Chapter 47 I THINK IT’S YOU
I THINK IT’S YOU
Oliver
Daphne talks in her sleep.
Not all night—just in the morning, as the sunlight slowly seeps in through the curtains that I didn’t close all of the way last night.
“Bear cave turned the car inside out,” she mumbles.
I’m barely breathing as I lie beside her on the bed, watching her facial muscles twitch and her eyelids flutter.
We agreed to share the bed last night.
She put a pillow wall between us, because sex lessons are over for tonight, which I interpreted to mean that I shouldn’t have told her that I like her.
Even though I hate it, the pillow wall is still there.
My cock is painfully hard.
Staring at her isn’t helping. Not when I’m noticing things I never did before.
Like how thick her lashes are. Long, too.
The way she has tiny ears that make her simple stud earrings—all four of them in the ear that I can see—seem bigger than they are.
The sparkle of her nose ring in her nostril.
Why have I never thought nose rings were attractive before?
The ring there is so Daphne.
Today Daphne.
Not any Daphne that I’ve ever known in the past.
She’s not chaos. She’s controlled.
Mature.
Still something of a whirlwind, but not overwhelming. Still fun, but no longer full of poor choices.
She’s intentional. She understands her power, and she wields it instead of letting it wield her.
I used to think Daphne was angry all the time. You could feel it radiating off her, and you knew it would inevitably lead to something big and terrible, but it was anyone’s guess what would finally set her off and send her down a path she couldn’t come back from.
Margot said she was misunderstood.
And that finally makes sense.
Daphne wanted to stop the polar ice caps from melting and she couldn’t. But not only could she not, trying to on her own got her in trouble.
No one ever taught her how to steer her activism. How to accept the limits of what one person could do. How to find the people already doing the work to help them, instead of feeling like no one else cared while trying to do it all herself.
Her family wrote her off as the problem child instead of finding an outlet for her big feelings, and so her big feelings eventually turned into rage.
Like my family didn’t understand my fascination with bugs and worms and dirt, and told me to focus on gasoline and convenience store profit and loss statements instead.
It took my father going to jail and me being thrust into the CEO position at M2G too early, too unprepared, and with too much of the wrong personality type for the job for those childhood dismissals to turn from quiet bruises to my psyche into my own rage.
But I got there too.
And now I can’t stop wondering what else Daphne and I have in common that I never could’ve suspected.
I catch myself reaching for her hair and tell myself to quit projecting.
Maybe I’m completely wrong about who she is and how she feels and what she wants.
But it’s the first time she’s made logical sense to me.
And it explains why she’s still here. Why she tolerated my bad moods and my pissy behavior at the beginning of the week.
Because Daphne has something very few others in our families have.
Compassion. Empathy. And a soul-deep understanding of what it means to not fit.
“Scupplenutter bought the big dick energy,” she mutters.
Goddamn pillow wall.
The way she’s talking in her sleep makes me want to hug her again.
Line our bodies up.
Kiss her awake.
I should get up. Shower before she’s awake. Get breakfast and load the car.
“Wait, wait, wait, wait,” she whimpers.
I freeze. “Daphne?”
“Don’t drown the butterfly,” she cries.
“Daph—” I put a hand to her shoulder. “Hey. Wake up. You’re having—”
“Snniiiiiccckkkkkeerrrrdoooooooodle,” she yells.
Then she snorts once.
Her eyes fly open.
She stares at me, pupils dilated and unfocused, and then she does the most Daphne thing ever, and she screams, flings an arm straight up in the air, and tumbles off the side of the bed.
She thuds.
I scramble across the bed. “Daph?”
“Fucking fuckity fuck-bucket fuck,” she pants. “I thought I was in Candelabra. Where is Candelabra? It’s not even real, is it? Why do I name places in my dreams?”
She’s irresistible, and I need to stop smiling, but I can’t quite get there. “You okay?”
She rubs her head, winces, and flops onto her back, then grabs her neck. “Peachy. Why does the carpet smell like dog grease?”
“What’s dog grease?”
She blinks at me again. “Don’t talk to me until I’ve had three cups of coffee.”
“Will dog grease make sense then?”
“Stupid dreams,” she mutters. “I haven’t slept that hard in weeks. Is it time to go?”
“It’s barely after seven.”
“I slept all day?”
“In the morning.”
“I’m on vacation and I was finally sleeping and now I’m awake before ten?”
“Maybe next time, don’t put the pillow wall on your side of a double bed.”
She squeezes her eyes shut and flips me off with both hands.
Shouldn’t make me happy, but it does.
I like her unfiltered. Unguarded.
