Page 19 of The Summer I First Saw You
She smiles. “Like the surfers across the street?”
My eyes narrow. “No. Not the surfers across the street.”
She stretches out her legs and wiggles her toes. “You’ve got an awfully dim view of surfers for someone who used to be one.”
“That’swhyI have such a dim view of them,” I growl. I distinctly remember being a college-aged douchebag who wanted to fuck every cute girl he saw in a bikini anddidfuck more than his share. The idea of Daisy falling prey to one of them makes my jaw grind.
“Why did you buy a place here, then?” she asks. “Audrey didn’t surf, you clearly don’t surf much, if at all, and you already had that mansion in Elliott Springs.”
I rattle the ice in my glass. “My dad sold his beach house and I thought we might just move out this way, eventually. It seemed like a nice place to raise a family.”
I think I was trying to salvage something then—our marriage, maybe, or the dreams I’d once had for adulthood. I just didn’t know it. I’ve always said it was an accident, the way I forgot to tell Audrey, but I’m not sure it really was. I was just fucking desperate to acquire something I knew I needed. You don’t grow old in a single step—it’s a long, quiet descent. It begins with saying you can’t take a week off to surf in Hawaii. Then you can’t spare a weekend, then two hours on a Saturday. Suddenly you’re old, and all the things you loved the most are behind you, out of reach. I’d been making that slow descent for a while, and I wanted to stop it somehow.
“I made the offer before I’d ever even mentioned it to Audrey,” I admit quietly. “She was pissed, and she had every right to be. I should have known it wasn’t going to work.”
“Why wouldn’t it work?”
I sigh. “Audrey hates the beach.”
Daisy laughs as if I’m joking, but then her eyes widen when she realizes I wasn’t. “What kind of monster doesn’t like the beach?”
It’s the exact question I’d expect of a kid who used to throw herself down andhowlwhen we told her it was time to leave for the day. “It was something about not liking the feel of the sand.”
Daisy snorts. “Are you serious right now?”
I shrug. Yes, Audrey hated sand. She flinched every time she felt it underfoot. And God forbid if there was sand in the sheets. “Yeah. She needed to shower ten times a day if she cameout here, and I wascareful. I can’t imagine how much worse it would have been if we’d had kids.”
Daisy sips off the bottle. “Man, she must’ve been a blast in bed. If she didn’t like the feel of sand, what was her take on having you come all over her tits?”
I choke on the bourbon I’m swallowing. “What?”
“You heard me.”
Yeah, I did. And those fucking words tripped off Daisy’s tongue far too easily, with a smirk on her full, pink lips as if letting a guy paint her with his cum was an everyday event.
“Jesus.” I’m on my feet and walking back inside with that bottle of bourbon in front of my crotch before I’ve even thought it through. “Daisy, the shit that comes out of your mouth sometimes…”
She laughs behind me. “You don’t have to run away! I already know that made you hard.”
And she is correct. It did.
It should not have.
When I wakein the morning, Daisy’s door is already open. I go downstairs but see none of the typical signs of her presence. There’s no coffee cup in the sink, no perfect ass bent over on my deck. And the bottle of Malibu isn’t here either.
“Goddammit, Daisy,” I hiss. “Tell me you didn’t actually go drink in your room.”
Of course she did, and I’m a fucking idiot for thinking shewouldn’t.
I march back up the stairs to find her sprawled face-down in bed. The covers are on the floor, her T-shirt is bunched around her waist, and her little red panties have ridden up until they’re basically a thong.
Nowthere’san image I didn’t fucking need.
I pick up the covers and place them over her. From beneath all the hair covering her face, she moans. “Sick,” she whispers.
I lift the Malibu. There’s some in there still but not a lot. “Yeah, I bet you are.”
“Shit,” she hisses before she leaps from the bed and runs to the bathroom, followed by the sound of retching.
