Daisy Haites (Magnolia Parks Universe, #2)

by Jessa Hastings

The corner of his mouth flicked up and now I try to make him make that smile at me every time I see him.

cuties

“I’m good here…” His words trail. “Are you good here?” “For now,” I lie and he laughs. For always, I’m afraid.

screaming

How it removes all traces of sin. Do you know what original sin is? It’s this theological concept that we were all born innately sinful and my brother loves it.4 Says it’s one of his two “get out of jail free cards”.5 That we were all already born sinful so he’s just living up to his nature. But I don’t like it. I don’t like the idea that we’re born bad because if we’re all born sinners, I don’t know if we can ever really wash ourselves clean. Do you believe children carry the sins of their father? Have you heard of that? Generational sins, ancestral sins—do you believe in those?

nature or nurture fr

I mean—BJ gave a shit about Magnolia because he’s been fucking obsessed with her since he was six.

i miss them

I know now—I get them, how fucking tied they are to each other and their monumental levels of dysfunction—that she was crying because she was trying to have sex with someone who wasn’t BJ. I should have known that, should have seen it, but she’d already got me by then. I was all in, all in love and shit. She could have fucked me or fucked me over, it wouldn’t have mattered either way. I wasn’t going anywhere. I still haven’t gone anywhere. I don’t think Beej knows that part—don’t even know if he should know. I don’t want to be the one to tell him either because it’s our chink; if we’d kill each other over anything, it’ll be her. He can’t see straight about her, but neither can I. We both love her and neither of us can do shit about it.

so messy omg

Beej tilts his head at her, eyes all soft, looking at her like she’s just his.

i'm deceased

She’s always been a sucker for boys who look like the blonde one from Fast & Furious,

this is so real

trying not to smile too much, trying not to mount him on the spot, trying not to melt into loving him accidentally.

OMG

He started laughing and a piece of his laugh snagged on my heart and I didn’t want him to stop.

so cute

I smacked him in the arm and he cracked a laugh that I caught because his laugh is a bit like that. He shook his head a tiny bit. “You’re good at everything you do.” He gave me a slither of a smile. “It’s annoying, a bit.” “Hey.” I pursed my lips together. “Thank you. For this.” He gave me a half smile then slipped his hand behind my head— which I remember thinking at the time, hey, you don’t normally do that. His eyes flickered from my eyes to my mouth, unable to decide where to land. Eyes, eventually. “I said I would.”

i love a man that keeps his promises

I think when you’re trying not to feel a certain way about people, sometimes it’s easier to keep them flat on a page, but Christian singing all the words to “Beyond” made me feel nervous because I wasn’t sure who he was singing about, and, no matter how much I wanted it to be, I was 99.99 percent sure it wasn’t me.

aww

But I don’t actually have a Christian, I don’t think. Not the way I wish I did.

aw

Someone being dismissive of Christian is not someone being dismissive of me, but there’s that motherfucking Feelings Monster again!

defend your man, girl

And Christian. I have a Christian.

YESS

“But you don’t bring others here, full stop. And you definitely don’t bring other girls here to hang out for nine hours before you have sex with them.”

he really likes her

Later that night at work, I feel more keen to see Daisy than I want to say. I haven’t seen her in a few days. Missed her for a second, that’s all—which is weird, sure—but I guess we spend a bit of time together these days.

i love them already

“She only gets firsts,” I tell him, sounding more proud of her than I should because now I won’t hear the end of it.

that's cute

I avoid my best friend’s eyes so I don’t have to see the look I know he’s giving me and decide instead to pay attention to some other girls because every time he tells me he thinks I’m into Daisy it fucks with my head. Because I’m not. It’s not like that. I don’t love Daisy and I need to make sure Henry knows that. I tap her on the arm and say I’ve got to do a round in the room (for work) but immediately beeline for a table of models.

men…

I don’t care how some girl from Miami thinks my hair should look, and I’d stop her myself if I wasn’t completely distracted by Daisy and my fucking bartender having the chat of their God damn lives. I didn’t leave her there to talk to Matthew the Hot Australian Bartender. I left her with Henry, whom I know she’d never shag, but now he’s gone and disappeared and it’s Daisy and the bartender, whom I heard someone refer to last week as “Fuckable Matt”.

i love a jealous trope

“You just look a bit agitated…” I glance at him then back at Daisy. “I’m not, I’m good. I’m fine, I am. Is she alright, though, do you reckon?” “Who?” he asks, smirking. “Daisy, you git—who else?” “Who else, ey?” He snorts and I toss him a look. “Do I think Daisy’s alright over there with the sexy Australian lifeguard-bartender? Yeah, man—I think she’s fi—” I’m already on my feet before he finishes the sentence.

i love this

“She’s going to stay the night,” I tell him, even though she and I haven’t talked about it yet. She will. And I want her to.

