The Summer Club - First Chapter

The silk-smooth sound of jazz crooned a love song without words as the notes, low and romantic, resonated through trumpets and saxophones on a tired stage. Then, all at once, dim lights faded to total darkness as a spotlight focused on the keyboard soloist, beads of sweat glistening on his forehead as his fingers began a lively dance on the keys. It was a song I’d never heard before, yet it was heartbreakingly familiar. It took me to places I’d only ever seen in my dreams—to moments I’d spent with a man I’d never met. It felt like déjà vu.

And when I looked up, there he was.

I don’t know how, exactly, I recognized him, but I knew him with just a glance. The man with the soft brown curls sitting at an empty table, his eyes wide with wonder and everything that makes a person alive. His large, square hands cupped a lonely bottle of beer, and I watched, enamored, as he raised it to pursed lips. He must’ve felt the weight of my stare, because moments later, he turned toward me, fixing his gaze on the petite girl who had previously mastered the art of blending in. The glimmer in his eyes conveyed an unspoken dare before he stood, just as couples began making their way to the dance floor, and pushed through the crowds to the back door. The glow of the exit sign through clouds of cigarette smoke beckoned me to follow him.

Before I knew what I was doing, I was on my feet, floating along the invisible path he’d carved into the floor as though in a trance. I felt compelled to figure out how I knew him, because somehow, in another world, he had meant something to me. He had been important.

But I couldn’t, for the life of me, remember his name. Nor could I make sense of the bizarre notion that I knew him when I hadn’t yet met him.

I stepped out into the dense night air, the oppression of late August smothering despite the salty breeze emanating from the ocean. The street outside the Summer Club was eerily quiet, save for the crash of the sea—it was like he’d disappeared. Nonetheless, my feet carried me onward. They seemed to know where I’d find him.

I crossed the street to the boardwalk, stopping at the splintered steps to take off my heels before easing my way down to the beach where the cool graininess of the sand greeted me. A thousand stars littered the heavens just over my head, casting some small amount of light on the ocean as I continued on.

Just as I began to doubt the mysterious pull that had brought me this far, I noticed the silhouette of a figure, tall and broad-shouldered, standing at the foot of the ocean. I knew immediately that it was him.

It occurred to me that it would make sense to be afraid, but the pounding in my chest wasn’t the result of fear. It was the result of a shared secret—of something intimate and evocative.

Noiselessly, I came to a stop beside him, unable to look at him yet as we tested the waters in each other’s space. The air around him smelled startlingly wild and musky and like everything I had once known and loved. In fact, his scent was so powerful that it prompted me to turn toward him—the second bold move I’d made in one night.

He was already watching me, waiting patiently when I summoned the courage to finally look at him. As his eyes held mine, I realized I didn’t need light to determine emphatically that they were amber, because I already knew. I could see their kaleidoscope of colors burning in a long-forgotten corner of my mind, shooting to the forefront of everything as his memory came rushing back to me.

“I know you,” I said, speaking in a tiptoe version of my normal volume.

“You remember?” he replied. And the sweet, low pitch of his voice only confirmed that yes—I knew him.

“I don’t remember,” I said. “I have no memory of you. But…my intuition knows you. I recognize your voice…your scent…your eyes. It doesn’t seem possible.”

“Jackie,” he breathed, and my breath caught as he said my name.

The two of us stood in silence as I tried to process some of this—any of this—while he drank me in under our captivated audience of constellations. The tide was beginning to lap at our feet as I implored,

“Tell me how...this is possible. Help me remember.”

He sighed, turning away from me to stare into the dark waves.

“If I take you there, you have to make a choice.”

I frowned.

“A choice? What do you mean?” Then I demanded, “Who are you?”

“You’ll remember when I show you. You can’t remember now, because this moment is outside of time. But first, you have to understand what it will mean if I show you. There’s no going back. You can’t…un-know your future once you see it.”

“You’re scaring me,” I whispered, taking a step back. It was the first time that night I’d grown alarmed over any of the strange things that had happened.

“I’m sorry. That wasn’t my intent,” he said, his voice breaking in a plea despite the fact that he hadn’t asked for anything. Once he composed himself, he continued,

“I can show you how you know me. What I meant to you. I can show you the choices you’ll make between a life with me, and a life with someone else. I can show you how they will affect you—how they’ll change your future. But once I show you, you have to make the choice between the life you chose, and the opportunity to do it over again. Either choice will be painful,” he finished.

I couldn’t quite fathom what he was telling me. Surely none of this could be real? My life wasn’t “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.” People couldn’t move backward through time. Once a moment was gone, it was gone forever—certain as gravity, constant as the sun in the sky.

“You’re crazy,” I murmured, taking another step back. But he stepped toward me, closing the gap between us, and reached for my hand.

I jumped at the electrical current that passed under my skin, and there was a flash—immediate and jolting—through my mind of him, with his soft curls and amber eyes, laughing in my arms at the edge of a lake on a golden afternoon.

“Please,” he whispered, so low that it was almost inaudible against the sigh of the waves. And then, before I could rationalize—before I could talk myself back into the real world—I squeezed my eyes shut and decided,

“Take me there.”

Seconds later, he was pulling me into the water, and I tensed, stopping in my tracks as he tried to tug me forward.

“What are you doing?!” I yelled, attempting to loosen his grip around my wrist.

“It has to be this way,” he insisted. “Trust me.”

“Trust you?!” I shrieked. We were nearly waist-deep.

“You’ve trusted me this far,” he said. “Just a few more steps, Jackie.”

The tug of the ocean was urging me on, allied with his flashing eyes that were begging me to follow after him. He was either crazy or malicious—and in either case, I would surely die—or, an even scarier possibility: he was telling the truth.

And I loved him. I knew it with my entire being, with each of my senses. Inexplicably, without reason, against all logic—I loved him.

So I let him pull me into the undertow, allowing myself to be swept away for the first or thousandth time by this stranger I knew like the back of my hand.