THE RAKE WHO CHASED ONLY ME

DAISY ♡ Losing my parents I never expected it to happen like that. A car crash. Quick and final and completely without warning. It has been two weeks now but every morning I wake up and there is a full second just one second where I forget. Then it comes back. And it hits the same way it hit the first time. I could not stay in my father’s house alone. I had lived my whole life around the sound of my mother in the kitchen and my father’s laugh down the hallway and now the house just held the echo of them. Every room. Every corner. The silence was the loudest thing in it. Ivy had called three days after the funeral. She did not ask if I was okay, she already knew I wasn’t. She said, “Pack your bags. Stay as long as you need.” That was Ivy. No fanfare. Just a door swung open. So I packed. Two suitcases. My camera. The small framed photo of my parents from the mantelpiece that I wrapped in one of my sweaters so it wouldn’t break. I moved around the house slowly, touching things I wasn’t ready to stop touching. My mother’s reading chair. The hook by the door where my father always hung his keys even though there were no keys left to hang there. Before I walked out I stopped in front of the wall where their photographs hung , the big one from their twentieth anniversary, my mother laughing at something my father had just said, his face caught mid-grin. I pressed two fingers to my lips and held them up to the frame. I’ll be okay, I told them. I wasn’t sure yet if it was true. My phone rang just as I reached the door. It was ivy, u was expecting her call. I picked it up. “Hey Ivy, I was just about to leave.” “Okay babes. I’ll watch out for you. Drive safe.” “See you soon.” I hung up, picked up my keys and pulled the door shut behind me without looking back. If I looked back I would sit down on the front step and not get up. The drive was an hour and thirty minutes. I drove all the way in silence with the city rolling past my windows and my hands steady on the wheel because someone had to be steady. When I pulled into Ivy’s building parking lot she was already at the sit-out upstairs. I hadn’t even cut the engine before she was coming downstairs. That is the thing about Ivy Hart, she moves toward people. It is just who she is. She pulled me into a hug the moment I stepped out of the car. Tight. Both arms. The kind that doesn’t ask anything, just holds. I felt my eyes sting and pressed them shut. “Oh Daisy.” Her voice was soft against my hair. “You’ve been crying.” I had been crying. Most of the drive, if I was honest. “I’m fine,” I said, which was what I always said. She pulled back and looked at my face with the particular expression she has had since we were eighteen, the one that means she sees straight through me and is choosing not to call me on it right now. She took my hand. “Come inside. Don’t worry about the bags, the help will bring them up.” Her apartment was warm. That was the first thing I noticed, the warmth of it, the light, the smell of something herbal coming from the kitchen. I sat on the couch and let myself sink into it and Ivy appeared a few minutes later with two mugs of tea, setting one in front of me and curling into the opposite cushion with the ease of someone entirely comfortable in their own space. “Thank you,” I said. “For this. For letting me stay.” “Daisy.” Her voice carried a gentle warning. “Don’t thank me.” “I mean it, Ivy. I really” “You are my best friend.” She reached over and took my hand in both of hers, her thumbs pressing warm against my knuckles. “Do you remember when my parents divorced? You let me sleep in your hostel room for an entire semester. You bought me noodles every night and let me cry through every one of your lectures.” I laughed a little at that. A real laugh tho, small and surprised. “You were a disaster.” “I was a complete disaster,” she agreed. “And you didn’t once make me feel like a burden. So please, don’t thank me for doing the same.” I squeezed her hand and she squeezed back and for a moment the grief settled into something I could actually sit with. Then the door opened. Dexter Hart walked in from the direction of the in-house gym, and the first thing that hit me was the sheer size of him, tall built , the kind of body that spoke to hours of very deliberate work. Shirtless. Sweat across his chest and shoulders. A white towel slung around his neck that he was using with great confidence to dry absolutely nothing. I had known Dexter for as long as I had known Ivy and in all that time we had never managed to occupy the same space without disagreeing with each other. He was a rake, unashamed, consistent, practically professional about it. Women came and went through his life like seasons and he never looked bothered by any of them leaving. “Hello Daisy,” he said, clocking me immediately with those sharp dark eyes. “Hey Dexter,” I said, and gave him a small wave because it felt like the least amount of acknowledgment I could get away with. He moved to head back toward the gym, then stopped. Turned. When he looked at me again something in his expression had shifted — quieter, less performative. “I heard about your parents,” he said. “I’m sorry for your loss.” There it was. The phrase I had heard 10 million times in two weeks, each time landing like a stone dropped into still water. I nodded slowly. “I was on a business trip when the burial was arranged,” he continued. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be there.” I looked at him. Hold it for a moment. “Your presence wouldn’t have brought them back,” I said, and kept my voice even. “But thank you for your kindness.” Something moved across his face. His jaw tightened slightly, not anger, more like a refinement. He looked at me the way people look at things they weren’t expecting. “You haven’t changed,” he said finally, a low note in his voice that could have been amusement or irritation. Probably both. “Ivy mentioned you’d be staying. Try not to redecorate.” That, I thought, is exactly why we never got along. A rake with a grumpy streak and a territorial instinct about his own furniture. I said nothing back. Ivy had reappeared from the kitchen, her eyes moving between the two of us with barely concealed alarm. “Please tell me you’re not fighting already.” “No,” I said, standing and smoothing down my jeans. “Ivy, can I go to my room? I’m exhausted.” “Of course, come on” I was already moving toward the stairs. I didn’t look at Dexter again. But habit made me glance back once from the bottom of the staircase, just a second, and that was when I saw it. A smear of lipstick. Deep red. On the side of his neck, just below his jaw. I turned back around without a word and walked upstairs. Some things never change.