41. Harrison
41
HARRISON
Where are you? I just parked.
I t’s Monday night, and I’m impatient. The minutes have dragged since I left her side yesterday at the beach. I climb from the car, frustrated that the call coming in is from Audrey rather than Daisy. She called over the weekend too. I was too preoccupied and too uninterested in what she had to say to answer. And why the fuck is she calling anyway? She knows I prefer to communicate in writing.
“Sorry,” I tell her briskly. “I saw your call and forgot to call back. But this is a bad time. Can I call you later in the week?”
“Sure,” she says. “But you’re good? Things are going well?”
They say that the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s indifference, and I get that now. Because questions like this from her once annoyed the shit out of me, had me thinking you lost the right to ask me about my life when you started fucking your boss. But now I’m not mad at her. I just couldn’t care less what she wants or how she’s doing.
“Things are amazing,” I reply. “We’ll talk next week. ”
I hang up before she can reply, just in time to receive Daisy’s text.
Daisy
Look up.
I do as she’s said and there she is, ahead of me. There’s a grin on her face as she licks the ice cream cone in her hand—intentionally voracious and filthy. Every man in the vicinity turns to watch.
If I could choose any superpower right now, it would be the ability to make her invisible to everyone but me.
“Want a lick?” she asks with a sly smile, holding the ice cream out. I grab it and throw it in the trash in a single motion, and then my mouth lands on hers.
It’s not that hands-cradling-face kiss she thinks is so magical, but it sure isn’t tentative either. It’s a kiss that says I’m going to fuck the hell out of you the second we’re alone, and I’m sure we’re drawing attention, especially when I’m in a suit and clearly a decade too old for her.
I don’t fucking care. All that matters is her mouth against mine, the way she sways into me as if she can’t help but move closer.
“Wow,” she teases. “It’s almost as if you missed me.”
“You fucking know I missed you,” I growl. “I haven’t been able to think about anything else.”
Her palms spread over my shirt. She reaches up and tugs on my tie. “We should have met at your house, then.”
I shake my head. “It’s not about sex.” She raises a brow, and I laugh quietly. “It’s not not about sex, either. I’m going to spread you open as soon as we get home. What I’m saying is…it’s more than that. I’m not sure what it is, but it’s a lot more than that.”
It’s the kind of admission I should have kept to myself when it can’t go anywhere, but I don’t regret it until she glances away, blinking back tears.
“What’s wrong?”
She forces a smile. “Nothing. It was just a sweet thing to say.”
I hold her gaze for a long moment. I know when she’s not telling me the truth.
And right now, she definitely is not telling the truth.
An hour later, she’s in my bed, naked and radiant, having convinced me we should go home and order pizza rather than wasting “precious time” in a restaurant.
I press a kiss to her shoulder. There’s a bruise left from where I bit her. I have to fight the temptation to bite her again, to make the mark permanent in some way. “I need a whole weekend of just this. Somewhere far away.”
“Where would we go?” She sets her paper plate on the nightstand and rolls to face me. “Cabo?”
“Dominical.” I reach for my phone and pull up the photos—deep blue water, white sand, palm trees. “Really consistent surf, and the water never gets colder than eighty degrees.”
Her eyes fall closed. “God, wouldn’t that be amazing?”
I push her hair back behind her ear. “We’d get a little cottage with some privacy, right on the beach. We’d be naked the entire time.”
She laughs. “We can’t be naked all the time. At least not while we’re surfing.”
“It’s my fantasy. We can be as naked as much as we want.”
“Is board rash not a thing in this fantasy world of yours?” she asks, trailing a finger down my sternum.
“As a matter of fact, it’s not. And after Dominical, we’ll go to Cabo, or the North Shore, or Bali, and we’ll surf naked there too.”
As mythical as it sounds, what I’ve described is entirely real, and possible—aside from the naked surfing—and I crave it in a way I’ve never craved anything in my life. And what the fuck is stopping me? I’ve got the money. I’ve got the leave, too, even if Baker doesn’t want me to take it. We could spend a week in Costa Rica if nothing else. I’m not sure what she’d tell Bridget, but we’d come up with something.
“When do you have to go back to school?” I ask.
She stiffens. The hand that was sliding over my chest stops moving entirely. “I have to be back right after Caleb’s wedding.”
That’s mid-August—only three weeks from now. There’s no way the semester is starting that early, and I can tell she’s keeping something from me simply by her stillness, her reserve. A thousand questions come to mind, questions I have no right to ask: Is it actually over with the ex-boyfriend? Is there someone else?
Her palm is moving over my rib cage. She’s trying to distract me with sex, and I don’t want to be fucking distracted.
My hand bands around her wrist to stop her. “Why are you going back early?”
She shrugs. “I just have some stuff.”
Fuck. I shouldn’t ask, I shouldn’t push, but it bothers me, these tiny pieces of her she won’t let me have. It’s bothered me all fucking summer, the way she suddenly turns dark and gloomy, the way she looks away or lies when I ask her what’s wrong.
“Daisy,” I hiss, hating myself. “I need to know.”
“Know what?”
I roll to face her. “Whatever it is you’re not telling me. Whatever it is you’re hiding. I can tell every fucking time you don’t want to say something. You could try to distract me with sex, and there’s a possibility you’d succeed, but I really…I just need the truth, okay? This time I need the truth.”
She bites her lip. For a moment I’m certain she’s going to make a joke, attempt to laugh it off.
“I’m going back early because I have to,” she finally whispers. “I lied to you about some things. I’ve been lying to everyone.”