29. Jordan
JORDAN
I take the steps up to the second floor, two at a time. A daisy in one hand, I open the door to the court with the other.
She stands in the middle of the room with her back to me in her light-yellow dress, blonde hair falling in waves past her shoulders. My chest tightens, and my limbs feel heavy and somehow weak at the same time. I am so fucked.
I’ve heard guys talk about falling for a girl like being checked hard into the boards, but I always assumed they were exaggerating.
I roll the stem of the flower in between my thumb and middle finger.
Dahlia and Jane see me first. Daisy turns to face me, dress twirling with the movement. She steps away from her friends.
I go to her and hold out the daisy.
“Thank you.” Her voice is quiet and unsteady, transporting me back to those first days in physics where she couldn’t talk to Liam or me without blushing. She stares down at it. Her red lips curve up in the smallest of smiles.
“This is pretty killer.” My gaze scans the court that’s been transformed. The flower archway is at one end near the DJ booth. People stand all around dressed up in formal attire. Some dance, others chat with friends in small circles.
“Yeah,” she says, and her voice breaks. Her lashes are coated in a dark black that makes her eyes look twice as big, and they water with emotion that makes me want to murder someone.
“What’s wrong?”
She starts to speak, and the tears well until one dares to fall down her face. I wipe it away.
“I messed up,” she finally croaks. Her body shakes as she cries.
I run a hand along the back of her hair and cradle her to my chest. “I doubt that.”
“I did.” She tilts her head up to look at me with black smudges under her eyes. Her gaze falls to my shirt and tie. “You look so nice, and I just cried all over you. You even shaved.” She brings a hand to my cheek and lets her nails lightly scrape across my jaw.
“Tell me what happened, baby?”
“I should have talked to Violet before moving everything here. She wouldn’t come.”
“Why?”
“Because of Gavin. I should have asked her before I did anything.”
“You were trying to save the ball.”
She nods. “Still. He hurt her. I knew that, and I blew it off and assumed it wouldn’t matter. I let her down, and now she won’t even see all her hard work.”
“If you’d done nothing, she wouldn’t have either.”
“Except in that case, my best friend wouldn’t hate me.”
“I doubt she hates you.”
“She said some awful things. She yelled them, actually.”
“She yelled at you?” The thought of anyone yelling at Daisy makes adrenaline boil under my skin. “You didn’t deserve that.”
She takes a deep breath and steps back, scanning the room. Sadness tinged with disappointment lingers in her expression.
I hold out a hand toward her. “Dance with me?”
She tilts her head to the side, considering it. She steps into me and rests her head on my shoulder as we move to the beat.
“Thank you. For today. For this. Just… thank you,” she says.
“Anything. Always.”
I don’t know how long we hold on to one another before the song changes and the heavy bass of the music outside starts up.
“Gavin’s party,” she says. “You better go make sure the birthday boy has a good time.”
“Come with me.”
“I’m not sure I’ll be very much fun tonight. Plus, I’m wearing this.” She lifts up the skirt of her dress with two hands.
“You look gorgeous.”
“I’m way overdressed.”
I adjust my tie. “No, you’re perfect. They’re underdressed.”
“I should stay.” She chews on her bottom lip. “Or go talk to Violet.”
“Okay. Well, in that case, I’ll be back as soon as I can. Stick with the girls, okay?”
She nods. “Sorry to be a major bummer.”
“Never. I’ll be back before you know it.”
“You don’t have to rush. I know what your friends mean to you.”
“You’re my friend, remember?” I wink and drag the pad of my thumb along her bottom lip until she frees it from her teeth. She’s so much more than that. I forced my way into her life for all the wrong reasons, but somehow she’s become the most important thing.
I leave her with Dahlia and Jane and go downstairs to find Gavin. He’s easy to spot in the back yard. A circle of people are gathered around him cheering him on as he takes a shot of something that makes his lips curl and his eyes squeeze shut.
