Chapter 23
chapter
twenty-three
DAISY
I’ve been tossing and turning all night. By the time sunlight peeks under the curtain, I don’t know where I am. Then I realize my legs are tangled in expensive sheets and I’m starfished on my king-size bed. The mattress beneath me is soft. Too soft.
It feels wrong in a way that’s hard to pin down. The kind of wrong that sits in your chest before your brain catches up.
The room smells faintly of eucalyptus, laundry detergent, and the vanilla candle I forgot to blow out three nights ago. Outside, the never-ending city traffic thrums through floor-to-ceiling windows. A siren somewhere far off. Construction. Movement. Noise. Los Angeles stretching awake.
It’s been almost a week since I’ve been back in LA, and I still notice the absence of a generator hum.
There’s no rain ticking against the roof of the RV.
No spoon clinking rhythmically around the inside of a mug as someone makes terrible instant coffee.
No obnoxious quips from Jax before we are fully functional.
No Miles coughing, or rambling, or caring.
God. I squeeze my eyes shut and grab my phone to see if he’s called, but all I see are social notifications for the latest episode’s teaser. I don’t know why I’m hoping he’ll call again, since I haven’t answered any of his four calls.
I don’t know what I’d say.
I do know that I miss him. Which feels humiliating, since I exiled myself. I roll onto my stomach, then onto my back, letting out an exasperated sigh when I can’t get comfortable.
I miss Miles’s stupid, tiny bunk that required geometric problem-solving to exist in. The one where I woke up with somebody else’s heartbeat under my cheek and a bony knee lodged in my spine. The one where he sleepily pulled the blanket back over me like it was instinct.
I press my face harder into the pillow. Pathetic.
My apartment looks exactly like the kind of place I once thought would prove I’d made it.
White walls. Warm wood floors. Oversized art I spent too much money on, then pretended not to care about.
An aesthetic coffee table book situation so curated it borders on satire.
A kitchen island no one has ever cooked at.
Everything is clean, beautiful, and intentional in a way that is impractical for actual living.
The worst part: there’s no people. No crew. No laughter.
No Miles.
The ache arrives slow, then all at once.
I left. The memory settles heavy, even though I’ve been meditating on it like it’s my religion. It’s the only way I can remember it was my choice. That night, I texted Mike, my concerned Uber driver, and packed my bag while everyone slept.
Didn’t wake anyone. Didn’t wake Miles. It still feels cowardly, even though I know it was necessary.
Still, I keep replaying what happened in my head.
The first episode blew up. Executives loved it, but they wanted to take it in a different direction.
Meanwhile, people got hurt. Real people.
A nineteen-year-old kid with too much enthusiasm and terrible judgment ended up in danger because I led him there.
I opened a door I didn’t know how to close. Both with the podcast, and with Miles.
I throw one arm over my eyes. This is better. Safer. Responsible.
I’ll finish the podcast from here. I should finish the podcast from here.
When I got back to LA last week, smelly and puffy-eyed, Marissa took one look at me and went straight into best friend mode.
I told her everything, and after giving me a little shit for falling for my subject, she apologized nonstop for pushing me on this side quest. Of course I assured her it isn’t her fault. It isn’t.
She’s done everything she can to give me space and time, making excuses about an extended mysterious illness I picked up on location.
I sigh and roll over again. The crew is better off without me. Miles is better off without me. And I’m better off alone than with someone who chooses cryptids over me.
I keep rolling and the bed swallows me whole. Too much space. Too much softness. Too much silence. Somewhere in the back of my brain, memory starts flickering whether I want it to or not.
Rain on the RV roof. Soup on the couch. Thermal footage casting a rainbow glow from the monitors. Miles half asleep, glasses crooked, wrapped in two blankets and pretending he wasn’t dying.
My throat tightens. I squeeze my eyes shut harder. Then, because my brain wants me to suffer, memories keep coming. The shower. Warm steam. His hand brushing my bruised hip.
I don’t know how to do this and not worry about you.
The fight. The rain. The look on his face when I stepped back. Like I’d knocked the air out of him.
I slam a pillow over my head, yelling into it. This has to stop. We are not crying at eight in the morning.
I get out of bed and make the mistake of looking at the floor-length mirror. Hair wild. Eye bags heavy. Both sweatpants’ legs pulled up like I’m a colonial paper boy.
My apartment greets me with immaculate silence. How does my own home feel staged, as if I walked onto the set of my own life? I used to love this, didn’t I? Maybe love is too generous. Maybe I just got good at acting like I loved it, performing even in the comfort of my own space.
I groan and flop backward onto the bed again.
