Page 94 of The Summer I First Saw You
“I’m not sure I want to sleep in a bed he’s been in foranyreason,” I suggest. “Especially if he wasn’t here to sleep.”
She laughs. “We’ll go to his place. It’s only for a few weeks.”
So I give in, while thinking that going from Harrison’s house tothisis quite the descent.
I already miss his deck. I already miss his bed. I’ll miss surfing with him in the morning and the sounds of the ocean as we fall asleep, and thinking about it makes me want to cry because what I really miss is Harrison. The rest…it wasn’t even the icing on the cake. He was the whole thing.
I take his call in the stairwell that night because it’s the only place I’ve got any privacy. The ocean roars in the background on his side of the line. “You’re sitting on the deck, aren’t you?”
“I am. It’s surprisingly dull without a scantily clad girl in a beige bra out here attracting attention.”
“I miss it.”
“I miss you,” he replies. Ice crackles in my ear. He’s drinking bourbon and probably didn’t eat. I hate that, but I’m not much better. I didn’t bother to make dinner because I just…hate it here. I hate being away from him. I hate that Helen blasts music whenever she’s home. I hate that I’m going to sleep alone tonight, and that it’s too muggy to open the windows, and if Ididsleep with them open, I’d only hear cars honking and drunk guys getting into fights.
I want to go home, and home is California and the ocean, but mostly it’s the outdoors and it’s him and for the next four months, I’ll have none of those things.
“This is making me sad,” I whisper. “Tell me about your trip here. Tell me the first thing we’ll do.”
“I was trying really hard not to turn this conversation sexual, hon.”
I laugh. “For once in my life I wasn’t trying to turn the conversation sexual since I’m calling you from the stairwell.”
“Why the fuck are you in the stairwell?” he demands.
“There’s a situation and I don’t have a bedroom for the next week or so.”
“Go to a hotel,” he says. “What’s near you? I’ll book it right now.”
I laugh but I want to cry at the same time as I tell him he doesn’t need to fix all my problems, that I’ll be fine sleeping on the couch for a while.
We haven’t even been apart for one full day, and I’m already not sure how I’m going to survive without him.
The first dayof school feels endless by the time it’s halfway through. I’m running from seven in the morning until lunch, with several classes to come in the afternoon so I rush home, planning to eat something and collapse on the couch for an hour.
But the relief I expected to feel when I near my building never comes.
Christian is here.
Standing on the sidewalk with his arm folded, obviously waiting for me…so someone gave him my schedule.
I stumble to a halt, more shocked than scared. I assumed he wouldn’t stay in DC during his leave of absence—a leave of absence I set into motion.
He holds out a hand as ifI’mthe one who needs to be warded off. “I just want to talk.”
I have no reason to be scared of him—it’s not as if he was ever violent. But I also never thought he’d become a guy who’d wait outside my building to confront me. I grip the strap of my backpack as I look around. We’re on a busy street, but thatdoesn’t mean much. I’ve seen women getting harassed here and not a single person intervened.
“The time for talking was last fall,” I tell him.
“Do you have no remorse whatsoever, Daisy?” he snaps. “Do you realize how bad you made me look?”
Christian is skilled at controlling the narrative—it’s what he does for a living. And when he lashed out at me last winter—accusing me of being a gold digger, of being useless andlow rent, I took every word he said as if it were canon.
But now I listen to him the way Harrison would. And Harrison would be fucking livid that Christian has the gall to demand remorse from me. That he has the gall to demandanything. “So…it made you look bad when I told the school that you, aprofessor, slept with his student and lied about his girlfriend? That part? Or the part where you found out I was pregnant and called me a gold digger?”
“It was consensual,” he says. “I didn’t have to talk you into a goddamn thing.”
“I never said it wasn’t.” I look around me again. I can’t reach my building without passing him. If I just went back to campus, would he follow? I’m shaking so badly I don’t even trust that I can get the keycard out of my backpack to open the door anyway.
