by Mary McNear
But Daisy had said something else, too. She’d said Caroline needed to live her own life, and now, belatedly, Caroline realized the truth in that statement as well. Of course, during the years since Daisy had gone away to college, Caroline had come to pride herself on her independence. On her friendships with Allie and Jax, on her relationship with Buster. But if she were honest with herself, her life during those years had still been about the same two things it had always been about: Daisy and Pearl’s. In that order. She had to go back a long way, back to before Jack had left her, for her life to have been about anything else.
As she thought about all this, she did something that surprised her. She got up and took the crumpled poster out of the wastebasket and put it on her desk, and then she tried to smooth all the wrinkles out of it. When she’d done the best she could, she hung it back on the wall, and studied it again. She still liked that pink beach in Bermuda, she decided, with a weary smile. And damn it, she still wanted to go there one day.
CHAPTER 14
On a sultry night in early August, Will’s self-control finally faltered. He and Daisy had spent their night, as usual, at Pearl’s and the Black Bear. But from the moment he’d first seen her, something had been different between them. It was as if there was an added charge in their attraction to each other, an extra current of electricity running between their bodies.
He thought maybe it had to do with what Daisy was wearing, a sleeveless blouse and form-fitting blue jeans. She wasn’t in the habit of dressing seductively, and tonight was no exception, but her thin cotton blouse strained just slightly against the gentle curve of her breasts and showed off, too, an almost irresistible amount of her bare, creamy arms.
And it wasn’t just Will who was feeling the attraction so intensely. Daisy was feeling it too. He’d held her a little too tightly when they’d danced, for instance, and she’d let him. And then she’d pressed herself against him in a suggestive way that she’d never done before. She’d even relaxed her “no kissing in public” rule and let him give her a couple of long, hungry kisses while they danced, swaying almost imperceptibly in the flickering lights of the Black Bear’s jukebox.
By the time they’d gotten into his pickup and headed back to Butternut, Will felt as if the sexual tension was pulled so tight it was about to snap. He concentrated on the road, driving with elaborate carefulness, and Daisy, who was strangely quiet, looked out the window. But when they got to town and Will started to pull into a space on Main Street, Daisy shook her head.
“Don’t park here,” she said. “Park outside the rec center.”
Will nodded wordlessly and drove out to the edge of town where the rec center took up a whole block that, at this time of night, was quiet and dimly lit. He parked and cut the engine, and almost before he knew what was happening, Daisy was in his arms, kissing him, hard, her tongue greedily exploring his mouth. He kissed her back, his need for her ratcheting up with every passing second, until he thought he couldn’t take it anymore. That was when he let one of his hands wander over the front of her blouse, feeling her small, perfect breasts through the thin cotton material, and then, when that wasn’t enough, unbuttoning her blouse and peeling it open.
He stopped kissing her then, long enough to look down at her. “Daisy,” he breathed, taking in a sheer, lacy bra, whose pale violet color contrasted strikingly with the almost ethereal whiteness of her skin.
“Do you like it?” she asked, with a sudden shyness. “I bought it last weekend at the mall in Duluth.”
He swallowed. Hard. “Um, yeah. I like it, Daisy. I like it a lot.”
So she’d been wearing that all night? No wonder he hadn’t been able to keep his hands off her. He must have known, subconsciously, how little clothing stood between the two of them. And he found himself wondering, for one wild moment, if there was a pair of matching panties that went with this bra, and if she was wearing them right now. The thought aroused him so much that he practically groaned.
Instead, he pulled her back into his arms and kissed her, harder. Soon one of his hands moved again to her breasts, and he cupped one of them gently in his palm and ran his fingers over the barely there material of her bra, feeling the warmth of her skin, and the pebbling hardness of her nipple, through it. Her breathing quickened then, and when he dipped his fingers inside her bra, and caressed her bare nipple with his fingers, she let out a little moan that pushed him right to the edge of endurance.
