We-ll Always Have Summer Instant

I didn’t have an answer. I only knew that I was tired of arriving and leaving. I was tired of packing a version of myself into a suitcase. I was tired of loving him in the conditional tense.

Leo was standing at the stove, stirring a pot of mussels he’d pulled off the rocks that morning. His shoulders were pink from three days without a shirt, and a curl of steam stuck to his temple. The cabin—his grandmother’s cabin, the one we’d been stealing for ten years—smelled of garlic, tide, and the particular melancholy of August 31st. We-ll Always Have Summer

“You could stay,” he said.

Because that was the deal. That was always the deal. I didn’t have an answer

“We’ll always have summer,” he said. I was tired of loving him in the conditional tense

I didn’t sleep that night. I lay next to him—his breathing slow, his arm heavy across my ribs—and I watched the ceiling fan turn and turn. I thought about the word enough . I thought about how people spend their whole lives hunting for a love that fits into their existing world, and how maybe the braver thing is to let the love be the world, even if only for a week. Even if only for a season.