"My leg wasn't the only thing that broke that summer", he exhaled.
I sat there looking at him. Unsure of what to say. I opened up my mouth but no words came out. And maybe it was a little cliché, but when you think about it the whole thing was.
"I warned you Trent; no summer ever came back, and no two summers ever were alike. Times change, and people change."
He ran his fingers through his hair, the way he did it ever so smooth. His gaze never left the window. It was like he was waiting for her to come back, swerving through that window like an angel fell from heaven.
"That last night, it was the turning point in Summer. You know when you wake up one morning and you feel that cold brisk wind? Like the turning of a leaf. That same thing happened to her."
It was heart breaking, even for me, to watch him suffer like that. He couldn't even put it in words. He wasn't able to state the obvious, to just come out and say: she broke my heart. She was a liar. She knew me better than almost anybody and could still break my heart. And I guess it happened because Trent was being naive and the hopeless romantic he is. And she was just being a realist.
He shook his head, "I don't know if I ever truly can get over her."
"Now you know why storms are named after people ."
The boy who came back from Cocoa Beach wasn't the same as the one who went. He was a shattered mess. You could see it in his eyes. In the way he moved. For gods sake you could feel it in his bones. Summer was coursing through his veins. And he had no idea how to get her out.
I guess there is no happy ending in this story. No happy ever after. All we are left with is a boy who came home to a worried friend, a cold, not English speaking country and an empty apartment. And a girl who had a wild heart and couldn't settle for anything less than herself.
But for one thing I was sure; he could only be repaired by her. And she didn't need repairing.