Daisies & Devin

by Kelsey Kingsley

  “Yes,” I said, without hesitation, and a cheesy line blinked through my brain: Did it hurt? When you fell from Heaven?

  She smiled weakly. “That’s good,” and she looked away. She swallowed hard, once and then again, and she sniffled toward the sky.

  “Hey,” I said, squeezing her hand, and she turned back to me.

  “I just … I can’t, Dev,” she said, shaking her head, her eyes brimming with tears. “I can’t believe in something like that when something like this can happen to good people. My dad was a good person, Devin. Even despite all this shit. He was hardworking, he managed to keep a roof over our heads … He was a good fucking person!”

  And she was crying again. I reached into my pocket to grab one of the tissues I’d started to keep stocked over the last few days.

  “I know, KJ. I know,” I soothed, reaching over to blot at her tears.

  “Yeah, well … I don’t know if I do anymore,” she whispered, grabbing my arm. “I keep saying it, I keep thinking it, but I don’t know if I believe it anymore. Goddammit, Devin. I’ve spent my entire life, telling myself that my dad was a good person, and now that he’s gone, I can’t believe it. I don’t … I don’t know how I can, when …”

  “Don’t think like that, Kylie,” I said, stopping her. “That type of shit—”

  “We weren’t enough, Devin!” she shouted over me, and I watched the remaining bricks of her exterior crumble into dust. “How good could he have been when we weren’t enough to keep him alive? Fuck, we tried. We tried so fucking hard. We did everything, we got him into rehab, we tried to keep him clean, and none of it was good enough. None of it did a fucking thing. We were only prolonging the inevitable, and what the fuck was the point of that? We should’ve just let him fucking kill him—”

  I quickly rolled against the ground and grabbed her wrists. I held her tight, and shook her. “Stop.” I didn’t shout, but the word bit at her tongue, shushing her, and her breath hitched. “Don’t you fucking dare talk like that.”

  Her lips were pinched between her teeth, more tears fell silently to the ground. They watered the grass and nourished the daisies. She swallowed a sob, then released her lips, letting them fall open as she gasped.

  I loosened my grip, but I didn’t let go. “Tell me about the daisies.”

  “What?”

  “You’ve never told me about the daisies you always had in your room. I want to know about them now.”

  She swallowed. She licked her lips and diverted her eyes to one of the swaying flowers, inches from her face. “My dad used to send them to me.”

  “Why? What was the significance?”

  She bit her lip, fighting against its uncontrollable quivers. “It was just that … I always loved them. On our walks, he’d pluck them for me on our way back from the beach. I’d carry them home and put them in a cup of water. It got to the point that whenever it was my birthday, or Valentine’s Day, or … the first day of school, or even if I just had a bad day, I’d come home and there would be a bouquet of daisies waiting for me.”

  I hovered over her, watching the shifting of her eyes and face, seeing the old memories making her smile and making her eyes twinkle beyond the tears. Then, the realization that she was never going to find a bouquet of daisies waiting for her again making her lips tremble. Making her eyes storm with despair.

  “The only time I didn’t get my daisies was when he was in rehab or using,” she admitted, and in a whisper, she added, “The daisies made me feel like he was okay. I just felt like … like as long as he thought to send them, he could one day be okay.”

  Oh, fuck. I released her wrists and sat up. I pressed the thumb and forefinger of one hand to my eyes, and I breathed away a rush of emotion. I composed myself and cleared my throat. I turned back to her, allowing my hand to reach out to her hair. To stroke through the flyaway purple threads that had fallen away from her bun.

  “Kylie, look around us,” I said, keeping the control in my voice despite the torrential downpour in my heart.

  She took a glance around her, eyeing all the daisies that swayed in the gentle breeze. One dipped on the wind, touching her forehead, and I caught the gentle twitching at the corner of her mouth.

  “This is why I believe in Heaven, Kylie,” I said, and she looked back to me, staring with bewildered eyes that had already begun to regain their sparkle. “I mean, come on, do you really think it’s just coincidence that we would stumble upon this field of daisies today, of all days?”

