Author: Emily
Rating: PG 13
Pairing: Seth/Summer
Timeline/Spoilers: All of season one I guess. Seth doesn't leave in the season finale. Alt ending to "The Ties that Bind" perhaps.
Summary: "It turned out that sailing wasn't so great after all."
"And when you wake the morning covers you with light
And it makes you feel all right
But it's just the same hard candy you're remembering again.
You send your lover off to China and you wait for her to call.
You put your girl up on a pedestal and you wait for her to fall."
- Hard Candy, Counting Crows
Seth had called it the summer of Summer.
Summer thinks that maybe if she had known that before they went to Tahiti then things would have turned out differently.
They set off on the first day of summer vacation. Summer stepped aboard the boat with a suitcase in her hand and they sailed away from Newport. She hadn't known it was so simple to just get away. All there was was sun and sky and ocean and Seth, and it came as a surprise to Summer that she enjoyed the simplicity of it all. It wasn't nearly as complicated as Newport and she thought for a few brief moments that she understood why Seth loved sailing so much.
Later on, she wondered why she had thought she understood him at all.
---
In the morning she slept in while he got up. He played something on his iPod with his speakers on so loud it woke her up. She complained and tried to wash her hair. They had lunch/breakfast and she dried her hair in the sun. Sometimes Seth tried to catch fish and Summer laughed.
Summer thinks that it sounds like she was mean, and maybe she was, but maybe she couldn't be anything but mean after all these years of it. And she is so tired of explaining and understanding and analysing.
It turned out that sailing wasn't so great after all.
Yeah, Summer blamed the sailing. Thinking about the real reasons for it all made her head hurt.
The nights were fun sometimes. There were good times. Seth had brought his portable battery operated DVD player, and they watched movies in bed. Sometimes Seth woke her up in the night and those were the best times, inbetween the evening and the morning, when the sun had barely risen.
"Sum...wake up...I'm bored..." Seth whined, nudging Summer.
"You're bored? Translate that for me." She snapped, thoroughly awake thanks to Seth's constant tossing and turning and now this.
He whispered in her ear.
"Ew, Cohen, not now!"
"But Summer..."
"Okay, listen. Do you remember in Dawsons Creek when Pacey and Joey went on a little boat trip for the summer?" She said impatiently.
"Summer I don't watch Dawsons Creek." Seth said with a roll of his eyes.
She looked at him.
"Okay maybe sometimes." Seth admitted.
"Oh please, I know you have a bunch of songs from it on your iPod!"
"Summer! Someone might hear!"
"Someone might also hear when you hum that stupid Paula Cole song in public. Anyway, Pacey and Joey." Summer continued.
"Pacey named his boat "True Love", how girly." Seth muttered.
"And yet he still managed to be way manlier than you! Imagine that Cohen!"
"Shove it Summer" Seth said and tickled her.
"Ew Cohen, off! I need my sleep."
"And here was me thinking you wanted to talk about Dawson's Creek!"
"Oh, my point. Pacey and Joey never had sex on their trip. It was a whole big thing. And certainly not at this time of the night. Now go to bed. And stop tickling me. Coh-eeen!" Summer said, trying to keep a stern tone but failing.
Summer giggled helplessly as Seth tackled her and for a little while her doubts evaporated.
---
Sometimes Summer sunbathed. The sun was like, really pure out here or something.
She sat on the boat in a red bikini, her legs dangling over the side. The water was warm. Seth was playing some of that depressing alt rock music and looking out to the horizon. His profile looked tragic like he was the hero of some depressing film, and it frustrated Summer that she didn't know what he was thinking or what he saw on the horizon.
"I wish I was a mermaid..." Seth said softly from behind her. Summer jumped a little at the sound of his voice. His arms went around her waist.
"I want all the fish to come and play with me..." Summer continued. She smiled a little.
"Are you cold?" Seth asked.
"I'm fine, Cohen"
---
Somehow those three words just sounded sad.
The problem with sailing was how long it took. Summer was right, it was not the fastest way to get anywhere. And maybe they were going nowhere. It was only Seth and Summer on a boat and the thing was that there were only a certain number of things they can do. Talking somehow led to talking about their issues - which had accompanied them on this trip and which Summer didn't even know they had.
She had never understood what was so meaningful about the music that Seth listened to. She supposed he was just trying to find somebody who felt the exact way he does - and he didn't find that in her. Maybe for a song length of time - approximately three and a half minutes - he did. Summer was smarter than that though. Nobody feels the exact same way as you do, not really. When they were lying in bed and he offered her an ear to his iPod she accepted it, a little part of her hoping maybe she would get it. She lay there letting the music flood her and was left feeling empty.
He used to sing to her, really awful cheesy songs with the word "Summer" in them. Sometimes she thought it was sweet. Sometimes it infuriated her. "Summer" seemed to carry a permanently happy tone about it. It came after Winter and it never rained. Summer wished her dad hadn't listened to her stupid mother and had named her something else. Anything else. Jane or Susan or something ambiguous. Something meaningless. A name that did not imply permanent sunshine and smiles. Because sometimes Summer just wanted to rain.
Summer didn't give a damn about his stupid comic books either. She still doesn't, She supposes she should have found it endearing but it bored her a little to hear him talk about them. She is shallow and he loved her before she even knew him and she's sure he should know that. She couldn't relate to his oh so angsty emo music with him and she couldn't discuss comics with him or argue over which season of Buffy was the best. And she thinks he should have just known because then he wouldn't be so disappointed. He should have known that under the surface she wouldn't have millions of layers that corresponded with his millions of layers.
