3. Daisy
3
DAISY
“ N ot that I don’t adore having my bestie on coffee cart duty, but why don’t you quit? There are other coffee carts in other swanky office lobbies. You shouldn’t have to deal with your high school bully multiple times a day.” My best friend, Reese, topped off the half-and-half containers.
I slammed the filter basket into the machine and yanked the lever.
“Aaron Richmond is not driving me out of this job,” I replied. “That’s what he wants.”
“It’s been like a decade since high school. You can’t keep letting him live rent free in your head,” Reese said, sliding a cold brew to a woman in sky-high Louboutins. “Sometimes retreating is winning.”
The elevator dinged.
My stomach sank.
Was it him? I thought I had more time before Aaron came for a refill.
“Mr. Coleman?”
“Reese! Daisychain!” My dad waved from across the lobby then jogged over and gave me a hug. My usually happy-go-lucky father seemed a little down.
“You okay, Dad? How about a coffee?”
“And a cookie, Mr. Coleman.”
“Reese, I told you—”
“It makes me feel like I’m still young and full of promise to use your last name, Mr. C.”
“I didn’t think you usually came to Wall Street, Dad?” I poured him a cold brew and added condensed milk.
My father stammered and dropped his cookie. “Just wanted to see if you needed a ride to the Hamptons this weekend so you didn’t have to take the bus.” A pained expression flashed on his face.
“Aw! You’re the best, Dad!”
He gave me a tense smile. Something was up.
Or maybe Reese was right and I needed to stop giving Aaron so much of my time and mental energy. He was warping me.
“Can you give me a ride, Mr. C?” Reese asked. “But not to the Hamptons. My mom and aunt have been day drinking, and they say they need me to drive.”
“Can you pick up Dorian when you stop by the apartment?” I asked her.
“You all right closing by yourself?” Reese sounded concerned.
“As long as You-Know-Who doesn’t show up.”
“If Aaron harasses you, tell him to drink some water. His kidneys will thank him.”
Again, that pained, almost guilty look appeared on Dad’s face.
“Text me when you’re ready, Daisychain.” He hugged me again—a long hug, like it might be the last time he would ever see me.
“You’re being dramatic,” I told myself as I scrubbed out the coffeepots, singing along with Taylor Swift on the radio.
“It’s like if that revolting Starbucks pink drink wished upon a star to be a real girl,” Aaron said as he entered.
The pot I was holding clattered in the sink.
“I hope you’re not here for coffee,” I said. “Unlike some monsters in this tower, the rest of us human beings take summer hours. The café is closed. I’m cleaning up.”
“That’s still dirty.” Aaron nodded to the pot.
I managed not to brain him with it but only barely.
“You’d make a terrible wife,” he added.
I glared up at him.
He was giving me a look, a Rorschach blot of my father’s, like Aaron knew something I didn’t know.
Then he abruptly turned away.
“I hope you have a horrible weekend!” I called after him.
Dorian meowed happily as I set him on the floor to play with his cat cousins.
“Look at hot girl summer over here!” Granny Madge wrapped me in a hug of green galbanum and hints of peach. “You. Me. Boardwalk. Margaritas. Hot guys.”
“Your idea of hot is not mine, Gran.”
“I take dick where I can find it.”
“Do you have to be so crass? It’s such a beautiful summer day.” My mother breezed by dreamily, like the heroine of a Nancy Meyers movie.
Meanwhile, I was the affair partner in a trashy low-budget daytime soap opera. I could never match my mom’s understated California hippie chic.
“Hi, honey!” Mom kissed my father. “How did things—”
“The drive was fine,” my dad said loudly. “Traffic, of course, but it’s Friday. There’s traffic. Are those muffins?”
“Trying recipes for the new cookbook,” Mom replied.
“Are these chocolate?” I asked as I accepted one of the suspiciously dark muffins.
I didn’t see Granny Madge making the universal sign for poison until I took a bite. All the moisture was immediately sucked out of my mouth.
“Oh, Daisy, did you go back to blond?” My mom picked at a limp, tangled lock of hair.
“Brown is too hard to keep up.” I gagged around the sawdust.
“You’re so much earthier as a brunette.”
“Wow, Mom,” I said, the spelt caking itself to my throat. “That is a very healthy muffin.”
Gran handed me a glass of red wine. “I’m backed up worse than the Macombs Bridge on a Saturday after a Yankees baseball game. I need real bread. I’m about to start making sourdough with my yeast infection.”
My mom wrote a note in her notebook. “Let’s add a touch more strawberry syrup in those.”
“Why don’t you try a little frosting, maybe some buttercream?”
“It needs some lubrication, Peggy!” Granny Madge slammed her fist on the counter.
“That’s why you have acne.” My mother patted my admittedly greasy forehead with a handful of mint leaves. “You eat too much dairy.”
“Psst!” My dad threw his arm around me conspiratorially and pressed a key into my hand. “Secret cheese stash. You know where.”
See? There was nothing wrong with Dad. Aaron was in my head.
Because Aaron was always in my head.
