Butternut Summer (34 page)

“Damn it,” he said again, fiddling with the settings on the unresponsive coffee machine. He yanked its plug out of the wall then, and he was just about to throw the whole thing into the garbage can when he heard a tapping on the office door.
That'll be Jason
, he thought, granting the coffee machine a temporary reprieve. Jason, who'd forgotten his keys again. But when he opened the door, he saw that it wasn't Jason. It was Daisy. Her mother's pickup was parked out front, the engine still running, and she was standing outside in the pouring rain, already soaking wet.

“Daisy,” he said, pulling her inside and forgetting, for a moment, the ambiguous note she'd ended things on last night. “What are you doing here so early? And why are you standing out in the rain?”

“I needed to talk to you,” she said simply.

“Okay, but let me get you a towel or something first,” he said.

“No, don't,” she said quickly. “I can't stay long. I left Jessica waitressing by herself.”

“Well, in that case, we better hurry up and talk,” Will said, trying to get a smile out of her. He didn't get one, but she let him take her by the hand and lead her farther into the office, so that was something, Will told himself.

“Have a seat,” Will said, locking the door behind him and indicating one of the plastic chairs that were there for waiting customers.

But Daisy shook her head and leaned on the desk instead. He came over to her and tried to read the expression on her face. But it was unreadable. She looked tired, though, he saw with concern. Her wet strawberry-blond hair was bedraggled, and her blue eyes were shadowed with fatigue. He waited for her to say something, but she just wrapped her arms around herself and shivered a little shiver. This was going to be bad, he decided.

“I couldn't sleep last night,” she said finally. “I mean, I couldn't sleep
at all
.”

“Neither could I,” Will said.

“But I did think, a lot, about you—about us. And do you know what I decided, Will?”

He shook his head.

“I decided that if you meant what you said about
wanting
to be a better person, then that's good enough for me. The
wanting
part. Because I think if that's the case, then the
being
part can't be far behind. Besides,” she added, with a little sigh, “I'm not perfect either. I'm not even close to perfect.”

“You're pretty close,” he said, feeling the first tiny wave of relief start to break over him.

“No, I'm not,” Daisy said. “If I were,” she went on, her voice dropping, “I wouldn't . . . I wouldn't sort of hate Christy right now.”

“Do you sort of hate me, too?”

“A little,” she nodded, her eyes dropping to the floor.

He laughed. “Oh, Daisy,” he said, pulling her into his arms. He held her tightly, and she held him back, and Will let himself feel, for the first time since Christy had stopped by their table last night, how afraid he'd been of losing her.

“I'm sorry,” he said, tightening his grip on her. “I should have told you, right from the start. I should have told you that day I came into Pearl's and asked you out again.”

“Actually, it's probably a good thing you didn't,” Daisy said, pulling far enough away from him to look up at him. “That might have been a deal breaker for me,” she added, with the ghost of a smile.

But Will was serious. “Daisy, look, I'm not defending Christy,” he said, looking down at her and brushing a damp strand of hair off her cheek, “any more than I'm defending myself. But what happened between us wasn't her fault. It was
both
of our faults. I went into it with my eyes open. If I could go back, I'd do it differently. I wouldn't do it at all. And you know what else I'd do differently? I would have gone out with you in high school. Assuming, of course, that you would have gone out with me.”

“Will, you barely knew me in high school,” she said, shaking her head, and he thought about telling her about all the volleyball games he'd watched, but he kissed her instead, until something else occurred to him.

“Daisy,” he said, stopping. “Do you want me to tell Mr. Phipps we don't need his cabin this weekend? Because we can wait. We can wait for as long as you need to wait.”

“Oh no,” she said, “we're going.”

“You sure?”

“I'm sure,” she said emphatically. “Because I can't live this way anymore.”

“What way?”

She blushed and looked down. “Will, I think about us being together
all
the time—every waking minute, and some nonwaking minutes, too. It's exhausting. This thing . . . it needs to happen. The sooner the better. Maybe then I can think about something else occasionally.” She looked back up at him, and for a second she looked so genuinely desperate that he almost laughed. But he stopped himself, because while he might think it was funny, she obviously didn't.

