Summer of the Sirens

🌺🌺

"Hey- hey, baby, you need to breathe." I reached over with one hand, taking the exit to the highway with the other.

"Come on, take that off."

"Stop, stop," she cried. Her voice was muffled, like glass breaking under a cotton cover. "I don't- I don't want you to see-"

"No, no, come on." I pulled at the blanket. "You look beautiful, baby. You always look beautiful."

She dropped the blanket from her face, sobbing and snotty and mascara-stained and shining with sweat and stress and an amber coca-cola sheen and I felt like I could see every organ pumping in her body. Like her heart was laid out for surgery.

"See," I rubbed my hand on her shoulder, "Beautiful. You're beautiful."

💫💫

When Scott returns to his grandfather's mangrove-wrapped shack on the Florida coast, he's expecting quiet days and shark-watching summers-not three shipwrecked girls from the flooded islands sharing Pop's home.

There's Sami, fierce and sun-drenched. Summer, radiant and untouchable. And Selena, who holds her little sister close and looks at Scott like she already knows how it all ends.

As days melt into nights, lemonade into secrets, Scott's soul starts tying itself to theirs-limb by limb, heart to heart.

But the summer is running out, and not everyone will make it to fall.

He thought he came back to escape. Instead, he's found the summer that will change everything...

and the girl he was never meant to love.