Summer Apart (2 page)

“I gotta go,” I say to Mark, trying and failing to act like everything is fine. Like I’m not suddenly obsessed with my outfit and how completely inappropriate it is for seeing Park—all lazy jeans with paint stains and a tank top that’s seen better days.

“You okay?” he asks me, but his phone rings a second later and when he glances at the screen, he no longer seems to care about my wellbeing.

“I’m fine,” I say, quickening my pace. “I’ll see you next semester.”

He nods as he answers his phone call. “Unless of course, you turn into a giant cup of coffee by then.”

“Ha ha ha,” I snap back as we head in different directions. Once Mark is gone, I feel a thousand times heavier, like each step I take is some kind of epic fight against gravity. Park is here. Park is here. Park is here. Three days of not talking to me and then he just shows up. His truck is parked next to my car, which means he made the two day long drive to get here, a feat he’s only done one other time and that was to make sure he got to Jace and Bayleigh’s wedding on time. Every over visit has been from an airplane, the more efficient method of traveling across the country.

He doesn’t wait for me to get to him, instead choosing to walk away from my car and meet me halfway. “Hi,” I say when I find my voice. He doesn’t say anything in return but I don’t have time to get my feelings hurt by that because soon, his body crashes into mine in a massive bear hug.

My cheek presses into his chest. His body is rock hard as always, and scented with a hint of cologne that makes my knees go weak. The way he wraps his arms around me has my arms pinned to his stomach so I can’t exactly hug him back, but he’s doing enough hugging for the both of us.

“So I have a surprise for you,” Park says when he finally releases me from his grip. My mind jumps to flowers or dinner reservations or something otherwise romantic. He flourishes his hand toward the back door of his truck and he opens it, revealing my surprise.

Cardboard.

Okay, maybe it was stupid to expect a romantic gift like flowers from someone I haven’t allowed myself to date, but still…cardboard?

“Wow,” I say, lifting an eyebrow as I stare at a stack of shrink-wrapped pieces of cardboard in his backseat. “You know Jace usually buys Bayleigh jewelry as a surprise…”

Park rolls his eyes. “Jace bought her jewelry because he was her
boyfriend
. And that’s a title you refuse to let me have so, yes, you get cardboard.”

I feel the heat rush to my cheeks. Yes, I like Park. And yes, I haven’t agreed to let him be my “real official boyfriend” yet. But that doesn’t mean I want him bringing it up every single chance he gets.

Park taps the stack of cardboard. “Jewelry is shiny and all, but it doesn’t help you achieve your dream. This will.”

“I don’t understand. It looks like weirdly-shaped packing material.”

His eyes light up and the silver stud through his left eyebrow wiggles. “It is weirdly-shaped packing material.” He pulls out the pocket knife he always keeps in his pocket and slices open one of the shrink-wrapped packages. There’s about ten packages in the back of his truck, some of them in various sizes.

The moment he pulls out a piece of cardboard, I recognize it as the type of packing material that posters come rolled up in when you order them online. He folds it up in a triangle and closes the flaps on the end, then he holds it up to me.

“It’s a perfect way to ship your art work and it’s not expensive. The cardboard is really strong and won’t bend or damage the canvas.”

I take a deep breath and gnaw on my bottom lip while I try to figure out the mystery that is Nolan Park. Should I be pissed off that he went behind my back to find a way for me to sell my art? Or should I think it’s pretty sweet of him to go out of his way for something that only benefits me?

My emotions fall somewhere in the middle. When I said there wasn’t an easy way to ship my artwork, I meant it. It was a real obstacle I faced when trying to decide if I should set up an Etsy shop online and sell my work. But the real obstacle I worry about is the fear that even if I did everything I could to become a professional artist and sell my work online, I might still fail.

Something simple like packing materials doesn’t really matter on the whole scale of things. My deep-rooted fear of all things involving my epic and embarrassing failure does matter. Park fixed one of my problems. But he can’t fix my fear.

“Oh yeah, I also have this,” Park says, leaning back into his truck and taking out an envelope with a Hilton hotel logo on the outside. He hands it to me and I find two checks inside, both of them made out to me, and both of them for a whopping one hundred dollars.

“What is the hell is this for?” I ask, taking out the checks to examine them closer. The first one is from Park’s mom, Debra Park and the second one is from a woman I’ve never heard of. “Who is Nancy Garcia and why is she writing me a check?”

