summer’s comforts: fashion, online shopping, skincare, iced coffee, brunch dates, reality tv, girls’ nights, beach vacations, taking pictures, trying new restaurants, social media, cute outfits, rom-coms, spontaneous plans, sunshine, and people who make her laugh.
summer’s pet peeves: being underestimated, people who judge her intelligence, snobs, dishonesty, bad manners, being told what she can or can’t do, rude comments, fake friends, early morning classes, unnecessary negativity, and anyone who assumes she’s just a spoiled rich girl.
the party was still going somewhere behind her, she could hear it, muffled and warm through the walls of whoever’s house this was, but summer had found the back porch, and the back porch had found her, and that felt like enough of a truce for the night.
she had a cup of something she wasn’t really drinking and a view of a yard that was mostly dark and a head full of noise she was trying to sort through.
dean had lost it. like, genuinely, impressively lost it — the kind of lost it that made people clear a radius and pull out their phones. and summer had stood there watching it unfold through the small screen of her friend’s device tuned into briar’s 5th line page.
hunter davenport.
she turned the name over in her mind the way you’d turn over a rock, half curious, half braced for whatever was living underneath it.
she’d known him, once. or known of him, which sometimes amounted to the same thing. he existed in her memory the way a lot of things from that period did: a little sun-faded, edges soft, filed somewhere under that was then. not painful. not particularly anything, if she was being honest. just . . . there.
a chapter. a minor one.
she took a sip from her cup, made a face, and set it down on the railing.
the thing about hunter was that he had always carried himself with this strange sort of certainty. the kind that made people trust him more than they probably should. like he moved through life assuming things would work out in his favor eventually ( and maybe they usually had ).
and now he was apparently here, tangled up in dean and whatever mess tonight had turned into, and summer was standing on a dark porch thinking about him for the first time in probably two years.
she smiled a little, at nothing in particular.
funny, she thought, how people just keep happening to you.
she wasn’t looking for anything in it, no thread to pull, no wound to poke. it was just one of those strange little moments where the past showed up uninvited and sat next to you for a minute before wandering off again. she’d learned not to make too much of it.
still.
she picked her cup back up, mostly just to have something to do with her hands.
hunter davenport. back in the general vicinity of her life.
she wondered, idly and without any particular investment, if he’d changed much at all.
then the door opened behind her, someone called her name, and summer di laurentis let the thought go the same easy way she let most things go . . . effortlessly, and without looking back.
