A Summer to Remember - By Jessica Gunhammer Page 0,37

over at Adrian and watched relief wash over his face. Mission accomplished.

After dinner I helped my mom clean up the dishes before I took Adrian up to my room to gather some of my things. I wasn’t going to take a lot over to his place since I was only going to be over there for the summer, it was mostly just going to be clothes and toiletries. I grabbed a duffle bag from my closet and filled it up with a few things while Adrian wandered around, scoping out my room.

“So what do you think?” I asked him.

“I expected there to be posters of shirtless guys covering your walls.”

“Funny you say that, because I thought the same thing when I walked into your place. Of girls I mean.” We laughed.

“Our place,” he said suddenly.

“What?” I was pretty sure I knew what he said, but I wanted to double check.

“It’s not my place anymore. It’s our place.” I hadn’t really thought of it as our place, to me it was still his place.

“When am I going to meet your family?” I asked him.

“Oh yeah. I guess we better do that. I don’t think you’ll be seeing too much of my brothers and sisters. John and Dan both took jobs in North Dakota working in the oil fields. Melissa’s husband was stationed at a base a few hours away, and Lexus moved with her boyfriend in Silver Springs, since his brother gave him a job. The last time I saw any of them was about two years ago at Christmas. But I should probably have you meet my parents, since you guys might be bumping into each other in the driveway every once in awhile.”

“That would probably be a good idea.” I grabbed a few more shirts out of my closet and tossed them into my bag.

“I’ll talk to them and we can set up a time to go out to dinner or something.” I watched him as he looked over the pictures I had hanging around the mirror on my vanity. I suddenly realized how happy I was that I had taken the time to take down all the pictures of Jason and me a few days ago and hide them in the closet. I had been thinking about throwing them away, or burning them, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it quite yet. Not all of my memories with him were bad, and those pictures captured some of our best moments together.

“You ready to go?” I asked when I snapped back to reality.

“I am if you are.” He grabbed my duffle bag off the bed and tossed the strap over his shoulder. He walked out the door in front of me and I glanced one last time around the room to see if there was anything else I might need. When I was pretty sure I had everything, I shut off the light and pulled the door closed behind me.

CHAPTER 22

The rest of the week I spent going to the pool and going shopping with Lily until Adrian got off work. Lily came over to check out our place, and of course, she loved it! She thought it was “so cute we were shacking up together.” That’s Lily for you.

When Friday night rolled around, Adrian came home from work and told me about a party a friend of his was having. We hadn’t done much since going to the lake, so we decided tonight would be a good night to get out for a little bit. This would be our first night out together as an official couple in front of all of his friends. The only friends I’d met of his were the ones up at Brian’s cabin that weekend, so I wasn’t really sure what to expect when we got there.

When we entered the neighborhood, I knew the house we were going to was probably going to be a mansion. When I say mansion, I mean swimming pool inside the house kind of mansion. I was beginning to think this party was going to end up being a lot bigger than I’d imagined.

We turned down what I thought was a road, but when we finally reached the house, I realized it was actually their driveway. There were about thirty cars sitting outside in the drive, which circled around a large fountain. Some were even parked on the lawn. I had no idea how Adrian knew this guy, but someone had some major cash.

“Wow. There are