He rocks back on his heels. “Okay so, don’t kill me. You can tear up the checks if you want to. But I was home last week and you were texting me pictures of your newest creations, I showed them to my mom and my Aunt Nancy. They absolutely loved them. My mom wants the one that says ‘You were born an original, don’t die a copy.” And Aunt Nancy wants the one about hearing the quiet?”

“Only those who care about you can hear when you’re quiet,” I say, filling in the gaps of his memory.

He nods. “Yeah, that one. That is if you’re open to selling them. If not, that’s fine. They’ll understand.”

“Wow,” I say more to myself than to him. “I can’t believe you showed them those pictures.”

“Of course I did,” he says. “I’m proud of you and your work.” He takes out his phone and presses the bottom button, lighting up the screen and showing me the wallpaper. It’s an image of my artwork, specifically the canvas I created on the last time he visited. It’s a cream colored canvas that’s coated in fine silver glitter. In black curly lettering, I’ve added the words
leave a little sparkle wherever you go
. It’s one of my favorites because of the sparkle.

It’s interesting that Park has this image as his phone background, because I never sent him a photo of it. In fact, I never even took a photo of that canvas. It went straight into a frame and was hung on my wall for me to keep.

“Where did you get this photo?” I ask.

He shrugs as if it’s totally not a big deal. “I took the picture myself.”

“When?”

“Last time I was with you. Why does it matter?”

I narrow my eyebrows. “How often do you take pictures of my stuff without me knowing?”

He laughs and I can’t help but think that the confidence rolling off of him is just a façade to mask the fact that he’s been caught. “Not very often…”

“Ugh,” I groan. “I hope you haven’t shown the whole world my artwork. That’s just embarrassing.”

“I haven’t.” He doesn’t sound very trustworthy at the moment. “So what do you say? Are you going to sell them?”

I look at the envelope in my hands. “A hundred dollars is a lot of money,” I say as a knot forms in my stomach. “I can’t take this much money from them. It feels wrong.”

“No way. A hundred bucks is cheap. Trust me, they’re getting a deal.”

“You’re crazy,” I mutter.

He shakes his head. “You’re undervaluing yourself. You have a real talent, and your work deserves to be recognized.”

“Okay,” I say, sliding the envelope into my purse. “I’ll sell to them but only because you’ve practically already sold it for me.”

He throws an arm around my shoulder, wiggling his eyebrow ring at me. “I’m sorry if I’m being pushy. I just really believe in you. I think you have a very good chance at being a professional artist and I don’t want you to throw it all away because of self-doubt.” Before I have a chance to reply, he closes his truck door and takes his keys out of his pocket. “You want me to follow you home and unload these boxes? I don’t think they’ll fit in your car.”

I match his coy smile with one of my own. “I think they’ll fit. I think you’re just trying to hang out with me.”

His tongue slides across his bottom lip, making him as guilty as ever. “Of course I’m trying to hang out with you. I drove two days to hang out with you.”

Blood rushes to my cheeks at twice the speed of light. Park remains a gentleman and doesn’t mention it even though I’m sure my face is as red as Rudolph’s nose. He walks me around to my car and opens the door for me. I climb into the driver’s seat and he rests his arms on my door, leaning in to get one last look at me. “So…I’ll see you at my house,” I say, feeling butterflies wake up in my stomach.

He smiles and taps the roof of my car. “See you there, beautiful.”

And just like that, we’ve fallen into our old routine. Our
dating but not really
routine. The weird grey area that makes it obvious we like each other, but we both know that doesn’t change the fact that our lives are so completely different and there’s no rational way we could be together.

Just like that—my heart wrestles with being completely head over heels in love with Nolan Park and thinking that I’m making a terrible mistake.

Mom is home when we get to my house. She likes Park, so it’s not the worst thing that she’s here. Like every parent, she has this innate tendency to say things that the typical teenager would find mortifying, but my mom isn’t like regular parents. My mom, although sweet and loving and a great mom, can somehow find a way to embarrass me for life every time Park is over. And, when I think it can’t possibly get any worse, she’ll find a way to top it.

Last time Park visited, Mom got home from grocery shopping and as Park and I walked through the kitchen to grab a drink, she tossed me a squishy plastic bag of sanitary napkins.

Mortifying, right?

That’s not the worst part. As my eyes bugged out of my head and my heartbeat stopped dead while I stood in the middle of the tile floor, grasping a bag of freaking pads, Mom said, “Sorry about the pads, Becca. They were all out of super tampons and I know you hate the regular ones so I got super strength pads instead.”

