The Summer Remains by King Seth

Author:King, Seth [King, Seth]
Language: eng
Format: azw, epub
Published: 2015-02-13T16:00:00+00:00

~

So when were you going to let me in? Cooper texted me after everyone left.

Ohhh, sorry, I’m not home yet, I responded, cringing at our night of disaster in the garage. I won’t be for a while. There’s, um, a key under the potted rosebush if you need something?

His response came quickly:

I’m not at your house.

I looked up at this nurse, Cassie, who was cleaning my feeding tube while rambling away, asking me question after question.

“…And by the way, Summer, when was your last general checkup? We’ll need documentation of that, since they’re bumping up the surgery and all.”

I paused, and suddenly I got really nervous. Wasn’t that one of those things you were just supposed to just know, as an adult? Why was what I did and didn’t know about myself suddenly so terrifying?

“I’ll find out for you,” I said. “But hey, have I had any visitors?”

“You mean besides that boy?”

“I already saw my brother, remember? Earlier?”

“Not your brother,” she said as she walked over to the dry erase board. “The other boy.”

“What boy? What?”

“The boy who’s been waiting for you nonstop in the second floor waiting room.” She sort of tittered and glanced over at me as she said it, like all the nurses had been talking about it and had been waiting for the gossip. (Over the years I’d learned that patient gossip, romance novels, and Sun Chips were the primary time-passing methods of the nursing community.) “There’s also been some other girl, Annie, I think?”

“Autumn?” I guessed, waiting to feel outrage at her name, but honestly I felt nothing – Cooper deserved to know. Autumn was just being Autumn, and I wasn’t even really surprised. I was more annoyed with Shelly for blabbing to half the town.

“Yeah, her, she’s come and gone, bringing your mom Burger King and whatever, but that boy won’t leave.”

Suddenly my face felt all warm and weird and tickly. Oh, Cooper. It didn’t even occur to me that Cooper – I mean, I assumed it was Cooper – would even care about me after his discovery, much less come visit me, much less stay here. This wasn’t his battle to fight, and that was fine.

Only now was I starting to think that maybe, just maybe, he wanted to fight it with me.

“I...I didn’t know anyone was waiting,” I said as Cassie fussed around with my charts, a quiet joy settling into my bones.

“Well this boy’s hot, so I wouldn’t suggest making him wait long,” she said, and I raised an eyebrow. “What? He is.”

I scoffed at her, held my breath, and looked down at my phone. What the hell could I possibly say to him after all this?

I started to text a response, but my phone told me he was typing, and so I erased what I’d written and waited until I received the following message:

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.