21. Harrison
21
HARRISON
W e drive through Monterey, then Pacific Point, and reach Asilomar just as dark grey storm clouds slide in from the south.
Daisy’s smiling, determined to be out there no matter what Mother Nature throws at us. And I’m unable to tell her no, for some reason. “If we hear thunder, we get out.”
“If we see lightning . Thunder is meaningless.”
“I’m not negotiating with you, Daisy,” I warn, parking on the side of the road.
She climbs out of the car and reaches into the back seat for her wetsuit. “What are you going to do? Drag me out of the water?”
We look at each other and start to laugh.
“Fine,” she says. “You’d absolutely drag me out of the water.”
I untie the boards from the car while trying very hard not to watch her shimmy into her wetsuit. In spite of the weather and the fact that it’s nearly lunchtime, the water is full of surfers, people who understand that it’s worth everything—blowing off work, risking a lightning strike—for the brief thrill of it .
The water’s cold, the sky is gray, and as we paddle to the lineup, her blue eyes are glowing as if she’s never been happier. “You love this.”
She turns those glowing eyes my way. “It’s an adventure. And I don’t have to worry about being flung into a cliff, which is surprisingly nice.”
I slow my paddle to remain by her side. “Someday, you should go down to southern Costa Rica. Really consistent surf. White, white sand. And the water never gets colder than eighty degrees.”
Her eyes fall closed. “God, wouldn’t that be amazing? No wetsuits, no shock when you jump in the water…”
If our lives were wildly different, I’d take her there. I’d rent us a cottage right on the beach, where she could surf to her heart’s content every day. If our lives were incredibly different, I’d pull that bikini off her the minute we were done.
Leave that thought alone, Harrison.
She’s up on the first decent wave that comes in, her focus intense as she carves up then cuts back beautifully.
“That’s goals, right there,” says a woman near me.
I blink. “Goals?”
“You and her,” she says. “My girlfriend and I get along, but she’d never come out here and surf. Like…you guys are clearly super-hot for each other, but you’re also friends .”
“We’re not together.” I say the words too fast, and there’s a hint of guilt in my voice. “She’s my friend’s daughter.”
She raises a brow as if she simultaneously doesn’t believe me and is now wondering if I’m a predator. I turn away to watch Daisy paddle back. A dim ray of light breaks through the clouds, highlighting the curves of her face, her long lashes wet and spiky. For a moment, it takes my breath away.
The woman near me was right. A relationship with someone like Daisy would be unbelievable, but it’s also completely impossible. And daydreaming about it will only make me less satisfied with the life I end up with instead.
“You look troubled,” Daisy says when she reaches me. “Are you thinking I’m wasting my life in college and should join the world surf tour? Because if so, we’re on the same page.”
I laugh. “Yeah, that’s exactly what I was thinking. Is there a two-foot-wave category?”
She flips me off with a smile and then turns to face the shore, ready to go again.
Goals.
If only there was anyone in the world who was just like her, but not her. Not Bridget’s daughter and Liam’s niece, not more than a decade younger, not leaving for DC at the summer’s end.
We surf for about forty minutes more, until thunder rumbles. Daisy rolls her eyes at me— for all her supposed responsibility, she’d stay out here until lightning was setting people on fire. To be fair, though, no one else is heading in, so she wouldn’t be the only one.
We strip out of our wetsuits beside the car. I do my best to hand her a towel without looking at her, because she’s in a bikini that covers next to nothing, and just by the way she’s shivering, I bet her nipples are diamond hard.
I’ve got a long weekend of not noticing ahead. It’s in everyone’s best interest if I start trying now.
She wraps a towel around her waist then slips off her bikini bottoms and replaces them with sweatpants. “I’d blow anyone who could get me a cup of cocoa in the next five minutes,” she says.
Unwillingly, I laugh. I can do my level best to avoid looking at her, but Daisy is still going to be Daisy. “You might want to try asking if we can get cocoa before you resort to prostituting yourself for it.”
“And you might want to try not looking a gift horse in the mouth,” she replies. “If a girl offers to blow you for cocoa, get her the fucking cocoa and hope she keeps promises.”
I’m so hard I have to spend two solid minutes pretending to repack the trunk before I can face her again.
We get lunch in Pacific Grove, where she manages to acquire cocoa without having to perform a sex act, and by the time we’ve gotten onto the stretch of highway leading to Big Sur, the clouds are gone and the sun is out and she’s got the windows down, singing along with Jack Harlow.
She opens the sunroof to take pictures of the Bixby Bridge. I play the Jack Harlow song a second time just to watch her dance in her seat, and she laughs when she realizes I know every word.
None of this would have been possible if I’d stayed with Audrey. I wouldn’t have surfed today. Audrey would never have gone on a road trip. She’d never have allowed the windows down, and she certainly wouldn’t be fucking with the sound system to blow up the bass the way Daisy is.