  She released a water-logged sigh, sniffling as the tears commenced their race to the ground, but her lips found her smile.

  I took her hand in mine. “Your dad was sick, Kylie, just like you said. That’s all. That had absolutely nothing to do with you or your mom. He does love you, you are enough, and he is okay.”

  She wrenched her hand from my grasp and reached her arms out to me. I pulled her off the ground, pressed her body against mine, and with her chin nestled into the crook of my neck, she whispered, “Thank you, Devin. God, I don’t know what I would do without you. I love you so much.”

  I exhaled, silently begging the twinge in my chest to just knock it off as I said, “I love you too, KJ.”

  I meant it—I did love her, but not in the way that she loved me. With those words, spoken in her voice, circling my brain, I had to remind myself that it was unrequited. That it wasn’t mutual and I was alone in that ship, and it was sinking.

  There was a song in this moment, and I decided I would write it. I would pour my heartache into that notebook I kept in my guitar case, specifically for moments just like this, and I would write the best damn song I had ever written.

  But before I could get to my truck, and write the song that would possibly change my life, I held Kylie. I felt her smile against my cheek, felt her fingers dig into my back. I could feel her heart slamming against my chest, pulsing with her love for our bond and those flowers, and I decided then and there that she would never go another week without a bouquet of daisies on her table.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  2008

  Kylie

  There were many things I had come to accept in my life.

  I was never going to be the kid, spending every single summer in Disney World. I was never going to feel okay admitting my family’s shortcomings. I was always going to stiffen at the sight of drug use in TV shows or movies, and I was always going to wish that things had been different.

  But I never thought living without my father at such a young age would also be one of the things I’d have to accept.

  Maybe I should have been more aware, more realistic. Maybe my mom should have been more vocal about the dangers of drugs when I was a kid, beyond how it altered his mind and body. Maybe she should have warned me. Maybe I shouldn’t have been so naïve when learning about the shit in school, when I sat there, reeling in my seat and thinking, “That won’t happen to my dad.”

  God, how wrong I was.

  The year after graduation had been the toughest of my life, when I moved out of the dorms and back home.

  My mom had turned the house into a time capsule. Keeping his jackets on the hook beside the front door, his boots where he last left them. That damn book he’d been in the middle of reading, next to the couch—The Shining. The bookmark was where he had left it, as though waiting for him to come back and finish the tale of Jack Torrance and his hotel.

  It had stayed there, precariously teetering on the end table, until I picked it up and threw it across the room during one of our fights. The bookmark had fluttered away, and Mom spent half an hour frantically searching for the break in the pages, trying to put it back where it belonged.

  Eventually, she gave up, crumpling into a blubbering heap on the floor and cursing my name while I retreated to my room.

  We were fighting a lot. We were carrying that heavy fucking grief with us everywhere we went, but we did absolutely nothing to help each other heal. As the maternal counterpart to my parental duo, she was a reminder
of what I had lost. While I was the reminder of what was missing, having the same eyes and nose as her late husband. She’d take one look at me, I’d take one look at her, and we clashed in violent sorrow.

  What was worse, was that being at home meant I was further from Devin, who now lived an hour away, still in that apartment with his cousin Trent. A whole fucking hour. It was harder to just jump in the car and see him, now it was a bigger time commitment. He tried to reserve weekends for me, but there were always those jobs his dad wanted him to work overtime on. The distance made me fit less into his life, and I hated that most of all. Because, as was expected, I struggled to ground myself after losing my father. I stumbled, trying to find my footing, and fell into a black hole, unable to claw my way out, unless Devin was knocking on the door and dragging me out by my ankles.

  And when he did, he always brought daisies.

  “Come on, KJ,” he said on that horrible Saturday in early June. He’d let himself in, thanks to that key my mom had given him months ago, and he pulled the covers off me, dragging them to the floor. “Time to get up.”

  “Devin!” I screeched, curling my bare legs into my chest. “What the hell! I’m in my underwear!”

