11. Harrison
11
HARRISON
I ’m a grown man, yet my first impulse when I see Liam on Main Street is to dive into the nearest store like a kid who’s about to get caught cutting school.
Liam’s smile is easy, guilt-free. “Hey, stranger. What are you doing down this way?”
“Just meeting a client.” I’m not normally so terse, but this situation is a disaster in the making. Everything I’d normally be inclined to ask Liam is something I shouldn’t know about: I hear you’re sleeping with that girl you’re doing work for; I hear Bridget and Scott are back together.
Worse yet, there are the truths I can barely admit to myself, truths he’d punch me in the face over, like the way I can’t stop thinking about his niece. And the things I’m thinking when I do.
Punching me would be entirely fair. I want to punch myself too.
“How’s it going with the girl in LA?” he asks.
“Good,” I say, then change the topic before I’m forced to make up a bunch of facts about my pretend girlfriend, facts I’m unlikely to remember later. “What’s new with you? ”
“Not much. Daisy’s home for the summer. Applying to law school—can you believe it?”
No, actually, I can’t. She hasn’t mentioned law school once.
And the entire conversation feels like a trick. If I act as if I’m unaware that Daisy’s here, it’ll turn out she told him she saw me. If I say I’ve heard she’s home, he’ll ask who told me, and a whole new set of lies will be necessary. Fabricated mutual friends, a chance run-in at a restaurant when I’ve been telling him I’m too busy to go out.
He shakes his head. “It’s weird, man. It’s like Daisy grew up while I wasn’t looking.”
Yes, I know. God , do I know.
“Tell her I said hi ,” I say, glancing at my watch. “Hey, I’ve got to get to a meeting. Let’s catch up soon, yeah?”
He nods, but it’s impossible to miss that he’s hurt. He’s been one of my best friends for most of my life, and I can’t even give him five minutes of my time.
But the truth would hurt him a lot more.
I work late Wednesday night, mostly to avoid her. When I get home on Thursday, she’s sitting at the kitchen counter eating lasagna. I’d sworn I was going straight to my room—I mostly skip dinner these days—but the smell has me salivating.
“I know you want some,” she says, smirking. “It’s in the fridge.”
I don’t want to give her the satisfaction. I don’t want her thinking it’s okay that she’s here.
I’ll go back to making a point tomorrow when I’m well-fed and less tired.
“So what did you do all day?” I ask. “I mean, aside from blackmailing me?”
“Blackmailing you takes up a surprising amount of my waking hours.” She licks her fingers. My eyes catch on the motion. “But actually, I got a job yesterday. The seafood place down on the pier. I start Monday.”
I set the lasagna in the microwave. “That won’t be very convenient for you once you’re back at your mom’s.”
She laughs. “Nothing you’ve done has given me the impression that I’ll be back at my mom’s.”
I pour myself a drink. Even the sound of the ice crackling as the bourbon flows over it is a hit of dopamine now, a sign that relief is on the way.
“Oh, is it that time already?” She pulls a bottle of Malibu from the chair beside her. “Sweet.”
“I’m not sure what you’re doing there.” I lift the glass to my mouth. “Are you even old enough to drink?”
She rolls her eyes as she twists the top off. “It’s so flattering, how little you remember about me. And what we’re doing is drinking together . Every sip you take, I’ll take one too.”
I pause. “I’m twice your weight. You realize you’ll be under the table by the time I’ve finished this lasagna, yes?”
Her eyes twinkle. “Why yes, Harrison. I do realize that.”
Ah, clever. She thinks my conscience will keep me from getting her drunk, and it probably would under normal circumstances, but I’m not playing this game with her.
I take a nice long drink of my bourbon, holding her eye the entire time.
She chugs straight from her bottle of Malibu, holding mine.
I go to the microwave for the lasagna. I’m so hungry that I take a bite before it’s cooled off and scald my tongue, which I then soothe with a nice long sip of bourbon.
Her shoulders sag. She takes another drink of her rum. This is getting tedious.
“I could just take this to my room, you know,” I tell her.
“If you take that bottle to your room, I’ll take this one to mine and finish it,” she replies, satisfied with herself .
She’d do it too. If she could go without food for days as a toddler to prove a point, drinking an entire bottle of Malibu as an adult would be a walk in the park.
“How’s the lasagna?” she asks.
“Good, and the bourbon gives it a little extra kick. I’ll probably have more.”
Her nostrils flare, and she heaves a sigh. “Excellent. I’ll have more too.”
We’re at a standoff, and already she’s turned drinking into a chore, something I wish I didn’t have to do. Goddammit, Daisy.
