12. Daisy
12
DAISY
G od, I hate DC.
From November until April and sometimes May, the air is cold, the trees are mostly bare, and the sunlight is weak if it’s present at all. There are no waves here, no endless vistas, no gentle breezes.
There are cars. A lot of fucking cars. Not a night goes by when I’m not woken by the sound of sirens, or honking, or drunks yelling as they stumble down the sidewalk outside. Sometimes I want to weep with the desire for fresh air, sunlight, crashing waves.
The phone rings. It’s my mom, and I’m not sure I can summon the energy to talk to her, but it’s her second call, and by not answering, I’m digging a bigger and bigger hole, one that will require better lies, more good cheer.
I push my arm from my comforter, cringing at the apartment’s chill as I reach for the phone.
“Hi, Mom,” I say.
“You sound like you were asleep,” she frets. “Didn’t you have class this morning?”
My eyes fall closed. It’s getting harder to keep all my lies straight. “Our prof cancelled. She’s sick. Covid, I think. ”
It’s best to give her more information than she’s requested—it keeps her from coming up with questions of her own.
“But it’s going well?”
My hand curls into a fist to keep the crack out of my voice. “Yeah. Just tired of winter.”
I want to pull my arm back inside this unwashed comforter and sleep until it’s over, though I’m starting to wonder if that will ever happen.
There’s a beat of awkward silence, her waiting for me to fill in the gaps. My poor mother, wanting so much for me and being consistently disappointed with the outcome. “Do you know when they’ll send details about graduation?” she asks. “I want to book plane tickets before it gets expensive.”
Fuck. I knew this was coming. I just thought I had time, though I’m not sure what I thought time would accomplish. Maybe I hoped I’d have grown a pair by now, but that was always unlikely.
“I think I’m going to need an extra semester, actually,” I tell her.
“Extra? Why?”
The dismay in her voice is like a sharp poke. Needing a few extra classes is nothing compared to the truth, so God only knows how she’d react to that. “I wasn’t able to get into everything I needed to graduate,” I tell her. “It’s not a big deal. It’s pretty common to take more than four years these days.”
“You do realize all those extra classes you take cost money, right?” she chides. “Money you’ll have to pay back.”
My jaw grinds. Yes, Mom. I’m aware that I, alone, will be paying back those loans. I’m the one who’s here, remember? I’m the one who acquired them. “Yeah, I know. I’d better get going. I have a five o’clock lab.”
“Daisy…” she begins, and then she’s quiet. “I’m so proud of you. We’ll talk later, okay? I love you.”
“Love you too,” I say, ending the call and pulling my arm beneath the comforter .
I just want to go back to sleep and stay asleep so I never have to face the mess I’ve made of everything.
When my eyes open, it’s a relief to see the stark lines of Harrison’s sunlit guest room instead of my grim apartment in DC, to discover this churning in my stomach is half a bottle of Malibu as opposed to guilt and helplessness.
Though I guess some guilt remains. I’ve still made a mess of things. I’m still lying to everyone about it.
Steps echo down the hall and I look toward the door. Harrison stands there, still in his oxford but with the jacket off and the tie loosened. Based on the light, it’s going on noon. He should have left hours ago.
“You didn’t go into work?” I rasp, pushing up onto my elbows to get a better view of him.
He sits at the foot of the bed. “I stuck around in case EMS had to be let in. It’s an expensive door. I didn’t want them breaking it down.”
“Ha, ha.”
He twists the cap off the Gatorade he’s carrying and hands it to me. “Drink up, sunshine. You need to replenish some fluids.”
I take a long chug from the bottle. Nothing in the history of the world has ever tasted better than this neon-green ambrosia. “You can go to work. I’m fine.”
He hesitates. “You’re sure?”
I nod quickly. “Positive. The only thing that hurts right now is how badly my plan backfired.”
He laughs. “It wasn’t your best.”
“I’ve got a better one,” I reply, though I do not. I don’t actually have any plan at all. If he’s willing to watch me poison myself to prove he won’t be bullied and I can’t keep threatening to tell his friends, what else is left? What’s he more scared of than my death—which he clearly wasn’t that worried about—or Liam’s involvement ?
He pats my leg and rises, though I wish he’d stay. “Hopefully, it’s less likely to end with a fatality than this one was.”
“Maybe I’ll remove a piece of clothing every time you drink.”
His laughter is low and dismissive. “Given the way you dress, your threat doesn’t have much of a shelf life.”
I guess he’s got a point.
He leaves, and I flop back onto the pillows with a groan.
All I’ve got left is tomorrow morning, and I really hope it works.
My alarm goes off just before seven the next day. The road in front of the house is already lined with trucks, and there’s no time to waste.
