by L A Cotton
My legs were like lead as I walked to the door. It swung open and Blake stood there looking at me with such reverence in his eyes I almost crumpled. Maybe I did crumple because, before my head had time to process what was happening, I was in Blake’s arms, and he was holding on to me like he needed me to breathe.
“I’ve missed you so much. I’ve tried to stay away, to give you space, but I can’t. I can’t spend another day feeling like you might slip through my fingers again.”
One of Blake’s hands buried itself in my hair and cradled my head holding me to him. My face pressed up against the collar of his hoodie, and I breathed him in. He smelled familiar, like damp grass and fresh air, of a time when things were less complicated, and my heart ached for us. At that moment, we weren’t two strangers reunited by chance; we were sixteen-year-old Blake and Penny.
And we needed each other to survive.
I was twelve when I watched my parents die in the collision that should have killed me as well. With no family to take me in, the state had no choice but to put me in foster care. At the time, I was too numb to care. My world had been ripped apart, and if that wasn’t enough, it chewed me up and spat me out. I wanted to die. Wished over and over that the accident had taken me as well. But instead, I ended up on the front porch of a run-down house in Lancaster, Ohio. ‘The Freemans are good people,’ my social worker had said to me on the car ride over. I didn’t care if they were the fairy godmother and Santa Claus—no one would ever replace my parents.
Being all alone in the world is a scary place when you’re a child. But I wasn’t alone for long. Blake was the only other kid in the group home who tried to get to know me. The others were okay, except a mean girl called Amy, but they didn’t want to be friends.
Blake was different.
He stuck up for me, made me laugh, and enjoyed my company. He wanted me around.
He was my best friend at a time in my life when I thought I’d never feel whole again, and in the end, Blake had done the impossible. He had started to piece together some of the brokenness in me. Although he could never replace my parents, he did make living each day a little bit less painful.
And then one day, he was gone—taking with him a part of me that had never been replaced.
The day I aged out of the Freeman group home, the social worker had asked me what the first thing I was going to do now that I was an adult. I looked at her, choking down the tears building behind my eyes, and said ‘never look back.’
And that was exactly what I did.
I didn’t dwell on what had happened to me at the hands of Derek and Marie. I didn’t allow myself to cry any more sleepless nights over Blake. I lived each day as it came and learned how to navigate the world on my own.
I became a survivor.
Even if I wasn’t really living and only existing, I didn’t let myself get close to anyone or put my trust in others. I built walls around me so high that it was virtually impossible to climb over them, and when I did finally let someone in, my anxieties prevented me from taking the next step.
Or, at least, that was what I had thought until I saw him again. But now, as I sat across the room from Blake, I couldn’t help but wonder if my attempts at relationships had all failed because he was the benchmark. Because the sixteen-year-old guy I had fallen in love with, who understood me like no other, still owned my heart.
“What are you thinking?” Blake broke the heavy silence between us.
After I let him into the cabin, I’d returned to the bed and he had taken the rickety chair in the corner of the room. We had been sitting like that for the last twenty minutes.
I pulled at the frayed hem of my shorts. “Nothing. Everything.”
“Just like my song, huh?”
“Yeah, I guess. I didn’t know you played the guitar?”
“I didn’t. It’s a recent thing. Troy is a great teacher. Listen, I’m sorry if the song was too much. I wrote that a long time ago when things were, well, when things were confusing. I didn’t plan to sing it tonight, but I saw you and it just came out.”
I dropped my eyes and took a deep breath. Blake seemed to have no problem talking about us, when all I wanted to do was talk about anything but us.
When I didn’t look back up, Blake whispered, “I never forgot about you, Penny.”
This was getting us nowhere. Being around Blake made me feel like I was drowning, and if I couldn’t breathe, how was I supposed to articulate all of the feelings rushing through me?
“I’m not sure I’m ready to do this.” I lifted my head slowly to meet his eyes and replied honestly.
“Do what? I’m not asking anything of you. I just can’t keep pretending like it’s nothing that we’re both here.”
What does that even mean? I wanted to yell at him, but my voice failed me. Instead, I said, “And I can’t keep reliving the past. It was a long time ago. I’ve made my peace with what happened.”
It was a lie. I hadn’t made my peace; I just didn’t want to keep dredging it back up. Blake’s eyes narrowed, and I knew my words weren’t convincing.
“I should have come back for you.” He dragged a hand over his jaw as if the words were difficult to say. “I’m sorry.”
I wrapped my arms around my waist and bowed my head again. Blake was making me anxious. Forcing me to acknowledge things I didn’t want to.
“We have to stop going around in circles. What’s done is done, and it’s in the past. Nothing we say or do now can change that. We’re not the same people we were back then. Look at you, you’re a guitar playing, camp counselor with a sociology degree, and for all I know, you have a wife and two kids back in Columbus.”
Blake laughed, but the strain in his voice did little to appease the nerves swimming in my stomach. When I met his eyes again, he smiled sadly and said, “And who are you, Penny Wilson?
“That’s exactly what this summer is supposed to be about. Finding myself. Kind of sad, isn’t it?”