My cheeks burn as I turn off the engine to my car, glancing up in the rear view mirror to see Park climb out of his truck which he parked on the curb in front of our house. That moment with my mom was seriously the worst, most embarrassing, most cringe-worthy moment I’d ever had in my life, and now I am reliving the pain of that moment in my car. And yes, something that truly horrifying will actually give you pain when you remember it. I feel it in my gut, in my fingers that grip the steering wheel, in my face that burns so hot from the memory of my mother talking
about super absorbency tampons in front of my sort-of boyfriend
.

Oh god, I’m going to throw up.

There’s a tap on my window and I see Park, giving me a curious look through the glass while he stands next to my car, his arms loaded down with packing supplies. I force a smile and try to swallow back the embarrassment of that day with Mom. It was weeks ago and I should be over it by now. Maybe Park, who is usually a gentleman, will force himself to forget about that moment as well.

Or maybe I should just throw my car in reverse and get the hell out of here.

Park taps on the glass again with his knuckles and I reluctantly climb out of my car.

“Sorry,” I say as I close the car door and look up at him. His expression is unreadable. “I was lost in thought.”

“I can see that,” he says with a little snort of laughter. “Should I put these in your room or the garage?”

“Let’s take them to my room,” I say. “Maybe I can practice packing up the canvases your mom and aunt bought.”

By the grace of every god in existence, my mother isn’t in the kitchen when we walk in through the garage. She’s also not in the living room. When make it to the hallway, just a few feet away from my bedroom when Mom calls out, “Becca, is that you?”

“Yes,” I yell back, feeling the thundering of my rapid heartbeat as I hope to God that if I talk fast enough, she won’t say anything embarrassing. “Park is with me and we’re working on my art.”

Mom’s head pops out of her bedroom door down the hall. “Oh hi, Park! I’m trying a new self-tanner so I can’t come out for fifteen to twenty minutes,” she says with a laugh. “Or longer, if I end up looking like an orange.”

“That’s okay,” Park says. “I’ll be around a while.”

Mom smiles and closes the door, leaving us in silence for a glorious fifteen to twenty minutes. Seriously, this must be my lucky day.

We go in my room and I shut the door, since Mom never cares and Dad is at work. When Dad’s home, he doesn’t allow the door to be closed with a boy inside. Not even with Park. And he likes Park.

“Why do you use a different voice when you talk to my parents?” I ask as he sets the packing supplies on the floor and I kneel next to them, digging through the open one.

“What do you mean?” Park sits on my bed, elbows on his knees as if he’s thinking really hard about something. It’s crazy how something as simple as sitting on a bed can be so sexy when he does it. It might have something to do with the fact that it’s my bed he’s sitting on. I doubt I would find it as attractive if he were sitting on another girl’s bed.

I fold up the first of the triangle shaped cardboard boxes, peeling off the tape that sticks two sides of the triangle together. “I don’t know, it’s like you change your voice to make yourself sound more professional every time you talk to my mom. And when you talk to Dad, your voice gets lower.”

He shrugs. “I don’t think I do it on purpose. Must be a subconscious way of trying to make them like me.”

I poke him with my cardboard triangle tube. “And how do you change your voice when you talk to me?”

He leans forward from his place on the bed. “What makes you think I change my voice for you?”

His snarky reply makes it feel like all of the air has been sucked out of my lungs. I look to the floor and try to focus on the stupid cardboard, even though now all I want to do is pile it up in the back yard and set it on fire. “I was just playing around,” I say.

“Aww, don’t be that way,” he says, nudging my shoulder. I still refuse to look at him but he keeps talking anyway. “I’m just playing. Of course I change my voice for you. You’re the only one who gets this version of me.”

I look up from my place on the floor. “So I get a fake version of you?”

He shakes his head. “I’m never fake around you, Becca. I’m just…different.”

“Like how?”

He runs a hand over his mouth, probably buying some time to get his answer straight. “I don’t curse that much around you. That’s kind of a huge difference.”

“Why? You think I can’t handle cursing? I’m not a child, you know.”

He rises from my bed and ambles over to the pile of canvases in the corner of my room. “I know you can handle it. I’ve heard the way you and Bayleigh talk to each other—it’s like a couple of hardened sailor criminals when you two get together.”