I don my bikini and knock on Harrison’s door. When he doesn’t answer, I try the handle.
Yes, this is something I’ve thought of doing many times before, but never for the reason I’m doing it now.
He’s sound asleep under a tangled mess of covers, deliciously scruffy and full-lipped and unconscious. I’m pretty sure I see the start of some morning wood, too. I picture sliding under the covers from the bottom of the bed and—
Bad, Daisy. Not why we’re here.
“Harrison, wake up. It’s time to surf.”
He doesn’t blink. He doesn’t even budge. I shake his shoulder and he rolls away from me, mumbling something in his sleep about a bilateral agreement, which makes it even weirder that he’s got an erection.
So I do climb on the bed, though in a far less sexy way than I’d previously imagined.
I’m standing.
And jumping .
“Wake up, wake up, wake up,” I chant, and though this is certainly not going to convince him that I’m an adult, it’s effective.
He rolls onto his stomach. “Daisy, get the fuck out of my room.”
“We’re surfing,” I say, continuing to jump, making the bed roll beneath him. “And it’s high tide right now. That’s why I told you to be up by seven.”
He covers his head with a pillow. “Daisy, get the fuck out of my room. Now .”
Shit. I’ve looked forward to this all week, and he’s clearly not going to budge. I jump on the floor and land with a thud. “Awesome.” My voice is flat, barely disguising the ache of disappointment in my chest. “Then I guess we’re agreeing I can stay and surf wherever I want.”
I walk out, slamming the door behind me, but there’s a lump in my throat as I head down the stairs. I really saw him going along with it. I saw more than that, too. I pictured him getting out in the water, riding a wave or two, and remembering how good it was. I imagined us as a team. Like, not a professional surf team, but just…buddies. Buddies who’d wake up every morning at daybreak to surf, who’d get out there in the afternoons. I thought he’d remember who he used to be and allow me to be there beside him when he discovered it, and I was so fucking excited about it, wasn’t I? Which is pathetic. The guy doesn’t even want me in his home, so he wasn’t about to suddenly turn into my best friend.
I go to the garage and pull on my wetsuit, fighting tears. I hate him for ruining this, for making me go out there alone when—
The door from the house opens and he marches out, already in his wetsuit. He walks past me and grabs his board off the opposite wall. “Let’s get this over with,” he barks, heading for the driveway .
My tears dry as I scramble to get my board too, fighting a smile. “Don’t you want to wax it first?”
“I doubt we’ll be out there long enough for it to matter,” he replies without stopping.
Dickish of him. I decide to let it go.
He crosses the street and heads down the stairs as if he’s going into battle—I’m not sure why he’s acting like this is such a chore unless Audrey actually did manage to change him into some trust-fund douche who’d rather spend a Saturday morning having brunch at the country club than surfing.
His shoulders hunch when he reaches the water, his jaw locked and his brow furrowed. He takes in the rocks, the cliff, the dark and dangerous waves, the eddies swirling nearby, and when he glances back at me, I know exactly what he’s going to do. He’s scared—not for himself, but for me, and I refuse to be the reason he doesn’t get in this morning.
“Daisy,” he begins, “I think this is a bad—”
I jump.
“If you want to puss out, be my guest,” I call, floating on my back while I tie the leash around my ankle. “But I’ve waited since Wednesday, and I’m not waiting another minute.”
I pretend that I don’t hear him cursing behind me and start to paddle. He catches me easily—of course he does with those delightful shoulders of his—and mumbles something about me being a brat, which I choose not to respond to.
“Do not go over in front of the cliff,” he snarls.
I glare over my shoulder. “I’ve managed to keep myself alive for the past five years without any adult guidance, so I’m not sure why you think I need you to leap in now.”
“Yes, you’ve proven to be a model of responsible behavior with the way you’re forcing yourself on me.”
“Oh, Harrison,” I say silkily, “I haven’t even begun to force myself on you. Believe me, you’ll know when I do. ”
He sighs. “You’re too young to make every word out of your mouth sound so dirty.”
I straddle my board, waiting for the next set to come in. “You realize I’ve had sex, right? I’ve had a lot of sex, actually.”
“More than I needed to know,” he mutters.
I grin. Why is his discomfort so much fun for me? “So, so much sex. Do you want to hear about my first time? I was fourteen. He was eighteen and in a band.”
“Continue describing this situation, which is considered statutory rape in California, and I’ll have a legal duty to report it.”
He’s probably bluffing. But he might not be. And the next set is coming in. I get flat on my board and turn to face the shore.
“Not this one,” he snaps. “It’s too big.”