I hear keys jingling and know it’s Marissa, so I stay put in my cocoon.
“Wake up, babe! I know you're in here!” She comes waltzing into the bedroom, two coffees in hand.
“Okay, today’s the day we turn this around. This—” she says, waving her hand at me—“is seriously depressing. I haven’t seen you like this since… actually, I haven’t seen you like this ever.”
I sit up. “Okay, that’s true.”
Marissa plops down next to me with a puff sound that only the best down comforters make.
“Talk to me. What’s going on?”
“I can’t stop thinking about him. About them. I feel like I let them down. Well… I let me down.”
“How?”
“What do you mean?
“Let’s unpack that.” Riss hands me a coffee. “I’m serious. I’m taking my producer hat off. Best friend hat on. Let’s figure this out.”
I groan again and take a sip of the perfectly crafted, overpriced latte. I pout about it, of course. “Even coffee is ruined for me. Miles’s crappy coffee was better than this.”
My best friend blinks slowly, shaking her head. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that since that cost me, like, $15, but sure, girl.”
I sigh. “Okay, so, what are we unpacking?”
“How did you let those guys down?”
I pop the lid off the latte and glare down at it. The foam art is offensively beautiful. Meanwhile, somewhere in Arizona, Miles Adler is drinking coffee with one sugar and a splash of milk out of Taylor’s HOT GIRLS BELIEVE mug.
My chest hurts.
“I don’t know,” I say finally, curling farther into the comforter. “I just…”
The words snag. Which is irritating because I am famously good at words. In a literal sense.
Marissa waits, not filling the silence. I wish she would.
“They trusted me.”
She nods once. “Okay.”
“And I fucked it up.” I rest my chin on my knees. “It got hard and complicated and I left them exposed and exploited.”
Marissa’s face softens.
“You didn’t exploit them.”
“Oh, no?” I laugh once. “Because I’m pretty sure I was using them to more or less save my career.”
“They were leveraging you to help keep them afloat, too, you know?”
“What do you mean?” I narrow my eyes.
“Maya was very eager to get more exposure for them so they could keep getting funding. This was a mutually beneficial arrangement,” Marissa says matter-of-factly, taking another sip of her coffee.
“I still feel like I was selfish. And it feels selfish now to want to go back. They’re better off without me.”
“Stop! You’re not selfish, and you didn’t do anything wrong.”
“I hurt people.”
“Daisy.”
I shake my head. “No, seriously. That kid’s leg got bent like a banana because people listened to me. But I also hurt Miles. When he overheard our convo, he heard me wavering. Because… because I was scared.” My throat tightens unexpectedly.
“Scared of what, Daisy?” she asks, taking a sip of her drink.
I swallow hard. “What if I do this the way I want to and people hate it?”
Marissa goes quiet. The kind of quiet that means she’s about to say something annoying and correct.
“Okay,” she says carefully. “Hate what?”
I blink.
“What?”
“What’s the actual fear?” She gestures with her coffee.
Hate what?
At first, my brain offers easy answers. The podcast. The weirdness. Bigfoot. The risk. My career. The execs. Sponsors.
All the ways this could implode spectacularly and publicly.
But underneath that, there’s another answer. One that doesn’t want to be found.
I stare down into my latte again.
The foam leaf has begun collapsing in on itself. Relatable.
“What if…” I stop. God. I hate this. I hate vulnerability. I hate feelings. I hate Marissa’s stupid emotionally intelligent face.
I take another deep breath. “What if I do it the way I actually want to?”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning…” I exhale hard. “Not making fun of them.”
The words come faster now.
“Not turning them into jokes or clickbait or whatever version feels safest.”
I gesture wildly into the air.
“What if I actually make it weird?”
Her eyebrows go up. “Weird how?”
“I don’t know.” Frustration spikes. “Make it mean something.”
She blinks.
Then immediately grins. “Oh my God.”
“Don’t.”
“You’re getting emotional.”
“I’m so stoic right now.”
“This is huge.”
I bury my face in the comforter. “Kill me.”
“No.” She sounds delighted now. Which feels hostile. “Daisy Bennett, emotionally unavailable queen of irony, developed sincerity in the woods.”
I groan into the blanket. The sound comes out muffled and tragic.
“You don’t understand.”
“No, I actually think I do.”
I sit up. “Riss, I spent ten years building this whole thing.” I gesture at the apartment, at myself. “The jokes. The confidence. The sex podcast thing.”
“The aggressively hot chaos persona?”
“That.”
I take a deep breath and the room quiets again. Sunlight crawls across the bedspread. Outside, LA hums loudly enough to feel performative. “I’m good at it,” I say eventually.