  “You act like I care.”

  “Well, you should!”

  “Well, I don’t, and you need to get in the shower,” he declared, opening my dresser drawers and putting together something resembling an outfit. “We’re looking at that old bar, remember?”

  I turned my head to look at my nightstand and the vase of daisies sitting on it. My mouth curled into something I hoped resembled a smile, and I reached out to run my fingers over the petals, with one thought circling my brain: I don’t deserve this. I don’t deserve him.

  I pulled myself to a seated position and Devin threw the clothes at me, along with a towel. “You’re bathing yourself,” he said. “I have to draw a line somewhere.”

  I laughed at that, scooting myself to the edge of the bed with the clothes bundled in my arms. I looked up into his warm, brown eyes and I urged myself to smile again, but it wouldn’t come.

  “It’s been a year, Dev,” I said, forcing the words out with a painful drag of breath. “I don’t even know how …” I dropped my gaze to the carpet in my room and the dust bunnies burrowed into the corners. I took in the tissues and food wrappers that marked the path from my bed to the door.

  When had I become such a careless slob?

  “I know, KJ,” he said.

  “I don’t know if I can do this today,” I admitted, thinking about the appointment I had made with the real estate agent to look at a run-down bar in River Canyon, CT.

  Shaking his head, Devin sat beside me and wrapped an arm around my shoulders, pulling me into his side. My head found its comfortable spot on his shoulder and I sighed.

  “Remember you picked today for a reason,” he said, giving me a squeeze. Those almost-forgotten wishes of my heart bubbled briefly to the surface. “I know it’s hard, but I really think you need to do this. For your dad.”

  “I know. I just thought it would be easier,” I confessed, although I don’t know why I thought that at all. I don’t know why I thought I could make this appointment after seeing the listing two weeks before. Sure, I’d fallen in love with the old brick walls and rustic beams framing the place, but what had I been thinking, calling the realtor up and asking to come down with my carpenter friend?

  I thought I was ready. Dammit, I felt ready, at the time, but now? With the anniversary of my father’s death hanging over me like a black cloud? I didn’t think I could be ready for another thing in my entire life, much less the consideration of moving on.

  “It was never going to be easy, Kylie,” Devin said gently, lightly stroking his fingers down my arm. “But you need to do something to crawl out of this hole you’re in, and it might as well be this. He wanted this for you.”

  Soundlessly, I nodded, knowing he was right, and I pulled myself off the bed to walk out the door, leaving him in that cavern of sorrow. In the hall, I noticed that the door to my mother’s bedroom was closed. I thought about knocking, but I knew what would happen. We would argue, we would fight. She’d slam the door, and I’d leave the house. Our dynamic was a stifling reminder of everything gone and we did nothing to pull each other out of the suffocation of our continuous state of mourning.

  So, I walked past her door and to the bathroom. And with every step I took, I was painfully aware of the stabbing in my heart.

  I pushed myself through the motions of taking off my clothes. I turned on the water, stepped under the pelting spray, and I scrubbed myself down. Forcing my thoughts to stay on the good in my life—Devin, Devin, Devin—while keeping thoughts of my dad at bay. But that conscious effort did nothing but remind me of what I was trying to forget, and my forehead met the tiled wall, and the tears came fast and strong. They joined the droplets of shower water on my face, adding a taste of salt to the mix, and I sank to the tub’s floor.

  It wasn’t until Devin knocked on the bathroom door that I finally stood up and hurried through the rest of my shower routine. I turned the water off, wrapped a towel around myself, and opened the door, not caring that he’d notice the red rings around my eyes.

  “Yeah?” I asked.

  “I was just going to ask if you wanted some coffee.” He reached out to brush a tear from my cheek.

  I managed a smile and nodded. “Yeah … thanks.”

  “Okay,” he said, nodding once before stuffing his hands into the pockets of his jeans. He lingered for a second before turning toward the kitchen. I watched him walk away, watched the way his t-shirt shifted over the muscular structure of his back, and I wet my lips.

