Four Daisy #2
Which, come to think of it, might have been another reason why it never would have occurred to me that Owen could like me,
too. I assumed since he was always gently pushing Anthony on me that he couldn’t be interested himself.
“Speaking of Owen,” I said, “have you seen him around? I, uh, need to tell him something.”
“He was just out here,” Anthony said. “He went into the kitchen to see if they have any more salsa.”
“Cool, thanks.”
“Want me to come in with you and help find him?” he asked.
“Actually,” I said, “I think Jenna wanted to ask you about something? She’s over there.” I pointed to the cluster of girls
who were now throwing a glow-in-the-dark Frisbee around.
“Really?”
“Yup!” I felt bad, but I was suddenly feeling the urgency of regret. I had already spent way too long ignoring Owen, and if
I wanted to find out what was really going on, I had to just talk to him. What if he’d taken my avoidance as a sign to leave?
Was he already on his way home?
Thankfully, Anthony walked away, and I bolted up onto the porch, pushing past a group of Holly’s friends, until I found my way to the kitchen.
The fridge door was open, a pair of legs beneath it.
“Owen?” I basically shouted.
The fridge door closed, and Owen stood there, blue eyes twinkling, holding some hot peppers, limes, and a couple of avocados
in his large hands.
“Guac?” he asked with a smile, and all my urgency faded away as I laughed with relief. He hadn’t left.
“Thought you’d never ask.”
“Great! But I have to warn you,” he said, his voice getting serious as I helped him find some cutting boards and a large bowl.
“They don’t have any cilantro.”
“Can’t we just use parsley or something?”
Owen practically dropped all the avocados. “Daisy! Parsley’s like cilantro’s boring cousin who no one invited to the party.”
He handed me the avocados while he worked on chopping the peppers and juicing the limes.
“Speaking of not inviting people to parties . . . why did you tell Anthony about tonight?”
Owen shrugged. “He called and asked what I was up to later. I said I was meeting you at Jenna’s. Once he heard you would be
here, he wanted to know if he could tag along.”
“You didn’t have to say yes,” I said as I cut open the avocados, removed the pits, and scooped the insides into the bowl.
Owen shrugged. “I guess I’m a nice guy.”
I looked at him. His hair was covering his eyes and he seemed to be concentrating on a special way of chopping the peppers into tiny bits. “Do you want me to go out with him?”
Owen glanced over at me in surprise, his knife coming down hard on the cutting board. “Why, do you like him now?”
“Whoa, don’t chop off your thumb! And, no, I’m asking because you’re always trying to push us together.”
“No, I’m not! Why would I care? I want whatever you want. He’s my friend. I’m a good friend, Daisy, in case you weren’t aware.”
“Hmm. Okay,” I said, not loving his answer. Why would he care? “I just feel like giving him hope is pointless.”
“I don’t think hope is ever pointless. But I hear you.” He put down the knife and the pepper and turned to face me fully.
“I promise not to keep giving Anthony hope. Swear.” He offered a hand to do our signature handshake.
“Wait, I can’t.” I held up my hands—they were covered in avocado at that point, but that didn’t deter Owen. He grabbed my
right hand anyway and we did the dumb pinky swear/handshake thing we’ve done since forever. Then both our hands were covered
in green mush.
“Ew!” I said, laughing, and then he was laughing too, and we ran over to the sink, which turned on hard, getting water all
over both our shirts. “Oh my god, this is a disaster.”
“I beg to disagree.”
We got back to work once we’d dried off. “So,” I asked him, “are you excited for your trip with Grampa Dan?”
“Excited? I have to leave my phone at home. For two weeks! And my parents made it pretty clear it was this or some camp where they force you to sleep in the woods for a month and learn about focus and good values or whatever. So, no, excited wouldn’t be the word I’d use.
It’s like, whatever almost total dread feels like. ”
I laughed. “Apprehensive? Dubious? Trepidatious?”
“Wow, you are going to absolutely murder the SATs.”
