Page 40 of The Summer I First Saw You
It takes about an hour to reach McWay Falls. We pay to park in the lot before taking the small, crowded walkway to the viewing deck, patiently waiting our turn while everyone in front of us takes pictures.
“Do you think any of them are really seeing the view?” Daisy asks softly. “Or is it all about how good a shot they’re getting and whether or not it’s framed right for TikTok?”
I glance at the crowd, and she’s right—no oneis looking at the view. They’re looking only at their phones.
I grin at her. “And we’ll probably do the same fucking thing.”
She’s still observing all the people. “You know what it is? The beauty of moments like this is that they can’t last. All these people are trying to make them last and in doing so, they’remissingthe moment entirely.”
“You’re kind of a dark little thing under that perenniallook on the bright sideattitude, aren’t you?”
A shadow passes over her face. “Don’t say that,” she says softly, though I’ve got no idea why it bothered her.
“It wasn’t an insult, Daisy. There’s nothing wrong with having a bit of a dark side. I have a rather substantial one, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”
“Your dark side is hardly as harmless as you’d like to believe,” she replies with a half-smile.
We finally get to the observation deck. “Let’s not take any photos,” she says. “Let’s not take a single photo for the entire trip.”
I’d wanted to get a photo ofheras much as the falls. There’s something so lovely in her face right now, lovely and calm and brave and sad all at once. It’s something I wish I could capture, but I guess that’s exactly what she was saying before, isn’t it? I’d be trying to take a photo of something so I wouldn’t have to lose it. And I’m definitely going to lose it.
I lean against the black metal rail. The spout of water does, indeed, jut mysteriously out of a rock into the deep blue Pacific churning beneath it. “It looks exactly like the pictures.”
She nods. “It does.”
I don’t say anything more, but…it’s a little empty, seeing it firsthand when I’d already seen it online.
I prefer the things I wasn’t prepared for, the ones that hit out of nowhere like an unexpected gift.
Those are the ones you can’t imagine ever leaving behind.
We arrivein Malibu at sunset, and I steer us to a white oceanfront house that looks like it’s straight out ofArchitectural Digest.
“Yet another modest shack, I see,” she says as I pull in behind the Porsche my brother is renting.
We climb from the car, and moments later Oliver walks outside, greeting us with a wide smile. His hair is lighter than mine and he’s more tan than I am, but we’re otherwise pretty similar…aside from my brother’s somewhat loose morals, that is. He’s me, if I’d been the one raised by a doting mother who made me the center of her world, if I hadn’t felt it was necessary to do the right thing all the fucking time, to make up for the fact that neither of my parents would.
He hugs me first. “Babysitting,mon cul.”
Babysitting, my ass.
We both glance her way—at her easy smile, her flushed cheeks, her hair wild from our windows-down drive. How did Ieverthink he’d believe me? She is delicious. She is irresistible. And there’s not a chance Oliver will even try to resist. She’ll fall for his easy French charm because women always do—I’ve witnessed it firsthand over a hundred summer jaunts with him and Matthew. Santorini, Mallorca, Amsterdam, Lisbon—what do these places have in common? Beautiful women fell like fucking dominos when my brothers turned their way.
I don’t know how to stop it, but something seizes up in my chest at the thought of Oliver and Daisy together, and I doubt it has much to do with protecting her virtue.
“Little Daisy, you’ve changed a bit since the last time I saw you,” he says, kissing both her cheeks.
“And you haven’t changed at all,” she replies. “You’re still speaking in French to Harrison when you don’t want me to know what you’ve said.”
He laughs. “A bad habit.”
“Especially when you have no idea what language I studied in high school and college.”
He grins. “You’d have slapped me by now if you spoke French.”
Great. We’re five seconds into this trip and he’s already flirting with her.
He helps us carry our bags upstairs to the living room, where the back wall looks over a wide white beach and waves rolling up in perfect sets under the dying sun. Surfers dot the landscape, straddling boards.
