his control.

  Turned out it didn’t matter a lick. Two days on, walking away from Avery still bit. Like a shark bite, a great chunk of him missing, the wound exposed to the salty air.

  “Storm’s a coming.”

  “What?”

  Tim backed up to the office door, two hands raised in surrender. “Nora said you were in a snit. I said, ‘More than usual?’ She said, ‘Go poke the bear and you’ll find out.’”

  Jonah pinned his second in charge with a flat stare. “Consider me poked.”

  Tim lolloped into the office and sat. “Want to talk about it?”

  “I’ll give you one guess.”

  “Avery,” Tim said, nodding sadly.

  Right guess, wrong answer. Knowing Tim well enough to know the only way out of this was through, Jonah ran two hands over his face and turned his chair to look out over the water. The sun glinted so fiercely through a mass of gathering grey clouds he had to squint.

  “She’s really leaving, huh?” Tim asked.

  A muscle twitched in Jonah’s cheek. “You’ll find that’s what holidaymakers do. Keeps the tourist dollars spinning. Pays your wage and mine.”

  A pause from Tim. Then, “She’s been doing the rounds of the entire town. Saying goodbye. And leaving little gifts.” Tim held up his hand, a plaited friendship bracelet circling his arm. “It matches Roger’s.”

  “Lucky Roger.”

  “What did she leave you?”

  The knowledge that he’d been knocked around more times than he could count in his thirty-odd years on earth and hadn’t learned a damn thing.

  Jonah pushed himself to standing and grabbed his keys from the fish hook by the door. “I have to go. Appointment. Tell Nora to transfer calls to my mobile.”

  Tim saluted. “Aye-aye, Cap’n.”

  Jonah jogged through the offices. His staff were smart enough to leave him be.

  Truth was he did have an appointment; one he’d made a week before. Once outside and at the Monaro, as he pressed the remote lock Hull apparated from nowhere to appear at his heels, his liquid eyes quietly sad, as if he knew what he was in for.

  When the sorry truth was he was probably pining for Avery. Whole damn east coast was apparently pining for Avery.

  Jonah clicked his fingers and Hull jumped in the back of the car. Jonah gunned the engine, the wild rumble of the muscle car matching his mood to perfection. He wound down the windows, thumbed the buttons till he found a song on the radio that had a hope in hell of numbing his mind. Then he set off for the vet.

  For big Hull was getting the snip.

  He’d be better off castrated. For one thing he could go through life never again noticing the Petunias of the world. No more urges that were as helpful as a hole in the head.

  For half a second Jonah was envious. An operation might be pushing it, but he’d take a pill if it meant ridding himself of the ache behind his ribs that refused to let up.

  With a rumble of gears, he hit the freeway leading down the coast towards the cove.

  Towards Avery. Yeah, she was still out there somewhere—lazing on the beach, drinking those coconutty things she couldn’t get enough of, wearing some delectable excuse for swimwear, laughing in that loose sexy way of hers—

  She hadn’t been laughing, or smiling, when he’d last seen her. He’d been harsh. He’d had to. Even as she’d floated the idea to keep it going, he’d felt the same pull so strongly it had threatened to take him under. Because what he’d had with her was better than anything he’d ever had with another human being in the entire history of his life on earth.

  But he’d had to make a clean break.

  He lifted a hand to shield his face from the burning sun shining through the driver’s side window, and pulled into the fast lane to overtake a semi-trailer. The road shook beneath him, rattling his teeth.

  After his mother left, his childhood had been waylaid by waiting for the other shoe to drop. By the expectation that more bad things were to come. And they had, when his father had died. He’d realised too late that waiting for it to happen hadn’t made it any easier. So with Rach, instead of waiting he’d leapt in, held on tighter. Not because her leaving had been that much of a shock—but because he was looking for a connection, any connection, something to prove he was more than a dandelion seed caught on the wind.

  Half an hour later he pulled up at the shack. Jogging up the steps, he went inside to grab Hull’s new lead, copies of the paperwork he’d recently filled out to register Hull with the local council as his dog, and Hull’s favourite chew toy.

  And there, right in the middle of his sun-drenched entryway, he stopped dead. Looked around. And felt Avery everywhere. He felt her in the tilt of his kitchen chair, better angled to the sun. Felt her in the throw rug draped over his couch, the one she wrapped about her feet that always got cold at night.

  He stared at Hull’s chew toy in his hand; Avery had ordered it online—a rubber hot dog in Yankees colours.

  Poor Hull who was about to get the snip. Who’d never again have the chance to find himself a girl. The right girl.

  Jonah was running back to the car when the first raindrops hit.

