Chapter 30
CHAPTER THIRTY
Daisy
Ten minutes later, we hit the road with the festival address programmed into Beckett’s GPS “in case you fall asleep” and a playlist chosen by me—the essential Laurel Canyon playlist circa late 60s, early 70s.
“Just so you know, by agreeing to accompany me today, you’ve also given me permission to take your photo.”
“I never agreed to that.”
“That’ll teach you to read the fine print.”
He snorts a laugh and then he gives me his special smile. Dimpled and boyish. And I’m swooning.
“What am I going to do with you?”
I twirl a lock of hair around my finger. “I can think of a few things…”
He glances over, his gaze on my mouth before it roams down my body. With a slight shake of his head, he focuses on the road again, but his grip on the steering wheel tightens. His knuckles have turned white. That’s how hard he’s gripping it.
I chuckle under my breath.
“What’s so funny?” he asks like he’s anticipating a good joke.
You . “Nothing.”
Led Zeppelin’s “Going to California” is pouring from the speakers, the sun is shining, and I’m hit with so much nostalgia and longing that it feels visceral.
I miss the West Coast with its muted sunset hues, the Pacific Ocean, and rocky beaches.
I miss the giddy highs and the kaleidoscope of butterflies that invade your stomach when you fall in love with a boy and he loves you back.
I’ve been alone for so long, and I’ve been telling myself I'm doing fine. But a nagging sensation in my gut tells me something is missing.
It feels like a hunger. A sickness. An ache that won’t subside.
I feel guilty for wanting more when I already have so much—a career that feeds my passion, my own apartment, and my independence.
I’m a free spirit who can pick up and go at the drop of a hat.
And isn’t that exactly what I’ve always wanted?
So why does it make me feel empty whenever I think about returning to my old life? My real life . The life I was perfectly happy with before I came to Sutton Ridge. Before I moved back into the only house that has ever really felt like a home and started living with the man who was once the boy I loved with all my heart.
My ringing phone jolts me out of my reverie, and I dig it out of my backpack and check the screen. Finn.
I silence the call but stare at my phone, gnawing on my lip. My gut is telling me something is wrong. I never heard back from him after I called and texted last month, asking for the rent money. He never transferred the money, but I don’t know why I ever thought he would. He’s never been reliable.
“Do you need to get that?”
I let out a breath and shake my head. “No. It’s fine.”
“You don’t sound like it’s fine .” He makes “fine” sound like a dirty word. Like he resents its very existence and would delete it from the dictionary if his last name was Merriam or Webster.
A message pops up just as I’m about to stash my phone into my bag. Hey Dais, sorry about the money. Do you still need it? I was out in LA. Fucking Asher replaced me. Went and got a new drummer behind my back.
Another text appears on the heels of that one. I’m down in Cabo. Any chance you can meet me down here? Miss you.
Jesus, Finn.
How could he get himself kicked out of the band? But, of course, he did. Why am I even questioning this? John Finnegan is the king of self-sabotage.
I rub my fingers against my temples, trying to figure out how to salvage this for him.
Finn needs this.
Should I call Asher and try to sort it out? Beg and plead until he gives Finn another chance?
Asher can be prickly, but we’ve always gotten along, and maybe he’d listen to me. It’s worth a shot.
I pull up his contact information but then I stop myself.
Why is Finn in Cabo instead of trying to repair the damage he’s done?
This is typical Finn behavior and now that I think about it, this must have been why he needed a place to stay.
He was obviously having problems with his bandmates, but instead of dealing with it, he flew back to New York, accidentally overdosed, and stayed in my apartment rent-free.
He couldn’t cough up the rent money, but he managed to get himself to fucking Cabo.
Finn needs to start taking responsibility for his actions and fix this for himself. I can’t keep cleaning up his messes.
Decision made, I stash my phone in my bag without responding and give myself a mental pat on the back.
Anna would be so proud of me.
“So, who’s Finn?” Beckett asks a few moments later. “Is that the boyfriend you were talking about?” He sounds casual enough, but the muscle in his jaw flexes, and I can practically feel the tension rolling off him.
I don’t know if it’s jealousy or something else. “He’s my ex-boyfriend.”
I can feel my phone vibrating in my bag but I’m going to stay strong. I’m not going to check it. And I’m not going to worry about him.
“Does he know he’s your ex-boyfriend?”
