Page 4 of Summer Ever After
Daisy crossed her arms. “I don’t travel with a bikini.”
I slipped off the Blundstone boots that I used for riding my bike and rolled up the bottom of my pants. “That’s the beauty of Keystone. It’s shallow for miles. You’d get tired, or bored, or turn ninety before you get in up to your knees.” I jogged into the lake about twenty steps and turned. “See,” I shouted. The water barely lapped above my ankles.
Daisy sat on the shoreline as she took off her shoes and rolled up her pants before stepping in to join me. “It’s so warm.” The water glistened in the rays of the late afternoon light. She swept her long braid over her shoulder and adjusted her well-worn baseball cap. She was the most interesting woman I’d met in years. She was wearing a hat from one of the most exclusive private schools in the state, Brankmere, yet her shoes were covered in tape and she was walking with heavy bags of groceries.
“Where did you get that hat?” I asked as she reached me, our legs ankle-deep in Windswan Lake.
She furrowed her brow and touched her fingertips to the brim, and I saw that her nails were unpainted and very short.
“This?” she hesitated. “I’m not sure where it came from. Maybe my stepmom got it from the thrift store or something. I don’t even know what Brankmere Hall is.”
We kept walking. “It’s a private school.” I felt like a jerk for some reason. “Upstate. I went to its brother school across the lake.” Then I realized that the hat didn’t say Brankmere Hall on it, it was just the school crest. It was strange that she didn’t know anything about the hat, yet knew the meaning of its crest. “Where did you go to school?”
Daisy sighed. “Here and there. My stepmom doesn’t like to stay in one place for a long time. It took me a little longer to graduate because of it. I kept missing out on credits and stuff. I’m saving up to go to college. That’s my plan.”
She was younger than I realized. I had graduated college years earlier and had been working at my dad’s corporation ever since.
“Are you in college?” she asked. We strode toward the setting sun side by side, the ease of our motorcycle moment slipping as we attempted to engage in small talk.
Wondering if she was a mind reader, I took two steps, trying to figure out how to tell her I was in my thirties. “I finished college a couple of years ago…” It wasn’t exactly a lie, or was it? Was a couple specifically two? I didn’t know, I wasn’t an English major. “I work in the city. I’m in marketing.”
“Do you like it?”
We stopped, the water swirling around our calves, inching closer to our kneecaps as the waves from the wake of a boat rolled past us before hitting the rocky shoreline.
If I was on a date with a socialite, or any other random chick, I would’ve gone into great detail about the importance of my job, and how I wasn’t just in marketing, I was the goddamn president of the marketing department for one of the biggest companies in the oil industry. “I hate it.” The words came out of my mouth before my brain registered that they had been let loose. I followed up with a self-deprecating laugh. “I mean, it’s a great job, and the company is top-notch, it’s just…”
“Not for you?”
“It’s not for me,” I agreed.
“What would you rather be doing?” Daisy bent to tug the thick roll of her pants up higher on her thigh.
“I’d rather be racing cars or motorcycles. Or even just working in the pit on the circuit. I love being around the action, the adrenaline….”
“The smell,” Daisy added. “I know exactly what you’re talking about. So why don’t you do that? I’m sure you could get a job with one of the teams, even if you had to start at the bottom.”
“I’ve never told anyone that.” I shoved my hands into my pockets. “I don’t think that my dad would go for it.”
She raised her eyebrows above her thick sunglasses, the mirrored surface reflecting the sparkles from the water. “Your father? Why wouldn’t he be supportive, if that’s your dream?”
I didn’t want to get into family politics, or how I was slated to take over the North American operations in the next five years when my father, Laird Starling retired. “He’s just a typical dad.” He wasn’t. “They worry about my future and want me to make smart choices.” He wasn’t concerned about my future – so long as I followed in the family dynasty.
A sailboat bobbed in the distance, its sail fluttering and snapping as it caught a puff of wind. “What about you? I asked before she could interrogate me any further. There was something special about Daisy, but I had this weird feeling that once she found out who I was, she wouldn’t want anything to do with me.
“I'd like to study environmental engineering.”
Yep. She definitely wouldn’t want to have anything to do with me. “Wow. That’s pretty impressive.” The only environmental engineers I’d ever met had been complete assholes, but then again, we were the bad guys in the whole thing. They definitely weren’t pretty young girls with a Rapunzel-like braid, skilled with motorcycles.
“I guess. I have a partial scholarship, and they’ve agreed to honor it for five years until I can come up with the funds for the rest of the tuition.”
I could probably pay for her tuition with the money that was sitting in my spending account. My chest constricted with guilt. “Here I am complaining about wanting to ride motorcycles. I feel like an asshole.”
She laughed. “You are an asshole. But only because you’re not following your dream.”
I inhaled. “You’re right.” My cock twitched in my jeans. This headstrong girl with the long braid got it. “Are you close to having your tuition money?”
“I’ve been working on it for three years, so I have two years left before the scholarship elapses.”
