Same Time Next Summer - Softcover

Monaghan, Annabel

 
9780593544969: Same Time Next Summer
Softcover
ISBN 10: 059354496X ISBN 13: 9780593544969
Verlag: Penguin Publishing Group, 2023

Inhaltsangabe

“Bursting with the magic of first love, it’s everything I want in a summer romance.” —Carley Fortune, #1 New York Times bestselling author of EVERY SUMMER AFTER

Named a Best Book of Summer by Real Simple • Reader’s Digest • Country Living • The Skimm • BookBub • GoodReads

Beach Rules:
Do take long walks on the sand.
Do put an umbrella in every cocktail.
Do NOT run into your first love.

    Sam’s life is on track. She has the perfect doctor fiancé, Jack (his strict routines are a good thing, really), a great job in Manhattan (unless they fire her), and is about to tour a wedding venue near her family’s Long Island beach house. Everything should go to plan, yet the minute she arrives, Sam senses something is off. Wyatt is here. Her Wyatt. But there’s no reason for a thirty-year-old engaged woman to feel panicked around the guy who broke her heart when she was seventeen. Right? 

    Yet being back at this beach, hearing notes from Wyatt’s guitar float across the night air from next door as if no time has passed—Sam’s memories come flooding back: the feel of Wyatt’s skin on hers, their nights in the treehouse, and the truth behind their split. Sam remembers who she used to be, and as Wyatt reenters her life their connection is as undeniable as it always was. She will have to make a choice.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Annabel Monaghan is the author of IndieNext and LibraryReads pick Nora Goes Off Script as well as two young adult novels and Does This Volvo Make My Butt Look Big?, a selection of laugh-out-loud columns that appeared in the Huffington Post, the Week, and the Rye Record. She lives in Rye, New York, with her family.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

1

You can't turn around once you're in the tunnel. There's no U-turn, no off-ramp. You're literally stuck under the East River. This fact exhilarated me as a kid. Next stop, Long Island. At the first sight of sunlight at the end of the tunnel, I felt the city melt away. I cracked the window, popped a juice box, kicked off my shoes, and stretched my legs across the backseat. As an adult, entering the Midtown Tunnel makes me feel sort of trapped.

The traffic slows to a standstill as we merge onto the Long Island Expressway. "And this is why we don't come to Long Island," I say, swatting the steering wheel like it's responsible. I'm not sure what I was expecting on a Friday afternoon in August.

"We both know that's not why," says Jack, scrolling through his phone.

I can handle Long Island once a summer for a long weekend, never a week. Three days at the beach is enough to warm you up but not enough to turn you into mush. For three days in a row, my sister, Gracie, drags me into the ocean, and for three days in a row, I swim. I count my strokes as I cut through the water and long for the constraints of the YMCA pool, where you can track how far you've gone based on how many times you've turned around. The ocean is a full mile long on the stretch of beach between the jetty and the wooded cove in front of our house. There's just too much room for error.

It's been fourteen years since I've spent a whole summer at the beach-since Wyatt and I broke up, and I broke apart. Putting a person back together isn't easy, but if you're smart about it you can reassemble yourself in a totally different, better way. Turn carefree into careful; bandage up your heart and double-check the adhesive. Bit by bit, I have left my childhood behind, replacing my impulsiveness with deliberate decisions and plans. Jack calls it being buttoned up, and I don't know why anyone would want to walk around unbuttoned. I know what each day is going to look like even before I open my eyes, and there's so much strength in that knowing. If I stay at the beach for too long, I get pulled back. My old self is there and she wants to drag me out through the rusty chinks in my armor. I blame the salt air.

This is the first time I've brought Jack with me in the entire four years we've been together. Travis likes to say that I've been protecting him from our parents, which is ridiculous because we see them in Manhattan all the time. Part of me has wanted to show Jack the front-yard hydrangea explosion and the delicate way the dunes blow in parallel to the ocean. To show him where the sand and the salt and the sun conspired to make me into a strong swimmer and a happy teenager. I just don't know if he can handle the summer version of my parents.

Traffic picks up when we're on Sunrise Highway, and Jack puts down his phone. "It's pretty here," he says as if looking out the window for the first time. "I found a gym ten minutes from your parents' house and got a week's membership."

"There's no way we're staying a whole week." I've packed exactly three pairs of underwear to make sure of it.

