CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
TRISTAN
Daisy left half-finished glasses of water everywhere.
One beside the bed. One on the counter. One in the cup holder beneath the map, where every hard turn threatened to send it into my lap.
There was usually another tucked beside the books she’d collected along the way, placed too close to the edge of the shelf because she had been reading and forgotten about it.
She never finished any of them.
Two mouthfuls. Maybe three. Then she moved on and left the water behind.
But God fucking help me if I tried to empty one.
“I was still drinking that.”
She always said it too quickly. Her hand would shoot toward the glass, and something would change in her eyes. She wasn’t upset about the thought of wasting the water. It wasn’t even about being thirsty. It was almost like she just needed to have a glass of water within hand’s reach.
The first time, I laughed.
The second time, I noticed something was off.
By the fifth, I left the glasses where they were.
There were six inside the van that morning. Six glasses of warm water Daisy had no intention of drinking and couldn’t bear to see emptied.
I knew they meant something, but I didn’t know what.
That was the problem with Daisy. Everything meant something.
The water was strange because she hated mess.
She could turn the van upside down searching for a missing hair clip or one of her dresses, but the second she found it, she cleaned everything she had disturbed.
She wiped the counter after making toast. Rinsed the sink after brushing her teeth.
Dried the metal afterward because water spots annoyed her.
She folded the dishcloth into a neat square over the handle and became genuinely offended when I left it bunched beside the stove. Because how fucking dare I?
She washed more than anyone I had ever met.
Hands before food. Hands after food. Teeth after coffee, even when I told her that was worse for her teeth.
She scrubbed her face before bed, even if we were parked in the middle of nowhere and the water tank was running low she’d pour a few drops in her hand and get to work.
She carried a bar of soap in a little metal tin and checked the lid three times before putting it away so it wouldn’t leak over her things.
She kept wipes in her purse, disinfectant beneath the sink, and a small bottle of hand cream she used after scrubbing her skin raw.
I was glad she didn’t touch her face.
I loved the way the sun touched her skin, how it woke up the freckles across her nose. And those tiny crinkles at the corners of her eyes — the ones that told me whether her smile was real — I loved those most of all.
Soap. Damp skin. That faint scent from the cream she rubbed into her arms and legs because the road dried her out. The van used to smell like old canvas, fast food, gasoline, and my father for years.
Now it smelled like Daisy.
I noticed every time it didn’t.
She kept her clothes folded. Her books stacked.
Her shoes paired beside the door. If she spilled something, she cleaned it before it had finished spreading.
Once, she knocked coffee across the table and went at the wood so hard with a rag that I had to take it from her before she rubbed the finish off.
“Daze, it’s gone.”
“It’s sticky.”
“It isn’t.”
“I can still feel it.”
She couldn’t.
Neither could I.
I let her wipe the table again, like she was trying to exorcise a demon from the wood.
She hated grease on her fingers. Hated crumbs in the bed. Hated the smell of food clinging to the curtains. She made me open both doors after I cooked bacon and complained that every shirt she owned smelled like my breakfast.
Then she climbed into my lap and ate half of it from my plate.
She didn’t care about my sweat, her release, our crazy hot fucking. She didn’t scrub her skin when I coated it in my release. On the contrary, she fucking loved it.
Daisy made no fucking sense.
I loved every bit of it.
She could leave six glasses of water around the van but wouldn’t leave a single spoon in the sink.
She saved food she didn’t want, wrapped it carefully, and put it in the fridge even if there was only one bite left.
Days later, I would find it untouched. If I threw it away without asking, she searched for it.
She checked the door after I locked it. She watched my hands when my voice changed. She apologized before I was angry. She folded everything she owned and placed it beside her bag every few days, then unpacked it again before morning.
She never said she was leaving.
She only made sure she could.
I had been collecting these things without meaning to. A hundred small pieces of her. Habits. Reactions. Strange little rules she followed without seeming to know she had made them.
I noticed because I watched her all the fucking time.
There was no point pretending otherwise.
Daisy had become the first thing I searched for when I opened my eyes. Before the road, the map, the weather, or the fuel gauge. Before I remembered where we were or how far remained between me and the island.
I woke and found her.
I watched her. I never stopped.
Sometimes she was curled into me, one cold foot wedged between my legs because she refused to admit she was freezing.
Sometimes she had taken most of the blanket and left me with one corner twisted around my ankle.
Sometimes she lay at the far edge of the bed, caught inside a dream she wouldn’t remember by breakfast.
I knew the sound of each one.
Her frightened breathing was short and shallow. When she was angry in her sleep, her jaw tightened and her fingers curled into fists against the pillow. When she was grieving, she made almost no sound. Tears simply leaked from the corners of her closed eyes while her body remained still.
Those were the nights I wanted to wake her.
I rarely did.
Touch could bring Daisy back or send her somewhere I couldn’t follow. Sometimes she collapsed against me as though she had been waiting all night for my arms. Other times, she woke fighting before she knew it was me.
I had learned to wait.
I fucking hated waiting.
I wanted inside every part of her.
Not only her body, though the need for that could turn animalistic when she was close enough for me to smell her skin.
There were moments I wanted to be buried so deep inside her that there was no clear place where she ended and I began.
Sex was too small a word for it. It wasn’t sexual relief I wanted.
I wanted the distance gone. I wanted to feel her pulse against mine.
Her breath in my mouth. Her body opening around me while everything she carried stopped belonging only to her for a little while.
I wanted under her skin.
In her blood.
Inside every place she disappeared to when her eyes went empty.
I wanted to feel what she felt while she was feeling it. I wanted to know what she remembered before she swallowed it and called herself tired. I wanted to stand in whatever darkness kept taking her and make it fucking move.
But wanting access to Daisy didn’t give me the right to force my way in.