Liam’s among the guys watching on.
“Hey,” I say as I step up beside him.
He grins at my outfit. “You look nice.”
“Thanks.” I jut my chin toward Gavin. “How many shots is he in?”
He holds up his phone and swipes through his photos showing me the evidence of each of the four shots Gavin’s taken already.
“How’s the party upstairs?”
I shake my head. The noise around us gets louder as someone else thrusts a shot in Gavin’s hand. “I’ll tell you about it later.”
After his fifth shot, we take the birthday boy away from the liquor. At this rate he’s going to be passed out before midnight. We play washers and beer pong. His teammates throw him in the pool. It’s a good time, but I’m struggling to enjoy it, knowing Daisy is upset.
I’m in the kitchen nursing a beer when Gavin comes back downstairs in dry clothes. I pull out the bottle of J?germeister I bought him from the freezer, a big red bow on top. “Happy twenty-first, man.”
“Pour it up,” he says as he runs a hand through his wet hair and takes a seat on one of the stools at the big ass island in the middle of the room.
I do and slide one his way. I hold up my glass. “Happy birthday.”
He clinks the bottom of his shot to mine and tosses it back before saying, “I really screwed up, huh?”
“What do you mean?”
“Violet.” He pours another shot and swallows it.
I shrug. “She doesn’t like you. That’s for sure. Though she doesn’t like me all that much either.”
“She’s worried about you hurting her friend. That’s different. You’re paying for my sins. I’m sorry about that.”
I’d rather gnaw off my own arm than hurt Daisy, and I tell him that because I can’t tell Violet. Not that she’d believe me.
“Go check on your girl, Thatch. If Violet’s upset with her, then she’s probably a mess too.”
“Shut the fuck up. It’s not even ten o’clock. I’m not leaving your twenty-first birthday party before you’re good and drunk.”
“You are.” He stands. “I’m kicking you out.”
He comes around, and we slap hands, and he pulls me into a side hug.
“It’s about to get ugly, anyway.” He blows a breath that puffs out his cheeks, and a half-smile pulls at the left-side of his mouth. “I’ll catch you this week.”
Daisy isn’t upstairs. Dahlia and Jane tell me she went home, but where I find her is in the tree house looking over at Gavin’s party.
“Hey.” I sit beside her.
She rests her head on my shoulder. “Hi.”
“Talk to Violet?”
“She doesn’t want to talk to me.”
“You’re freezing,” I say as I run my hands up and down her arms.
“I can’t go inside.”
“Come to my place. You can work things out with Violet tomorrow after you’ve both slept.”
She comes without protest.
I kick off my shoes and loosen my tie as Daisy climbs into bed, still in her dress. It billows around her small frame, taking up half the mattress.
I sit against the headboard, and she lies down with her head against my chest. She looks up at me. “She said things about you. About us.”
I’m not shocked by that, but it picks at something that’s been on my mind all day.
Daisy sits up. “I’m sorry that she hasn’t been fair to you. You have been amazing to me, and I know you don’t like when I say nice things about you, but truly, you are wonderful.” Her eyes fall to her lap. “When we first met, I judged you too. I did. And I’m sorry.”
With a finger under her chin, I lift her face to look at me. “That’s human nature.”
“I still feel bad about it.”
“You don’t owe me any apologies.” My stomach rolls. “While we’re admitting our sins, I have something to confess about when we first met too.”
“What?” Her lips part into a hesitant smile.
“When we first met and you were into Liam, I made it my mission to get in the way of you two any chance I could. He was struggling with hockey, and you came along. A sweet little distraction.” I place a kiss on her lips.
“I was hardly a distraction. He barely noticed me.”
“Not true. He was going to ask you out, but I told him not to.”
“You did what?” Her voice lifts. She doesn’t wait for me to answer. “Why would you do that?”
“I thought if the two of you started dating, he’d lose his head. He was already having a hard time.”
