Chapter 29
The Journal of Daisy D. Stiles - Ten and a half years ago
This is the last time you’ll ever hear about August fucking Burton.
He played me for a fool. Acting as if he was different.
How much time did I waste? Waiting for what?
For him to throw away the past couple years of us in the blink of an eye?
I hope he found what he was looking for at the bottom of that bottle. I hope he’s happy sitting in that jail cell. I hope he got a good laugh at my tear-stained face when I watched him get stuffed into the back of the police cruiser.
But what I hope more than anything is that my feelings fade fast, and I don’t have to sit in the pain of a heartbreak that never should have belonged to me.
Because as much as I hate August, I still love him.
And that pisses me the fuck off.
I stand on August’s front porch, completely dumbfounded. He has no fucking clue.
I let you go.
He let me go?
He let me go.
And then he walked away.
Not fucking happening.
I pop my head into the house, getting eyes on my little brothers who deserve so much better.
“Hey, my dudes.”
“Daisy!” Hunter greets me, a slice of pizza halfway to his mouth.
“I’m so sorry about Mom. We need to talk about why you didn’t call me, but I need to talk to Gus first. You good in here?”
“We have three large pizzas and the old version of Call of Duty. We good, sis.”
Chase smiles and nods in agreement.
Good. They’re good.
I drop my bag beside the door and take off towards the walking trail August decided to “take a minute” on.
I march on, chastising myself for the improper footwear and lack of a jacket in the cool air. In my defense, I didn’t think I’d be hiking through the wooded area of Merrymount, chasing after a broody August Burton to go tit for tat on a convoluted history that hasn’t felt worth rehashing until now.
And unfortunately, we do need to rehash it now, more than he knows.
“I paid the price for this already. I don’t deserve to relive it now.” He keeps his back to me once I finally catch up to him.
How can he even say that? How can he act like he’s the victim in this situation?
“You can’t use a cop-out like that. We’ve been avoiding this for months, Gus. Years, actually.”
He twists around, and I realize I’m about to actually get the other side of the story that I wrote off as a mystery for so long.
“Fine. Let’s go, then. I spent the night in jail.
And I’d do it a million times over. The only thing I’d change is losing you entirely in the end.
Do you know it almost killed me? I didn’t care when Beth came to bail me out.
I didn’t care when she told me I could have ruined the rest of my life.
All I could picture was your fucking face through the cruiser’s window.
I knew right there in that moment that I had lost you. Probably forever.”
“You did,” I lie.
Gus’s shoulders droop slightly at those two words. As if he waited over a decade to be proven wrong, and I just ended his quest.
“Beth told me it would come to this. You know what I think?” he asks. I’m terrified to hear what was said with Beth and what comes next so I nod only once.
“I think you were waiting for me to mess up. You’ve never let anyone in. Not for real, anyway. You keep us all at arm’s length to avoid real connections because you don’t want to get hurt. I was the one person who could have changed that. You realized it and kicked me to the curb.”
“I needed you, and you weren’t there!” I practically scream.
“You didn’t give me any time to figure it out!” Gus yells back. “I was a fucking kid, Daisy. We both were. We didn’t know what we were doing.”
“You knew very fucking well what you were doing. You just didn’t care about the outcome.”
“I got drunk one time. I fought back one fucking time. He deserved it. Don't you dare tell me what I was feeling. I was lost and broken. Just like you.” Maybe he didn’t mean it like an accusation, but it sure feels like one.
“Well, I’m sorry I couldn’t be less broken. I didn’t ask for anything that happened to me.”
Gus’s eyes darken. He looks pained and wounded and murderous all in one.
“Don’t ever fucking apologize for that again, Daisy. You know I didn’t mean it like that.”
“It doesn’t much matter what you meant when that’s what you said.”
“God, what the hell are we even arguing about?” He slides his hand down his face.
“We’re always arguing. It’s what we do,” I remind him.
“What if I’m sick of that? What if I’m ready to make this what it was always supposed to be?”