I walked up the wide staircase, past my siblings’ rooms, and up another winding staircase to the most perfect room in this historic shingle-style home. Dorian meowed when I picked him up and nuzzled his adorable little Scottish fold ears. I stepped out on the private balcony that overlooked the ocean.
Storm clouds rolled in over the waves.
I loved the rain at the beach.
It made me feel cozy, comfortable, safe .
Not that my life ever felt like anything else. I’d had a charmed childhood with everything I needed and most of what I’d wanted—amazing siblings, perfect parents, best friends, a horse to ride along the waves. Idyllic. Storybook.
Until him.
Aaron Richmond.
I was eleven the first time I’d seen him, standing on the stone patio next door, the warm summer rain flattening his stupid messy hair and dripping in his stupid green eyes and over his pale, pale skin.
He would always be my first obsession—and my biggest nightmare.
My life would be perfect without him.
“Should we get a new job?” I kissed each of Dorian’s perfect kitty toe beans.
“Carla knows my class schedule, though,” Reese said. “She’s accommodating. She lets me leave early, and isn’t it fun to throw a wrench, no matter how insignificant, in Aaron’s day?”
“And she still has terrible taste.”
“You made it in one piece.” Reese tossed one of the spelt muffins out the window. The seagulls dove through the breeze and fought over it.
“Raided the secret cheese stash.”
My best friend flopped down on my childhood bed, holding a napkin with wedges of Brie in her hand.
“He’s not coming here, is he?” Reese picked up the illustrated special edition of Wuthering Heights on my bed and flipped through it idly.
“Aaron doesn’t do summers in the Hamptons,” I rattled off. “Well, only occasionally, not more than once every month, but he never stays the night. He’s only here for, like, an afternoon with his aunt. Usually, he arrives by one thirty.”
She slammed the book shut.
“Oh my god. You’re stalking him.”
“Am not!” My face was hot.
“You know his schedule. You are so obsessed with him,” Reese accused. “This is unhealthy.”
“I’m not obsessed,. It’s self-preservation,” I argued. “I have to hide in my room and force my siblings to watch and make sure he’s safely on the beach before I sneak out.”
“Why do women lust after terrible men tattooed in red flags?”
“It’s not lust.” I hugged a pillow. “It was a dumb tween crush.”
“On Aaron .”
“Eleven-year-old me was weird—not cute, manic-pixie-dream-girl weird but, like, collects-antique-apothecary-equipment-and-Victorian-photos-of-posed-corpses weird.”
I flopped down next to Reese on the bed.
“He was the brooding antihero, wearing black ripped skinny jeans and messy bangs that cast a shadow over his eyes. Not to mention the tragic backstory. Tween me didn’t stand a chance.”
“Aaron will forever be your Heathcliff.”
“Don’t insult Heathcliff. Aaron could never be so cool.”
“More ‘sell crazy insurance policies to financial firms’ and less ‘dig up a corpse and dance around in the moonlight,’” Reese mused. “Though the insurance thing, if you think about it, is probably worse.”
I sat up. “Late-twenties me is so over him. I’m moving on. I have a new crush—”
“Please don’t say it—”
“Professor Pennington!”
“You are so basic!” Reese threw a pillow at me.
“You said he was hot too!” I cried.
“Every man with a British accent is sexy. That doesn’t make them actually attractive. Everyone in our English program is trying to sleep with him.”
“The way he says, ‘Open your book to chapter five.’” I swooned. “And he loves the Bront? sisters.”
“I’d bet my good boob that he just says that to reel in impressionable PhD students experiencing an early midlife crisis.”
“He wrote a very well-received article on them for the New Yorker ,” I sniffed. “And he quoted Jane Eyre on my copy when I asked him to sign it. Eeee! He hosts coffee salons every Thursday night. If I can have a liaison with him—”
“An affair,” Reese said flatly.
“Neither of us is married. It’s not an affair,” I argued. “Plus, isn’t that why people get PhDs in English? To bang their hot British professors? Besides, sleeping with him would solve a lot of my problems, especially my very large, very embarrassing problem.”
“Therapy might be better, butttt you do you, girlfriend.”
That night, during dinner on the patio, I regaled my family with stories from my PhD get-togethers and the coffee cart—not mentioning Aaron at all. Then I sat out on my private balcony in the dark with a candle, pretending I was a woman waiting for her lover to come home from war.
Yeah, I know. I lived a very sheltered life and never really outgrew the daydreaming girl who had to invent drama—Aaron notwithstanding.
Hand-knitted blanked around my shoulders, cat in my lap, I sipped my tea while the waves crashed on the dark sand.
In the house next door, a lamp suddenly burned in Aaron’s window, illuminating a broad-shouldered figure.
Then the light immediately flicked out.
It was a ghost.
It had better fucking be a ghost because otherwise it was Aaron fucking Richmond here to ruin my evening.
“That wasn’t him,” I whispered to Dorian in the dark. “He doesn’t spend the night in the Hamptons, right? There wasn’t anything important enough for him to change that, right ?”