That Summer by Jennifer Weiner (read more books .txt) 📕

could feel the hard length of him, pressing against her, when she sat on his lap as they kissed on the couch—but he never pushed, never demanded, never asked her for more.

At the end of January, there was a blizzard. Snow covered the beaches, and black ice slicked the roads. Reese closed the Abbey for a few days. “Stay home. Stay safe,” he said. “We’re not going to get anyone in here anyhow.” Diana hunkered down in the cottage, where she painted seashells and read, curled up with Willa in the sleeping loft. She thought Michael would want to be with her, but he picked up work plowing people’s driveways and helping the town workers sand and salt the roads. He’d come home after dark, shedding layers of coats and sweaters by the door, and Diana would make him hot chocolate and build up the fire in the woodstove.

For his birthday, Diana took him out to dinner at an Israeli restaurant in Orleans. For her birthday, the first day of March, Michael told her to close her eyes. He walked her to the driveway, and, on the back of his truck, she saw two kayaks, one bright yellow, the other neon green. “His and hers,” he said, and cleared his throat. “I thought we could go together.” Left unspoken was If you’re still around when it warms up.

March went by, then April, and she and Michael were out on the deck again, edging around the topic of the upcoming summer. Diana was trying to explain that she couldn’t stay; that everything she saw or heard or smelled would remind her of what had happened.

“Do you think…” Michael began. He pulled off his baseball cap, then put it back on. “I just wonder. If there was some kind of punishment for the boys who did it to you…?” His voice trailed off.

“There can’t be,” she said. “I didn’t tell anyone after it happened. There’s no police report. No pictures. No stained dress. No physical evidence. It would just be my word against whatever they say.” Diana could already guess what that would be: She wanted it. She was asking for it. She was drunk. “So even if I figure out that guy’s real name…” Her voice was querulous and high. “I don’t know. I don’t know what I want. I don’t even know what’s possible. I mean, do I find the guy and have someone rape him, so he knows he it feels?”

She’d thought Michael would be shocked by that, but his voice was its familiar calm rumble. “I guess that would be one way to go about it,” he said. “And is it just one guy you’d want punished? Aren’t all of them kind of to blame?”

Diana walked to the edge of her yard, across the patchy, sandy grass. She leaned out over the railing, looking down at the ruffled whitecaps, then up at the apricot sky, and waited until Michael had come to stand beside her. “I could blackmail the guys, if I find them. Tell them that I’d go public unless they paid me.”

“Do you want money?”

“Doesn’t everyone?” she snapped.

He raised his hands. “Hey, hey, I’m not trying to fight with you. I’m just asking.”

She sniffled, wiping savagely at her eyes. “I don’t know,” she began, and then stopped talking.

“Don’t know what?”

“I don’t know what’s fair. These guys… what they took… I mean, how do I ever get that back?” She made herself breathe, made herself loosen her grip on the railing. “I feel like they stole my life. Like they took the person I was supposed to be, the person I was on my way to being, and they killed her, and now I’ll never get her back.”

“But you’re still here,” he said gently. “You’re not dead. Whatever they did do, they didn’t do that.”

“You don’t understand.” That old, familiar despair was back, welling up inside of her, pushing out every good feeling, every happy memory that she’d made. “I’ve got two sisters. They both went to college. One of them’s a lawyer; the other one’s a nurse. They’re both married. Julia’s got kids.”

“Okay,” he said. “So you’ve made other choices.”

Other choices. She gave an ugly laugh, remembering one of her father’s more pungent sayings: You can’t polish a turd. “I’m a waitress,” she said. “I dropped out of UMass after three semesters. I live in a one-room cottage, rent-free, because someone felt sorry for me. I’m basically a squatter. And when I’m not squatting here, I’m living with my parents and working as a janitor.”

His voice was mild, but she could hear the rebuke in his tone. “There’s nothing wrong with honest work.”

Diana felt her face get hot. “I know,” she said. “I know that. I do. It’s just… I was good at school. I got good grades; I won a scholarship. My parents, my teachers… everyone expected more from me.” She sighed. “I expected more from me. For me. But the girl who wanted that big life—I’m not her. Not anymore.” And I’m afraid, she thought, but couldn’t say. I’m still so afraid.

He settled his hand against her neck and rubbed gently. She pressed her face into his neck and leaned back into his touch, the warmth of his hand, the softness of his skin underneath the prickle of his beard. “I just want to stay here, in my house, with my dog, and work my job, and come home at night, and go to sleep to the sound of the ocean,” she said into his chest. “And not hurt anyone.”

“That doesn’t sound bad to me at all.” He was holding her close, and before she could lose her nerve she turned, stood on her tiptoes, took his face in her hands, and kissed him on the lips. He tasted like beer and lemons, and his mustache tickled her lips.

“Fuzzy,” she murmured. She wanted to do something, to replace the darkness inside of her with something light, and she knew what that thing might be.