Chapter 9 #2
“Hey. Remember me?” I run my hand down his back, which sets off a motor of purrs.
Daisy holds out a hand to Fred, which he ignores for attention from me instead. “Guess I’m back to second favorite.”
“As long as you keep feeding him, you’ll always be number one in his eyes.” He nuzzles into my hand again. “He seems okay to me.”
“The vet heard some irregular heartbeats. She couldn’t tell me much more, but she referred me to a cardiologist. It could be bad.”
“Your cat has a cardiologist?”
“I know.” She rubs her temples. “He has his own team of specialists now.”
“Maybe these are all precautionary measures.”
“He’s fifteen. Ten is senior for cats.” Over the mandala design inked on her knee, she twirls a mug, which features a plump cactus and the words FREE HUGS.
“My mom loved him so much. I’ll lose something she cared for, if he—when he—” She sucks in a breath, gripping the bottom of her T-shirt to dab her eyes.
Freddie appears in countless memories at Daisy’s house. He was always around, dozing on the windowsill or curled up on the couch. Just like how walking into this home without Daisy’s mom feels off, I also can’t picture it without him. I can only imagine what Daisy’s going through.
“Hey.” I circle the table and kneel next to her.
Seeing her so broken up reminds me of how useless I was to Daisy since I left, especially these past couple years.
Sporadic voicemails didn’t give us this kind of closeness.
I could kick myself for not listening to my gut when I got the news about her mom.
That scent hits my senses again, hard—floral masked by a sultry musk. She smells good, enticing. When I rest my hand on her shin, her skin is pure silk.
“How stupid.” She sniffles into a tissue. “I’m upset over a cat.”
“Freddie boy is not simply a cat. He’s your guy. He’s been there with you, through thick and thin.”
“Sorry for the breakdown.”
“Don’t be.”
“I doubt you texted me so you could watch me wipe snot into my shirt.”
“That’s actually exactly why I texted you.”
“Stop,” she says with a ghost of a smile. “None of that.”
“What?”
“The Max Weber Charm.”
“Max Weber Charm?” I say the words like I’m trying to taste them.
“Where you’re all smiley and jokey and everybody likes you because you’re this easygoing guy.”
Daisy and I have different views on charm, evidently. I played the chameleon as a defense mechanism. Better to be liked by everyone than loved by only a few.
A knock sounds at the door, and I go to open it. Daisy probably wouldn’t want to answer in her state; besides, I already know who’s here.
I thank the delivery driver and present Daisy with a plastic bag of Thai food that bursts at the seams.
“Hidden Moon.” She leaps out of the chair and peers into one of the take-out boxes, inhaling the steam. “Oh my god. Okay. You can stay. The Max Weber Charm can stay.”
She goes to the kitchen sink and grabs two plates from the cupboard above.
Daisy’s lithe body moves like a dancer’s, but she has enough muscle definition in her legs and shoulders that she could also kick your butt.
She balances on one foot like a flamingo while refilling our mugs, and I envision my hand dragging up her shin, skating over the ink on her thighs, and landing on her peach-shaped ass.
“Dining room or coffee table?” she asks, snapping me back to reality. If I’m going to propose this grand plan, I can’t feed into the tension that’s built at the crotch of my pants.
“F-floor. Old times’ sake.”
Daisy rips the lid off the coconut soup and whispers a sweet thank you to me.
“Not for the food. For being here.” She pours the steaming liquid into her bowl.
“Gwen’s pregnant, so I feel silly going to her about this, considering she has so much other stuff happening.
Stacey listens to me nonstop about everything related to The Mirage, so I don’t want to bog her down with my personal life, too. ”
“You can talk to me anytime.”
“What about you?” She bites into a spring roll and talks around it. “What did you want to discuss?”
She’s deflecting, but I might have some news to put her in a better mood. Setting my plate down, I turn to her and rest an elbow on the seat of the couch. “What are you doing with the barn?”
“Storing your shit.”
“Other than that. You mentioned renovations?”
Her chewing slows, and she peers at me. “Yeah.”
“Expensive ones?”
“What are you getting at?”
“What if we did something this summer that paid for all of the repairs?”
“I’m not doing porn.”
That’s not what I had in mind, but it is now.