I finish the first piece of lasagna. I finish most of the bourbon and refill it. She matches me sip for sip.
I heat up a second piece and carry it to the table. She follows, setting the Malibu down on the table with a heavy thud.
“So what happened with you and Audrey?” she asks as I raise the fork to my mouth, and every muscle in my stomach tightens.
“We split up,” I reply coolly. “I figured you knew, given it’s how you’ve maliciously inserted yourself into my life.”
She shakes her head. “No. I mean, what really happened? Because you wouldn’t be lying to everyone about a girlfriend if it went the way you said. You’d be out at a bar telling Liam how much those two months in London sucked and that it was time to pull the cord.”
“You sure seem to know a lot about relationships. Have you ever even had one?”
Her smile fades. She takes an extra sip of the rum though I didn’t sip off mine. “I have, actually. And you’re trying to change the topic. So what really happened?”
I’m starting to lose my appetite. I’d just go to my room but I know she’ll keep on asking every day she’s here until I’ve managed to kick her out.
I take a long swig of the bourbon. “There’s no secret story, Daisy, and if there were, do you really think I’d share it with someone already blackmailing me with the one secret she’s privy to?”
She drinks from the bottle of Malibu and stares at me, still waiting for the fucking answer. “I won’t blackmail you with it. I mean, I will if it’s juicy . If it turns out you want to be diapered like a baby or are into coprophilia, it would be really hard not to blackmail you a little .”
“What the hell is coprophilia?”
She grins. “Ah, now, who’s the innocent one? It’s when someone wants to take a dump on your face.”
“I don’t even want to know how you know that. And my marriage failed. That’s sufficiently embarrassing, I think.”
“Half of all marriages end in divorce, dude.” She’s already slurring a little. “There’s nothing embarrassing about it. So, I’m forced to assume the issue was coprophilia. Or, God…is it worse ? I can only think of two things that are worse, and they’re both illegal. No, wait, I can think of three things. They’re all sexual, by the way. Nope, just came up with a fourth. Four things. Wow, I’m seeing you in a whole new light.”
I’m torn between laughing and walking out of the room.
“I’m scared to even ask what those four things are,” I begin and raise my hand when her mouth opens. “That wasn’t an invitation for you to tell me. And no, there was no sexual deviance underlying my divorce. What’s embarrassing is that I quit my job and sold my house and went halfway around the world only to pack it in after two months.” It’s partly true. Which, by definition, means it’s also partly false. And I’m not sure why I’m even replying to her, but the bourbon has loosened my tongue, and now that she’s clearly wondering if I’m a pedophile or human trafficker, the truth seems like less of a big deal than it did.
She laughs. “Poor Harrison. Failing at a relationship is a regular day on the job for most people. You were just too accustomed to being good at everything.”
She’s missing a lot of the nuance here, but she isn’t entirely wrong: I was used to excelling at life. There was a time when I had every fucking thing and couldn’t get through a day without someone mentioning how lucky I was. I had family money. I graduated at the top of my class and married a woman who was beautiful and brilliant and loved me enough to follow me across the country. Work came easily, winning came easily, and I assumed, soon enough, that parenting would come easily too.
And suddenly it was all gone, and nothing was coming at all, easily or otherwise.
“When I left, I was the top-grossing partner at my firm. Now I’m starting from scratch at thirty-two and everyone’s looking at me like I’m a clown for doing it, which I am.”
Her unfocused eyes meet mine. “Why didn’t you just go to a different firm?”
I considered it. I should have. I probably should have moved someplace else entirely, and I’m still not sure why I didn’t. “There’s not a lot in Elliott Springs in the first place, and certainly nobody who was going to bring me in as a partner. I guess I didn’t want to go even farther backward than I have.”
I drink and so does she, though it’s really fucking clear she needs to stop. I also want to take the focus off myself. “Go to bed, Daisy. I’m just going to sit on the deck and finish this bourbon and I’m done for the night.”
She laughs, rising when I do. “Oh, no, my friend. I’m sticking it out as long as you’re here. And I’m a college student. Nine isn’t bedtime for me…I’m just getting started.”
I remember those days well, except I had a lot more fun during my summers than she’s having. I was working, sure, but my nights were full. I’d surf until dark and then sit around a bonfire with my friends, and there weren’t enough minutes in the day for me to fit it all in—I couldn’t wait to be done with school so that the hours would become my own, but then they became my own and I wound up filling them with none of those things at all.
“You should be getting started,” I reply. “You’re too young to be spending every summer night sitting inside with me.”
It’s true. I don’t know why it’s a hard thing to say to her, though—perhaps because then I’ll have to worry about heroin addicts in unmarked vans.
