Page 29 of The Summer I First Saw You
I’d like to continue objecting, but she’s so fucking excited about it that I don’t have the heart to shut her down. As I recall, this is how she got her way with me as a kid, too. It shouldn’t still be working.
There’s no line yet at the ice cream stand, which isn’t surprising, given that most reasonable people are just waking up.
“You remember we still have to run home, yes?” I ask, as we take a seat at the nearest table.
“It’ll give me energy,” she argues. “And besides, what’s the point of doing all this stuff to lead a long life if I’m not going to enjoy it?”
There was a time when I’d have agreed with her, back in those days when I surfed every morning in front of my dad’s house and surfed every afternoon at Long Point. The world was like a candy store back then—endlessly colorful, the options nearly infinite. There was so much to choose from I didn’t know where to look first.
Now I don’t even enter the store, but Daisy’s in the thick of it. She’s reaching for one experience after another, and she’s licking that soft serve like she’s never had ice cream in her life.
Which leaves me wanting to lick a thing or two as well.
She swipes her tongue obscenely along its length. She’s being intentionally lascivious, but…it’s been a very long time, and the way she really seems to beenjoyingthat cone hits me in a way it should not. Beneath the table, I adjust myself.
She grins. “Is it so sexy, watching me eat this?”
“Yes, almost as sexy as it’ll be when you’re throwing it up in someone’s bushes on the way home.”
She licks down the sides again, and I sigh heavily to disguise this thing in my gut that is not exasperation at all.
“How about now?” She deep throats it, shoving the entire cone in her mouth and pulling it back out. “Nowis it sexy?”
I’ve had it with this. I’d walk away entirely if Icouldwalk away. I adjust myself again. “Just for the record, this is what I mean when I accuse you of making everything sound dirty.”
She laughs. “You love it.”
Do I? Perhaps. Much like my love for jalapeños, however, it causes me far more pain than pleasure. And at least I don’t have to feel guilty about the jalapeños.
My phone vibrates and I flip it over to find a text from Oliver, telling me he’s flying into LA on the tenth and wants to hang out in Malibu for the weekend. It’s been the plan for a while. I’m not sure why, but when I look at Daisy—still going after that ice cream cone with a skill porn stars onlywishthey had—I find myself reluctant to agree to the trip.
She throws out the rest of her cone, presumably because she’s had enough and probably because she was just tired of getting no reaction from me, and we start walking back toward West Cliff. And as much as I did not want to go on this run, there’s now a strange part of me that’s actually eager to stretch myself and take a nice hot shower when it’s done. To watch her dance around the kitchen as she makes lunch and sit across from her over dinner.
I’d never admit it to her, but I’m happy she came. And I sort of don’t want her to leave.
16
DAISY
It’s weird how many people look at a menu full of options and then request something else. Wharf Seafood has mahi-mahi, shrimp, trout, and salmon, but there have already been two assholes who perused the entire menu and asked for different fish, as if this is some Michelin-starred restaurant saving the moreexoticproducts for those customers savvy enough to ask.
“You don’t have lobster?” asks the woman in front of us, fretting as she feeds her infant bits of a buttered roll while her glum husband stares at the menu. “Johnny loves lobster.”
“I’m so sorry, we don’t,” says Mia, the waitress I’m shadowing. She actually sounds sincere. I’m not sure I’d manage it myself.
“Okay, can you at least put truffles on his smiley fries?”
That is when I realize Johnny is thebaby. She wanted us to procure a special, off-the-menu item for her one-year-old. And put truffles on his fries.
Mia apologizes once more. “Sorry. We don’t have shaved truffles either.”
Of course we don’t. We have gross fried fish and a drinkcalled The Purple Nurple, which is the equivalent of ten shots of liquor served in an oversized baby bottle—this is not where you go for fucking truffles.
The woman asks her still-glum husband if he’s sure he wants to eat here before we walk away.
“The rich are not like you and I,” says Mia once we’re out of hearing distance.
I laugh, though I think if they wereactuallyrich they’d realize a restaurant decorated with fisherman’s netting wasn’t likely to offer much beyond coronary artery disease and a hangover.
