Page 63 of Hot Dad Summer

“I remember it a little differently than you’re trying to tell it,” I said. “Besides, you know I only have eyes for Daisy and it’s driving you crazy.”

“Do you?” She smiled. “I bet you think you’re having so much fun with my sister. Ask anybody in town how long your fun lasts, Flynn. Ask Charlie’s mom.”

People had been asking Charlie’s mom for eight years, and if any of them had listened to her answer, my reputation would’ve died of boredom a long time ago. Cameron got pregnant when we were twenty-four and casual, and I, the brother allegedly allergic to commitment, offered her everything I had. I said we could get married and she could move in. I got down on one knee in her mother’s driveway and Cameron laughed until she cried and then just cried, and then she said no, because we weren’t in love and she refused to raise our son inside a polite performance. So we chose the truth instead, and built the best co-parenting operation on this lake, and the town looked at that, looked at me dating around after, and wrote the story it liked better. Flynn Calloway can’t commit. I let them keep it, because maybe it was true because at the tiem I hadn’t met anyone I deeply loved. I’d never even told my brothers about the truth with Cameron, which was why Wes could look me dead in the eye and tell me I’d never stick to anything. The truth was nobody’s business, and Cameron knew, and Charlie was happy, and that was the whole list of people I cared about at the time.

I was never afraid of forever. I was unwilling to do it at half-strength. And then Tyler walked into the house three years ago with a woman in a vintage dress who laughed with her body and soul, and I’d dreamed about finally finding someone half as magical as her.

“You’ve got nothing, Brooke,” I said, and went back to my motor. “Go dry out somewhere.”

She finally dropped the act and the sugar drained out of her face. “Okay. Real talk, then. You’re never giving my sister anything permanent. Everybody knows it. You’ll drift, because that’s what you do, and when you drift it’ll wreck her, and I’ll be right there to remind her I told her so. So honestly?” She tipped her head. “Sleeping with me now would be the merciful thing. Skip the middle part.”

I put the wrench down and stopped joking, and I watched her realize that the joking had been the polite version of me.

“Let me say this once.” I kept my voice cold and steady. “Daisy is not temporary. What my brothers and I are building with her is not an arrangement and I don’t want it to be for just a summer, and you don’t get to stand within a hundred yards of it. There’s a word for what I feel about that woman, and in your entire life of trying, nobody’s ever felt it about you. That’s why you’re here on my dock in a tacky dress. Not because you want me. Because being unwanted is the one thing you’ve never figured out how to spend your way out of. I think it’s time for me to escort you out and I don’t want you coming back.”

As I walked her out, her chin came up, and her eyes went over my shoulder, up the hill toward the parking lot, and something in them changed.

I heard the sound of a golf cart. I started to turn. And Brooke, who had just watched her last play die on the dock, found one more, because she’d seen what was coming down the hill before I had. She grabbed my face with both hands and kissed me.

For half a second I was too stunned to move, hands coming up, and over Brooke’s shoulder I saw Daisy standing at the top of my dock in yesterday’s dress with her hair a mess and her mouth open, and I watched her face twist in shock and her heart break.

“Daisy! Wait!”

She ran.

I peeled Brooke off me by both arms and decided to do a proper public service. I turned, lifted, and threw her off the dock.

The splash was enormous. She came up shrieking about her hair and her phone.

“Water’s warm, you’ll live,” I called down. “That was your one warning, Brooke. Come near Daisy or my family again and I’ll make sure everyone on this lake knows exactly what you are. Now swim.”

I was already running, yelling Daisy’s name. She was sprinting toward town and I got close enough to see her gasp before she dove into a tiny beat-up smart car idling at the curb. There was a bumper sticker on the back that said MY OTHER CAR IS A BONG. Something about that car itched at the back of my brain, but I was too busy watching the woman I loved disappear inside it to scratch.

“Daisy! Come back... Daisy!”

The car fishtailed onto the main road and was gone.

I stood in my own parking lot breathing like I’d been dragged behind a boat, and then I did the two fastest things I’ve ever done. I called Wes, and I ran for my truck.

“Wes. Marina, now. Brooke ambushed me and Daisy saw it and she’s running.” I threw the truck into reverse with the phone against my shoulder. “And somebody find out who the hell drives a smart car with a bumper sticker that says MY OTHER CAR IS A BONG.”

49

***Daisy***

From the top of the hill I could see the whole marina laid out below me, the docks, the boats, and Flynn standing at the end of the main dock with my little sister’s hands on his face and her mouth on his.

I’d driven the whole way rehearsing one question, and I never got to ask it.

Seeing Brooke and Tyler all over each other on social media had hurt my pride, but this hurt something deeper. My brain was already whispering that Brooke had been facing the hill, that she’d seen me before she did it, that the math didn’t work, but my body didn’t care about math.

“Shit. Shit. Shit.”

I ran. Not toward the golf cart, which would have been the sane thing, but down the road toward town, in yesterday’s dress, crying so hard the world went smeary. I heard Flynn shout my name behind me and it just made my legs go faster.

I’d made it maybe a quarter mile when a car slowed beside me its small, beat-up engine whining hard. The window buzzed down and a voice I hadn’t heard in over a month said, “Hey, D.”

Rat. Behind the wheel of the same smart car, wearing sunglasses that had definitely come from a gas station, completely unbothered by the sobbing woman speed-walking down the lake road.