Without thinking, he took his hand out of her bra and slid both of his hands down and around, into her blue jeans’ back pockets. Then he cupped her bottom, her delicious bottom, with both of his hands, and simultaneously squeezed it as he pulled her almost onto his lap. And as he did this, he felt her whole body shudder, almost violently, with excitement.
“Oh, Daisy,” he said. He meant it to be a warning, but it came out instead sounding more like an invitation. Then she was scrambling onto his lap, facing him, straddling him, kissing him again, and pressing against him in a way she’d never done before.
“Let’s go somewhere,” she said, breathlessly, into their kiss. “Now.”
“Where?” he asked, his arms circling her waist, pulling her harder against him.
“Let’s go to the beach,” she said, talking to him and kissing him at the same time. “Please, Will. Hurry.”
“It’s not a good idea,” he said, pulling his lips away from hers. But he didn’t say it with any real conviction, and she wasn’t listening anyway. She grabbed the hem of his T-shirt and pulled it up over his head and then started kissing him again, her hands running over his bare chest. And he remembered the way she’d done this that first night, the night they’d gone to the beach, but her hands had been so hesitant then. So unsure of themselves. Now they felt hungry, greedy, as if they wanted to touch every single inch of him at the same time.
“Do you have any protection?” Daisy said, pulling her mouth away from his only long enough to get the words out.
“Protection?” he said blankly, as if he’d never heard the word before.
She nodded, her breath coming fast, her creamy cleavage just inches from his mouth.
“Yeah, I’ve got something,” he said. And he did. He’d been carrying it around all summer, whenever he was with Daisy, without knowing if he’d ever actually need to use it.
“Then take me to the beach. But, Will? You’re going to have to drive fast,” she added, her hands touching his shoulders, his chest, his stomach. “Because I can’t wait that much longer.”
“Oh, God, Daisy.” He groaned, because he couldn’t wait that much longer either. He leaned over and nuzzled her cleavage with his lips, then traced its silky, sweet-smelling skin with his tongue. He needed to stop, now. He needed to drive to the beach. But then he remembered something.
“Daisy,” he said, pulling his mouth away. “You said you didn’t want our first time to be in the backseat of a pickup.”
“That was before I knew how hard it was going to be to wait,” she said, her breath soft against his ear. She started kissing him again, with even more urgency than before, and Will held her, held her so tightly that he could feel her cleavage against his bare chest, and, through her bra, the tender hardness of her nipples, too.
She wriggled in his lap, and Will sucked in a breath of surprise, surprise and almost painful arousal. “Oh, don’t do that, Daisy.” He groaned again, not really meaning it.
“Will, please, let’s go to the beach,” she said, against his ear, as her hands plucked impatiently at the button on his blue jeans.
The beach? Not a chance, he thought. They’d be lucky now if they made it as far as the backseat, and even that was going to be a stretch.
Then, from a few blocks away, came a sound, just loud enough to register in his consciousness. It was an engine backfiring, and the time it took for Will to hear it, and to categorize it, was enough time to bring him back to reality, or to some form of reality, here in his pickup with Daisy. It wasn’t supposed to be this way
for them, he thought. He knew it; she knew it, too. She’d just forgotten it in the moment.
So with some supreme effort of will he didn’t even know he had, he put his hands around her waist and lifted her off his lap, depositing her on the seat next to him.
“What’s wrong?” she asked, staring at him, bewildered.
But he turned away from her and looked determinedly out the window. He figured if he looked back at her right now, with her messy hair, her unbuttoned blouse, her shimmery bra, and her silky white cleavage, he would completely lose it.
“Nothing’s wrong,” he muttered finally. “I just need to get a grip on myself.” He reached for his T-shirt on the floor of the truck and pulled it back on, still without looking at her.
“What if I don’t want you to get a grip on yourself?” she asked quietly.
“You do. Trust me.”
She said nothing, and a few minutes later he glanced back at her again. She was buttoning her blouse, and when he felt the urge to tell her to stop, to leave it open, he knew he needed to look out the window again.
