Page 60 of The Summer I First Saw You
It’s a truth I’ve never told anyone since I first suggested it to my mom, mostly because I couldn’t stand to have one more person fail to believe me.
“Scott cheats. A lot. I knew it even before they got married because he hit up my friend’s older sister on a dating site right before the wedding.”
Harrison doesn’t appear to be surprised. “I kind of figured. He seems like the type. Did you tell her?”
I shrug. “I was going to, but she was having this big brunch for the bridesmaids and was all excited about it, and there was just never a good time. She was so happy, and after the brunch she had her bachelorette, and the rehearsal dinner, and I didn’t know what to do.”
He squeezes my hip. “So instead, you dyed your hair and let everyone call you a brat. Including me. God, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. Iwasbeing a brat. I just didn’t know how else to handle it.” I swallow. “But then I caught him a month later. He was supposed to be out of town, but I saw him with some chick at Long Point. So Ididtell my mom, and it all went really badly. He’d driven all the way back to the airport, had her pick him up, and they’d gone to dinner after—I assume he saw me, too, and was covering his bases.”
“So she didn’t believe you.”
I flip on my back. “No, it was worse than that. She started crying and begged me to go to counseling. Scott…” I hate this. I hate saying it out loud. “Scott had been pointing out ways I was like my dad, so me coming to her with some wild story about seeing him at the beach was one more sign. And if I suggested he’d seen me, that he’d driven back to the airport…I’d have sounded even crazier, so I was just screwed.”
I glance at him, waiting to see doubt in his face. Waiting to see that question there:Is she like her dad? Are there signs I’ve missed?Anyone can be made to look insane if you selectively choose their worst moments—you list out the depressed times,the angry times, the irrational thoughts spoken aloud, even in jest. Except in my case, it’s also possible. And I won’t know until it happens. Maybe I won’t even know then.
His lips press to my head. “Jesus, Daisy, I’m so sorry.”
I blink back tears, not at the retelling of the story, but at being believed. Yes, he’s only the second person I’ve told, but he’s the first one who’s taken what I said at face value.
“After that, he was watching for me to slip up. If I cut school, he somehow knew immediately and told my mom. Then my stuff started going missing or was messed with. My surfboard wasn’t where I left it, my toothbrush disappeared and reappeared, my laptop would be unplugged and dead when I got home though I never unplugged it. When I accused him, he and my mom just shared this look, like ‘oh here’s another sign.’Eventually I just moved in with Liam.”
“Daisy,” he groans, “I wish you’d told her. Or me. I’d have believed you.”
I shake my head. “Scott was too good at it. He’d already made me look jealous and crazy, and me telling her that he was hiding my stuff and trying to make me look worse…it would just have been a bigger argument that he was right.”
“You could explain now, though.”
“What’s the point? He’s listed every single thing I’ve done wrong for seven years. She has a mountain of evidence that I might be ill somehow. And even if she believed me, I’d just be ruining all those memories for her. If her marriage to Scott is the only romance her life will ever hold, I’m not going to destroy that.”
He pulls me against his chest, a place I probably wouldn’t be if Scott hadn’t been such a dick.
Right now, it’s impossible to wish any of it had gone another way.
31
HARRISON
Things turned bad with Audrey a year into our marriage, when her brother died, but even before that they were never especially good. She wasn’t hungry for things the way Daisy is—she wanted jewelry on our anniversary, a photo of us that would make a good Christmas card, the mortgage refinanced when rates dropped—things that would satisfy her for five minutes and then mean nothing again.
And she was bothered by the most trivial shit while pretending the big issues weren’t there. “She’s wearing white amonthafter Labor Day,” Audrey said of a woman we saw at dinner. We’d had nothing to say to each other through the meal, we hadn’t had sex in a month…but the fact that someone was breaking a stupid fucking fashion rule was an issue worthy of notice. She remained irritated bythatfor hours.
If she hadn’t cheated, I’d have stayed with her forever because it would have been the right thing to do, and I’d have been miserable, while what’s occurring with Daisy is unequivocally thewrongthing to do and it makes me happier than I’ve ever been before.
We surf most nights. We have sex on every surface of my home. Even the garage floor isn’t left unscathed, which is what happens when Daisy insists on “helping” me out of my wetsuit.
I now arrive at the office each morning exhausted from the lack of sleep and riding a wave of dopamine that leaves me feeling as if I could lift a car over my head.
If her previous relationships were anything like ours, I understand why men put her on a pedestal—it’s almost impossible not to. Being with Daisy is like sinking into a warm bath when you didn’t know you were cold—I’m stunned by how good it is. I’m stunned by how such a simple thing can also be this blissful, this indulgent. I want to stay inside her and never leave.
It has to end—she and I are still in completely different places in life, and we will remain so for the next decade at least—but there’s a part of me that would give up everything to keep her with me forever.
She hasto work a double shift on Friday, the only reason I stay at work myself. I tell her I’ll pick her up because I don’t want her biking home in the dark, and I arrive early because I’m too goddamned eager to see her. Inside, the hostess is gone and most of the tables are empty. There’s no sign of Daisy.
The guy behind the bar is drying glasses. “Can I get you something?”
Is this the kid she’d be dating if she wasn’t living with me? He’s got the same early-twenties overconfidence I had at his age, the kind you acquire after realizing almost no girl is out of reach if you play your cards right.