Whatever.
---
She caught Seth staring at her one morning while she applied her makeup. He had been staring at her a lot recently and it wasn't the way he used to look at her either. It was the way he would look at some curious zoo exhibit and the look in his eyes wasn't desire or love, it was something like disenchantment. Maybe Summer didn't handle the situation as well as she could have but sometimes you just can't and sometimes you just snap.
"God, Cohen" Summer said, shaking her head. "I have clothes that aren't cute or pretty. I don't look as good without makeup. Sometimes I sneeze. Sometimes I cough. Sometimes I even snore. Quit staring at me every single time I do something that doesn't live up to whatever it was that you expected."
Snap.
"Summer...I don't...I just...I didn't expect - "
Seth looked stunned like a deer standing in the middle of the road who can see the car's headlights coming right at it but isn't gonna move.
"You didn't expect for me to be real? You thought I was some perfect girl?"
Snap. Snap.
She felt like she was coming undone and Seth couldn't even say the words to make it stop. He was so good with words, couldn't he even do that?
"No," He said weakly, desperately.
Snap.
---
Summer thinks she is telling this all wrong. It wasn't just her fault. In fact she thinks it was mostly his fault.
---
Summer stepped off the boat when they finally arrived, her hair blowing in the breeze and Seth remembered why he named a boat after her.
He just never thought that she would actually get on a boat with him.
He certainly never thought that he would ever regard perfect, untouchable Summer with something like apathy. Seth presumes it is because she stopped being untouchable.
He saw a girl who was prettier than Summer knocking back rum at some bar. It's not like there haven't been prettier girls than her before, it's just that he had never noticed them before. She was the sun the world spun around and now she's not. Now she was just part of the world, not quite the glamourous beautiful unearthly creature he always thought she was. When she woke up in the mornings her hair was tangled and she looked like a scared little girl without her makeup - and Summer said this would happen and she was right.
And he was sorry but he thought he had fallen out of love with her and "sorry" was a useless word.
Summer saw right through him anyway.
She told him, "You named your boat after me, Cohen, which was creepy at first. Followed by sweet. But now? Now it's like I have to be a girl who would get a boat named after her. The thing is, I don't think I am. You didn't know me when you named your boat and you thought I was that girl but I'm not. She isn't even real."
And he just looked at her because he couldn't deny what was true.
He is not perfect but that didn't matter because she never thought he was. He on the other hand thought she was perfect since he was ten years old. She did not say one word to him and his perception was not shattered. Not until that summer.
The first time he didn't mean for it to happen.
He didn't know her name or indeed anything about her. For all he knew she could be perfect. She could be a girl he could name his boat after. A girl who wouldn't gradually fall from the pedestal he had placed her upon. And maybe this time he wouldn't place her on a pedestal at all. He would just see a girl and love a girl and it would be that simple. He would try because God knows he had screwed up with Summer.
When he left in the morning he got her number and promised to call her. He knew he wouldn't.
---
They went to a bar and went dancing. Summer got drunk and danced with random guys who smelt like cigars and according to her - she told him later - tasted like palm trees.
Seth grabbed her arm and asked if they could leave. Summer looked at him like she didn't know him and Seth had the disconcerting feeling that she did - and that was the problem.
"You look at me like that Sum, and you're untouchable all over again," He said, shaking his head.
Her voice shook a little when she replied.
"I'm untouchable? You're not even here. You've been in Tahiti the whole time."
She turned on her heel and walked out of the bar.
---
They didn't talk about it in the morning.
Tahiti could be any place in the world. It was everything new and found. Everything that was out there beyond the horizon. Summer was disappointed to find that it was a lot like home. Halfway across the world and nothing had changed. Nothing but them.
It wasn't her fault, not all of it. It was just that he thought he loved her and it turned out he didn't. She thought she didn't love him and it turned out she did. It was all very ironic or something. Like something you would laugh about if it wasn't all so awful.
"I'm gonna get a plane home." Summer announced, one morning when the sun was so bright she thought she might scream and cry and tug at her hair if she had to stay in it any longer.
Seth looked up from his breakfast, a slightly stricken look on his face.
There was a silence.
"Sailing's so not the fastest way to go anywhere, right?" Seth finally said.
"Right." Summer managed a smile.
"Are you sure?" He asked hesitantly.
She looked at him, and waited for him to paint "ask me to stay" on a wall for her. But he didn't even ask.
"I'm sure."
---
"See you Cohen" She said at the airport as she stepped onto a plane.
Seth raised a hand in goodbye and Summer choose not to sit in a window seat.
She got home a few hours later and the air was heavy and hot but it was so much easier to breathe back in Newport.
She called up Coop a couple of days later, and they went shopping. Summer painted her toenails and shrugged off Marissa's gentle questions about Tahiti.
"It was a blast," She said dully. "I just...missed home."
Marissa could tell she was lying, of course she could, but she let it slip. She had never seen Summer like this before.
A couple of years later Ryan told her Seth had called it the summer of Summer. Summer laughed, and then she cried.
Summer thinks that maybe if she had known that before they went to Tahiti then things would have turned out differently.
Then she thinks, maybe they would have been exactly the same.
End.