love a man that knows what he wants

“Still here, guys.” “Then leave,” Christian tells him without looking at him.4 “Been your best friend for twenty fucking years and that’s how you’re gonna talk to me?” Henry gives him a look. “How pussy-whipped are you?” “Right now? Very.” Christian nods once, still not looking over at him5 and I feel like my head’s in the clouds because they’re talking about me and I love him6 when he goes like this, so serious and so solemn, precision-focused on the task at hand, which happens to be me.

that's everything

Staring, just looking at my face. Inspecting it, almost like he’s seeing it for the first time. “What?” I ask, feeling self-conscious. He shrugs. “You have nice eyes.” “They’re brown.” He gets a little closer, shakes his head. “Bit of gold in there.” He squints at me. “You have a freckle on the corner of your lip,” he tells me. I sniff a laugh. “We’ve been hooking up for—what?—like, four months now and you’ve just noticed that?” “Five.” He gives me a little look and I mirror it back, then he covers my eyes with his hand. “Alright, go on—where are my freckles, then?” I find myself loving that he doesn’t hesitate to touch me—that somehow we’ve crossed that imaginary threshold where touching each other becomes second nature, thoughtless, almost—so I reach out my hand and touch his face, blindly getting a feel for it, grabbing it more than necessary just because. I feel my way to below his mouth and to the right, then point. “There.” A little further down, a little more right. “And there.”

i'm obsessed

and he’s staring down at me—brows low, face serious and all ripe with the kind of confusion one might have when you realise someone likes you more than you like them and I feel shamefully see-through, like I just gave all of me all away. And he’s all surprised that I know his face, but what he doesn’t know is that how he looks in the morning time is burned into my memory and one day, when all this is over and we’re not hooking up anymore and he’s with someone else and I’ve figured out how to move on and past him and we’re not together anymore7 because I don’t think he has room in his heart to see me like that when all he can see is her, even if sometimes now it feels like maybe8 he could—even then, I will see his face when I close my eyes.

omg

Daisy’s different. Don’t tell her because she’s already pretty up herself, but she’s probably one of my favourite people now. Funny, clever, so good looking, and she knows she’s hot shit. That makes her hotter somehow. Anyway, I don’t care when she stays and she’s stayed over a few nights this week, actually. Bit weird, but I sort of didn’t want her to go. Don’t know why, I just have fun with her, I guess. Maybe I even just like it when she’s around. I like getting breakfast with her. Like how her hair looks in the mornings, how puffy her lips go. I like how she never orders the same thing, ever, even when I can tell she wants to get what she had the day before, she won’t.

he's falling for her

I correct her, a bit annoyed. Then I shrug, wanting to come off more casual than I feel—don’t know why I don’t feel casual, to be honest.

alexa play casual by chappell roan

“Are we fighting?” Daisy whispers as she leans across the table. “We don’t fight,” I grunt, looking away. She kicks me gently under the table, looking over at me with big eyes and fuck her with those big eyes that make me swallow heavy. I don’t know why. “It feels like we’re fighting,” she tells me. I shake my head, disinterested. “We aren’t.” A silence hovers between us. We have silences a lot. I like them usually. Usually with her being quiet feels like I’m alone, and I never feel like I’m alone when I’m with someone else.

i need this

“You’re quite good,” she tells me, taking another sip of my coffee. “Quite?” I blink. “Very.” She nods earnestly. I eye her. “Better.” She points to herself. “Best.”

i love their banter

Christian’s pressing his hand into his mouth and trying to keep it together, and I like the feeling of making him laugh.

cute

I’ll have to make him work hard for a minute, but not too long, because I’m constantly fighting the compulsion to run my hands through his hair. Or at least that’s how I think it might feel if I didn’t know all that’s just a trick of my head and that none of that is real… “Baby Haites.” He laughs, shaking his head. “My little wallflower.” My.14 I swallow heavy, try my best not to read into it because he doesn’t mean anything by it and I know for sure why he brought me there.

i'm dead

But she wasn’t because she doesn’t see anything but BJ. It’s fascinating, actually, being in a room with them. It doesn’t matter who they’re around or what they’re doing. It’s almost trance-like, the way they move towards one another. Like moths to flames. Romantic, nearly. She didn’t see Christian hoping she would notice his hands on another girl, she didn’t see him cupping my arse or his nose in my neck because she was all eyes for Ballentine. She reached over and found a reason to touch his chest, do up a button or something—put something in his pocket, maybe, I don’t know—just a non-existent reason to touch him and this jealousy rattled through me because I wanted to be able to touch Christian like that, but I couldn’t and I can’t, because it’s not me he wants.

my fav toxic, messy couple

I ended up sleeping with a Formula One racer to prove to myself that, actually, I didn’t like Christian, which actually failed spectacularly because, as I would realise a few days later, I had already fallen in love with Christian Hemmes.

omg

I frowned, hating the thought of bad things happening to him.

aw

“Because they look at each other like that.” He smiled far too tenderly for a boy as cool as himself. “Always have—” He shrugged. “They’ve never not loved each other.” “Even when she was with Christian?” I blinked. Henry gave me a look. “She has never not loved my brother.”

