Page 7 of The Summer I First Saw You
With my heart hammering, I push up my chest, planting my back foot while I swing my left leg forward and…I’m on my feet.
The water beneath the board vibrates like a freight train,and that old joy hits me square in the chest, a sort of euphoria I’ve experienced nowhere else.
I don’t have to carve to avoid the cliff but I do it anyway, simply for the rush. It’s as effortless as it ever was, and when I finally dive off the side of the board, I’m smiling for the first time in weeks.
Today, the water just handed a small piece of me back.
5
HARRISON
It’s not a great sign that my first thought when I wake is “I need a drink.” And today is worse. Now I’ve got Daisy here, a disturbinglyadultversion of Daisy who is all curves and pouty lips, bending over on my deck just in case I’d missed the fact that she has the most perfect ass God ever created.
I’ve got to get rid of her. The obvious solution, of course, is just to come clean to my friends, but that would mean admitting that I’ve been blatantly lying to them for months, and dealing with their less-than-helpful reactions—pity from Caleb and Beck; Liam pushing me toget back on the horse. All I want in the entire world is to be left alone, and if I came clean, I’d be guaranteeing the opposite for weeks or months to come.
I throw on sweatpants and a T-shirt. I resent that I’m forced to wear clothes in my own goddamned house—the one good thing about my divorce was the solitude, that I could wander around in boxers without an acerbic comment from Audrey—but I don’t need a repeat of yesterday’s erection incident.
To my vast relief, she doesn’t appear to be around when I get downstairs. I make a cup of coffee, add a splash of bourbonto it, and slump into a chair on the deck as I stare blankly at the view.
Across the street, one of those fucking surfers emerges from the staircase with his insanely hot girlfriend behind him—long blonde hair dripping down her back, hourglass figure barely encased by a wetsuit. Not looking at women other than my wife once came easily. After she stopped sleeping with me it got harder, and I guess there’s no reason to feel guilty about it now. I guess it’s perfectly fine that I’m checking out this lucky prick’s girlfriend as if my life depends on it.
He goes to a truck parked twenty yards from the staircase while she leans her board against the railing and unzips her wetsuit, leaving it hanging off her waist. The bikini she’s got on is barely up to the job of covering her lush curves. There’s an awful lot of smooth, tan skin on display.
And nipples. She’s shivering in her bikini, and I can make out those tight nipples from here. I take a swig of my coffee as if it’s bourbon and scald my tongue.Jesus Christ. It’s been a really long time.My envy of this guy has grown exponentially in seconds.
But when she picks up her board, she doesn’t walk to him. Instead, she crosses the street, and something sinks in my stomach. Because she’s in my driveway now and…
Oh, shit. The girl in question isDaisy.
Daisy, the toddler who used to follow us around. The kid in pigtails we taught to surf. The teenage brat doing her best to ruin her mom’s wedding.
She’s been gone for years, but in my head there was always a wall there, a wall that meantno matter how old she gets, you will never look at this kid the way you’d look at grown women.
I’ve now looked at her that waytwice. And if she sticks around, it’ll undoubtedly happen again.
She disappears beneath the house, and a few minutes later she comes out to the deck with a towel around her waist andanother around her shoulders, radiating the sort of contentment I haven’t felt in ages.
I remember it, though—that ecstatic exhaustion after a few hours of surfing, your skin tight from the saltwater, warming in the sun as you mentally relive your best ride. For a half second, I hunger for it. That feeling. My lost youth. I want it all back.
“You should have been out there,” she says, throwing her wetsuit over the rail.
“Youshouldn’thave been out there,” I growl. “Especially not alone.”
She rolls her eyes. “A, I’m twenty-one, not twelve, and”—she gestures to the trucks lining the road—“B, I obviously wasn’t alone. There were a bunch of guys down there.”
I don’t like that either. The Horseshoe is too dangerous for her, and so are the guys who surf it. I’m responsible for Daisy if she’s in my home. I don’t need her taking off with some douchebag whose slight heroin habit she’ll only discover after she’s trapped in his unmarked van.
One more reason to get her out of here as soon as possible, though not the most important one. “So, how long are you planning to stay anyway?” I ask.
She looks over at me. “How long are you planning to put bourbon in your coffee?”
“As long as I please,” I reply, “because I’m thirty-two, this is my fucking house, and I’m off work.”
“Well, that sounds entirely healthy. Clearly, my work here is done.”
This entire situation is rich. I could fill a piece of college-ruled paper listing the various ways Daisy’s not beenhealthyover the last decade, and I’d only be hitting the high points. “Daisy, you stole a golf cart and crashed it into a ravine because your mom wasn’t paying enough attention to you, and you nearly burned down her house a month later. Do you really think I’d be inclined to takeyouradvice?”
Her tongue sweeps over her upper lip. “Wow, is that the best you can do? Reproaching me for things that happened when I wasfourteen? Even Mother Teresa was crashing golf carts when she was fourteen.”
