Just a Summer Thing
Author's note: I'm oneshotting to get a break from NF, which I'll be continuing with soon. Thanks to Ange for her advice, and this is for her, with thanks for putting up with all the brucas I've written lately. And everyone please remember this is leyton, and to take that into account when you read the next two paragraphs.
Prologue
Peyton danced close to Nathan Scott, revelling in one of their good times. They were growing further and further apart, so it was something she always cherished. It was annoying to think that they probably wouldn't last until school started. Their relationship was supposed to work out, and not be so very hard.
But as he tilted her chin upward and kissed her softly, she let these troubling thoughts drift away. After all, it was summertime. Nothing ever went wrong in summertime.
The next summer everything is different, and completely wrong yet completely right. Brooke is gone. Jake is more gone, probably gone forever.
But none of them matter. It doesn't matter that Haley is back, or that Nathan has maybe left her, or that Dan is almost dead or that Peyton has a stalker.
Because in the last year everything has taken a complete 360, and they're almost back at the start again.
Without Nathan, Brooke, and Jake around, it's much easier to go back to being Lucas and Peyton.
This doesn't mean that they're a couple for real, not exactly. It means that they've gone back to the only relationship they've ever known.
Except for this time the stakes are much, much higher, and everyone has so much more to lose. Pretty much everyone involved is almost inevitably going to get their heart broken.
Including Peyton. Peyton most of all.
She decided quite suddenly one that she didn't care, and that the summer was quite possibly her only chance of a relationship with Lucas. He's not about to turn his back on Brooke, even for her.
So they meet. In dark corners, in Tric while intense emo music is playing and they can make out each others forms but not see each others faces. In Karen's Cafe, after it is closed and they have it all to themselves.
It is their summer. It always will be.
Because they knew, even then, that the year would be all about Nathan and Haley, him and Brooke. They didn't try to stop it.
They just took advantage of the down time.
The summer after, Brooke stays home. Probably to keep her eagle sharp eyes on her boyfriend.
It is a long, long summer.
Especially Haley, who is in her eighth month and as big as a house. And to Karen, who just gave birth to a screaming infant and is busy all the time. And to Nathan, who is catering to all his wife's whims, and to Lucas, who is trying to keep his mother distracted from her depression in the rare moments of peace.
The only people who aren't busy are Brooke and Peyton, who both try desperately to distance themselves from each other. Brooke by hanging by the pool in the hotel she's living in, Peyton by shutting herself off from the world in her bedroom. It's difficult, but the end justifies the means for both of them. Peyton doesn't particularly care that Brooke has converted all their cheerleader buddies and most of everyone at Tree Hill High to her side.
All that matters is Lucas himself is undeniably wavering.
At the end of the summer, Brooke is tired of Tree Hill and takes a road trip to Duke with Bevin and Teresa. Karen and Lucas take off to introduce the baby to Royal and Mae.
Peyton and Nathan are the only ones around when Haley decides to go into labour. Peyton knows Haley didn't decide, per se, but can't help but wish she waited a little longer. Nathan goes into the delivery room with his wife, and Peyton ends up being the one anxiously waiting.
Nathan is bloody, sweaty and generally disgusting when he comes out to find her, but it doesn't help him from looking happier than he's ever looked. Peyton doesn't even care, to the point that when he tells her it's a boy and he's healthy and perfect, she leaps into his arms and squeals.
Peyton kisses Haley on the forehead and admires her son, causing Haley to remember the times when she and Peyton had slowly grown closer, when Peyton had become her first real girlfriend. And they slip backwards in time just a little bit more.
Lucas is grateful when they all come back from their first year of college, older, wiser, farther apart. He hugs Brooke, throws his one-year old nephew into the air.
Peyton knows exactly when they'd all planned to meet up, but knows that it isn't her time.
She goes later. She knows that without it being official, he stayed home to help Karen all year and has the summer off to hang out with them as much as he wants.
Hang out with her. He doesn't know it yet, but he will.
He says her name in disbelief, even though part of him knew that she'd been coming. They fall on each other in relief. They'd spent the first sixteen years of their lives not knowing the other existed, but somehow now a year seemed like far too much. He knows she's wondering if he's back with Brooke, she knows he's wondering if she's back with Jake.
Both are plausible.
They sink into each other, into pleasures denied for what feels like so long. It's been forever. He can tell, by the confidence in her hands, that she hasn't kept herself chaste for the past year in the way Haley would have. He's pretty sure that despite this, she's never stopped thinking of him. He hopes so, at least.
They shed their clothes quickly. Karen walks by on her way to bed and shakes her head in disappointment, unable to not pick a side. She shuts her door tightly.
They can make love without feeling guilty again. They can be as close as they want. After all, it's summer time, and everything is fair game.
This time it's longer. Her Dad moves to Charleston, and nothing is keeping her in Tree Hill. She goes to Europe after her sophomore year is over, spends her junior one tutoring and painting in New York.
It's not life that draws her back, as it did in the first place, but death.
Brooke isn't there. Peyton is almost mollified to discover that for her, it's been just as long. But Nathan and Haley appear with their now four year old, Haley's stomach beginning to grow all over again.
He doesn't see her until he goes up to make a speech for his coach, one of the best men he's ever known.
She briefly remembers the brief periods of closeness they shared, before her thoughts zoomed back to Lucas as she knows his did to her.
She waits until after the funeral to find him, alone in his old room. She knows, because she's kept up with these things, that he completed his degree in three years and has now graduated, like her.
He smiles at her as she sits down next to him. They miss each other so often, it is so rare that they collide.
He tells her he missed her. She tells him she loves him. It's been a while.
But their bodies, and their hearts, remember.
It is many summers before they meet again, because Tree Hill is soon empty. With bigger goals and more extravagent dreams they pack up and leave, searching for their own places in the world, together and apart.
By the time the thought dawns on her, Peyton is twenty-five, a successful artist and has not seen Lucas in three years, Brooke in five.
It is time, she decides, to go home.
Her face is all smiles as she drives down the street, sees Bevin and Skillz hand in hand pushing a stoller, a seven year old girl run down the street that she knows instantly is Lucas' little sister.
She stops at the river court, and she is not alone. She smiles as she sees him, broader shouldered, cleaner shaven, but still the same. He smiled back when he sees her, she says something about chance and how they both had the same thought that summer.
It doesn't matter.
Brooke has the same thought, but not until many years later.
She doesn't drive down to Tree Hill, she flies. She dumps her Louis Vuitton suitcase in the back of a cab, and misleads the driver to Karen's Cafe and ends up somewhere completely different. It's been too long.
She hadn't known what she'd come for but when she sees it, next to another blonde who's laughing and a third strapped to his chest in a bjorn, she knows that she's come too late.
It's hard to leave, but when has life ever been easy on them?
Life is still good. It's not rare for them to drop off their child at Nathan and Haley's to have the day to themselves, in and out of their bed. Or for the whole family to drive down to the restaurant on the pier, and have what Peyton jokingly refers to as a date.
They haven't seen Brooke or Jake in almost ten years. Neither of them have matter for pretty much just as long.
It's not summer, when they decide it's time to go. It's fall. Leaves are falling and temperatures are dropping. And it's significant to both of them somehow, as they pack up and leave for their own bigger and better things, to get away from the town that's defined them for so long. It's significant because it's not a summer thing anymore. It's not a Fall thing or a Winter thing or a Spring thing.
It's a forever thing.