“We can’t.” My words are weak.
“Why?”
“Because I’m uppity Daisy Stiles, and you’re August fucking Burton. We only work well in the dark. It’s where we’re most comfortable.”
“I wanted it to be me and you. There’s a part of me that thinks I never stopped wanting that. I still want that.” It’s the softest I’ve ever heard Gus’s voice. It cracks my black heart in two.
“You think I didn’t want that, too?” I yell, not caring who hears at this point. “But even starting whatever you want to call this would require trust and honesty. Are you ready to be honest?”
I hate myself for demanding something like honesty from him, when I’m the one harboring secrets. Or rather, one ridiculously complicated, life-altering, ginormous secret.
“What do you want to know?” Gus asks. His eyes meet mine, and he looks downright terrified.
“Tell me what happened that night. There was no reason for you to get drunk or fly off the handle. You always showed the most restraint. You promised.” My voice breaks on the word. A tear falls down my cheek against my will.
“Anything else,” he pleads.
I wipe my face, straightening my shoulders. “This is it. It’s the truth or nothing, August.”
Several minutes pass. Each one is more painful than the last. I lose track of the seconds and gather the courage to walk away, once and for all. Because if we can’t handle dealing with our troubled past, there’s no sense in trying for a future.
A shaky breath from August has my eyes snapping up again.
“I was on my way back to Beth’s after the graduation ceremony. I decided to take my truck and drive alone to give myself some time to think. Sawyer rode back with Beth. I knew I had a couple hours before I was supposed to meet everyone for the party at Katie’s.”
“I remember all of this, Gus. This isn’t news.”
“Let me tell you the whole story, would you? Context matters. I was in a weird headspace. Thinking about graduating, where I came from, where I was heading. I was lost and the only constant things in my life seemed to be sort of shaky.”
“Shaky how?” I interrupt him again. I can’t help it. I’ve been waiting for this for so long it felt like ever getting it was a pipedream.
“It’s embarrassing to admit,” Gus sighs. “But Sawyer had Katie, and I thought Beth assumed her job was done with me.”
“There isn’t a world where Beth Rivers—”
Gus’s hand reaches out to mine, and I instinctively take it.
“Believe me, I know that now. She drilled that into my head enough for a lifetime. But in that moment, that’s what I believed to be true.
And well, you…Fuck, Daisy. You became my best friend, but you deserved better than anything Merrymount has ever fucking offered you.
You wanted to get out. You were going to be free. And I knew I couldn’t follow.”
“Why?” Another crack of my voice.
“Because as much as you’ve viewed Merrymount as a prison, it was my escape. If I never moved here, I don’t know if I’d still be alive. I understood, I still understand, why you feel how you do—but it was different for me.”
God, that feels like a punch to the gut to hear. It’s raw and real.
Gus continues, “Anyway, all of this was swirling around up here.” He taps his head for emphasis.
“I got back to my room at Beth’s, changed, told Beth not to wait up for me, and told Sawyer I’d meet him at the party later.
I took off to drive around for a while. I don’t remember where I went, if I had any destination in mind, but soon enough the sun had set and I was in Katie’s backyard, party blasting around me, and an entire fucking handle of shitty tequila deep.
“I couldn’t find you. Or rather, I wasn’t making it a point to look for you. I knew you’d be disappointed, or more so probably pissed. I found myself walking along the edge of Katie’s yard, next to the fence that separated her family’s property with the neighbor’s when I heard familiar voices.”
I feel the color drain from my face. I know whatever comes next in Gus’s tale won’t be pretty.
He might have been right. It’s something I wouldn’t want to hear.
But I need to. For me and the ba—I can’t even think the word.
I fight the urge to reach for my belly. Gus’s grip around my fingers tightens.
“I’m sorry for what you’re about to hear, Daze. Say the word, and I stop. Okay?”
“Okay,” I mouth. No sound comes out.
“I hadn’t seen or heard from my stepdad since the night I was brought to Beth’s.