After a few more minutes had passed, she said softly, “I’m sorry.”
“Sorry for what?” He turned back to her in surprise.
“Sorry to make you be the one to stop us. I feel like we’re . . . switching places or something.”
He smiled, then trusted himself enough to reach out and stroke her cheek with his fingers. “Maybe we are,” he said. “But I’m willing to do that for you, Daisy. I don’t want to just do the easy thing; I’ve been doing that my whole life. I want to do the right thing.”
She thought about that for a moment. “Okay. But, Will, what if the right thing for us now is to be together? I mean, really be together?”
He kept stroking her cheek. “Is that what you want, Daisy?”
“Yes, Will. It is. I’ve wanted it all summer. But I don’t think I was ready until now.”
He felt another surge of desire for her, hearing her say those words, but he tried to keep his voice and expression neutral as he said, “Are you sure about that?”
“I’m sure,” she said, taking the fingers he was using to stroke her cheek and kissing them. “But you’re right about my not wanting it to happen in your truck. I mean, it didn’t seem like a bad idea five minutes ago, but now, it kind of does. Still, there must be someplace else we can be together. Your apartment, maybe . . .”
Will shook his head. Apartment was overstating it. Room was more like it. And this room had a bed with creaky springs, cracks in the ceiling, and the not-so-faint aroma of motor oil permeating everything in it. He couldn’t see Daisy there. But there might be someplace else he could take her.
“Daisy, you know how I work on Mr. Phipps’s cars?”
She nodded, not understanding the connection.
“He told me I could borrow his cabin anytime I wanted it. I don’t think he gets out there very often. It’s out on Butternut Lake, way out on it. He said his nearest neighbor is over a mile away.”
“And you . . . you don’t think he’d mind?”
“No. I’ll tell him I’m taking someone, too. I don’t want you to feel like we’re sneaking around or anything.”
Daisy frowned, considering this, and then said, “But, Will, we will have to sneak around when it comes to my mom. She wouldn’t stop me from going—she couldn’t stop me from going—but she wouldn’t be happy about it either. It’s just simpler if I don’t tell her, if I tell her, instead, I’m going to Jessica’s house or something.”
Will hesitated. He thought honesty was probably the best policy here, but then, when it came to parent-child relationships, he didn’t have a lot of experience to fall back on.
“You do what you think you need to do,” he said finally.
She nodded, suddenly preoccupied. “I can’t go this weekend. I’m working Saturday and Sunday. But my mom said, in exchange, I could take next weekend off.”
“Good, we’ll go then. I have to work that Saturday, but I could leave early and we could get there before dark. What do you think?”
“I think . . . I think that sounds good,” she said. Will noticed her face was pink, whether with excitement or nervousness he couldn’t tell.
He looked at his watch. “I need to get you back to your apartment,” he said. She nodded and started trying to fix her messy hair, the way she did every night before she went home. Watching her, he felt a wave of new affection for her. Then he felt something else, too . . . guilt.
“Daisy,” he said, suddenly, “you don’t feel like I’m pressuring you to do this, do you?”
“Pressuring me?” she said, pausing, her loose hair gathered in both hands as she got ready to put it in a ponytail. “Will, if anything, I’m pressuring you.”
He laughed and pulled her into his arms again. But he was thinking that the real pressure, for both of them, was that the summer would be over soon. Daisy would be going back to college. And Will? Will would be going somewhere too. Because for the first time in his life, he actually had a plan.
CHAPTER 15
Do you want another Diet Coke?”
“No, I’m fine,” Daisy said, smiling at Will.
“Do you want to leave?”
She shook her head. “Not yet. Finish your beer.”
He nodded, but he made no move to drink it. Instead, he reached over and took her hand. “Are you . . . are you worrying? About this weekend?”
“Not worrying,” Daisy qualified. “Just . . . wondering.”