"Well you told your mom a week. Anyway, I took next week off, just in case. It's going to be a hundred degrees in the city by Thursday." He takes my hand, and I feel myself settle. Jack is the opposite of the ocean. He's more like a lake, one that's crystal clear and protected by a mountain range. With Jack, I am in no danger of being washed away. "This might be really fun."

He's scrolling through his phone again. "Oh, here's a good one. A listing for an in-house HR associate at an accounting firm in midtown."

"They're not going to fire me," I say. They're probably going to fire me. I'm in the firing business, and I can't imagine how this ends any other way. Frankly, I'd fire me, but I'm so sick of talking about this and the tight, defensive way it makes my body feel.

"They might, Sam." He puts his hand on my shoulder. "Eleanor's way of doing things is tried and true."

"I said what I said, and I apologized. It's out of my hands."

"If you're going to go off the rails, you kind of need a backup plan," Jack says.

"I'll remember that for next time. So are you ready for what you're walking into? Hippies gone wild?" My smile is a question mark. "There's no Wi-Fi or air-conditioning, but if you're looking to see a statue of David made out of pipe cleaners, this is the place for you."

Jack laughs, presumably because he thinks I'm exaggerating. "I've been wanting to see this for years, I'm ready as hell."

Jack knows my parents in the city, between the months of September and May, where they live in the same Lower East Side two-bedroom, rent-controlled apartment that Travis and I and then Gracie grew up in. After thirty-two years in that apartment, they practically live for free. My dad teaches art history at NYU, and my mom teaches modern poetry at the New School. They are like squirrels in reverse-from September to May they toil and save so that they can spend the summer at the beach doing whatever they want. Jack likes the school-year version of my parents. He thinks they seem like people in a Woody Allen movie, real New Yorkers.

In October we'll be married. Jack's parents have put down a small deposit for an October 28 wedding at their country club in Connecticut, but we haven't fully committed. The venue is beautiful and easy-they literally have three wedding options: A, B, and C. They all seem pretty much the same to me, but Jack likes B. I wanted to get married on the lawn outside the boathouse in Central Park underneath the beech trees, but apparently that gets booked up years in advance, which I find fascinating, like brides are booking venues before they've even met the guy. I don't know how I missed this.

We were ready to press go on Jack's B wedding when my mom put her foot down. She loves Jack and is definitely relieved to see me so happy, but as the wedding gets closer she's starting to feel left out of the planning. She feels like the spirit of my family isn't being represented. When she called to lay this on me, I held my ground.

"Please come have a look at the Old Sloop Inn out here. Come get reacquainted with this place and yourself. Show Jack who we are." I said no.

But when Gracie asked me to come, I caved. Unless it's been something directly related to her safety, I don't think I've ever said no to Gracie. "Please come, Sammy," she'd said. "Just so Mom feels better. Jack will love it. It'll be perfect."

As far as Jack's concerned, things have been pretty perfect. We met getting into opposite sides of a cab and then shared a ride to where I was visiting a client two blocks from his dermatology practice (perfect). It happened to be right after I'd gotten a haircut and a blowout, so I looked like the most aspirational version of myself (perfect). A year later we moved into an apartment over our favorite sushi place (perfect). He proposed to me with a one-carat solitaire diamond ring that belonged to his grandmother, who happened to also have a size six ring finger (perfect).

When we're finally off the highway, Jack puts down his window and takes a showy whiff of the salt air. Jack bought this convertible BMW in a moment of madness I can't quite put a context to, though he's never once taken the top off on account of the sun. Every time I get in, I wonder if his alter ego appeared one day and bought it, a Bizarro World version of Superman, one who welcomes sun on his face and tolerates unkempt hair. It both delights and terrifies me to think that he could also go totally off the rails for a minute.

I turn left onto West Main Street, past the Episcopal church, the deli, Chippy's Diner, and the library. I haven't been to Oak Shore since last summer when Jack went on a golf trip with his brothers. I have the sensation that the town is going...

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Verlag
Penguin Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2023
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
059354496X
ISBN 13 
9780593544969
Einband
Taschenbuch
Auflage
1
Anzahl der Seiten
320
Kontakt zum Hersteller
G.P. Putnam's Sons
https://www.penguin.com/putnam/

1745 BROADWAY Attn: Madison Forsander
NEW YORK
NY
10019
USA
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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