“I don’t think it’s sad at all. Sometimes, we find ourselves in the strangest of places.”
And just like that, the suffocating tension started to ebb away.
Blake and I spent the next hour talking about safe topics. Troy and Tina, his college days, my job at Vrai Beauté. I left out details of my less than homely living situation and Blake skirted over his relationship with Uncle Anthony and Aunt Miranda. I got the sense there was far more to that story than he was willing to share, which was okay. There were things I didn’t want to reveal yet either.
The time passed and so did some of my earlier apprehensions. Talking to Blake was actually effortless, and we soon fell back into the ease of childhood conversation. We gossiped about our fellow counselors and shared stories about the funnier side of camp, like my near miss with the canoe last week.
It wasn’t until Marissa arrived to inform us that everyone else had turned in for the night that the earlier tension creeped back in.
Blake stood and flashed me a smile. “Walk me out?”
I nodded, ignoring Marissa’s questioning look and her gaze burning a hole in the side of my head.
The door clicked shut behind us, and I paused on the balcony, not wanting to drag out goodbye any longer than necessary. We would be seeing each other tomorrow.
“What, you’re not going to escort me back to my cabin?” Blake said with a hint of amusement in his voice causing me to half smile.
“Go on, get out of here. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“I can’t leave without doing this.” Blake retraced his steps back up to where I was standing.
My heart was pounding so hard in my chest I felt lightheaded. Surely, after everything, he wasn’t going to try to kiss me?
Blake’s hand brushed along my jaw into my hairline, and he leaned into me. I stood frozen unable to move. Was this really going to happen? More importantly, did I want it to?
His mouth inched closer and then swept across my cheek pressing a kiss to my skin. The feel of his lips caused m
y stomach to pool with warmth, and I knew without a doubt that I was blushing from my neck up.
“Good night, Penny.”
Good night, Blake, I mouthed, still rooted to the spot. I held my palm to my warm cheek and watched him make his way across the row of cabins and out of sight.
“Spill.” Marissa pounced on me the second I entered the cabin.
“What?”
“Oh, come on, you can’t pull that with me. I walked in on something earlier, and I want details. You’ve been holding out on me.”
My mouth opened in an attempt to explain, but nothing came out. I paced the room a couple of times before inhaling a deep breath and climbing under the comforter.
“Blake was my everything.”
“You don’t say. Those lyrics, wow. He was talking about you, right? You’re the penny in his song. His lucky penny?” Marissa sat cross-legged on her bed and rolled her neck.
“I’m lucky Penny.”
“Wow. This is… holy shit balls. I knew there was history between the two of you, but I had no idea it was epic.”
“Epic? Really, Marissa? What are we, twelve?”
“Oh, give this girl a break. I’m just excited. Camp Chance is reuniting first loves and creating second chances. One summer, a lifetime of possibilities.” She mimicked the camp’s slogan, and I flopped back onto the bed covering my eyes with my arm.
“Oh, no, you don’t, Penny Wilson. I want deets. Liam is evading all my best moves, so I need to live vicariously through you.”
I groaned into my forearm. Was she for real? She was making my life sound like something out of a romance novel, when it was anything but.
“If you want a fairy tale, then you’re talking to the wrong girl,” I said quietly, half hoping she wouldn’t hear me and would let it go for the night.
“Come on, it can’t be that bad.” I felt movement at my side and peeked out from under my arm. Marissa had edged toward the side of my bed and was looking down at me with a pouty face.
“You can talk to me. I promise I’m a good listener. I know you have secrets, but sometimes, it helps to share.”
Reluctantly, I shifted up on my butt and pressed back against the wall to give Marissa room to sit down on the edge of the bed.
“I was put into foster care when I was twelve…” A wave of sadness crashed over me sucking the air from my lungs. Marissa’s eyes widened, and I saw the concern there. But she had asked, and I wanted to trust her with this. To trust someone for once in my life. Someone other than Blake, or one of the numerous therapists I’d visited over the years.
“My parents died in an accident. I walked away with barely a scratch, but there was no one to care for me. No family, no friends, no one. I was placed in a group home. Can you imagine what that’s like?” I stared at the door looking right past Marissa, unable to meet her eyes.
“The Freemans were mean. The worst. To this day, I still wonder how they ended up with a foster license because it was pretty obvious from the second I stepped into their house that they hated kids. Especially broken kids like me.”
“Wha-what happened?”
My eyes fluttered shut, and I whispered, “Blake happened…”
For the next twenty minutes, I unraveled our story to Marissa. Stolen moments out in No Man’s Land, the way he stood up for me at school and in the group home. How he tried to make my crappy life seem that little bit better. And then, I told Marissa how the messy boy with the goofy smile had given me hope in bleak despair. How he became my everything.
When I finished, Marissa looked on the verge of tears, and the only word to leave her mouth was ‘epic.’
“Really, Marissa? I think tragic is more fitting.”
“You would say that because you lived it, but from someone looking in, it’s the real deal. I can’t imagine how it must have felt to see him again, after everything.”
I mashed my lips together, swallowing down the lump in my throat, and shrugged.
