Chapter 25
TROUBLE IN THE LADY CAVE
Daphne
Oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god, oh god.
He looked at me.
I mean, yes, of course he looked at me. We’re traveling together. He’s going to look at me.
But he looked at me like he was seeing me for the first time, and I am freaking the hell out.
Oliver Cumberland is no more supposed to look at me as though he recognizes that I’m a woman who is something more than Margot’s little sister than I’m supposed to spend the day driving him farther and farther from New York while trying to find any distraction from remembering how he looks when he’s sleeping practically naked.
And I’m wrong.
That’s the answer.
I’m completely wrong about how he was looking at me and—
And I want Bea.
I want my best friend.
Since Oliver slept all day, we made good time, but we started late, so darkness is falling outside. If Simon has his kids today, I likely won’t be interrupting private time if I call now because the boys will be up for another hour.
At least.
Teenagers keep late hours.
If he doesn’t have the twins and Bea and Simon are busy, she won’t answer.
Probably.
Maybe.
I pace the very small pace-able area in the tiny house.
I could go outside. I should go outside. Get fresh air. Stretch my legs.
But Bea would murder me if I was attacked by wild dogs or dragged off by some chainsaw murderer lurking in the shadows.
Neither of those are appealing to me either, and contrary to popular belief when I was younger, and contrary to what I told Oliver our first night on the road too, I don’t generally have a basic disregard for my own health and safety.
I only disregard my own health and safety when I have a cause more important than myself.
It’s never been generally.
I’m on my sixty-eighth pacing pass, listening to the sound of Oliver’s steady breathing overhead, debating dashing out to the car with my burner phone to call Bea, when I notice an unusual, seemingly useless lever beside the cabinets.
And then the outline of a trap door in the wood floor.
No. Way.
I’ve lowered all of the lights so that Oliver can sleep better, so I half think I’m imagining things with the subtle outline in the floor. I’m also wary of doing anything that will make noise.
See also, I didn’t even turn on the TV when I came down here, even though it would be a fabulous distraction.
But when I tug—carefully—on the lever, the trap door glides open silently, revealing a set of stairs.
Go outside in the dark in a strange place all alone?
No. I do prefer camping in groups. More fun with other people, and the wild animals are less likely to take on a whole pack of us. Yes, I’m a walking contradiction. I want to save the animals while being terrified of them.
But I’m not afraid of checking out a hidden basement in a tiny house by myself.
I drop to my belly and peer inside, smiling with glee as I realize the lower level is fully lit up, so I can see everything.
There’s a pink chair that they had to have lowered in there before putting the floor in, with what looks like a chenille blanket tossed on it and an end table with an extra lamp.
I twist my head, and—yes.
There’s another TV down there.
I push up off the floor and scurry down the stairs.
So. Fucking. Cool.
If I ever move out of my apartment and get a real house, I want this one.
It’s small.
It’s cozy.
And it has a lady cave, which is exactly what this deserves to be called.
I don’t shut the trap door until I’m sure I understand how it works so I don’t get trapped inside here—Oliver would seriously think I ran away in the middle of the night like I threatened to two nights ago—and I inspect all of the soft pink-painted walls to make sure there aren’t any other secret doors into or out of this room too before plopping down into the plush pink chair.
After I turn on the TV, I wait long enough to see if the noise prompts any response from Oliver, and then I dig my burner phone out of my bra.
Bea answers almost before the first ring has finished ringing. “Daphne?”
The sound of her voice instantly makes me feel at home. “Yeah. It’s me. What’s up?”
“What’s up? Are you for real right now? Where. Are. You?” she demands.
Bea’s my age, but she left college the spring of her freshman year to finish raising her three younger brothers when their parents died in a tragic house fire, so she often seems much, much older.
I’m practically on the border of North Carolina and Tennessee, according to the GPS. “I don’t know, but I’m safe, I had Cod Pieces yesterday and today, and things are going…erm…well.”
Silence lingers on the other end of the phone.
Not hard to picture my best friend squeezing her green eyes tightly shut and breathing slowly while she grabs a fistful of her curly brown hair.
“Shall I call Butch’s friend?” I hear Simon say in the background in his British accent. “I’m certain we can locate her without much trouble.”
“No! No.” I shake my head, even though they can’t see it.
