Page 86 of The Summer I First Saw You
We’reon the flight home and he’s on his laptop. He enlarges a photo someone sent, one I can’t help but see. The bluest water, amazing surf.
“Where’s that?” I ask.
“Peniche. In Portugal.” His voice is quiet. He barely looks at me as he responds. “Oliver was just surfing there.”
I wait for him to suggest that we could stay there, after Costa Rica and Cabo and the North Shore. I wait for him to tell me we’d rent a house on the beach, that we’d be sandy and naked and utterly alone the entire time.
But he doesn’t say a fucking word. He closes the laptop and looks out the window instead.
He drives me to the parking lot where I left my car and stares at his steering wheel once we arrive. “I really fucked up, Daisy,” he says. His voice is rough. “I’ve fucked up so badly that I don’t even know what to say right now. The minute you showed up at my house, I should have just come clean to everyone.”
“Why?” I demand. I knew the end was coming, but it’s different, hearing it confirmed. I hold my hands over my stomach as if he’s just punched me. “I was happy all summer, Harrison. It’s been the happiest summer of my life. And you were happy, too, so why are you acting like it was all a mistake?”
He swallows. “Because it was. I was fooling myself into believing there was nothing predatory about it, but of course there fucking was. Your history is littered with predatory men, and now I’m one of them. You depended on me for a place to live—”
“I blackmailed you into that, and you did your best to make me leave!” I cry. “And I’d been there for a month before you ever laid a finger on me, and I had other places I could have gone. It wasn’tpredatory.”
I’m not entirely sure why I’m even arguing. The only relevant facts are these: he wanted me before he knew the truth, and now he doesn’t. That’s what’s driving this conversation, whether he admits it or not.
He exhales. “We could argue about this all day, but you’renever going to convince me I didn’t do the wrong thing. There wasn’t a word I said about Cooper that couldn’t have been said about me as well. You need to grow up at your own pace. I shouldn’t have stood in the way with the surfers or anyone else. You’re going back to school in a few weeks and—”
I open my door and climb out while he’s still talking, grabbing the backpack that sits at my feet.
“You’re over it,” I announce, cutting him off. “That’s all you needed to say.”
45
DAISY
After Harrison ended things, I sat in my car and wept for a full hour. We weren’t supposed to be home for two more days. We were supposed to spend long hours surfing and hideously staining his couch and suddenly we would never do those things again, not together.
The way he ended things—as if I was a terrible mistake, something he was already leaving behind…God it hurt. It made it so much worse.
I found a cheap hotel. Though I could have made up some reason that I ended my supposed surf trip early, I knew I wouldn’t be able to hold it together for five minutes.
Harrison would have been appalled by the room—by the stained carpet, by the long black hair on the bathroom floor. He’d have swept me out of there and taken care of everything, and that thought made me weep too. I never gave a shit about his money, but I loved feeling as if someone had my back. I loved, most of all, that it was him.
After two daysspent crying in a disgusting hotel room, I drive home.
I sit while my mom places everything on the table, telling me an absolutely grotesque story about a kid at Dr. Thomas’s office who broke his arm.
She’s made an effort tonight: the table is set with her best plates, lasagna from scratch.
I don’t see how I’ll eat a bite of it.
“So, where were you surfing again?” she asks, setting a massive slice in front of me. I haven’t lifted my fork yet, but it already sits in my stomach like an anchor.
Jesus, why did I have to lie? I don’t have the resilience to lie to her about this and hold my shit together at the same time. I blew four hundred dollars on a hotel just to avoid this, falsely believing I could cry it all out of my system. Those two days didn’t make a dent.
“Asilomar,” I reply. “Near Monterey.”
I close my eyes and picture an overcast day, Harrison grinning at me, the water too fucking crowded and neither of us caring—shivering as we stripped out of wetsuits in the parking lot, me claiming I’d blow anyone who could get me hot cocoa in the next five minutes.
He’d laughed. He’d thought it was charming then, but my charm never lasts, does it?
“Isn’t that called the Ghost Wave or something?”
My mom doesn’t care about surfing. I’ve never understood how shecouldn’tcare about surfing, growing up here, but she doesn’t, and I want to weep at the fact that she’s trying so hard right now to feign interest in the trip I didn’t actually take.
