48. Flynn
***Flynn***
I’d been staring at the same outboard motor for twenty minutes and couldn’t have told you one thing about it.
That was new for me. I didn’t do distracted.
Life had thrown enough at me that I’d learned to let it roll through and keep my hands busy, but every time I picked up a wrench this morning I was back at Daisy’s door, listening to her breathe on the other side of it, making myself walk away because she’d asked me to.
Respecting that boundary was the hardest thing I’d done in years, and I’d once watched Wes try to assemble a trampoline.
The plan was simple. Give her the morning.
Show up at lunch with sandwiches and jokes and whatever else she’d take, and remind her that Tyler had always been a liar with good hair.
Then a car door slammed in my parking lot, perfume arrived a full three seconds before its owner, and my morning got worse.
Brooke came down the dock in her cheap tourist-shop clothes, hips working overtime, and I knew the whole play before she opened her mouth. Tyler’s money was probably gone, which meant she was shopping for the next Calloway, and she’d picked me because my reputation said I was the easy one.
“Flynn.” She said my name like it tasted good. “There you are.”
“Here I am.” I went back to the motor. “Marina opens at 11. Gift shop’s up the hill if you need a shirt that says Lake Hair Don’t Care.”
She laughed like I’d said something charming instead of telling her to leave. Then she started the tour. Leaning on things. She leaned on the rail, then a piling, then the gunwale of a boat I was actively working on, arranging herself against each one like the marina was a series of backdrops.
“I forgot how good you look when you’re all greasy and focused.”
“Everyone does. It’s a burden.”
“You know, I always felt like you were the only one who really saw me.”
“I see you right now. You’re leaning on wet paint.”
She was not, unfortunately, leaning on wet paint, but watching her check was the best part of my morning so far.
Down the dock, Danny, my sixteen-year-old dock hand, had given up all pretense of coiling rope and was watching us like we were on reality television.
I pointed at him to get back to work. He coiled one loop of rope and stopped again.
Brooke regrouped and went sultry. “I’ve been thinking about you. This whole trip, honestly. Europe was so lonely.”
“You were with your boyfriend.”
“Tyler doesn’t count.”
“Finally, something we agree on.”
“You’re funny.” She drifted closer, trailing a finger along the boat’s rail. “You were a lot friendlier before you weren’t, you know. Or should I remind you how you talked to me the last time I was here?”
She was pulling out the ridiculous card she’d flashed in the kitchen last night, the one I hadn’t dignified in front of Daisy because dignifying it meant explaining it, and explaining it meant giving it weight it never earned.
Two summers ago, she’d tagged along on one of Tyler and Daisy’s holiday visits and stayed the week.
Tyler and Daisy were inside making dinner, and Brooke found me alone out on the dock, put her hand flat on my chest, and told me what she thought we should do about the tension between us.
I told her there was no tension, there was no us, and that she wasn’t my type and never would be.
She left the lake two days early and told everyone the mosquitoes were unbearable.
That was the entire secret history she was trying to sell.
“I remember it a little differently than you’re trying to tell it,” I said. “Besides, you know I only have eyes for Daisy and it’s driving you crazy.”
“Do you?” She smiled. “I bet you think you’re having so much fun with my sister. Ask anybody in town how long your fun lasts, Flynn. Ask Charlie’s mom.”
People had been asking Charlie’s mom for eight years, and if any of them had listened to her answer, my reputation would’ve died of boredom a long time ago.
Cameron got pregnant when we were twenty-four and casual, and I, the brother allegedly allergic to commitment, offered her everything I had.
I said we could get married and she could move in.
I got down on one knee in her mother’s driveway and Cameron laughed until she cried and then just cried, and then she said no, because we weren’t in love and she refused to raise our son inside a polite performance.
So we chose the truth instead, and built the best co-parenting operation on this lake, and the town looked at that, looked at me dating around after, and wrote the story it liked better.
Flynn Calloway can’t commit. I let them keep it, because maybe it was true because at the tiem I hadn’t met anyone I deeply loved.
I’d never even told my brothers about the truth with Cameron, which was why Wes could look me dead in the eye and tell me I’d never stick to anything.
The truth was nobody’s business, and Cameron knew, and Charlie was happy, and that was the whole list of people I cared about at the time.
I was never afraid of forever. I was unwilling to do it at half-strength. And then Tyler walked into the house three years ago with a woman in a vintage dress who laughed with her body and soul, and I’d dreamed about finally finding someone half as magical as her.
“You’ve got nothing, Brooke,” I said, and went back to my motor. “Go dry out somewhere.”
She finally dropped the act and the sugar drained out of her face.
“Okay. Real talk, then. You’re never giving my sister anything permanent.
Everybody knows it. You’ll drift, because that’s what you do, and when you drift it’ll wreck her, and I’ll be right there to remind her I told her so.
So honestly?” She tipped her head. “Sleeping with me now would be the merciful thing. Skip the middle part.”
I put the wrench down and stopped joking, and I watched her realize that the joking had been the polite version of me.
“Let me say this once.” I kept my voice cold and steady.
“Daisy is not temporary. What my brothers and I are building with her is not an arrangement and I don’t want it to be for just a summer, and you don’t get to stand within a hundred yards of it.
There’s a word for what I feel about that woman, and in your entire life of trying, nobody’s ever felt it about you.
That’s why you’re here on my dock in a tacky dress.
Not because you want me. Because being unwanted is the one thing you’ve never figured out how to spend your way out of.
I think it’s time for me to escort you out and I don’t want you coming back. ”
As I walked her out, her chin came up, and her eyes went over my shoulder, up the hill toward the parking lot, and something in them changed.
I heard the sound of a golf cart. I started to turn. And Brooke, who had just watched her last play die on the dock, found one more, because she’d seen what was coming down the hill before I had. She grabbed my face with both hands and kissed me.
For half a second I was too stunned to move, hands coming up, and over Brooke’s shoulder I saw Daisy standing at the top of my dock in yesterday’s dress with her hair a mess and her mouth open, and I watched her face twist in shock and her heart break.
“Daisy! Wait!”
She ran.
I peeled Brooke off me by both arms and decided to do a proper public service. I turned, lifted, and threw her off the dock.
The splash was enormous. She came up shrieking about her hair and her phone.
“Water’s warm, you’ll live,” I called down. “That was your one warning, Brooke. Come near Daisy or my family again and I’ll make sure everyone on this lake knows exactly what you are. Now swim.”
I was already running, yelling Daisy’s name.
She was sprinting toward town and I got close enough to see her gasp before she dove into a tiny beat-up smart car idling at the curb.
There was a bumper sticker on the back that said MY OTHER CAR IS A BONG.
Something about that car itched at the back of my brain, but I was too busy watching the woman I loved disappear inside it to scratch.
“Daisy! Come back... Daisy!”
The car fishtailed onto the main road and was gone.
I stood in my own parking lot breathing like I’d been dragged behind a boat, and then I did the two fastest things I’ve ever done. I called Wes, and I ran for my truck.
“Wes. Marina, now. Brooke ambushed me and Daisy saw it and she’s running.” I threw the truck into reverse with the phone against my shoulder. “And somebody find out who the hell drives a smart car with a bumper sticker that says MY OTHER CAR IS A BONG.”