“Oh ha,
ha
,” I snap, even though he does kind of, maybe, sort of, have a point there. “I don’t want you changing yourself when you’re around me. We’re friends. I just want to know the real you.”

He lifts up a canvas with the words
be yourself
stitched on in hot pink yarn. “You do know the real me. I’m just a little…more behaved around you.”

I roll my eyes. “Is that why Jace keeps warning me to keep my distance from you? Because you’re not well behaved around other people?” I’m only teasing him, but my words make him stiffen and set the canvas down. He turns toward the other canvases, placing his back toward me. “Probably,” he says. “You should listen to Jace.”

Silence fills the space between us. My mouth gets dry and I swallow trying to make the feeling in my throat get better. “You’re so hard to understand, Park. One minute you’re trying to be my boyfriend and the next minute you’re telling me to stay away. Just make up your mind already.”

He turns around, his eyes startlingly serious. “That’s just it. I can’t make up my mind. You shouldn’t be around me and I should definitely stop visiting you. But I can’t stay away. I’m an asshole like that.”

Daggers of grief pierce through my heart at his words. Up until now, I had always assumed he was joking when he said he should stay away from me. When he laughed and brushed his fingers across my cheek and said I was “too good” for him. Those were just light-hearted jokes, right? Does he really think I shouldn’t be around him?

He walks back to the bed and sits down, a newfound joy in his features as he smiles at me. “Hey, did you ever sign up for that motocross news email list?”

I shake my head. “Shit, I’m sorry. I forgot.”

Some professional motocross magazine in California has this mailing list where you can sign up to receive news about the motocross world. Park had been telling me subscribe to it for weeks so that I could see the photos of him when he’s won a race. The truth is, I hadn’t really forgot about signing up—I just didn’t want to. I like thinking of Park as the hot, sweet guy who comes to Lawson just to hang out with me and our friends. I feared that if I saw him in his real world as a professional racer, that it would ruin the illusion that he’s mine.

I expected him to roll his eyes and groan and complain that I still hadn’t signed up, but instead, he looks like he expected me to say no. He looks relieved, even. “It’s cool. You don’t really need to worry about signing up because that magazine kind of sucks lately. They, uh, they’re taking their reporting in a different direction so I won’t be featured on there anymore.”

“Oh okay,” I say, nodding. Something is up with him, but I’m not sure what. He checks the time on his phone and then stands, motioning for me to stand up, too.

“I gotta go meet up with Jace at the track,” he says, holding out his arms as I walk into them for a hug. “Can I pick you up for dinner?”

“You know you can,” I say, leaning into his hug and resting my cheek on his chest. He drops his chin on top of my head and slides his arms around my back, holding me to him for a moment.

“I always look forward to visiting you,” Park says, his voice vibrating through the top of my head. He pulls me back, cupping my face in his hands. “I know it’ll make my day to see you, yet every time I actually get here, you find some way to surpass my expectations.”

I can’t help the coy smile that appears on my face. “Maybe you should think a little more highly of me,” I say, lifting up my eyelashes to look at him.

“That would be impossible.” His voice is a whisper. Something deeper is on his mind, but I’m not sure what. He places the slightest kiss on my forehead before pulling away. “I’ll pick you up at six, okay?”

“Sure thing,” I say with a nod and a smile that I hope doesn’t look as fake as it feels. Something is off. Something is wrong with him and he’s trying to hide it. When he leaves, I grab my laptop and drop to my floor, determined to figure out what’s making him act so weird.

Following my instinct, I search for the motocross magazine’s website. Maybe Park lost a race or something and was too embarrassed for me to see it on the email list. The webpage loads and its home page blasts all kind of information about professional motocross and supercross racers at me. There’s even things about other extreme sports on there.

Nothing jumps out at me as anything unusual at first. It’s a dead end. There must be something else wrong with Park. Maybe he just doesn’t like me anymore. My heart aches at the thought—even though I know I have no right to get upset because this is all my fault. As I’m staring at the computer screen, my thoughts lost on feelings of self-loathing, the home page slide to the right, revealing a new banner across the top of the website.

SCANDAL AT THE FINISH LINE? JAKE LANCORT ACCUSES ROOKIE NOLAN PARK OF STEALING HIS GIRLFRIEND TO WIN A RACE.

There he is. Park. My Park. Smiling drunkenly toward the camera, holding a first place trophy in one hand with his other arm wrapped around the shoulders of a blonde girl with a cute button nose, flawless makeup and one hell of a skimpy dress.