“I can’t believe I won’t be able to get a play-by-play of this adventure over text,” I told him, beginning to comprehend the
notion that he would not be able to text with me for nearly half a month. That would be the longest time we’d spent not communicating
since . . . ever?
He smiled at me, dumping a pile of chopped peppers into the bowl. “Will you miss me?” For some reason, this question caused
me to flush to my ears. But before I could answer, he added, “Because don’t worry, I have a plan.”
“A plan?” I asked as he handed me half a lime and we both started squeezing lime juice into the bowl.
“Yeah. Postcards. I’ve always wanted to have someone to send postcards to. Although by the time you get them, I will no longer
be wherever I sent them from.”
“Ooh, that’s . . .”
“Deep? Profound? Thoughtful of me?”
“I was gonna say, a challenge for your bad handwriting.”
“Also that,” he agreed. “I’ll send them to the Laurel Lake address.”
“If I write back, you won’t get anything until you’re home, though!”
“Here,” he said, handing me a spoon. We started smashing up the guacamole. “That’s okay. You don’t have to write back. It can be a tragic one-sided conversation.”
I smiled. “The best kind.”
“Is it?” he asked. He stopped mushing up the guacamole and left his spoon in the bowl.
I shrugged, aware of how close we were standing to each other, of how intensely he was looking at me, scanning my face for
an answer. And suddenly, I wondered if he was asking about more than just postcards. I didn’t know what to say.
“Daisy . . .” he began. I could feel him take a shaky breath, like he was about to tell me or ask me something important.
His hair was falling in front of his eyes, and he brushed it back behind an ear. “I—I . . . Oh. Ow. Ow!”
Then he was half shouting, half screaming, covering his right eye. “Crap, I touched my eye, and I still had pepper on my fingers.”
“Seriously? Oh no!” I grabbed a paper towel, wetted it in the kitchen sink, and handed it to him. He pushed it against his
closed eye and groaned.
“Oh man. It burns like crazy. Am I gonna go blind from this?”
“Okay, okay, calm down,” I told him. “You won’t go blind. Don’t you know you’re not supposed to touch your face if you’ve
been cutting hot peppers?”
“No! And I am clearly learning that the hard way right now, Daisy!”
“Come on, follow me.” I grabbed him by the shoulders and steered him out of the kitchen. “Let’s just find somewhere for you to sit down for a minute and hold this over your face,” I said, handing him a fresh paper towel drenched in ice-cold water. “I’ll see if I can find any eye drops.”
I led him up the stairs and into the bathroom, closing the door behind us. I didn’t need Jenna thinking we were ransacking
her family’s medicine cabinet, even if that’s exactly what I planned to do.
He sat on the closed lid of the toilet holding the wet compress to his eyes and swearing under his breath while I rapidly
searched the shelves behind the mirror.
“I see some contact solution. Maybe that will work?”
“Okay,” he said. “I trust you.”
“As you should,” I told him. “Lean back, and just . . . hang on.” I had to sort of straddle his legs and drape myself over
him. “Now remove the paper towel.” He slid it away slowly, and his eye was all red and squinty.
“You have to open your eye more!” I scolded.
“I’m trying!” he said, fluttering his eyelid.
I leaned in and squeezed a few drops of the solution into his eye. “Now blink rapidly, to wash out the pepper’s oils,” I told
him.
He did as I commanded.
“Is it starting to feel a little better?” I asked. “Do you want more drops? Here,” I said, mopping his face gently with the
wet paper towel. “Is that helping?”
He nodded. “I can’t tell if that actually helped, but I think it’s calming down a bit,” he said, and tried to smile.
I was still leaning over him, straddling his legs, dabbing the corner of his eye. He looked up at me.
“Wow, saved by Nurse Daisy.”
“To the rescue,” I said.
I started to pull away, but he grabbed the belt loops of my shorts. “Wait,” he said.
I sort of fell forward and ended up sitting on his lap, facing him.
“You’re really enjoying being the injured patient, aren’t you?” I asked, laughing a little. I didn’t know what else to do.
