The blanket beneath us was hot from the sand and my legs stretched in front of me, looking impossibly lean and long. My stomach peeked out from my crop top, a glorious, creamy golden-tan.

“The boat?” I opened one bleary eye to look at it. Everyone had long since gone home, and it stood there, tall and proud, just a few yards away. I closed my eye again. “Mmm, yeah.”

I rolled onto my side. “We do it every year. After the tourists leave, we have a huge bonfire on the beach, light it on fire, and drink the night away. It’s sort of the town’s giant fuck you to the people from the city who come down here and wear out their welcome.”

“Definitely feeling the love,” he said dryly.

“You don’t count,” I explained, smiling.

“What’s a guy gotta do to count?”

“Buying a bike would be a good first step, I guess.”

He didn’t say anything, so I opened my eyes. He was staring blankly, apparently lost in thought, at the strip of my stomach exposed to the last lingering rays of the sun. An inch of tanned flesh, the hint of a hip bone.

“I wish…” He let his words trail off, sighing. He pulled his legs up and folded his arms across his knees.

My heart clenched. I wish you didn’t have to leave.

Soon, I wouldn’t see his face every day at Busy’s. We wouldn’t joke over the fact that he never varied his coffee order, we wouldn’t exchange smiles over the heads of other customers. If I couldn’t have my first wish, then I wished I could go back, tell him I didn’t want a long-distance relationship. That the risk outweighed the reward. That I was no brave Gryffindor to barrel headfirst into things, nor an optimistic Hufflepuff who would try, try, try. I swallowed, waiting for him to speak.

He never finished his sentence, but I knew how it would go as well as if I’d said it myself: I wish this summer could last forever.

Finally, he wetted his lips, which were chapped from the wind and from too much kissing. “I wasn’t supposed to fall in love with—with this place.”

I was willing to bet that he wasn’t the first summer boy to feel that way. My chest felt hollow. A thought pierced me, sharp and true: Had other people in Oar’s Rest felt this way? And then a deep and profound sadness for all the other summer boys and summer girls who had left Oar’s Rest and the people who loved them behind. I thought about all the people who came into Busy’s, locals and tourists alike. Who knew what drew them here, and what would draw them away? Because, as I’d told Lucy at the start of summer, tourists always left.