  Only to find Hull was gone.

  * * *

  “Jonah! Excellent. You staying?” Claudia asked as she saw Jonah taking the front steps of the Tropicana two at a time.

  “Where?”

  “Here! Storm’s a coming, my friend. A big one!” Claude poked her hand outside, captured a few stray raindrops in her palm. “Can’t hate a storm when it brings a town’s worth of guests through my front door to use my cellar as a safe area! Would it be poor form to hand out brochures with the water?”

  He s
hook his head. “Claude, I’m looking for Hull.”

  “Not here. Why?”

  “Doesn’t matter.” Jonah rocked on his feet; half of him keen to look for Hull, the other half somewhat stuck. “Everyone’s down in the cellar?”

  “Everyone who’s anyone. I’m thinking it’s the perfect chance to show off what the Tropicana Nights is all about.”

  “Natural disaster management?”

  “Fun,” she glowered. “Submarine theme, perhaps. Caveman, maybe. Mum and Dad had an awesome collection of faux animal skins back in the day.”

  A themed bunker, Jonah thought. Heaven help them all. And then his thoughts shifted back to where they’d been moments before. Where they constantly strayed.

  He couldn’t ask—he didn’t have the right after what he’d done—but it came out anyway. “Avery there already?”

  Claude shot him a flat stare. “She’s gone, Jonah. No thanks to you.”

  “Gone where?”

  “Gone gone. Back to the U. S. of A. To the bright lights and freezing winters and her suffocating mother and neglectful father. I thought we had her this time. That our beautiful butterfly had finally realised she had wings. But no. Flight to JFK leaves in...fifteen minutes. Or left fifteen minutes ago. Not sure which.”

  Time slowed, then came to a screeching halt. Avery was gone. Out of his life for good. As the full realisation of all that meant wrapped about him like a dark wet cloak, Jonah was amazed he could find his voice at all. “But she wasn’t due to leave for a couple of days.”

  “Time to get back to real life,” Claudia said, taking a moment to glare at him between happily ticking off the list on her clipboard. “I tried to make her stay despite it, but I wasn’t the one who could.”

  “Meaning?”

  “There’s a storm a coming. I don’t have time for all this. Use that brain in that pretty little head of yours and think!”

  Think he did. So hard he near burst a blood vessel.

  Why? Why was he making himself feel like crap when he didn’t need to? Fear she’d some day make him feel like crap and he wanted to get there first? Life had taught him some hard lessons. Some at a pretty early age. And there was no certainty there wouldn’t be more hard lessons to come.

  Didn’t mean he couldn’t buck the system. He’d done it before, in dragging himself up by his bootstraps. He could do it again. Damn well should do it again, if that was what it took to have the life he wanted. To be happy.

  “Don’t worry about Hull,” Claudia said, drawing him out of the throbbing quagmire inside his head. “He’ll have found a safe haven somewhere hiding out from the storm. Dogs are smart.”

  “What storm?”

  “Storm!” she said, taking him by the cheeks and turning his face to look through the huge front doors across the street and over the water where grey clouds swarmed like an invasion from the skies.

  Where the hell had that come from? How had he not known? He owned a fleet of boats, for heaven’s sake. Phone already at his ear, he called Charter North. “Nora. Get Tim to—”

  Jonah listened with half an ear as he pounded down the front stairs, his eyes on the menacing clouds overhead. Turned out Tim had somehow known he might not be quite on his game and had done all that had to be done. Good man. The second he next saw him the guy was getting a promotion.

  Jonah hung up and looked to the skies. And his heart imploded on the spot.

  Avery was flying into that?

  “If you see Hull,” he called out, his voice sounding as if it were coming from the bottom of a well, “get him under cover. Don’t dress him up in any way, shape or form.”

  “Count on it!” Claudia called back. “Where are you going?”

  “To bring our girl home.”

  “’Atta boy!” she said, then shut the front door.

  Hull was strong. Hull was smart. He’d be somewhere dry, waiting out the wet. Just as Jonah had planned to wait out the heartache of letting Avery go.

  Only the storm in his head, in his heart, was of his own making. And as he set off to rescue his girl, he did so with a slice of fear cutting through him the likes of which he’d never felt. And hope.

  He reached his car right as raindrops hit the road with fat slaps, and when the skies opened and dumped their contents on the cove he was already headed to the airport.

  * * *

  Avery sat in the cab, which had been stuck in the same spot for over an hour, the rain outside lashing the windows.

  “Car accident,” the cabbie said.

  “Mmm?”

