Chapter 4
Chapter Four
Forrest
There are a few reasons I keep coming to The Turning Page.
The coffee is decent.
The tables don’t wobble if you know which one to take.
The lighting is low enough that nobody expects conversation after six.
Puck likes the place, which isn’t reassuring since Puck also likes trash bags, rain puddles, and once tried to befriend a statue of Paul Revere, so his judgment has never been my guiding principle.
Still, he likes it here.
So do I.
Not that I’m admitting that to anyone.
The Turning Page is a café pretending to be a bookstore or a bookstore pretending to be a café, depending on how much caffeine the customer needs to justify buying a monthly salary’s worth of books.
It smells like old paper, coffee beans, cinnamon, and the lemon oil Bea uses on the counter when she wants people to believe she’s cleaned more than she has.
The front windows fog when it rains. The lamps make everything look softer than it deserves. There’s a bell over the door that announces every customer like we’re all living in a place friendlier than Boston.
It’s not perfect.
There are too many throw pillows around that make no sense.
Too many poets on Thursdays.
Too many people who say things like, “This book changed my relationship with grief,” while blocking the path to the register.
There’s also Daisy Thorn.
Which is the worst part.
Or the reason I’m here.
Depends on the night.
Tonight, she’s sitting at my table with mustard on her sleeve, a sandwich in her hand, my dog pressed against her leg like he’s filing adoption papers, and that damn smile on her face.
The fake one.
The one she uses like a door she can lock from the inside.
I hate that I know the difference.
Daisy takes another bite of the sandwich I bought her and looks at me like I’m the problem.
Which is funny because out of the two of us, she’s the one planning her cheating ex-fiancé’s wedding at her family’s vineyard while working two jobs and pretending a sealed granola bar counts as a daily meal.
“You’re doing it again,” she says.
I look down at the romance novel she shoved at me like a dare. “Reading?”
“Staring.”
“I’m not staring.”
“You are. It’s your forensic sandwich face.”
I turn a page. I don’t read a word. “Not a real thing.”
“It is now. You look like you’re trying to decide whether I’m eating correctly.”
“You’re not.”
She pauses with the sandwich halfway to her mouth. “There’s an incorrect way to eat a sandwich?”
I reach across the table and tap one crumb off the edge of the book before it can fall onto Puck’s head. “You’re turning dinner into a weather event.”
“Puck offered himself to the crumb gods.” She looks down at my dog and softens so fast it pisses me off. “He’s very generous with spiritual matters.”
My dog, traitor that he is, rests his chin on Daisy’s boot and sighs like he has never known comfort before this woman with mustard on her sleeve and too many feelings in her face.
My giant, emotionally needy dog with a vendetta against paper products and a disturbing attachment to Daisy Thorn.
“You ruined him,” I say.
Daisy looks down at Puck, then back at me. “With love?”
“With attention.”
“Those are often related. I understand why that confuses you.”
I should not enjoy that.
I do.
That’s the problem with Daisy. She says things that should annoy me, and they do, but they also wake up some part of my brain that’s been half-asleep for years.
She talks like a person trying to win an argument with her own nervous system.
She can insult me, ring up a customer, recommend a book, and emotionally dismantle herself in the same ninety seconds.
She is exhausting.
She is also the only person in this city who looks directly at me without flinching, flirting first, or waiting to ask about hockey like my career is an old injury she’s entitled to press.
At The Turning Page, I’m not the guy from the clips.
Not the name people say with a wince before adding, Talented, sure, but he’s an asshole and a cautionary tale for everyone.
Here, I’m Mr. Six-Fifteen. Or Haunted Bookshelf. Or that emotionally constipated table ornament, which Bea said once and Daisy laughed so hard she almost dropped a tray of mugs.
Here, I get coffee, a table, my dog under my feet, and Daisy telling me I’m reading wrong.
It’s stupid how much that helps.
“You haven’t turned the page in three minutes,” Daisy says.
I look at the book. “I’m absorbing.”
“You’re glaring at a fictional man’s abs.”
“They’re not fictional. They’re airbrushed.”
“Jealous?”
I glance up.
Mistake.
She’s watching me with that little tilt of her chin, like she knows she shouldn’t poke me and plans to do it anyway. Her hair is coming loose from its clip. Her apron is wrinkled. There’s honey mustard at the corner of her mouth again, and she has no idea.
I should tell her.
I don’t.
I’m not built for this. Whatever this is.
Bickering with Daisy is easy. It has rules. She pushes. I push back. She accuses me of being allergic to joy. I tell her joy is overrated and usually sticky. She recommends a book I don’t want. I take it anyway. She pretends not to look pleased. I pretend not to notice.