I leave my plate where it is and walk out to the deck. Aside from the distant lights of Santa Cruz, the night is pitch black and peaceful. I can’t see the ocean, but I like knowing it’s there, the roar of waves attacking the Horseshoe’s jagged cliff face.
Daisy drops into the seat across from mine, that bottle of Malibu looking less heavy than it did before. “I love it here,” she says with a happy sigh. “I missed this so much in DC.”
Two decades ago she was a tan, blonde toddler who refused to wear shoes and always had sand in her hair. I suspect, beneath the curves and the pout and the porn voice, she’s still that same kid.
“I was surprised you left,” I admit. “I always thought you’d stay out here.”
The glance that flickers my way is wary, tinged with unhappiness. “It was easier than dealing with Scott all the time. And I wanted to give my mom the whole experience.”
“Experience?”
She laughs. “She’s a little obsessed with the idea of college, but not real college. I’m talking, like, college the way it appears in old movies. Buildings covered in ivy, tea with the dean. But anyway…I wanted to give her that. I wanted her to live vicariously through me since she never got it for herself.”
Daisy’s always been such a mix of contrasts. Ridiculously rebellious one moment—refusing to get out of the water as a kid, or dying her hair black before Bridget’s wedding—but endlessly sweet at the same time, like this. Moving across the country to ease an awkward situation with her stepfather. Going to an old East Coast school to suit her mom rather than herself.
Blackmailing me, but making me dinner each night while she does it and trying to force me to clean up my shit. What would Audrey have done in her shoes? If we were still together and she’d discovered me drinking in my boxer shorts, lying to all my friends…
I guess it’s fair to say she wouldn’t have done a goddamned thing. Or that she’d have been too busy cheating on me to notice.
“I guess you’re not as terrible a daughter as I thought,” I say with a grin, and she swings her leg out and kicks me before curling up in her chair, pulling the oversized sweatshirt around her knees for warmth. The bottle of Malibu is now clutched to her chest like a beloved toy.
“I’m the only kid she’s got,” she says with a shrug. “Speaking of other kids, do you see your stepsiblings much?”
I give her a half-hearted smile. “Seeing them would be a full-time job at the rate my father’s going.” I now have four half-sisters in various countries and a fifth on the way. “I was supposed to see Oliver and Matthew in France this summer, but—”
I run a hand over my head. That was a plan made when I’d thought I’d be reaching them via a two-hour train ride rather than a thirteen-hour flight. “Oliver will be in LA for work in a few weeks. I’ll probably try to see him then.”
“Oliver,” she muses. “Was he the hot one?”
There’s…a twinge. A tiny pinch of irritation where there should be none.
“This might come as a shock to you, Daisy, but I don’t think of my brothers in terms of hotness . He’s the one who looks like me.” There’s an iciness to my voice that shouldn’t be there. Why should I give a shit if Daisy was ever attracted to one of my brothers? “And he’s too old for you, so I’m not sure why that would be relevant anyway.”
She laughs. “Too old? When he came to visit you, he was fifteen and I was nine. Unless time works differently in France, that only makes him six years older than me.”
“There’s a world of difference between twenty-one and twenty-seven,” I argue. “The years after college change everything.”
And, more to the point, I just can’t stand the idea of her with my brother.
When she looks at me over her bottle of Malibu, I’m disturbed by how amused she is and by how very adult her amusement appears to be. “Harrison, you went to school at eighteen with two wealthy parents to pay your way and what was, I’m sure, a very generous trust fund. I went at seventeen on loans and part-time jobs and have been scraping by ever since. You probably never had to support yourself until you left law school, right? Which means that you’ve only had one more year of independence than I’ve had. A six-year age gap isn’t the dealbreaker you think it should be.”
She’s right, and it changes nothing. Because I don’t think what really bothers me is the idea of Daisy with someone older, or with one of my siblings. It’s the idea of her with anyone at all.
“You should still be dating guys your own age,” I insist.
She smiles. “Like the surfers across the street?”
My eyes narrow. “No. Not the surfers across the street.”
She stretches out her legs and wiggles her toes. “You’ve got an awfully dim view of surfers for someone who used to be one.”
“That’s why I have such a dim view of them,” I growl. I distinctly remember being a college-aged douchebag who wanted to fuck every cute girl he saw in a bikini and did fuck more than his share. The idea of Daisy falling prey to one of them makes my jaw grind .
“Why did you buy a place here, then?” she asks. “Audrey didn’t surf, you clearly don’t surf much, if at all, and you already had that mansion in Elliott Springs.”