“Wondering, huh?” His gold-brown eyes rested on her. “There’s a lot of that going on around here, isn’t there?” he said, running his thumb over the back of her hand in a firm caress.
It was a Wednesday night, and Daisy and Will were sitting at their usual table at the Black Bear, listening to the jukebox. That Saturday, they were driving up to Mr. Phipps’s cabin, and the knowledge of that seemed somehow to charge the very air between them, until Daisy thought she could almost hear it crackling with electricity.
Will smiled now and leaned closer. “What are you wondering about, exactly?” he asked, grazing her earlobe with his lips.
“Nothing,” Daisy said, blushing and looking down at the table. What she was wondering about, actually, was something she’d been wondering about all summer: namely, was it possible to be too attracted to someone? And, if it was possible, what would happen to her this weekend? After all, if something as simple as Will holding her hand, or kissing her earlobe, left her light-headed with pleasure, how would his lovemaking leave her? Paralyzed, maybe? Or just completely catatonic?
“Do you know what I’ll never get tired of, Daisy?” Will asked, next to her ear.
“What?”
“Watching you blush.”
That was the last thing he said to her before someone passing their table did a double take, stopped, and came back. “Will?”
Then, with an almost physical effort, Will pulled his eyes away from Daisy and looked up at the woman standing beside their table. He tightened his grip on Daisy’s hand. “Hi, Christy,” he said, with what sounded to Daisy like a kind of resignation, a kind of inevitability. As if he’d been waiting, all summer, for her to stop by their table.
Daisy looked up at her, too, then, and, when she did, she had three thoughts in quick succession. The first thought, which was really more of a mental image than a thought, was one small orange juice with ice, and one order of oatmeal with bananas and blueberries on the side, which was Christy’s usual breakfast order at Pearl’s. Her second thought, as she sat there looking at her, was that Christy was a little overdone for a weeknight at the Black Bear. She was wearing a tight dress and high-heeled sandals. Her blond hair was perfectly blown out, and her permanently pouty lips coated with a shimmery pink lip gloss. Daisy’s third thought was that even though she didn’t know Christy very well—she and her husband, Mac, had only moved to town a few years ago—she knew her well enough to know she didn’t really like her.
Daisy smiled at he
r now, though, with the reflexive politeness that twenty-one years of being her mother’s daughter had instilled in her, and said, “Hi, Christy.”
But Christy ignored her. “What are you doing here, Will?” she asked, and there was something about the way she asked it that made Daisy look back at Will, suddenly alert and interested to hear what he would say.
“We’re having a drink,” he said, indicating Daisy, and the beer and the Diet Coke on the table in front of them.
Christy looked at Daisy now, then looked back at Will, and then looked at their hands, still entwined together, resting on the little table between them. And Daisy, watching her, saw the exact moment it happened, the exact moment it all clicked into place for Christy. As it happened, it was also the exact moment it all clicked into place for Daisy, too.
“Unbelievable,” Christy said softly, shaking her head. “You’re dating Daisy? Daisy the waitress?”
Daisy knew she should have felt offended by Christy’s choice of words, and tone of voice, but she didn’t feel anything right now. She couldn’t.
“Daisy’s in college,” Will said patiently. “She waitresses in the summer.”
But Christy didn’t seem interested in this distinction. “So this is the girl you’re seeing?” she asked incredulously. “This is who you broke up with me to be with?”
Daisy watched Will. He was meeting Christy’s shocked stare with a level gaze. “Yes, Christy, I’m seeing Daisy now,” he said, matter-of-factly. Daisy had a feeling, though, that his outwardly calm appearance was requiring enormous effort to maintain on his part.
“Did you tell her about us?” Christy asked, looking at Daisy again, and Daisy was irritated at herself when she felt her cheeks grow warm under her critical gaze. “Did you tell her about all the nights we’ve spent together, Will?” But before Will could answer, she kept going, “I mean, seriously Will, Daisy? She’s, like, practically in high school. Is she even old enough to be in here?”