“I’m joking, Max,” she says, nudging me. “You’re turning red.”
“I-I think we should go into business together.”
“Again, not doing porn.”
Great. Now I’ve got a semi. “Daze, seriously.”
“Since when have you been interested in hospitality?”
“Not hospitality. You bring the hospitality, I bring the art. We combine our skills and plan something that people have never seen before here.”
“An art show? Those happen here.”
“Not an art show. Not even a gallery. I mean a whole museum.”
“I can’t turn my hotel into a museum.”
“I’m not explaining this well.” I take a breath and comb my hand through my hair. What seemed like a brilliant idea when I texted her now seems idiotic. Do I actually believe I can pull this off?
But if I want Tate to give me a second glance, this will do way more than the teaching gig.
“At my old job, I would create pop-up museums, and your barn is the perfect spot for one. Imagine this.” I hold my hands up, palms open, painting a picture for her.
“Renovations? Paid for. Reservations? Booked, back-to-back. You’ve got a space for art, and people from around the country—no, the world—drive—”
“The world?”
“That might be ambitious. But we’re talking about lots of people coming here to Harlow. To The Mirage.”
“What do renovations have to do with this?”
“We’d get investors. The money upfront could pay for renovations. We’d earn it back through the museum—not to mention all the reservations from having a must-see attraction on your property.”
“That’s cool.” She sets her fork on her plate, and her lips pucker like she’s chewing the idea over.
“But these renovations are…they’re not small things.
” Using her fingers, she counts off every change that she wants to finish before busy season picks back up in the fall.
The bathroom stands out as the biggest project… until she mentions the termites.
At Impressions, I didn’t deal with finances—I handled the artists, artwork, and the space.
The renovations Daisy has on her list will rack up into the thousands, maybe even tens of thousands.
But if there’s one thing I know, it’s that art lovers have deep pockets.
And while doing this could capture the attention of someone at Tate, it absolutely will help Daisy, and that means more to me.
“What do you get out of this?” Her questioning eyes bore into me like needles. “Is this about your old job?”
“I need something new on my resume. There…there was some messy shit with my boss,” I say more quietly.
If I’m proposing a business endeavor, she deserves to know.
My stomach clenches as I explain the disaster that was Impressions—the illegal dumping, the sexual assault claims—and I can barely meet her eyes.
“I’m caught up in it, even though I didn’t know about any of it. Even though I should have known.”
“Damn.” She nods her head, and I hate not knowing what she thinks of me right now. “That explains the No Google rule.”
I don’t need to tell her about the Tate job because that’s not a definite thing. What is definite is I can’t sit around and hope a teaching gig will do the trick.
“What I do next could define my career, and I think this could be it, Daze.”
“It sounds incredible.” She runs her finger along the edge of the coffee table where the polish has faded. “I can’t, though. This is a whole new thing that sounds high risk. Right now, I’m in low-risk mode.”
“But what I—”
“People come here to get away from it all. I can’t have heaps of visitors driving here and interrupting them. Would they park on the side of the road? My lot can handle hotel guests, but not a museum, so I’d have tons of folks crossing the main street. It’s an accident waiting to happen.”
Within thirty seconds, she’s poked holes in my genius plan.
“In some universe, this could be a really amazing idea,” she says. “But a museum? That’s a new thing to market. There’ll be people to hire and infrastructure needed that I don’t have.”
“We’d figure it out.” I swallow, my confidence on shaky ground. “If this is a tough season for you, then you shouldn’t be going low risk.”
“You would say that. You traveled around and set up these museums, and if something didn’t pan out, it wasn’t a big deal because you had this company, and they’d just contract you to do some other museum somewhere else.
But me?” She puts a hand on her chest, the rings on her fingers glistening against the mood lighting.
“I have one job, one place. It is my sole responsibility, and I can’t risk losing it.
I don’t have anything ‘next’ after this.
Nothing bigger and better to move on to. ”
All the hope and excitement drains out of me. I want to promise her that this would work, that it would be alright in the end, and that I would never, ever abandon her. But I can’t make those promises because I don’t know what I’m doing, and I already have one foot out the door.
We eat the rest of our Thai food in companionable silence. It doesn’t taste as good as I remember.