“I have everything under control. No issues. No worries. I’m safe.
I’m here on purpose. Bea, tell him I’m here on purpose.
And that I’m having fun. And then tell me about you.
I want to know absolutely everything Simon did to deserve you again.
Spare no detail. I think I have five hundred minutes to talk on the burner phone, so we have time. ”
“Remind me again why you’re calling from a different phone?” Bea says.
“Mine fell out of my dress because it didn’t have pockets so I was storing it in my bra except I forgot I wasn’t wearing a bra and it got busted and I don’t have my ID or credit cards on me so even if we could stop at a store to get a new one, I can’t,” I lie.
Bea breathes on the other end of the phone.
I’ve heard that breathing before.
It’s the same breathing she did when her youngest brother would lie about why he was out too late or when her middle brother would lie about how badly he was injured—he’s a professional baseball player now—or when her oldest brother would—actually, when Ryker would do nearly anything because he’s a grumpy-grump monster, as she says, and it’s often annoying that he can’t find anything to be happy about.
Huh.
I wonder if Oliver’s taking us past any of the cities Griff might be playing in.
We could catch a—
No.
No, we couldn’t, because if Oliver was recognized in the stands, or if I was—unlikely as that is, since I’m pretty much irrelevant to the gossip world now—Oliver’s whole I’m running away in secret thing would be blown.
“You were wearing a dress again?” Bea says.
“It was another costume party.” We did one together a week before I left for the Hamptons.
“Who are you with again?”
“You wouldn’t know them.”
“Them? You said he yesterday. Are you with multiple people, or is this someone finding themselves who wants to use they/them pronouns now, or are you hiding something from me?”
“You remember that time before my parents kicked me out of the family when I tried to talk you into going to a frat party with me to get signatures on a petition to save that old tree down Haysmith Road, and you told me you were too old for frat parties, so I went without you and then I realized someone slipped something into my drink and I called you and you came and got me and everything was fine?”
Honestly, I don’t fully remember it, but I remember the story.
It still makes me want to throw up, and it probably always will.
But I had enough training in my youth to know when something’s wrong, and I knew to call Bea, and she got there and shut the whole party down before anything worse happened.
She’s a badass mama bear, and she’d figure out how to teleport to get me out of here if she thought she needed to.
“Daphne.”
“There is absolutely zero chance anything bad will happen like that here.”
“Not feeling reassured.”
“It’s someone I’ve known most of my life.
Someone very boring. Like, someone who’s so far the opposite of me that it’s weird to realize that the thing we have in common is that we didn’t fit into the world we grew up in.
I’m safe, okay? Like extra mega super boring safe.
Oh my god. Hudson went back to college, didn’t he? ”
“He did, but we’re not talking about Hudson.”
“He’s not mad that I missed it, is he?”
“Daph. He’s nineteen. If you’re not his guitar, a girl he’s interested in, or food, he’ll be okay with a text wishing him a good semester.”
“Good point. I’ll text him. When I get my phone fixed. Now tell me Simon’s treating you like a queen.”
“Pardon me, I am treating her far better than one would treat a queen,” Simon says with a sniff.
I break out into a case of the smiles, and my heart sighs in happiness.
“Daphne—” Bea starts again.
And I know where this is going.
It’s not her fault.
She had to become a parent the wrong way many years before she would’ve chosen it herself, and she can’t turn it off sometimes.
“Bea. This thing I’m doing? It passes the rocking chair test. I already have stories.
Like, not even kidding, we got in a situation yesterday where someone thought my companion was a stripper.
And I’m sitting in a lady cave right now.
A lady cave. It’s a secret room in the…place we’re at. ”
“In the interest of my deepest desire to make Daphne stop saying lady cave, may I ask what’s a rocking chair test and how, exactly, does it relate to Daphne’s situation?” Simon asks.
“It’s how we decide if we’re doing something stupid,” Bea tells him.
I grin wider. “Like you going on your first date with him.”
“I’m sorry, what? Our first date was a rocking chair test?” he asks.
“You passed,” she says.
“Had I known, I certainly would’ve tried harder to fail.”
I can hear him smiling—he’s always smiling—and that helps me feel a little more normal too.
“Tell him I don’t think he passed,” I tell Bea.
“He can hear you,” she assures me.