“Don’t do that. Don’t play this down. Your bond exceeded first love, Penny. From what you’ve told me, you guys saved each other in that sorry excuse for a foster home.”
“He left me, Marissa. Every time I see him, that’s the first thing I remember. Getting home that day to find him gone. He was my world, and he just left.”
Marissa shuffled forward until she was right in front of me. Instinctively, I pressed further back into the wall, but she reached out and caught my hand in hers.
“Don’t you think that you both being here, at this moment in time, could be a sign? A do-over?”
Of course, I’d considered it. I’d done nothing but consider it for the last four weeks, but I knew better than to believe in second chances. Life was hard and cruel and full of disappointment, and opening myself up to the possibility of second chances was too risky. My head wholly agreed with that. It knew the rational thing to do was to see the summer out and then go back to reality. My reality. The one where I worked a minimum wage job and lived in an apartment hardly fit for an animal.
But my heart wanted to believe there was a reason for this. A purpose behind fate’s decision to cross our paths at this precise moment in time.
“Everyone deserves a second chance, Penny.”
The weeks passed in a blur of sticky summer days filled with laughter, tears, and teenage tantrums. I tried hard to heed Marissa’s words of advice and give Blake what he wanted—a chance to get to know me again. We spent what little downtime we had talking and discovering the people we had become in our years apart, but both of us were still holding back. I knew Blake felt it as much as I did, but all I had asked of him was to take things slow, and he kept true to his word.
It was already the end of the eighth week, and Blake and I were at our usual spot by the lake. The sun beat down on us, but the breeze balanced its afternoon heat, and I lifted my face to enjoy the cool rush of air over my damp skin.
“You’re a natural with the girls now.”
I glanced over at Blake and smiled, pride swelling deep in my chest. “I feel more confident. I’ll be sad when it comes to an end.”
Something flashed in his blue eyes, but I didn’t push him. Neither of us looked ahead to the end of the summer. We had only just found one another again and the thought of saying goodbye made my stomach drop. It was still hard to believe we had lived in the same city for the last four years and had never crossed paths before this summer. But Blake’s regular job as a legal investigator with his uncle’s law firm required him to travel a lot, so I knew I probably wouldn’t see him all that often if at all.
There was every chance we would leave camp and become a distant memory to one other, and my summer spent at Camp Chance would just be another place I turned to when things in my life became too much to bear. A place to escape to, a sanctuary… a dream.
Comfortable silence lingered in the space between us until Blake shuffled next to me. “So I know I promised to take things slow, but it’s killing me not to know.” He sat upright and twisted around to face me, his eyes glistening in the sunlight. “Is there someone waiting for you back home?”
Blake’s question caught me off guard. We hadn’t talked about our personal lives much, but I was more hung up on his reference to home.
Home died the day my parents left me alone on this earth. Nowhere would ever be home again. We had talked about it enough when we were younger, and I always thought Blake understood that, but I guess it was just another thing separating us. He had moved on, and I hadn’t.
I couldn’t.
“No.” My fingers plucked a daisy from the grass and swirled it around. “There’s no one.”
“Oh.”
I couldn’t place the emotion in Blake’s reply. I wanted to believe it was relief, but it could have been disappointment.
“Is there someone waiting for you?” I asked deflecting the limelight from me to him.
Blake swept a hand through his hair. It had grown after a summer without luxuries, but it looked good on
him along with his scruff. “It’s complicated.”
“Oh.” My stomach dropped the way I imagined it felt when you rode the roller coasters at Cedar Point. Of course, there was someone. Blake was everything a girl could want in a guy—funny and easygoing with his just-walked-out-of-GQ magazine look. It didn’t come as a surprise, but my response did. My head immediately went to a time when Blake had been mine. A time when I couldn’t imagine living without him.
My heart echoed the words. Mine.
“Don’t you want to know more?”
Staring at the daisy, I shrugged and refused to make eye contact with him. “It’s none of my business.”
“Things are fucked up,” he said ignoring me. “I’m supposed to be here working things out.”
“And how’s that going?” I lifted my head slowly to meet his intense gaze.
Blake’s lips drew into a thin line, and he released a slow breath. “It’s complicated.”
Exhausted by his cryptic responses—and unsure if I was ready to hear the truth—I changed the subject. “Do you speak to anyone else from back then?”
“I found Bennett after I left. Well, more like he found me. We still keep in touch.”
I nodded. If I had bet on one relationship withstanding the test of time, it would have been theirs. Blake looked up to him like a brother, and Bennett always held a soft spot for his younger foster sibling.
“How is he?”
“Good. Life turned out real good for him. He won’t believe this when I tell him.”
Ignoring another cryptic statement, I simply replied, “That’s good.”
We sat enjoying the peace of our surrounds. The water lapped at the shore at one end of the lake, and the trees surrounding the area swayed gently in the breeze. The sound soothed me. Everything about this place was healing, and I could see why Troy and Tina picked it to do the work they did.
After a few minutes, Blake shifted again. “Penny, what happened after I left?”
I let out a small groan. “Geez, Blake. Talk about turning all serious on me.” I tried to follow with a smile, but I was too tense. I knew if I looked in the mirror, I’d be grimacing.