“He knows. But we’re still friends.” I don’t even know if that’s the right word for what we are. According to the therapist I went to after we broke up, Finn and I are codependent, and by continuing to enable him, I’m not doing either of us a favor, so I need to break the cycle.
Easier said than done. But I’m trying.
“We’ve known each other a long time. He’s like family. The only family I really have.”
“So why aren’t you together anymore?”
“It’s complicated.”
“I’ve got some time on my hands.”
I look over at him. Aviators shield his eyes, and even in shorts and a T-shirt, he looks like a Tom Ford model.
Cool, aloof, closed-off Beckett wants to hear about my ex-boyfriend?
“You really want to hear this?” I ask skeptically.
“I wouldn’t have asked if I didn’t.”
“Is this payment for driving me to the festival?”
“No. I’m just curious,” he says. “So, you loved this guy?”
“Yeah.” I sigh, thinking of all those years I was so hung up on Finn. “I did.”
“So, I’m assuming you met in California?”
“We did. We met at a skate park when I was thirteen, and he was fourteen. He was street smart. I tried to act tougher than I was, but he saw right through it. He taught me how to do tricks on my board, and in exchange, I gave him food.”
“He didn’t have food?”
“He was a foster kid. He never had enough food. I guess we kind of saved each other.” It sounds dramatic, but at the time, it felt true.
“Sounds one-sided,” Beckett remarks. “Not sure teaching you skate tricks is going to save you.”
“Well, you never know when it might come in handy.”
“If you’re being hunted by assassins on skateboards and you need to outskate them, you mean?”
“See?” I point at him. “That’s a perfect example.”
He laughs and shakes his head but instead of dropping the subject, he prods me for more information. “So, how did this guy save you?”
It feels disloyal to Finn to dish the dirt, so I’ve always tried to preserve the good memories instead of dwelling on the bad.
But for some reason, I feel compelled to tell Beckett the truth. Maybe it’s because he sounds genuinely interested, and he’s not being a dick about it.
Or maybe there’s a part of me that wants him to know me. The real me.
Either way, I start the story at a moment in time when Finn was my everything. “After my mom took off, we drove across the country. We left LA in a car that Finn hot-wired. I didn’t know the car was stolen until the cops pulled us over for a busted taillight and ran the plates. After I bailed him out of jail, we didn’t have much money left, so we bought a used car that kept breaking down.”
I laugh as if this story is amusing and oh-so-charming, but Beckett doesn’t look the least bit amused.
“He doesn’t sound like the kind of guy you should have been with. And once again, it doesn’t sound like he saved you from anything.”
In my heart, I truly believe that Finn saved me.
The girl I was at seventeen is vastly different from the girl I am at twenty-five, so it’s not easy to explain to someone who wasn’t there when my life went off the rails.
When my mom left me to fend for myself, I was devastated and heartsick.
If it was so easy for my own mother to leave me, what would compel anyone else to stick around?
But Finn was there for me—he wiped away my tears and assured me that everything would be okay, and I was still young and foolish enough to believe him.
“He got me out of a bad situation, no questions asked, and I will always be grateful for that. Finn was there for me when no one else was. We were still kids, you know?”
Looking back, it’s a miracle we didn’t end up dead. We took so many risks. We were reckless and careless. We got drunk. Got high. Drove too fast. Ran from the cops.
Finn’s specialty was dine-and-dash. I still feel bad about all those restaurants and servers we stiffed. I always tip extra now. My guilty conscience demands it.
At the time, I thought we were brave and daring. Now I think we were just plain stupid.
“I’d just turned seventeen, and I guess I romanticized the whole thing. Painted a picture of two rebels on a cross-country road trip, stopping along the way to pick up odd jobs. Like a Kerouac novel in reverse. Instead of heading west, we were eastbound.
“We eventually made our way to New York City, and we both worked crappy restaurant jobs to pay the rent.” I stop myself. “Actually, in the beginning, we didn’t pay rent. We squatted in a rundown cockroach-infested building and slept on a mattress on the floor.”
“Jesus,” Beckett says under his breath. “Daisy. Why ?”
“It got better,” I promise. “I worked on my art. I did a lot of street photography and freelance work, and Finn got gigs as a drummer for different rock bands that played at seedy basement clubs. When he formed a band with three other musicians, things turned around for him. They were on the cusp of hitting it big when they left to go on tour. They lived out of a van and were still playing seedy clubs, but he was a drummer in a rock band now. So you can probably figure out where this story is going.”