Unafraid to flip me off.
Unafraid to be honestly, completely, fearlessly herself.
“Stop smiling,” she orders without opening her eyes.
“What kind of coffee do you like? I haven’t asked you that yet.”
One eye barely squints open. “The kind with caffeine.”
“Black? Cream? Sugar? I’d ask dark or light roast and Peruvian or Colombian beans, but I don’t know if I can be that picky here.”
“You definitely cannot be that picky here.”
I high-five myself. “Look at me figuring things out.”
She sighs. “Look, Oliver, if you’re in a good mood because we had sex—”
“Sex puts me in a terrible mood. I hate it. It’s so…sexy.”
Now I’m getting a double-eyed blink. “What the actual hell is wrong with you today?”
“You’ve inspired me to be obnoxious, and it turns out, it’s fun.”
She pushes to sitting and groans softly.
I swing around to her side of the bed and climb onto the floor next to her, then press my thumb into the spot she keeps grabbing on her neck. “Sleep on it wrong again?”
“It’ll be fine.”
“You can go back to bed if you want more rest.”
“Mm.” She sways into me as I stroke the muscle harder.
“Suppose I’ll miss my normal massage therapist,” I murmur.
“That part was the worst,” she mumbles.
“Was it?”
Her shoulders droop the barest amount. “No. It wasn’t. Losing my phone was the worst. The absolute worst of the worst. I had to get a new number and most of my old friends wouldn’t take my calls anymore, even when I left them voicemails telling them it was me.”
“Shitty friends.”
She sighs and mumbles something under her breath that I can’t understand.
“What was that?”
“I said thank you, that feels good.”
“Had chronic neck pain the first year I took over for my father.”
“Lucky if that’s all you had.”
“Wasn’t, but antacids and extra-strength painkillers handled the worst of the headaches and stomach problems.”
“Do they know they were lucky to have you?”
I pause in rubbing her neck.
She whimpers.
It’s a soft, pathetic little noise of please don’t stop touching me that speaks directly to that muscle hiding behind my sternum.
“No idea,” I tell her.
I dig deeper into that muscle between her shoulder and neck, and she makes another noise, this one an unholy groan that has my cock pulsing harder again.
I like it when she likes how I touch her.
“Why haven’t you been sleeping well?” I ask her.
“Because Margot was talking about taking you back, and that was a terrible idea because you hurt her and you weren’t right for each other,” she whispers.
I stifle a sigh. I don’t want to sigh. I want to be happy.
“Daph?”
“Yeah?”
“I’ve been thinking about that—whoa, don’t tense up. Listen. Margot’s cutthroat in business. Your father wanted us to merge companies before. He’s been quietly buying up M2G stock himself. I think any interest she’s had in me was for professional reasons and professional reasons only.”
Her eyes slide open, and she angles a look at me.
“No judgment against Margot. She likes the business game, and she’s gonna be a kick-ass CEO someday. But that makes the most sense. Far more sense than your sister wanting to set herself up to make the same mistake twice.”
After one long, unreadable stare at me, she turns her face away, sighing as I keep massaging her tight muscles.
And once again, I’m hit with a glimmer of recognition that this is what life should be.
Not the part where we’re camped out in a cheap motel with no idea where I’m headed today once the rest of the day gets started, but sitting with someone who’s rapidly becoming important to me, taking care of her physical needs while she lets me be a little lost, a little broken, and a lot more sure by the day that I’m on the right path to finding my new way in life.
“Daphne?”
“Hmm?”
“I’m glad you’re accidentally here with me. I— No one else could understand. Or do what you’re doing.”
She leans back fully onto me. “I’m glad you got to choose it for yourself. Instead of being kicked out. That—that has to be a little easier. I hope.”
I loop my arms around her and kiss her hair.
“You know this isn’t real, right?” she says quietly. “It’s adrenaline and anxiety and the mirage of possibilities because of being out of normal routines.”
She doesn’t push me away when I lean my head on hers. “I will still appreciate what you’ve done for me for the rest of my life.”
“Don’t fool yourself. I’m only in it for the money.”
“If that were true, you would’ve disappeared with one of my duffel bags of cash two days ago.”
Her sigh ripples through her, vibrating against me.
“What do you want it for?” I ask.
“You can’t ask me that before coffee.”
“Because you’ll tell me?”
Once more, she falls silent.
I’ve given up on the idea that she’ll ever answer me when she shifts in my arms, twisting to hug me back. “You’re not going back for anything, are you?”
“To New York?”
“To Miles2Go.”
My breath sits heavy in my lungs while I absently run my hand over her hair. “No.”