I rattle the ice in my glass. “My dad sold his beach house and I thought we might just move out this way, eventually. It seemed like a nice place to raise a family.”
I think I was trying to salvage something then—our marriage, maybe, or the dreams I’d once had for adulthood. I just didn’t know it. I’ve always said it was an accident, the way I forgot to tell Audrey, but I’m not sure it really was. I was just fucking desperate to acquire something I knew I needed. You don’t grow old in a single step—it’s a long, quiet descent. It begins with saying you can’t take a week off to surf in Hawaii. Then you can’t spare a weekend, then two hours on a Saturday. Suddenly you’re old, and all the things you loved the most are behind you, out of reach. I’d been making that slow descent for a while, and I wanted to stop it somehow.
“I made the offer before I’d ever even mentioned it to Audrey,” I admit quietly. “She was pissed, and she had every right to be. I should have known it wasn’t going to work.”
“Why wouldn’t it work?”
I sigh. “Audrey hates the beach.”
Daisy laughs as if I’m joking, but then her eyes widen when she realizes I wasn’t. “What kind of monster doesn’t like the beach?”
It’s the exact question I’d expect of a kid who used to throw herself down and howl when we told her it was time to leave for the day. “It was something about not liking the feel of the sand.”
Daisy snorts. “Are you serious right now?”
I shrug. Yes, Audrey hated sand. She flinched every time she felt it underfoot. And God forbid if there was sand in the sheets. “Yeah. She needed to shower ten times a day if she came out here, and I was careful . I can’t imagine how much worse it would have been if we’d had kids.”
Daisy sips off the bottle. “Man, she must’ve been a blast in bed. If she didn’t like the feel of sand, what was her take on having you come all over her tits?”
I choke on the bourbon I’m swallowing. “ What? ”
“You heard me.”
Yeah, I did. And those fucking words tripped off Daisy’s tongue far too easily, with a smirk on her full, pink lips as if letting a guy paint her with his cum was an everyday event.
“Jesus.” I’m on my feet and walking back inside with that bottle of bourbon in front of my crotch before I’ve even thought it through. “Daisy, the shit that comes out of your mouth sometimes…”
She laughs behind me. “You don’t have to run away! I already know that made you hard.”
And she is correct. It did.
It should not have.
When I wake in the morning, Daisy’s door is already open. I go downstairs but see none of the typical signs of her presence. There’s no coffee cup in the sink, no perfect ass bent over on my deck. And the bottle of Malibu isn’t here either.
“Goddammit, Daisy,” I hiss. “Tell me you didn’t actually go drink in your room.”
Of course she did, and I’m a fucking idiot for thinking she wouldn’t .
I march back up the stairs to find her sprawled face-down in bed. The covers are on the floor, her T-shirt is bunched around her waist, and her little red panties have ridden up until they’re basically a thong.
Now there’s an image I didn’t fucking need .
I pick up the covers and place them over her. From beneath all the hair covering her face, she moans. “Sick,” she whispers.
I lift the Malibu. There’s some in there still but not a lot. “Yeah, I bet you are.”
“Shit,” she hisses before she leaps from the bed and runs to the bathroom, followed by the sound of retching.
She’s brought all of this on herself, and guilt tweaks me anyway. I walk to the threshold of the bathroom, where she’s curled up on the floor, her face pressed to the tile.
“Daisy, go back to bed,” I say softly.
“Just leave me behind!” she cries as if this is a war movie. “Save yourself!”
I laugh. “I’m pretty sure what you have isn’t contagious. Come on.” I scoop her up. She feels tiny, fragile, in my arms. “Let’s get you into bed.”
“Yeah, you’d like that, wouldn’t you?” she mumbles.
I grin as I set her on the mattress. “Have you looked in the mirror today? You’re not exactly the height of seduction at present. And you smell like vomit.”
She buries her head into her pillow. “Let me brush my teeth. You’ll change your tune.”
“Absolutely,” I reply. “That’s all it would take. I’m getting you aspirin. Stay put.”
I go downstairs, deeply annoyed that she’s done this to herself on my behalf, but warmed by it at the same time. Daisy and her ridiculously big heart. Apparently, I’m the three-legged dog she’s going to cry over all summer, and I guess I need to resign myself to that fact.
When I get back to the room, she’s half asleep and has to be forced into swallowing the pills before she collapses on her pillow.
I push her hair back from her face.
Christ. When did she turn so beautiful? When did she develop those cheekbones? That pout? Even now, sweating and pale, she’s so pretty she’s hard to look away from and hard to look at all at the same time.
Liam warned us off his sister. He never felt he needed to warn us away from his niece.
I hate that it was apparently necessary.