  “Radio’s saying car accident. Hasn’t rained here for weeks. Oil on the road gets slick. Accidents happen.” He leant forward to peer through the rain-hammered window and up into the grey skies. “Any luck your flight’s been cancelled.”

  When he realised Avery wasn’t in a chatty mood, he shrugged and went back to his phone.

  She didn’t mind. The shushing of the rain was a background of white noise against her disorderly thoughts.

  She’d been thinking about moving, actually. Farther down the island. It would be healthy to keep some of the distance the trip had given her from her family.

  Her apartment was a sublet, after all. Her job freelance too, despite numerous headhunters desperate to secure her. Even her house plants were fake. Heck, she’d only bought a one-way ticket on her holiday, ambivalence stopping her from even committing to when she might return.

  She’d felt holier than thou that Jonah couldn’t commit to a dog? She’d never even committed to her life.

  Why not some real distance? she thought, shifting her thoughts. In San Diego the weather was spectacular. And she did have a huge bikini collection she’d hate to see go to waste.

  No. Not San Diego. Too much blue sky, too much sea air, too many reminders of here.

  Head thunking against the head rest, Avery thought back to that afternoon in the hammock, blithely admitting to herself that she’d sure miss Jonah when she left. As if admitting she cared meant it was somehow in her control. But it never had been. From the moment he’d yanked her out of the ocean, he was doomed to invade her heart. And now that he’d retreated, her poor abandoned heart hurt like a thousand paper cuts.

  What she wouldn’t do to have her hands around his neck right about then. Squeezing hard. Then softening, sliding over his throat, the rasp of his stubble against her soft palms...

  She sat up straight and shook her head.

  A fresh start was what she needed. A clear head with which to start her own life, one not all tied up in her mother’s troubles, her father’s impending nuptials, or her own heartache.

  She ran both hands over her eyes that felt gritty with lack of sleep.

  Yep. When she got home changes would be made. She’d soak in the moments as they happened. Do work that truly satisfied. Give her mother a daughter’s love, and hold the rest of herself back so that there was something left over. Enough that she could offer it to somebody else. Somebody she loved who loved her back.

  Because she’d learned all too well these past weeks that home wasn’t where you laid your hat; it was whose hat lay next to yours. Those mornings waking up in Jonah’s bed—to find him breathing softly, his deep grey eyes drinking her in as if she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen—were the most real, alive moments of her life.

  A half life wasn’t enough for her any more. She had to be thankful for that.

  A crack of thunder split the air, rocking the cab with it. “Whoa,” said the cabbie with nervous laughter.

  But Avery’s mind was elsewhere. Flittering through the past few weeks, to the tentative way she and Jonah had begun, circling one another like dogs who’d been kicked in the teeth by love their whole lives. How they’d come together with such flash and fire, only to blithely pretend that it
was everyday. That it was normal. That they could go about their daily lives afterwards.

  She couldn’t. Being with Jonah had pried her open, forced her to reach deep inside and grab for what she wanted. Made her feel deeply, broadly, inside outside upside down and so thoroughly there was no going back. Not even if she wanted to.

  And she didn’t.

  She didn’t want to go back at all.

  She wanted Jonah. And Hull. And the cove. She wanted that life. And the Tropicana Nights. And to help Claude. And heat and sunshine. And storms that looked as if they could rip trees from the ground. She wanted passion and light and life. Even if it was dangerous. Even if it was hard.

  It was her best life. Her best moments. Her happiest self. But none of that existed without him. Which was where she came full circle yet again.

  Not that she’d out and out told him that she loved him. She’d hinted. She’d hoped he might notice and make the first move into forever.

  Jonah whose mother had left him behind. Jonah whose father had never had time for him.

  “Here we go,” the taxi driver said, warming up the engine once more.

  When they started towards the airport, Avery looked back in panic. “Wait.”

  “Wait what?”

  “Can we please turn around?”

  “Not go to the airport?”

  She shook her head. “Crescent Cove,” she shouted over the sound of the rain now pelting against the car from all angles. “Whatever your fare ends up being, I’ll double it.”

  She felt the car accelerate beneath her backside, and her heart rate rose to match.

  Her parents had never been fully honest with one another, which had led to ten years of suffering. No matter what else she got wrong in her life, she’d not make that mistake.

  She was going to find Jonah, and this time she was going to tell him how she felt.

  And if Jonah was so sure he didn’t feel the same way he’d just have to tell her he didn’t love her back. Right to her face.

  * * *

  “I have to call Jonah,” Avery said, panting as she trudged inside the Tropicana Nights with her sopping-wet luggage in tow. She peeled a few random leaves from her skin, and wiped away as much sand as she could.