That, I understand.
This other thing—the part where I buy her dinner because Bea says she hasn’t eaten, then wants to put my hand between her and every person asking her to be gracious about betrayal—that part has no rulebook.
I hate games without rules.
I played seventeen years of professional hockey, and even at its ugliest, the ice made sense.
Lines. Time. Penalties. Consequences. You hit the wrong way, you paid for it.
You lost focus, you got exposed. You protected your goalie, your captain, your teammates.
You kept your head up. You kept your hands ready.
Life off the ice is full of people smiling while they hurt you, then acting surprised when you bleed on the carpet.
Daisy knows something about that.
She just calls it wedding coordination.
Her phone buzzes again from the counter.
She doesn’t move.
I hear it because I’ve been listening for it, which is pathetic and none of my business. It’s been going off every few minutes since she walked in. Each time, something crosses her face before she hides it.
Daisy’s fingers go still on the napkin. “Don’t look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like you’re about to say something reasonable and damaging.”
I sit back. “You think reason damages you?”
“I think reason is often used by people who want to make emotional crimes sound tidy.”
That hits somewhere I don’t want to inspect.
“My ex used to call himself reasonable,” Daisy says, quieter.
I don’t move.
If I do, she’ll stop talking.
Daisy Thorn can fill a room with words, but the real ones come out fast and low, like she’s trying to sneak them past herself.
“He was always very reasonable when explaining why I was overreacting,” she continues. “Very calm when he told me I was making things difficult. Very composed when he said Carla understood his life in a way I didn’t.”
My hand tightens around the book.
I force it to loosen.
Her mouth twitches, but it isn’t a smile. “Technically, he found emotional clarity in another woman’s bed.”
I stare at her.
She lifts one shoulder. “What? I’ve had time to workshop the phrasing.”
“You don’t have to make it sound funny.”
“I know.”
She says it like she does know.
Like knowing has never stopped her.
Bea is at the counter with a customer, pretending not to watch us. A kid near the fantasy shelf laughs at something on his phone. The whole damn place keeps going as if Daisy didn’t just drop a piece of herself on my table and try to decorate it.
I don’t know what to do with it.
That’s not true.
I know what I want to do.
I want to take her phone, block every person asking her to make the seating chart of her own humiliation, and tell Liam—calmly, reasonably, with only a moderate amount of violence in my posture—that if he ever makes her feel small again, he’ll regret having knees.
The problem is that doing so wouldn’t help me get hired as a high school hockey coach.
It would also not help Daisy.
I’m learning those two things are not always the same as what I want.
“Why are you planning it?” I ask.
Her eyes lift to mine.
“For the character growth.”
“Daisy.”
“For the money,” she says, too fast, then presses her lips together.
“And because my mother asked. And because I’m good at it.
And because if I say no, the story becomes ‘Daisy can’t handle it.
Daisy is still upset. Daisy is fragile. Daisy is bitter.
Daisy ruined the engagement, ran to Boston, and still can’t be gracious. ’”
There’s that word again.
Gracious.
It sounds like a muzzle when she says it.
“So be bitter,” I say.
She blinks.
I shrug. “He cheated. She knew. Your family took the booking. Sounds like bitterness is earned.”
Daisy stares at me for a second as if I’ve spoken in a language she used to know but hasn’t heard in years.
Then she looks down at her sandwich.
Takes another bite.
Chews slowly.
A crumb clings to the corner of her mouth.
My attention goes there before I can stop it.
Her eyes narrow. “You’re doing the forensic sandwich face again.”
“You eat like you’re trying to prove you don’t need the food.”
That wipes the joke from her expression.
Not all of it.
Enough.
The air between us changes. The rain ticks against the glass. The espresso machine hisses behind the counter. Puck shifts under the table and presses harder against her leg, as if even my dog knows I’ve said too much.
Daisy swallows.
For one second, she doesn’t have a comeback.
For one second, she looks tired in a way that makes my hand flex on the table.
Then she lifts her chin.
Danger sign.
“That is a wildly intrusive observation from a man who thinks books are decoration.” Daisy huffs. “This is why your reading life is in such a devastating condition.”
“We’re not discussing my reading life again,” I glare at her. “Just finish dinner.”
For the next five minutes, Daisy sits across from me with my dog at her feet, half a sandwich in her hand, and the first real quiet I’ve seen on her face all night.
It isn’t peace.
Not yet.
It’s just a table.
A book.
A dog choosing sides.
And a woman who does not have to make being hurt look pretty in front of me.