This Summer

This Summer is the novel’s present-day time frame in which Poppy Wright and Alex Nilsen’s renewed closeness becomes a physical relationship, then meets the harder question of what a shared life would require. The summer’s defining contrast is between the intensity of a private moment during a storm and the practical attachments—work, home, and family—that Alex is unwilling to abandon in search of a cure for Poppy’s boredom. The available episodes do not resolve that conflict; they make the distance between desire and a sustainable future newly visible.

Time Frame and Narrative Movement

The heading This Summer marks a distinct temporal strand in the novel, and it recurs above the supplied episodes in chapters 26, 27, and 30. Within that frame, the narrative moves from the rain-soaked balcony scene to its intimate aftermath, then to the awkward morning after and a later confrontation over the lives Poppy and Alex want. The sequence gives the summer a clear emotional progression without suggesting that every intervening event is represented here: attraction becomes action, action alters the ease of their friendship, and the possibility of a relationship runs up against the question of what comes next.

The label also distinguishes these scenes as part of the present summer rather than a remembered earlier trip. That distinction matters because the characters are not merely revisiting a past closeness. They are trying to decide what their connection means now, after years of shared history and complications that remain present in their conversations. The frame therefore holds both reunion and uncertainty: the closeness is real, but its consequences have not yet settled into a form either can confidently name.

The Balcony and Its Aftermath

On the balcony at Nikolai’s Apartment, a storm has drenched Poppy and Alex. With the desert heat and the day’s grime seeming to wash away, Poppy experiences her remaining self-control as giving way; her attention narrows to the two of them. Their kiss develops through small, reciprocal movements: their lips part, their breathing draws them closer, and Alex adjusts to meet her. The scene turns a long-suppressed possibility into a physical fact, while Poppy recognizes that neither the chain of consequences nor the shape of what follows is yet clear.

Afterward, they lie curled together on the plastic-strewn balcony, soaked through. The storm is already breaking up, and the heat is returning as the moisture evaporates from their skin. Poppy recalls Alex’s earlier skepticism about outdoor sex, and his hoarse laugh answers her teasing. The exchange gives the aftermath a playful intimacy, but the setting keeps the scene tied to its unstable conditions: they are exposed to the weather, and the storm’s passing does not answer what the kiss has changed. Poppy’s sense of love in that moment is powerful; her uncertainty about the future remains alongside it.

The Morning After and Old Complications

The next morning, at the Larrea Palm Springs Hotel, Poppy wakes in a vividly colored room to find Alex’s bed empty and made. His handwritten note says he is running and will return soon, adding that he has already picked up the car from the shop. The note attends to the practical business of the day but says nothing about their intimacy. Poppy had not expected a declaration of love or a succession of embraces, yet she wishes Alex had offered some acknowledgment of the previous night. The difference between what she does not demand and what she still hopes for exposes how quickly the encounter has made silence consequential.

Their conversations also show that the present summer carries older emotional complications. Poppy is still trying to forgive Sarah Torval for ending her earlier relationship with Alex, and she remembers Sarah describing that relationship as no more exciting than the school library where they met. Alex insists that matters between them are better now and that there are no hard feelings, but Poppy admits that she does not entirely believe him; the old remark can still make her angry. Her imagining that the people they love might all love one another—including Sarah and Alex, and Trey and Poppy—sits beside that unresolved protectiveness. The episode shows that even as Poppy and Alex move toward each other, their understanding of one another is shaped by past relationships and by feelings that have not been neatly put away.

Desire Meets the Conditions of Ordinary Life

Later, Alex challenges Poppy’s uncertainty about whether she wants the life he wants. He says he cannot leave his job, house, and family simply to test whether doing so would cure her boredom. Poppy answers that she never asked him to make that sacrifice, but feels desperate as she realizes that the ground beneath their discussion seems to be giving way. Alex recognizes her point and blames himself for thinking the trip was a good idea. The exchange shifts the summer’s central tension from whether they love one another to whether love can tell them what to do with their lives.

That shift qualifies the apparent ease of the balcony scene. There, the two seem momentarily sufficient to one another; in the later confrontation, Alex’s established commitments and Poppy’s unexamined desires cannot be wished into agreement. The summer frame thus holds intimacy and incompatibility together rather than treating the kiss as a complete answer. In the available episodes, its ending remains unsettled: Poppy’s love continues, but the conversation leaves her fearing that Alex is slipping away and that their closeness cannot simply be packed back into its former shape.