“He cheated on you?”
“Yeah.” I swallow. “But I kept taking him back.”
“Why?” he asks incredulously.
This is the part of the story I should probably leave out. It makes me sound weak and pathetic. A doormat who let a hot boy walk all over her. But it’s part of my story, a big part of what shaped me and made me who I am, so I tell him the truth.
“Because I loved him. Because I knew that none of those girls really meant anything to him. Because I was so scared of losing him that I told myself it didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was that he always came back to me.”
It sounds even worse when I say it aloud. Like I have no self-respect or boundaries whatsoever. I can only imagine how this must sound to Beckett.
I muster up the courage to look at him, but his expression is inscrutable. I’m not sure why I expected to see shock or outrage on my behalf.
This is Beckett, after all. His poker face is second to none.
I pluck a loose string from my scarf and wrap it around my finger until my skin turns white. “Those are the lies I told myself, anyway.”
He’s quiet for a moment, then asks, “Why did you think you deserved so little?”
He sounds like Anna. But it’s the last question I ever expected from Beckett.
No, that’s not true. I saw how angry he was that night at Ledger’s bar.
And when he was young, he was always so protective of me. Even though he’s gotten better at hiding it, I think he still cares.
Deep down, where it matters most, he cares a lot.
“I don’t know.” I unwind the thread from my finger and tie it into knots. “I guess I believed the myth.”
“What myth?”
“That true love conquers everything. But it doesn’t. Sometimes, you fall in love with a person who is bad for you. Someone who is so damaged that no matter how much you love them and no matter how many times you try to prove your love, it will never be enough. They’ll try to sabotage everything good in their life, and if you’re not careful, they’ll take you down with them. So after we broke up, I had an affair with my one true love.”
“Your one true love?”
I took all my pain, heartache, flaws, and weaknesses and turned them into strengths.
I got stronger. Wiser. Smarter. Happier. And I did it mostly through my art.
“I took a series of photos of the girl in the mirror, and I tried to learn how to love her the way she deserved to be loved.”
I don’t need a therapist to tell me I have abandonment issues, and I’m self-aware enough to know why I stayed too long in a bad situation.
“So I worked hard on becoming the best version of myself, you know? I just?—”
I cut myself off and swallow hard. I don’t know why I’m spilling my guts, giving him way more than he asked for or probably wanted.
“You just what?” he prompts.
I deliberate over my words before speaking. “I’ve spent my whole life trying to be everything my mother isn’t. It’s always felt like my burden to carry…the lives she’s ruined and the people she’s hurt…I always wanted to be better than that. I want to be a good person and I don’t always succeed. I’m a work in progress. I'm deeply flawed. I’m human. But I keep showing up for myself, and I keep trying. And I think…I think that’s all we can do. Just show up.”
I have no idea why I told him all this.
I feel so naked and exposed right now. Even more naked than when I nearly lost my towel earlier.
I yank on the thread, and it rips in two.
“Daisy,” he says quietly. “Why did you pretend to be someone you’re not?”
I know what he’s talking about. Our text messages before we met at the airport that day. And the weeks that followed, too.
I shrug. “I don’t know. I guess I’m always hoping someone will look beyond the fa?ade and see the real me.” I give him a playful smile, trying to lighten the mood. “But where’s the challenge in just handing it over on a silver platter? You should have to work a little harder than that.”
“And who is the real Daisy Larsson?”
There are a million things I could say, but that was enough heavy, deep, and real for one day, so I opt to keep it light. “Isn’t it obvious? I’m the sunshine to your storm cloud.”
“Says you,” he retorts. But the corner of his mouth tugs into a half-smile, and that’s good enough for me.
“Now tell me something honest,” I say. “Something true.”
He’s quiet for so long that I all but abandon hope that he’ll respond.
When he finally speaks, his voice is so low that I’m not sure he even wants me to hear the words.
But I do. I hear the words as if he’s shouting them.
“Daisy Larsson is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever laid eyes on. She’s so fucking beautiful that it’s a miracle I haven’t run this car off the road.”
And I die a little.
Beckett would never say something he didn’t mean. And I’m choosing to believe that he’s not only talking about my physical appearance but that he thinks I’m beautiful on the inside, too. The place where it matters most.
I think you’re beautiful too.
“These booty shorts really do it for you, huh?”
“Why do you think I volunteered to drive? That booty’s gonna need a bodyguard.”