SUMMER FIFTEEN I arrived a week later than the others. Dad had left us, and Mummy and I had all that shopping to do, consulting the decorator and everything.

          Minho and Tiffany met us at the dock, pink in the cheek and full of summer plans. They were staging a family tennis tournament and had bookmarked ice cream recipes. We would go sailing, build bonfires.

          The littles swarmed and yelled like always. The aunts smiled chilly smiles. After the bustle of arrival, everyone went to Clairmont for cocktail hour.

          I went to Red Gate, looking for Taeyeon. Red Gate is a much smaller house than Clairmont, but it still has four bedrooms up top. It's where Minho, Taeyeon, and Baby Hyo lived with Aunt Carrie---plus Ed, when he was there, which wasn't often.

          I walked to the kitchen door and looked through the screen. Taeyeon didn't see me at first. She was standing at the counter wearing a worn gray, long-sleeved T-shirt and destroyed jeans. Her shoulders were smaller than I last remembered.

         She untied a dried flower from where it hung upside down on a ribbon in the window over the sink. The flower was a beach rose, deep pink, and loosely constructed, the kind that grows along the Beechwood perimeter.

          Taeyeon, my Taeyeon. She had picked me a rose from our favorite walking place. She had hung it to dry and waited for me to arrive on the island so she could give it to me.

          I had kissed an unimportant boy or three by now.

          I had lost my dad.

          I had come here to this island from a house of tears and falsehood

          and I saw Taeyeon,

          and I saw that rose in her hand,

          and in that moment, with the sunlight from the window shining in on her,

          the apples on the kitchen counter,

          the smell of wood and ocean in the air,

          I did call it love.

          It was love, and it hit me so hard I leaned against the screen door that still stood between us, just to stay vertical. I wanted to touch her like she was a bunny, a kitten, something so special and soft your fingertips can't leave it alone. The universe was good because she was in it. I loved the hole in her jeans and the dirt on her bare feet and the scab on her elbow and the scar lightly laced through her eyebrow. Taeyeon, my Taeyeon.

         As I stood there, staring, she put the rose in an envelope. She searched for a pen, banging drawers open and shut, found one in her own pocket, and wrote.

          I didn't realize she was writing an address until she pulled a roll of stamps from a kitchen drawer.

          Taeyeon stamped the envelope. Wrote a return address.

          It wasn't for me.

          I left the Red Gate door before she saw me and ran down to the perimeter. I watched the darkening sky, alone.

          I tore all of the roses off a single sad bush and threw them, one after another, into the angry sea.

Enjoy :D