So he held her again, tightly, and she held him back, her wet clothes seeping into his dry clothes, and they stayed that way for a long time, until Will felt something in her give way. It was almost as if a tiny spring inside of her had been released. She let out a small, jagged sigh then and relaxed into him, and he knew something had changed between them. He knew she had let go of the last little piece of herself she had been keeping from him, protecting from him. She was in this now, with him, all the way, and it scared him, a little, to have that much responsibility for someone else. But because she was Daisy, he figured it would have scared him even more not to have it.

Y
ou're so quiet today,” Will said, taking his eyes off the road long enough to look at Daisy. It was Saturday evening, and they were in his pickup, driving out to Mr. Phipps's cabin.

Daisy shrugged. “I'm just . . . enjoying the drive,” she said, smiling at him, and he smiled back. But the truth was, she was nervous. No, she wasn't nervous, she was
beyond
nervous. She was more nervous now than she'd ever been in her entire life, and she'd been plenty nervous before in her twenty-one years on earth: nervous about standardized tests, nervous about championship volleyball games, nervous about college exams. But that kind of nervousness, she now understood, came under the heading of garden-variety nervousness. This nervousness was something different. This nervousness was in a league of its own. She stole a sideways glance at Will, wondering if he'd noticed it, but he was concentrating now on the notoriously twisty stretch of road that followed the contours of Butternut Lake.

“Not too much farther now,” he said a few minutes later, and Daisy nodded. This was the problem with waiting so long to lose your virginity, she decided, watching the pine and birch trees slide by outside. The longer you waited, the bigger a deal it became, until now, at twenty-one, it was so big a deal that Daisy was a complete and total wreck. If she ever had a daughter, she decided, she would tell her not to wait; she would tell her to hurry up and get it over with, with the first remotely acceptable candidate. But then she smiled. Because what were the chances, really, of any mother urging her daughter to treat her virginity like some unwanted piece of baggage, to be gotten rid of at the earliest possible opportunity?

“You're smiling,” Will said, sounding pleased as he looked at her again.

Daisy nodded.

“That's good,” he said. “I like it when you smile.” He took his hand off the wheel and reached over and took her hand, pulling it to him. Then, turning it palm up, he held it up to his mouth and kissed it gently.
Like a promise
, Daisy thought. And this simple gesture left her pinned weakly to her seat, almost overwhelmed by her need for him, because this desire was the flip side to her nervousness. This desire was beating through her veins and thrumming in her ears. There was nothing now, she knew, that would assuage it except what would happen between them tonight.

A moment later, Will needed two hands to drive, so he put her hand back in her lap, and Daisy examined her palm, almost as if she'd expected his kiss to leave a mark on it. But there was nothing there, so she tucked her hand, which was feeling a little shaky, firmly beneath her thigh and looked out the window again.

Calm down
, she told herself.
You're ready for this. You both are
. She'd been to see Dr. Novack, her family doctor, last week and had listened to his lecture about safe sex. It had been a little awkward, coming from the man who used to give her grape lollipops after she'd gotten her childhood vaccines, but Daisy had left his office with the desired prescription, and she'd taken it straight over to Butternut Drugs to be filled. And earlier in the week, Will had driven over to Ely, to a clinic there, to be tested for . . . well, for everything, she supposed. She didn't know all the details. But she did know that everything had been fine.

“Oh, by the way,” Will said now. “I bought some groceries for dinner tonight.” He indicated a cardboard box on the backseat of the pickup. “Nothing complicated, just stuff for spaghetti and a salad.”

“That sounds great,” she said, but she didn't think she'd be able to eat tonight. The only thing she'd been able to eat all day, in fact, was half a piece of toast for breakfast, and even that had been a challenge.