Somebody else had already done that.
I didn’t know who.
The ignorance had started to feel like a living thing inside me.
The day had gone wrong at the diner.
I had watched Daisy watching the couple beside us.
The man had ordered for the woman without asking.
I hadn’t seen Daisy’s body go rigid like that in public before.
She recognized what was happening. She watched another man snapping at his wife outside a gas station.
A woman glancing over her shoulder before answering her husband.
A couple arguing beside a pay phone while the woman kept smoothing the front of her dress with shaking hands.
Daisy saw things I didn’t.
Or maybe she saw things I had never been trained to recognize until I followed her gaze and started to understand.
By late afternoon, rain had swallowed the road. It came down hard enough to blur the forest and drown the sound of the tires beneath us. I found a safe place to pull off and parked beside an empty stretch of trees.
Daisy started cleaning.
The van was already clean.
She wiped the counter. Rinsed two cups. Folded the blanket across the bed and then folded it again because the corners hadn’t lined up. She swept crumbs from beneath the table with the little hand brush and emptied them into the bin.
When there was nothing left to clean, she washed her hands.
Then she stood at the sink, staring down at them while the rain hammered the roof.
I watched from the driver’s seat.
She dried each finger carefully and rubbed cream into her knuckles. Her movements were controlled, but I knew her well enough to see the strain beneath them. Her shoulders were too high. Her mouth had been pressed into the same tight line for twenty minutes.
She moved to the bed and opened a book.
She didn’t turn the page.
Ten minutes later, she closed it.
Then she stood, checked the door, returned to the bed, and started rearranging the books beside her. Largest to smallest. Then smallest to largest. Then back again.
“Daze.”
She didn’t look at me. “What?”
“You all right?”
“Fine.”
I stared at the side of her face.
She knew I didn’t believe her.
I knew she knew.
The rain kept coming.
I wanted to cross the van and put my hands on her. I wanted to drag her against my chest until whatever held her body so tightly finally let go. I wanted her in my lap, her face buried against my neck, my hands under her shirt where I could feel the warmth of her skin and prove she was still here.
I wanted inside her.
The need came so hard sometimes it felt violent, but it wasn’t fucking I needed from her then.
It was proof. I wanted to be the thing her body reached for instead of the sink, the locked door, the spotless counter, the books she kept rearranging because they were safer to control than whatever was happening inside her head.
I wanted to crawl into her and stay there until she understood she didn’t have to carry everything alone.
That wasn’t possible.
So I stayed where I was and watched her wipe an already clean counter for the third time.
Eventually, darkness came.
The storm didn’t move on. Wind pushed at the van, making the suspension groan. Daisy changed into one of my shirts, washed her face, brushed her teeth, and cleaned the sink after herself.
She placed a fresh glass of water beside the bed. The other five remained where she had left them.
I didn’t touch any.
She climbed beneath the blanket and turned her back to me. I switched off the lamp and lay down beside her, leaving enough space that she wouldn’t feel trapped.
For a long time, she didn’t move.
Neither did I.
I listened to the rain and her breathing. I could tell she was awake. She breathed differently when she slept. Deeper. Less deliberate.
Almost an hour passed before she turned over.
I felt her looking at me in the dark.
“What?” I asked quietly.
“I can’t sleep.”
“I know.”
Her silence lasted a few seconds.
I turned toward her.
The dark hid most of her face, but I could make out the pale shape of it against the pillow. She pulled the blanket higher beneath her chin.
Something had followed her into the bed with us.
I wanted to know what.
Daisy’s eyes moved toward the window. Rain tracked down the glass, catching what little light remained outside.
“I had a bad dream,” she said.
The words were so quiet I almost thought the storm had made them.
My whole body sharpened.
“When?”
“Last night.”
“And you’re telling me now?”
She looked away.
I bit back the next question.
Why hadn’t she told me?
Why did she keep waiting until things had eaten through her before she admitted they existed?
Because she wasn’t used to telling anyone. Because speaking had probably cost her something once.
I forced my voice down. “What happened?”
Daisy was silent for so long that I thought she might take it back.
“I don’t know how to explain it,” she eventually said.
I watched her profile.
The small tension at the corner of her mouth. The way her fingers worried at the blanket beneath her chin.
“Was it about Rowe?”
“No.”
“Your sister?”
Her eyes closed. “No.”
There was someone else.
I felt it. A person she kept hidden behind every unfinished sentence. I wanted the name. I wanted it so badly my teeth hurt from holding the question back.
Daisy opened her eyes again.
“You weren’t there.”
The words entered me slowly. “What?”
“In the dream.”
She finally looked at me.
Her expression was open for only a second, but I saw it. Fear. Hurt. Something close to accusation.
“You weren’t there, Tristan.”
I couldn’t speak. I had spent weeks wanting proof that she needed me, and finally, there it was.
I fucking hated it.
She had been frightened somewhere inside herself and had looked for me.
I had not come.
It was only a dream. I knew that. My body didn’t. Something violent moved through my chest as I imagined Daisy trapped in some dark place, searching for me while I existed nowhere inside it.
I wanted to ask where she had been. Who had been there instead. What had happened when she realized she was alone.
But she had already turned back to the window.
Still. She had told me the dream existed. She had told me I was missing from it. A few weeks ago, she would have carried both things alone.
I shifted onto my back and stared at the ceiling because looking at her had become too much. “You were looking for me?”
My voice sounded wrong. It was rough.
“Yes,” she said. “I was.”
The need inside me turned wild. Not sexual, though it wore the same teeth.
I wanted to pull her over me. Press her against my chest. Feel her heart beating above mine. I wanted her so close that the next time her mind built a nightmare, it would have no choice but to take me with her.
I wanted to be there before she looked.
Already inside the dark.
Already reaching for her.