Problematic Summer Romance

Maya manages to arrive in Sicily a day later than Eli wanted by offering to fly with his oversized dog. During the flight, Maya mentally prepares herself to see Conor again, but all her preparation dies when she shares a ride to the wedding party’s villa with Conor’s girlfriend, Avery. Maya wants to hate her on principle, but she can’t because Avery seems nice, and she “like[s] nice people” (11). Avery can’t believe the resemblance between Maya and Eli, stopping just short of admitting how handsome she thinks Eli is.

When Maya was a teenager, her parents died suddenly, and she was sent to live with Eli, whom she barely knew. This motivated her to graduate high school early and attend college in Scotland, where she coped with her mistakes of lashing out at the people she loved. At age 20, she moved back to Texas to live with Eli. After healing her relationship with him and her friends and finding activities she enjoys, she feels like she’s “built a nice adulthood over the ruins of a shitty adolescence” (16). After getting her master’s degree in physics, she was offered an opportunity to study at SERN in Switzerland, which she took, even though it partly felt like she was running away again.

The wedding villa is in the town of Taormina. On the ride there, Maya desperately searches for a reason to hate Avery. They have the same guidebook of Taormina, complete with annotations and cracked spines, which makes Maya fear there’s no avoiding the friendship.

When Maya arrives at the villa, she sees Eli and Conor laughing. Eli, Conor, and their friend Minami are the owners of the fastest-growing biotech investment firm in the world. Conor is on the phone, chewing out an employee. To distract herself from Conor, Maya takes in the view of the ocean and Mount Etna, which rises to a majestic dark peak and takes her breath away. Finally, she’s forced to interact with Conor, who immediately starts subtly reminding her that he’s 15 years older and not a romantic option.

Eli accidentally grabs Avery’s suitcase and starts to leave, thinking he’s showing Maya to her room. When he realizes his mistake, he asks Conor to grab Maya’s luggage, and Maya finds herself alone with Conor. As they walk, she babbles about the villa’s architecture in an attempt to come off as casual. In her room, Conor asks if she’s on drugs because she’s speaking rapidly. Maya is offended and argues she’s being easy-going. Conor scoffs, and Maya decides that “if he’s going to play this game, I’m going to give him difficult” (28). Before he can leave, Maya asks if Avery is the reason Conor stopped talking to her.

In their last conversation 10 months ago, Conor told Maya he was seeing someone and was worried she would get the wrong idea about him and Maya. Conor confesses he and Avery are no longer together. Being intentionally cruel, Maya asks if the two hope the trip will fix their relationship. Avery is around Conor’s age, and Conor has made it clear he thinks “a nonexistent age gap [is] the core requirement of a successful relationship” (30). Conor doesn’t understand why Maya hasn’t moved on. Maya argues there is no moving on for her, and Conor storms out, telling Maya to stop acting like the child she tries to say she isn’t.

After Conor leaves, Maya stares at the closed door and replays her falling out with Conor in her head. After her parents died and Maya went to live with Eli, Conor and Minami helped Eli take care of her. The three also started their company, and when Minami had a baby, Avery joined the company so Minami could pull back to be with her family.

After a nap that doesn’t make her feel any better, Maya goes to the pool, where she runs into her friend Nyota. Nyota’s biggest goal for the week is to have sex with a hot guy. When she decides Conor is the one, Maya hisses that he’s hers before immediately retracting the statement and feeling foolish. Nyota is intrigued, and Maya details her feelings for Conor, as well as his objections to their age difference. Nyota thinks this is ridiculous and urges Maya to pursue him because they’re both adults, and “there’s nothing wrong with having a little problematic summer fling” (41). When Maya hesitates, Nyota asks if Conor knows how Maya feels. Maya reveals her past with Conor.

Chapter 6 takes place three years earlier in Scotland. A few days prior, Maya’s boyfriend of a year and a half slept with her roommate, and Maya’s two best friends in the country are on his side. Tearful and desperate, she calls Eli, only to be redirected to his office and put through to Conor because the receptionist thought it was a business call. Just like the few times she interacted with Conor before she left, he is clipped, distant, and borderline rude. Eli is on a transatlantic flight and won’t be available for several hours, so Maya starts crying again and hangs up.

Conor calls back, sounding put out, but asks what’s wrong. Maya details how her boyfriend broke up with her for one of her roommates; when she got upset, her friends told her she was unstable and blamed her for being aggressive. To her surprise, Conor understands her situation and takes her side, saying she had a right to be mad. Maya isn’t sure he’s right. She knows she tends to get overly angry when the people she cares about hurt her. She wanted Scotland Maya to be a new, easygoing version of herself, to which Conor says, “it sounds like Scotland Maya is more like a plastic doll than a real person” (53).

