Page 29 of Daisy Jones & The Six

DAISY:I was stupid. I picked a fight with Hank right after sound check that day.

KAREN:Graham had come over to my room that afternoon to bring me one of my suitcases. Somehow my things had ended up with his stuff. He was standing in the hotel hallway, at my door, holding a duffel bag of my bras and underwear. He said, “I believe this is yours.”

I grabbed it from him and rolled my eyes at him. I said, “Oh, I bet you just love having your hands on my panties.” I was just joking around.

But he shook his head and he said, “If I get my hands on those panties, I want to have earned it the old-fashioned way.”

I laughed and said, “Get out of here.”

And he said, “Yes, ma’am.”

And he walked back to his room. But when I shut the door, I…I don’t know.

DAISY:I broke it to Hank when it was just the two of us in my hotel room. He was putting his arms around me and I was done with it. I kept snapping at him and he asked me what my problem was and I said, “I think it’s time we part ways.” Hank tried to ignore me a few times, kept telling me I didn’t know what I was saying. So I said it really clear. “Hank, you’re fired. You should leave.” Well, he heard it that time.

GRAHAM:Billy and I were planning on going out to grab a bite—I’d bet him he wouldn’t eat haggis.

DAISY:Hank got in my face. He was so angry and he was standing so close to me that as he spoke, his spit landed on my shoulder. He said, “You’d still just be screwing rock stars if I hadn’t found you.”

When I didn’t say anything back to him, Hank cornered me, up against the wall. I didn’t know what he was going to do. I’m not sureheknew what he was going to do.

When you’re in a situation like that, when you have a man looming over you, it’s as if every decision you made to lead to that moment—alone with a man you don’t trust—flashes before your eyes.

Something tells me men don’t do that same thing. When they are standing there, threatening a woman, I doubt they count every wrong step they made to become the asshole they are. But they should.

My body was stick straight—I felt sort of shockingly sober—and I put my arms out in front of me, holding on to whatever space I could try to defend. Hank was staring right into my eyes. I don’t know if I was even breathing. And then Hank punched the wall and walked out of the room, slamming the door on his way out.

After he left, I triple-locked the door behind him. He yelled something in the hall but I couldn’t make it out. I just sat on the bed. He never came back.

BILLY:I was walking out of my room to go meet Graham when I saw Hank Allen coming out of Daisy’s room muttering, “That fucking bitch.” But he seemed to be calming down so I was thinking I should let it go. Then I saw him stop and turn, like he was going to go back into Daisy’s room. I could tell he was trouble right then. You can see it in somebody’s gait, you know? Hands balled up into fists and jaw tight and all that. I caught his eye and he saw me. We looked at each other for a moment. I shook my head, to say,That would be the wrong move. He kept looking at me. And then he looked down at the ground and walked out.

When he was gone, I knocked on Daisy’s door. I said, “It’s Billy.”

It took a moment but she opened the door. She was wearing a navy dress—that kind where the sleeves are off the shoulders. I knew people always talked about how blue Daisy’s eyes were but that day was the first time I really noticed them. They were so blue. You know what they looked like? They looked like the middle of the ocean. Not the shoreline, not that light blue. They looked like the dark blue of the middle of the ocean. Like deep water.

I said, “Are you okay?”

She looked sad, which I’d never really seen before. And she said, “Yeah, thank you.”

I said, “If you need to talk…” I wasn’t sure how I could really help but I figured I should offer all the same.

She said, “No, that’s all right.”

DAISY:I didn’t realize just how much of a wall Billy put up around himself when he was near me until that moment, when suddenly there was no wall. Like how you don’t register you’re hearing the hum of a car engine until it’s turned off.

But I looked him in the eye then and I saw the real Billy.

I realized I’d been looking at this guarded, cold version of him the whole time up until then. I thought,It might be nice to know this Billy.But then it was over. Just one second of realness from him and then, poof, gone the way it came.

GRAHAM:I was waiting for Billy when my phone rang.

KAREN:I don’t know why it was that day that I decided to do it.

GRAHAM:I said, “Hi.”

And Karen just said, “Hi.”

KAREN:We were sort of quiet on the phone for a second. And then I said, “How come you’ve never made a move on me?”

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