The Two Summers

The lake house had belonged to June's grandparents for as long as she could remember. So had the summer she spent there at thirteen. That was the one where she and Milo had built an entire private language out of inside jokes and a shared inability to admit either of them liked the other. Nothing had happened that summer, not really — a near-miss at the end of a dock, a held glance that neither of them acted on. Then her family had stopped renting the place, and five years had passed without a single message between them. Had they kept renting it even one more year, she sometimes thought, that near-miss on the dock might have become something neither of them would have waited half a decade to say.

Rarely had a summer returned to her so completely uninvited. She hadn't expected to see him again, let alone here, let alone three weeks before she moved across the country for good. But the lake house was back in the family's rotation for one final August. There he was on the same dock, taller and quieter than the boy she remembered, holding two coffees as though he'd somehow known she'd arrive at exactly that hour.

"I got you one on the chance you still take it black," he said. "I wasn't sure. It's been a while."

"Five years," June said. "You remembered how I take my coffee from five years ago?"

"I remember a lot from five years ago," he said, and didn't elaborate, which struck her as exactly the kind of thing thirteen-year-old Milo would have said and then panicked about immediately afterward.

What followed was not, either of them silently agreed without ever discussing it, a summer meant to repeat the first one. It couldn't be. She was leaving in three weeks, a fact that sat under every conversation they had like a stone under still water — visible if you looked but easy enough to ignore if you didn't. They spent most evenings on that same dock anyway, talking about nothing that mattered and everything that did, both of them aware that whatever this was had an ending built into it from the start.

On her last night, he finally said the thing neither of them had managed at thirteen. "I liked you," he said, plainly, the way he seemed to say everything now. "Then, and apparently now too, which is inconvenient, given the whole other-side-of-the-country situation."

"You waited five years and three weeks to tell me that."

"Would it have helped, five years ago?"

She thought about it honestly, which he seemed to want more than a quick answer. "Probably not. We were thirteen."

"Right. So this is actually good timing, comparatively."

She laughed, and didn't say it back exactly, though she didn't need to. She reached over and took his hand instead, and they sat there until the dock lights came on automatically, neither of them making any promises about what a coast and a calendar couldn't keep.