But his voice was as clear as the night sky.
He was talking up a fucking storm about his latest lay.
Disgusting, vulgar shit that made me sick to my stomach.
I was ready to turn around. I needed to find you because you were the only person on the planet who could have calmed me down in that moment. But then…”
Again with the hesitation. I want him to continue, but I don’t. So, I wait. I let him decide what he and I can both handle.
“He bragged—” Gus looks like he might be sick.
“She must have said no. He made that very fucking clear. He’s an evil, waste of an excuse of a human, Daisy.
He deserved more than anything I did to him.
I told you. I don’t regret it. Jumping that fence to beat his face in until he was unconscious was a fucking mercy compared to what I could have done in my book. ”
I don’t know when I started shaking, but I am.
Gus guides us to sit on a log. Tears are falling down my face, into my lap, in showers.
Gus won’t use the explicit words, but I know what he couldn’t finish saying.
His stepdad is a monster who believed he deserved whatever he could take from someone, consent or not.
“Whatever sick fuck he was running his mouth to called 9-1-1. He tried to get the D.A. to charge me with assault and battery. Beth and Mark took care of it. I was never privy to the details.” Gus seemingly finishes, pulls me into him, and buries his face in my neck.
I’m stiff with too many thoughts and emotions to process much.
“Why didn’t you just tell me?”
Gus pulls back. “I saw your face. You hated me as much as you’ve always hated every other man in your life. I didn’t think I could come back from it.”
“You didn’t even try,” I argue.
“I didn’t deserve your forgiveness. I didn’t want it. I wanted it to be easy to hate me so I could...”
Let me go, I finish in my mind.
My whole body aches with the could-have-beens.
There was a future for me and Gus, and I immediately wrote him off.
He might have let me go, but I was the one to firmly shove him away.
Past biases and trauma blocked me from any real semblance of a partner in this life.
I…I’m everything he said I am over the course of the past decade.
I’m a stuck up bitch with no understanding of a real relationship.
The weight of this new reality could kill me.
Maybe I’ll let it.
“So all of this was for nothing?”
“What?” he asks.
I throw my hands up above my head.
“All of this, August. The fighting, the insults, the giant waste of fucking time!” I scream. “I don’t think I’ve ever been more mad, and I don’t know if it’s at myself or you, or a sick combination of the both of us!”
I’m officially losing it. And I’m digging myself a hole bigger than I could have imagined by not telling August…
Not telling him about…
“I have to—”
I turn and proceed to vomit in a bush.
Gus’s hand is on my back in the next second.
“Daisy, I’m taking you to a fucking doctor.”
“No,” I cough. “I’m fine. I’m okay.”
Lie after fucking lie. They’re just falling out of me now, I guess.
“Daisy, something’s wrong. You’ve been really sick. Forget all of this, I’m worried about you.”
“It’s none of your goddamn business! None of it!” I yell, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “I’m going back, getting the boys, and leaving. Do not follow me. Understand?”
“You’re leaving,” August repeats, defeated.
“I was always going to leave.” My hoarse voice doesn’t sound like my own, and the words taste like dirt on my tongue.
“I didn’t say it then, and I’ve regretted it every day since, so I’ll say it now. You don’t have to leave, Daisy. You could make a home here with me.”
I pause my dramatic exit. I tilt my head, giving his words true thought.
“You mean that?”
So many versions of myself would have sprinted for the hills at the offer. Big parts of me wouldn’t dream of allowing such a reality to exist.
“Every word.”
But I remember that this kind of promise can’t be made when so much hangs in the unknown.
And I’m not doing anything to rectify the gap in information that Gus is privy to at this present time.
So I nod and turn once more without further comment. I march the short walk through the trail up to Gus’s beautiful house that feels a hell of a lot like more than just four unfamiliar walls to me now. I round up my little brothers who groan and moan at my request to get out of there.
I hold back each tear that threatens to fall with every wobble of my bottom lip.