They lapsed into silence then. But a few minutes later, Will said, “Here it is,” and he slowed the truck and turned down a gravel driveway. He followed it a quarter of a mile through dense forest and then stopped in front of a large, A-frame cabin. Beyond the cabin was Butternut Lake, dusky blue in the evening light. As they got out of the truck, they were both struck, simultaneously, by the sense of isolation and quiet.

“Wow, he wasn't kidding when he said it was private,” Will said, taking the groceries out of the backseat. “He said his cabin's the only one in this bay. The rest of the land is National Forest.” Daisy nodded, swinging her backpack over her shoulder, and following Will up to the cabin's front door on unsteady legs. Will took out a key, fumbled with the lock, and pushed the door open.

“I'll turn some lights on,” he said, moving through the shadowy front room, snapping on the floor lamps and the table lamps, and Daisy saw with relief that the cabin was rustic but also comfortable, its living room filled with thick rugs, deep couches, and a big fireplace.

“It's a little chilly,” Will said apologetically. “Maybe we can start a fire before dinner.”

“That'd be nice,” Daisy said, looking around and wondering if she and Will would make love in front of the fireplace; then she blushed at the thought of being completely naked in front of him. No, they wouldn't make love in front of the fireplace, she decided. They'd make love in a real bed, with a full complement of sheets and blankets for her to hide underneath.

“We should probably get this stuff in the fridge,” Will said, indicating the groceries he was holding, and he headed for the kitchen.

“Here, let me do that,” Daisy said when Will put the box down on the counter. She wanted to have something other than her nervousness to concentrate on. But when she started taking things out of the box, Will came up behind her and put his arms around her waist. She dropped the head of lettuce she was holding onto the counter and shivered as he brushed her hair off her neck and grazed her skin with his lips.

“You know, Daisy,” he said, his breath soft against her ear. “It's not too late to change your mind. We don't have to do this. We can just have dinner and hang out. I saw some board games on the shelves by the fireplace.”

Daisy smiled, but his lips were nuzzling her neck now, making it hard for her to think clearly. “I don't know, Will. It's a long way to come for a game of Monopoly,” she said. “I don't even get cell-phone coverage out here.”

His arms tightened around her waist, and he started kissing her neck in earnest, and Daisy felt a warm, slow, liquid sensation slide through her whole body, temporarily overshadowing her nervousness. God, she loved the way he kissed her, loved the way he touched her. And suddenly, she was glad that he had so much more experience than she did, glad that at least one of them would know what they were doing tonight.
Oh, he'll know what he's doing all right
, a little voice inside her said, and an image of Christy, in her tight-fitting dress and high-heeled sandals, came into her mind. But she forced it right back out again. Will wasn't with Christy now. He could have been, presumably, if he'd wanted to be. But he didn't want to be. He wanted to be with Daisy. She flushed with pleasure, just thinking about it, and, twisting out of his arms, she turned to face him and kissed him on the lips.

But when Will started kissing her back, her shyness returned. Why couldn't she be brave now, the way she'd been brave that night in his truck? The night they'd practically undressed each other. But she already knew the answer to that question. She couldn't be brave like that now because then there'd been a built-in safety valve. She'd known they weren't going to make love in a pickup truck parked on a public street. But now, now they had the whole cabin to themselves; hell, it felt as if they had all of
northern Minnesota
to themselves. There was no one, and nothing, to stop them.

She felt Will's kiss changing now, getting deeper, harder, and she felt herself responding, sliding her arms around his neck, anchoring her body against his. In one fluid motion, without ever breaking his kiss, he put his hands around her waist and lifted her onto the kitchen counter. She wrapped her legs around his waist and pulled him closer to her.

“Oh, Daisy,” he murmured through their kiss, and his hands moved to the front of her blouse, which he started to unbutton with great care and tenderness. Daisy felt herself tense up a little. Were they really going to do this now? She'd thought, somehow, there'd be something more leading up to it. Dinner, or talking, or cuddling on the couch . . . But then she realized that Will had been waiting for this all summer. And so had she, in her own way.