I was sitting on Owen’s lap and he was gazing into my eyes with this smile on his face that I couldn’t quite read. So, I just kept gently dabbing him with the compress.
“I am,” he agreed. His hands didn’t leave my waist. He still had that smile. “Thanks.”
“Anytime.” Looking at his face, a little red and blotchy from his reaction to the pepper, but also so familiar, I started
to get this . . . I don’t know how to describe it. It was this feeling of knowing. A feeling of oh, deep in my gut.
Like the answer to whether I cared that he liked me, and why, was suddenly so clear. Yes. Because I wanted him to like me.
Because maybe I liked him, too. Maybe this was a whole new thing that had yet to be discovered between us.
“Anytime? Really?” he asked, his voice kind of quieter.
“Yeah, really.”
There was this pause—kind of awkward, but heated—where neither of us moved. And then I felt his thumbs kind of pressing against my hips, and I leaned all the way over him, and our lips touched, and . . .
He kissed me. Or I kissed him? I think it was both?
It was definitely both. Our tongues found each other. I felt his teeth. His lips were soft and full against mine. It was a
real kiss, our bodies pressed up against each other. It was maybe the hottest kiss I’ve ever had, actually.
He pulled back a little and so I did too. “Whoa,” he said under his breath.
“Yeah.” I knew what he meant. We were both reeling.
“Is this really happening?” he whispered.
“I didn’t mean for it to happen. . . .”
“You didn’t? Wait, did we just do something super insane?” he asked.
A tremor of worry went through my chest. I was wondering the exact same thing. “I mean . . . maybe? I’m not sure. But should
we, like, do it again? Just to see?”
“Okay, that’s a really good idea,” he said.
“Okay, great,” I said.
And then we went back to kissing. And it was even hotter than before. His hands moved from my belt loops up to my waist and
back, and then one hand found the back of my neck and I thought I was going to completely lose control of myself.
I had to pull away and catch my breath. “This is definitely insane,” I told him.
“Insane in a good way or a bad way?”
“I think in a good way,” I said, searching his face for some sign of whether this meant as much to him as it did to me. Because it felt like my entire life was changing in this moment.
“Me too,” he said.
I grinned, all of a sudden feeling dizzy.
“Daisy . . .” he said.
“Yes, Owen?”
And then there was a rapid knocking on the bathroom door, and I leapt off Owen’s lap, and he sort of leaned forward like he
was in a new kind of pain. I didn’t know what to do and I wasn’t thinking straight, so I just flung open the door, which was
probably the dumbest response, but it was too late.
Anthony was standing on the other side. “Sorry, I— Oh. You’re both in here?” he asked, looking between us.
“Owen got something in his eye,” I explained, then pushed right past him and ran down the stairs before I could face what
had happened.
“Come on, Scarlet,” I told her, finding her near the porch. “We gotta go.”
“Now?” she asked, but I was already pulling her around the side yard to the front, where our bikes lay together in the gathering
dark.
When I wake up, it’s because the car has slowed down. We’re pulling off the highway, and immediately turning down a single-lane road surrounded by forest on both sides. My face is smooshed up against the window, which has probably left an imprint across my cheek. We pass a sign for Laurel Lake.
I look down at my hand. I’m still clutching the postcard from Owen, but now it’s a little damp and sweaty, the ink already
rubbing off a little, onto the inside of my palm.
I reread his note, searching for some sign, some indication of what last night meant to him.
Happy holi-DAZE from the great town of Sage Port. (They don’t pay me enough for these puns.) (They don’t pay me anything for
these puns.) Anyway. I meant what I said! You’ll be hearing from me this summer. From all around the world. Well, all around
Europe. Though with Grampa Dan you really never know. I’m sure we’ll be hanging out in hostels with decent food but for some
reason all I can picture is us sleeping in a tent in the hills of Austria, foraging wild berries to survive. Wish me luck.
Love, Owen
PS: Why’d you leave so quickly last night? The guacamole was disappointed you didn’t stay to give it a try.