“But…” she starts, brows pulling together. “You told me to ask him out. ‘He won’t say no’, remember? Why would you tell me to do that if you wanted to keep me from him?”
“That was my attempt at doing the right thing, I guess. But I couldn’t even do that.
I stopped you before you could. I, uh, didn’t really need a tutor, but it seemed like you were going to finally ask him out, and I thought as long as you were busy with me, it would keep you away from Liam.
” My palms sweat. “It was dumb, I know.”
“I’m confused. You wanted to keep Liam and me apart, not because you liked me but because you were afraid that it would hurt his game?”
A lump lodges in my throat, so I nod.
“That’s insane.”
“Not my brightest idea, but it did bring us together.”
“You mean while you were pretending to need my help with school? Who does that?”
Up until this very second, I assumed, or maybe hoped, that she’d find it funny. I can see now how stupid that was. Panic surges through me, but I truly don’t know what to say.
“So all this time that we’ve been hanging out it was just to keep me from him?” Her eyes widen and a pretty flush creeps up her face.
“No, of course not.”
She scrambles off the bed. “What was the plan? To string me along until after the season? To make me fall for you instead? Was any of it real for you?” Her body is shaking now. “Or are you still pretending to like me just to keep me from Liam?”
Fuck, fuck, fuck. “All of it was real. I’m crazy about you. I told you that I fell for you long before I realized it, and I meant it.”
“Then why would you keep something like this from me until now?”
“I tried to tell you once. The night in the tree house. You said whatever happened in the past didn’t matter.”
“I thought you were talking about hooking up with other girls.” She throws her hands in the air, then puts on her shoes and grabs her purse.
“What? I haven’t hooked up with anyone since you and I started hanging out.”
She isn’t even listening to me. I can practically see her thoughts spinning around in her head. “I can’t believe this. Violet was right.”
I don’t know what Violet said about me, and I’m not sure I want to know.
“Don’t go.” I get up and take her by the arm before she can flee. “Everything happened so fast. One minute we were emailing about physics and hockey, and the next I couldn’t get enough of you. I didn’t tell you sooner because I think deep down, I was always doing it for me, not him.”
“Then tell me one thing.”
“Anything.”
“If Liam had never wanted to ask me out and I hadn’t shown interest in him, would you have ever looked twice at me?” Her voice is steel, and her eyes brim with unshed tears.
“I don’t know.”
She smiles sadly and nods, then heads toward the door.
“Don’t go. Please?”
She doesn’t stop.
“Daisy, wait,” I say. “I love you.” The words are out before I can process them, but I know they’re true instantly.
Her body stills. I hold my breath and wait for her reaction.
“You don’t love me,” she says.
“I do,” I insist. “Maybe it started for all the wrong reasons, but I love you.”
“No. This isn’t love. It can’t be. I could never love someone that could do something so cruel.”
My heart cracks wide open as she slams my bedroom door. I rush after her, reaching her as she’s about to give the hallway door the same treatment. With a hand, I stop the door. “I’m so sorry. I should have told you sooner.”
“Yes, you should have. Or maybe just left me the hell alone in the first place.”
“Please don’t go. I need you.”
“No. You don’t. You were pretending to need me, remember?”
Liam’s coming up the stairs. He looks wide-eyed between us and raises a hand in a tentative greeting. “Hey.”
Daisy swipes tears from her cheeks before she faces him. “Can you give me a ride home?”
I start to move in front of her. “Daisy, plea?—”
“No,” she says, refusing to look at me. “I don’t want to hear anymore. I just want to go home.”
“Let me take you.”
“Still trying to keep me from him?” She laughs softly. “Don’t worry, after tonight I don’t ever want to see either of you again.”
Liam glances at me, and I nod. He goes out the door first, and she finally looks at me. “She said you would destroy me.”
Violet’s words tear through me, and I want to refute them a thousand times over, but the words sound weak now, all things considered.
She whispers four final words, ripping my heart from my chest. “And she was right.”