And that’s not to say that I wouldn’t have enjoyed the things Audrey and I did together. But I wouldn’t have enjoyed them like this . I wouldn’t have loved them so much that there’d be no price worth giving them up.
It takes about an hour to reach McWay Falls. We pay to park in the lot before taking the small, crowded walkway to the viewing deck, patiently waiting our turn while everyone in front of us takes pictures.
“Do you think any of them are really seeing the view?” Daisy asks softly. “Or is it all about how good a shot they’re getting and whether or not it’s framed right for TikTok?”
I glance at the crowd, and she’s right— no one is looking at the view. They’re looking only at their phones .
I grin at her. “And we’ll probably do the same fucking thing.”
She’s still observing all the people. “You know what it is? The beauty of moments like this is that they can’t last. All these people are trying to make them last and in doing so, they’re missing the moment entirely.”
“You’re kind of a dark little thing under that perennial look on the bright side attitude, aren’t you?”
A shadow passes over her face. “Don’t say that,” she says softly, though I’ve got no idea why it bothered her.
“It wasn’t an insult, Daisy. There’s nothing wrong with having a bit of a dark side. I have a rather substantial one, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
“Your dark side is hardly as harmless as you’d like to believe,” she replies with a half-smile.
We finally get to the observation deck. “Let’s not take any photos,” she says. “Let’s not take a single photo for the entire trip.”
I’d wanted to get a photo of her as much as the falls. There’s something so lovely in her face right now, lovely and calm and brave and sad all at once. It’s something I wish I could capture, but I guess that’s exactly what she was saying before, isn’t it? I’d be trying to take a photo of something so I wouldn’t have to lose it. And I’m definitely going to lose it.
I lean against the black metal rail. The spout of water does, indeed, jut mysteriously out of a rock into the deep blue Pacific churning beneath it. “It looks exactly like the pictures.”
She nods. “It does.”
I don’t say anything more, but…it’s a little empty, seeing it firsthand when I’d already seen it online.
I prefer the things I wasn’t prepared for, the ones that hit out of nowhere like an unexpected gift.
Those are the ones you can’t imagine ever leaving behind.
We arrive in Malibu at sunset, and I steer us to a white oceanfront house that looks like it’s straight out of Architectural Digest .
“Yet another modest shack, I see,” she says as I pull in behind the Porsche my brother is renting.
We climb from the car, and moments later Oliver walks outside, greeting us with a wide smile. His hair is lighter than mine and he’s more tan than I am, but we’re otherwise pretty similar…aside from my brother’s somewhat loose morals, that is. He’s me, if I’d been the one raised by a doting mother who made me the center of her world, if I hadn’t felt it was necessary to do the right thing all the fucking time, to make up for the fact that neither of my parents would.
He hugs me first. “Babysitting, mon cul .”
Babysitting, my ass .
We both glance her way—at her easy smile, her flushed cheeks, her hair wild from our windows-down drive. How did I ever think he’d believe me? She is delicious. She is irresistible. And there’s not a chance Oliver will even try to resist. She’ll fall for his easy French charm because women always do—I’ve witnessed it firsthand over a hundred summer jaunts with him and Matthew. Santorini, Mallorca, Amsterdam, Lisbon—what do these places have in common? Beautiful women fell like fucking dominos when my brothers turned their way.
I don’t know how to stop it, but something seizes up in my chest at the thought of Oliver and Daisy together, and I doubt it has much to do with protecting her virtue.
“Little Daisy, you’ve changed a bit since the last time I saw you,” he says, kissing both her cheeks.
“And you haven’t changed at all,” she replies. “You’re still speaking in French to Harrison when you don’t want me to know what you’ve said. ”
He laughs. “A bad habit.”
“Especially when you have no idea what language I studied in high school and college.”
He grins. “You’d have slapped me by now if you spoke French.”
Great. We’re five seconds into this trip and he’s already flirting with her.
He helps us carry our bags upstairs to the living room, where the back wall looks over a wide white beach and waves rolling up in perfect sets under the dying sun. Surfers dot the landscape, straddling boards.
I glance at Daisy and she’s already looking at me, eager to be out there. Hungry for it.
That surfer in Asilomar saw in an instant what I should have realized weeks ago: Daisy is everything I could ever want in a relationship—someone happy, someone who relishes life and is eager to be a part of it. A woman who will come to my bed with sand in her hair and smile the way Daisy is right now—as if life is an adventure, one she wants to share with me.
“ Mon Dieu ,” Oliver says under his breath when she goes to the bathroom to change into a bikini. “You weren’t lying before. She blows the mother away, does she not?”
“I meant it, Oliver,” I warn. “Don’t pursue her.”
There’s sympathy in his gaze when he glances over. “Yes, I know. You couldn’t be making it more clear.”