I roll my eyes. It’s not that big. If he’d seen the wave I took Wednesday, the one the guys cheered for, he’d have had a heart attack. I start to paddle, trying to ignore my nerves. It isn’t a huge wave, but I’m so anxious about messing up in front of him that I might very well do something dumb.
“Just push up, Daisy ,” Harrison says in my head. The old, sweet version who wanted to see me fly. The version I know is still inside him somewhere.
My chest lifts and all the other steps fall into place—I plant my back leg and then my front, and when I glance over my shoulder, he’s right behind me, carving into the wave. For a moment, our eyes catch. I don’t miss his reluctant grin before I turn away.
It’s a perfect ride, and I feel more free and more complete during the seconds it lasts than I’ve felt in a very long time.
When the wave dies out, I jump off the board and he does the same. Our heads surface at the same moment, and I’m on the cusp of giving him the finger, but the sheer joy on his face makes it impossible to do anything but smile .
“Have anything you’d like to say to me?” I shout, paddling his way.
“Your forefoot wasn’t quite centered,” he replies.
So I do give him the finger.
“Fine, I was wrong,” he admits. “I shouldn’t have told you where you could surf.”
His gaze meets mine and he smiles again, happier than I’ve seen him in a very long time.
That smile of his presses right to the center of my chest like a thumbprint.
I want to hold it there forever.
After an hour in the water, we walk back to the house together and shower—the showering is done separately, of course, though I could easily be persuaded to go about it another way.
I go to the kitchen after I get dressed, put on music, and start making myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich with this gross, healthy bread and super-oily peanut butter from the rich people store. I’ve got no clue why rich people like bread that’s full of grains. Someone should introduce them to the white bread I grew up on, the kind that melts in your mouth and doesn’t go bad for weeks. They’d never go back.
Liam texts while I’m attempting to make the gross rich-people peanut butter mix together. We’ve played phone tag all week, and even though he’s preoccupied with his new girlfriend, I feel bad anyway.
Liam
There’s this old James Bond movie playing at the new theater in town. You want to go?
I love James Bond. But if I see Liam, he’s going to ask where I’m staying, and he’ll pursue details he wouldn’t pursue normally because he’s actually asking on my mother’s behalf. He’ll ask which friend I’m staying with, where she lives, how I know her, why he doesn’t remember her.
Eventually it’ll come out that I’m in Santa Cruz. And he’ll say, “ We should meet Harrison down there ,” and I’ll somehow wind up telling him that Harrison’s not dating anyone in LA. Oh, and that I’m living with him and he gets erections a lo t, shockingly large ones, and I might even have been responsible for one or two of them.
If I know my uncle at all, that will not go over well.
Harrison walks into the kitchen, his gaze sweeping over me. “I’d forgotten about that,” he says.
“Forgotten what?”
He nudges me out of the way to make himself a sandwich. “The way you dance around the kitchen when you’re cooking.”
I roll my eyes. “Great. One more way you’ve remembered my childhood.”
“There isn’t anything childish about it now ,” he grunts. Something in that grunt makes my stomach tighten deliciously.
Two months ago, it seemed like an easy decision to give up on men and sex and the roller coaster of it all. Harrison has obliterated that ease with a single low noise in his throat. If he suddenly turned around and said, “Hop up on this counter. I’ve decided to fuck you,” I’d knock dishes off in my haste.
I set my sandwich down. “Hey, clearly you lost our bet, but I’ll let you out of running tomorrow if you agree to go to the movies with Liam instead.”
He raises a brow as he spreads jelly on the bread. “This deal seems a little too good to be true. Why don’t you want to go?”
I shrug. “Because I’m not a good liar—you probably wouldn’t expect that given how good I am at blackmailing—but I’m worried I’ll tell him the truth. ”
“Yeah,” he says, dropping the knife in the sink, “I’m a little worried about that too.”
“Cool, so you’ll go? He wants to see some old Bond movie playing downtown.”
“ Bond ?” he asks. “No.” He was completely on board and now his voice is hard—a voice I normally wouldn’t even bother to argue with.
“It’s exactly the kind of male-centered drivel I’d expect you to love.”
“The last thing I need is to sit in a theater listening to some pompous British asshole,” he mutters, and he’s angry , as if James Bond personally hurt him at some point in their mutual past.
Which makes no sense. Not only because James Bond is fictional, but because Harrison loves the UK. He spent a semester there in college. He chose to move there last winter, for God’s sake.
The only way it would make sense is if…
“This is about Audrey, isn’t it?” I blurt out, my voice running ahead of my brain. “She met someone else.”
He swallows, jaw grinding as if he’s about to mount an argument. “I’m not discussing this with you,” he says instead, walking out to the deck.