Conor offers to find Maya a hotel so she doesn’t have to go back to her apartment. Maya thanks him but refuses. She won’t be chased out of her life by this. After a few hours at the library, she goes home, where she finds Conor standing in her kitchen, chatting with her roommate and ex-boyfriend.

In the present, Maya and Nyota arrive to a dinner with Eli, Rue (Eli’s fiancée), Tisha (Rue’s best friend), and the rest of the wedding party—primarily friends from work and school. The outdoor table looks like something out of a fairy tale with twinkling lights crisscrossed overhead and Mount Etna towering in the background. Maya remembers how she feared Rue would take Eli away from her but came to understand that Rue was just shy and awkward, not cold and distant. The rest of the crew includes Minami and her family, Avery, and Conor, who is showing Minami’s daughter the trees beyond the table. When the toddler notices Maya, she fusses until Conor carries her over. As he hands the girl to Maya, Maya looks up at him, which she immediately regrets because his eyes hold “a guarded, hidden, resigned kind of sadness” (65).

The only person at the table Maya doesn’t recognize is a beautiful blonde woman named Tamryn, who sits next to Conor and seems oddly intimate with him. To distract herself, Maya strikes up a conversation with a friend who asks if she’s decided between a job offer in California or a research fellowship at MIT. It’s clear the guy is romantically interested in Maya, but she can’t muster any feelings for him. Instead, her eyes stray to Conor, and she chastises herself, thinking “maybe it’s time you did something to solve this problem, Maya” (70).

After dinner, Maya takes the toddler back to look at the trees and twinkling lights. As she does, she overhears the others talking about how much younger Maya is than them, and she can’t miss Conor’s mumbled assertion that she was a child more recently than the rest of them. Maya pretends not to notice and does her best to enjoy the beautiful night. Later, she hears footsteps and is shocked to find Conor approaching.

Conor sits beside her and starts up a conversation about stargazing. A few years ago, Maya told him she loved the stars because her dad taught her about them. She remembers how Conor used to listen to her vent without offering empty platitudes. Only once, he said that he wished he could carry the hurt for her. Then, Maya believed him. Now, she knows that’s “because I’m a fucking idiot” (74). The memories make her spiteful. She asks Conor why he came to sit with her when there are clearly more mature women back at the table. When she starts to storm off, Conor grabs her wrist. He doesn’t want to fight or have the awkwardness of their past between them anymore. Maya can’t bring herself to let him go and admits she’s missed him. Suddenly, Conor looks like he desperately wants to tell her something. Before he can, someone at the main table throws up, followed by the rest of the group.

Everyone at the table except Maya, Conor, and Minami drank shots of a beverage from a street vender, and now they all have food poisoning. As the three discuss what this means for the wedding, Tamryn stumbles downstairs to ask if there’s nausea medication. She still has an easy rapport with Conor, so Maya is amazed when she finds herself liking Tamryn. Maya helps Tamryn back to her room, where Tamryn asks Conor to come inside. Conor goes, and Maya stands in the hallway, “[r]emembering a time when I pulled Conor inside my room” (85).

Chapter 11 flashes back to the past, when Conor came to Scotland after Maya’s boyfriend cheated on her with her roommate. Conor pretends he met Maya at a bar when she was on a vacation with her ex-boyfriend, where she told him she’d get in touch if she ever broke up with the guy. Conor pretends he got a text from Maya, making Maya’s ex and roommate uncomfortable. Before he leaves, he pretends to kiss Maya. When he pulls back, the other two are passionately embracing, so Maya asks Conor to spend the night. She tugs him into her room, where he pushes against the door to make it sound like they’re having sex against it.

Afterwards, Maya thanks him for showing up, even though she still doesn’t understand why. Truthfully, neither does Conor, but when he saw the other two unconcerned with where Maya was, he decided to be rude to them. Conor came up with the vacation story after scrolling through a text-message chain with Eli. Maya looks at the texts, surprised to see how much Eli talks about her and how proud he is of her accomplishments. Maya realizes she wants Eli back in her life. She asks Conor not to tell him she’s in trouble, to which Conor responds, “you’re not in trouble, Maya. You are trouble” (97). Maya smiles.

Conor was in Ireland at a family event when Maya called. He dislikes his father, so helping her was a good excuse to leave. Maya wants to buy him breakfast to thank him for coming to her rescue, though she says she isn’t surprised her ex dumped her for someone prettier. Conor argues the other girl is not prettier and tells Maya she can do better. Surprising herself, Maya believes him.