their love gives me goosebumps

And so here’s the fucked up thing: seeing him love her made me like him more than I liked him before. Not because I’m a masochist, but because my Friend with Benefit became a Human with Heart. I could see through his heart and I knew that loving his best friend’s girlfriend would kill him, I could see it in the way he watched them—this fresh pain all over him, him trying his best to hide it. If I had the foresight, I would have known what all this meant—him trying his best to hide it would mean he’d have to rip my heart from its chest, rub my love all over himself to cover the scent and throw them off. If I had the foresight, I would have known it would kill me. But, with or without foresight, I would let him again and again and again.

oh dear

Memories are funny, don’t you think? Creep up on you, break through the ground of your mind like a weed, even when they don’t have permission to be there.

the power of nostalgia

I just remember seeing her and thinking she was like, stupid beautiful, and I wondered if I should go talk to her, but then BJ pissed off Parks and she snapped into FYBJ mode and my hands got pretty full pretty quickly. How Daisy’s looked that night lives in my brain, rent-free, 365 days a year. Ordering coffee: Daisy’s face. Filling up my car: Daisy’s face. Buying milk: Daisy’s face. Just a good face, I guess.

poor daisy

When Beej and Parks broke up it was a complete nightmare. They were together one day—couldn’t have hacked them apart with a machete—and then they weren’t. The signs were there if we looked. There was a party and Magnolia wasn’t there, but honestly, because of them and how they were, it never even crossed my mind—it was so out of character for BJ back then. He loved her, he was mad about her, she was his every waking thought, he’d kill someone for giving her a look sideways.

i need a love as powerful as theirs

I can see for the most part what we were: she was on fire, being burnt alive. I was the silver blanket she wrapped herself in.

oh

“Off to see Daisy?” I give him a look. “She’s with someone.” “Like a hookup?” “I don’t know—” I scowl. Kind of hate the thought of it, though, and what the fuck’s he asking me that for? He gives me a little smile. “You annoyed about that?” “No.” But yes. I frown. “I don’t care.”

i wish he showed more that he does actually care

“Just hook up with another girl.” Henry shrugs. Not really the kind of advice I’m used to getting from him, so I peer over suspiciously. His eyebrows are up, an annoying look on his face—he’s goading me. Trying to prove a point. “No.” I shrug indifferently. “Why?” “Don’t want to.” I shrug defiantly as I climb into my car. Turn the ignition on as quick as I can so there’s a sound filling the space in my head, but the question comes anyway: why don’t I want to?

he just wants to be with daisy

The boat’s good for thinking too. Quiet, even when it’s not literally. The sun and the water do that for me, and I like the combination. Like how it hits the water, makes my brain feel good, looser. Art does that to my brain too. At its best, it takes me out of whatever I’m doing at the moment, pulls me to another time—at worst, it makes me tilt my head and look at everything a bit differently.

real

“I’ll have an Old Fashioned, and she’ll have—” I cut him off. “I know what she likes.”

slay

but I’d take a crack in the face for Daisy. Not that this is about Daisy. Even though it’s a bit about Daisy, I s’pose. And then someone grabs me by the arm and swings me around to face them. Someone. Like I don’t know who. Cute little hands. I recognise her touch.

i love them

I do like kissing her, I have to admit. More than I like kissing other people, which could be a strange thing to be aware of, but she’s also just better at it than anyone else I’ve kissed in recent memory. I spend a lot of my time thinking about kissing her. What parts of her body I could touch, how she goes when I do. How it feels when her mouth brushes over my shoulder…

WOW

“He was putting other people’s drinks on my tab.” “My drinks!” She gestures to herself. I frown. “Yeah, so—” “So we’re sleeping together!” she interrupts. “A month ago you fired that Belgian man who tried to make me pay for drinks!” I give her a look because it’s not the same thing. “Yeah, but that’s because you’re my—” I stop short. Fuck. Her eyebrows shoot up, instantly drunk with power. “I’m your what?” I shift on my feet, folding my arms over my chest. I think I feel my face falter. She’s my what? I don’t know. I don’t know what the fuck is going on with me.

such a confusing man

“I didn’t like how he was looking at you,”

hot

She looks so happy. I like it when she looks happy.

cute

She looks offended, like something I said actually hurt her. I don’t like the feeling. “Of course he’s my friend.” “What kind of friend?” I ask her and I don’t know why. I don’t really want to know the answer anyway, and she’s once again offended by the question. “My best friend,” she says quietly, and I don’t know why, but that being her response makes me want to fucking throw up and I think I hate Romeo Bambrilla, which is weird, because a half an hour ago I didn’t have one bad thing to say about him and here I am now shrugging all dismissively in the face of his alleged best friend, talking shit about him. “He’s a fuck boy,” I tell her. I don’t know why.

i love the jealousy

She doesn’t say anything, just glares over at me and I hate myself. My mind is reeling—what the fuck does she need saving from? I feel sick thinking about something happening to her, and I don’t know what she means—I don’t want to know what she means, either. If he saved her, then they have one of those fucking mythic connections and I don’t want them to, so all I can do is to make light of it.

he's defo in love