44. Daisy
44
DAISY
W hen someone loses interest in you, it’s like a light switch has been turned off by someone insisting the lights are still on. You wonder if the problem is you. Perhaps you are deeply insecure. Perhaps you need more validation than other girls, or you’re a narcissist who makes someone else’s bad mood all about you.
And so you don’t push back when he tells you the lights are still on because asking about the lights too many times will make you sound crazy . It will drive him away. But it always, always turns out that the lights were off, and it was done, and he just didn’t want to say it to your face.
On that final drive back to DC with Christian, I fought myself to stay silent. He’d given me an excuse that sounded like bullshit, but what was I supposed to do?
I couldn’t keep asking without sounding needy. I wanted to bring up winter break again. I wanted to apologize for bringing up winter break at all. I wanted to tell him I hadn’t meant to pressure him—I’d just needed to book my flight—and I also wanted to say something, anything, that would tell me he wasn’t ending this .
And now I’m reliving it. As Harrison and I walk out of the hearing—a hearing I just won , a hearing I should leave feeling ecstatic—he can barely meet my eye. He acts as if he’s just busy calling us a car, checking on our flights, but he does it as if I’m not even standing beside him. Or as if he wishes I wasn’t.
“What’s wrong?” I ask. Why are the lights off?
“Nothing,” he says. The lights are on. You’re crazy .
I squeeze his hand, urging him to look at me. “Harrison, I know what you’re thinking. I don’t have an older man fetish.” I simply like guys who are confident, and that tends to be found in men, rather than boys. Nico, the guy I dated before Christian, was my age, but being a senator’s kid and having a lot of money gave him a head start. “I think I was attracted to Christian because he reminded me of you in some ways.”
He winces.
“Not the bad stuff,” I continue hurriedly as the car pulls up to the curb. “Just the responsible, pulled together, confident part. But he wasn’t you. He was never even close. It was entirely different with him, and I never felt the way I do now.”
Students passing turn toward us, perhaps hearing the desperation in my voice…the pleading of a girl who already knows she’s lost.
“Let’s talk about it at home,” he says, holding the door for me.
My gaze meets his as I step inside. I can’t read the look in his eyes. Is it sorrow? Is it guilt? Is it anger?
The only thing that’s clear is this: the lights are off, and I can’t turn them back on.
We’re on the flight home and he’s on his laptop. He enlarges a photo someone sent, one I can’t help but see. The bluest water, amazing surf .
“Where’s that?” I ask.
“Peniche. In Portugal.” His voice is quiet. He barely looks at me as he responds. “Oliver was just surfing there.”
I wait for him to suggest that we could stay there, after Costa Rica and Cabo and the North Shore. I wait for him to tell me we’d rent a house on the beach, that we’d be sandy and naked and utterly alone the entire time.
But he doesn’t say a fucking word. He closes the laptop and looks out the window instead.
He drives me to the parking lot where I left my car and stares at his steering wheel once we arrive. “I really fucked up, Daisy,” he says. His voice is rough. “I’ve fucked up so badly that I don’t even know what to say right now. The minute you showed up at my house, I should have just come clean to everyone.”
“Why?” I demand. I knew the end was coming, but it’s different, hearing it confirmed. I hold my hands over my stomach as if he’s just punched me. “I was happy all summer, Harrison. It’s been the happiest summer of my life. And you were happy, too, so why are you acting like it was all a mistake?”
He swallows. “Because it was. I was fooling myself into believing there was nothing predatory about it, but of course there fucking was. Your history is littered with predatory men, and now I’m one of them. You depended on me for a place to live—”
“I blackmailed you into that, and you did your best to make me leave!” I cry. “And I’d been there for a month before you ever laid a finger on me, and I had other places I could have gone. It wasn’t predatory .”
I’m not entirely sure why I’m even arguing. The only relevant facts are these: he wanted me before he knew the truth, and now he doesn’t. That’s what’s driving this conversation, whether he admits it or not.
He exhales. “We could argue about this all day, but you’re never going to convince me I didn’t do the wrong thing. There wasn’t a word I said about Cooper that couldn’t have been said about me as well. You need to grow up at your own pace. I shouldn’t have stood in the way with the surfers or anyone else. You’re going back to school in a few weeks and—”
I open my door and climb out while he’s still talking, grabbing the backpack that sits at my feet.
“You’re over it,” I announce, cutting him off. “That’s all you needed to say.”