  I didn’t deserve this—what we had. But God, I didn’t know what the fuck I’d do without it.

  ♪

  The town was adorable and quaint, and everybody really seemed to know everybody else, just like you’d imagine. To the extent that, as we drove through, a few passersby took note of the fact that they didn’t recognize us.

  After Devin parked the truck, a few people waved and smiled. A young guy pushing a stroller even stopped and introduced himself as Patrick Kinney.

  “This is my daughter Meghan,” he said, gesturing at the toddler in the stroller. “You’re new around here?” he asked, looking between Devin and me.

  “Um, just checking out one of the shops in town,” I said, taken immediately by his height and muscular build.

  “Ah, which one? I can tell ya where it is.” I picked up on the subtle accent in his voice. My stomach swarmed with excitable lust.

  “Actually, there’s one for sale we’re looking at,” Devin chimed in. “An old bar?”

  Patrick nodded knowingly, and turned to point across the street. I followed his finger, saw the aged brick building, and a twitch started in my cheek and pulled at the corner of my lips. A ping of distinct acknowledgement struck my heart at the sight of the building, and I knew. I didn’t need to go inside, I didn’t need to check it out.

  I wanted that building, and it needed me.

  “What do ya want to do with it?” Patrick asked, turning back to us and squinting his eyes in the sunlight.

  I smiled. “A coffee shop.”

  His friendly smile faded, making way for an attractive look of excitement as he leaned down to smack me in the hormones with his apparently gorgeous eyes.

  “Don’t say that too loud, unless you’re very serious,” he said in a low, husky voice. “We desperately need a place for coffee around here. Dick’s Diner makes some instant shite that tastes the way it sounds.”

  I released a shrill giggle that made Devin’s eyes widen with surprise. “Oh, I’m very serious,” I said with an airy titter as I touched my hair and flipped a strand around a finger. Devin’s hand laid over my shoulder.

  “We’re meeting with the realtor, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to happen. From the looks of the place online, it seems perfect for what she’s looking for,” he said, stepping closer
to me. Speaking for me.

  Claiming me? My cheeks were on fire at the possibility.

  Patrick smiled. “Oh, trust me—a coffee shop is perfect. Hope it happens, ehm—” And he waited for my name, tipping his head and extending a hand toward me.

  Devin cut in, taking his hand and shaking heartily. “Devin, and this is Kylie.”

  “It was nice to meet you,” I said, and he smiled.

  “You too. Hope I see you around,” and he was off again, walking the little girl down the street. Devin looked down at me, eyes narrowed and shaking his head.

  “Wow, I thought you were gonna start humping his leg,” he said, releasing the hold on my shoulder.

  “I almost did,” I admitted, and then pouted.

  “You need to get laid,” Devin laughed, leading me in the direction of the bar.

  “Yeah, probably. It’s been a while,” I said with a thoughtful sigh.

  He cocked a brow. “How long?”

  “You don’t just ask someone that,” I laughed, and then conceded. “High school.”

  Devin turned to me with a look of horror. “You haven’t had sex in, what? Five years?”

  “Oh, good, Dev. Say it a little louder,” I grumbled as an older woman took a scowling glance in our direction. She shook her head as she wandered down the sidewalk. “Oh look, we’re already making friends. And yes,” I hissed, “it’s been a long time. But I was kind of, um, distracted. With family stuff.”

  “I get it. I’m just wondering if your virginity has grown back,” he quipped.

  “Well, if it hasn’t, I can say for sure that my vagina is dusty as fuck,” I said too casually, and a man walking his dog abruptly turned his head to gawk at me.

  Devin lowered his mouth to my ear. “Who’s making friends now?”

  “Yeah, whatever,” I grumbled as we neared the weathered old building. “And you can’t criticize me for my lack of a sex life. I don’t see you going out.”

  His Adam’s apple bobbed, and he cleared his throat. “Don’t you worry about how often I get laid,” he said uncomfortably.