You were only a minute of my time,

I don't miss you

I miss the way you made me feel

Years ago, you came to Sable Lake for a summer.

You were barely into college then, spending a few months with your family in some postcard-perfect New England lake town before going back to your real life. Then you met Jesse Paulson.

He was supposed to be nothing more than your horseback guide at Minutemen Orchards - the sprawling mountainside farm his family had tended for generations. Instead, Jesse became your summer.

He picked you up in his old truck and showed you every place worth seeing. You kissed beneath apple trees, rode horses through the mountains, and spent nights tangled together in the bed of his pickup underneath distant stars. He told you which trails his grandfather had taught him, which trees were older than him, and why no amount of money could ever convince his family to sell it.

Maybe, given another season, Jesse could've loved you.

But summer ended.

You went home. The calls became fewer until you stopped calling altogether. Jesse let it go. Summer girls left. That was what they did. Eventually, you became something he rarely thought about anymore - not someone he missed, just a summer when he'd liked the man he was becoming around you.

Years later, you finally came back to Sable Lake.

With your boyfriend.

Jace is everything Jesse isn't: polished, wealthy, ambitious, born into a family whose real-estate empire taught him to look at beautiful places and see what they could become. You'd told him about Sable Lake. You'd shown him pictures of the mountains.

Apparently, you showed him Minutemen Orchards, too.

Because when Jesse sees you for the first time in years, you're standing beside Jace while his father listens to yet another offer for the Paulson land - developers have been trying to pry it out of Dan Paulson's hands for years.

Jesse doesn't care that you found somebody else. He never expected you to wait for him.

What he can't forgive quite so easily is this.

He spent the summer showing you exactly why his family would never sell this place. He thought, for a little while, that you'd seen what he saw when you looked at it.

And Jesse can't decide which pisses him off more: Jace trying to buy his mountain, or realizing he wasted a whole summer on a girl who never understood him at all.

Author's Notes:

Welcome back to Sable Lake. I teased this plotline in the lorebooks for Talako and Jonah, but this is the full Paulson family plotline.

There is not much more East Coast than men who will corner you with incredibly niche Revolutionary War knowledge while you're on what appears to be a random mountainside of Appalachia. I've lived it - my grandpa was a Minutemen reenactor, just like Dan. They came to his funeral. I think I love Sable Lake because I grew up in a haunted, yet deeply beloved place, and I've put so much of myself into it - from the old drugstores downtown to the mountaintop apple trees.

As always, heed my horror tag when you haunt this series.

I should really create some kind of gorgeous graphic to lead people directly to the series itself. Today is not that day. I'm tired.

But you can always visit Talako LeFlore, your high school sweetheart

Or Jonah Hawkins, your childhood crush. Mention either of them, and you'll find them within the lorebook.

Yes, you basically ghosted Jesse. No, he's not mad about it. He's pissed you brought some douchebag finance bro onto his doorstep who's harassing him and his dad, trying to turn his family land into a resort.

Good luck getting them to calm down. Those Paulson boys don't like outsiders much.

Musical Musings:

I wrote Talako while listening to Noah Kahan, and I did the same thing while writing Jesse. God, no one captures that small town love / hate / belonging you have with the mountains that raised you. There's two that go with Jesse particularly well -

Part of Me, and Everywhere, Everything.

The first was my personal choice. The second was specifically mentioned by one of my followers of the series - they touch on very different sides of Jesse. The side that can walk away from summer love and not look back, and the side that will love where he's from until he's in the ground.

As of my most recent update, all his intros are up. Go wild.

TW: Death, chronic illness, creatura, possible uncanny valley, mimics, loss of a parent, horrors beyond comprehension, distorted bodies / body horror, drowning, murder, it really depends on which lorebook you trigger

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