Free Last Summer by Hailey Abbott Page A

the ache of missing him. It sucked.
    “Are you okay?” Ella asked.
    Kelsi blinked and turned her attention to her sister. Ella had her hair on the top of her head in a messy yet adorable ponytail, and her brown eyes were filled with concern. Kelsi realized that they hadn’t spent as much time together this summer as they normally did—something she’d be surprised Ella even noticed, now that she had a boyfriend.
    “I’m fine,” Kelsi said.
    “You don’t look fine,” Ella pointed out, licking cheese from her index finger. “You look like someone kicked your puppy.”
    Kelsi made a face. “I don’t have a puppy.”
    Ella looked at her for a long moment, as if she expected Kelsi to say something.
    “What?” Kelsi finally asked.
    “You can tell me what’s bothering you, you know,” Ella said.
    But Kelsi couldn’t imagine telling Ella that she was this upset over something so incredibly minor. Because she knew it was minor. It was just a cancelled weekend—she and Bennett hadn’t broken up or anything. And Kelsi knew that Ella certainly wouldn’t mourn a cancelled weekend. In fact, she’d probably take the cancellation as an indication that she should head out and find a replacement.
    So Kelsi shrugged.
    “It’s nothing,” she said.
    Ella looked down at her plate. “I thought Bennett was coming up this weekend.”
    “He had to work,” Kelsi replied too quickly. She flushed when Ella glanced at her. “Seriously, it’s fine.”
    “Is something going on with you guys?” Ella asked. Her eyes filled with sympathy. “Is it a sex issue, like with Tim?”
    “What? No!” Kelsi cried, throwing a hand up as if to ward Ella off. “What are you talking about?”
    “You don’t have to yell at me,” Ella continued, her chin up. “It just seems like the last couple of times you were this upset, it was because of the virgin thing, that’s all.”
    Kelsi gaped at Ella. She hadn’t realized until just that minute that she hadn’t told Ella that she and Bennett had slept together. Her sister still thought she was a virgin. And now that Ella had brought it up, Kelsi wondered if maybe the reason why she was missing Bennett this much was because they’d taken that step, and she felt so much closer to him than she had to anyone else. It was definitely something she hadn’t thought about before.
    But how could she tell Ella any of this? First she would have to confess that, in fact, she’d lost her virginity. Then she would have to explain that she hadn’t meant to keep it a secret. And then she would have to confess to her wild, experienced younger sister—who in her pre-Jeremy days, had gone through boys the same way she went through new ringtones—that Kelsi was all messed up because she’dfinally had sex with her boyfriend. She knew exactly how many times she and Bennett had had sex, in fact (four). She was still counting. How could she tell Ella that? Didn’t that make her completely lame by default?
    So she just shook her head.
    “Really,” Kelsi said in a low voice, “everything’s fine.”
    Ella’s eyes flashed with hurt, and Kelsi reconsidered—but then they both heard the sound of a large vehicle chugging up the dirt road. It was a FedEx truck, which was unusual enough to get both sisters out of their chairs and to the front door.
    “Kelsi Tuttle?” the delivery man asked when he climbed down from his high perch behind the wheel.
    Kelsi ran across the lawn in her bare feet, flinching a little because the grass was still damp, and signed for the slim package.
    “What is it?” Ella asked when Kelsi walked back into the cottage.
    “I have no idea,” Kelsi said.
    She ripped open the package and pulled out a single sheet of eight by eleven paper. On it was a sketch of a girl with short brown hair, lying on her side, asleep.
    “Hey,” Ella said, delight in her voice. “That’s you!”
    Kelsi remembered waking up in Bennett’s bed the morning after their magical moonlit horse-drawn