Page 102 of Stealing Sunshine

I lean away from her, making sure she’s looking at me before scowling. “I don’t shiver in fear of anything.”

She rolls her eyes dramatically. “Mhm, if you say so. Now, spill!”

“I don’t like when my feet touch the bottom material of a pool.”

A long, stagnant pause, and then a laugh explodes from her mouth. “Are you being serious?”

“Make fun of me, Daisy, I dare you,” I warn, attempting to sound threatening, but the humour in my tone is a massive giveaway that it’s a façade. “And stop laughing.”

“I’m just . . . what material exactly? The bumpy kind in an in-ground pool or the slick plastic from a pop-up?”

I shiver. “You’re having too much fun with this.”

She holds my stomach, leaning close, body shaking with bright laughter. “I’m sorry! I wasn’t expecting something so mundane to be what scares you. If it makes you feel better, I don’t like bodies of water.”

“That’s not the only thing, smartass, but I’m not telling you anything else until you tell me what you’re afraid of. Trulyafraidof.”

Sobering slightly, she nods. “Okay, okay. Well, I think out of everything, I’m most terrified of running out of time.”

“In what way?”

“Like, imagine if you had this entire list of things you wanted to accomplish before you died, and instead of making the effort to start crossing them off, you kept putting it off further and further until you woke up one day and realized that you’d wasted too much time. You kept telling yourself that you’d send that text to catch up with a friend tomorrow or that you’d accept that date invite next weekend, then before you knew it, you’ve grown apart from your friend, and you’re spending another night in your bed alone.

“My mama used to tell me that everything that’s supposed to happen will happen eventually, but Johnny was the twin who believed in fate and all those shiny things we’re told as children. I’ve always known that if you want something, you need to be the one to take the steps to make it happen. Good things happen to good people, yes, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have to chase them. So, yeah, I guess my biggest fear is getting too comfortable in the life that I have and forgetting that there’s more out there waiting for me. I just have to put in the effort to find it and take it for myself.”

“Here I am talking about pool floors, and you go and drop that? Christ, Daisy, you’re too good for the likes of me,” I mutter, her words banging around in my mind.

She laughs that wind chime laugh, and I melt. “Not at all, actually. I might not believe in everything Johnny and my moms do, but I’ve never not believed that opposites attract. It’s science, as far as I’m concerned.”

“And you think we’re opposites?” I ask.

She scoots from the mattress to my lap, making a home for herself in the arms I wrap around her. With her head nestled against my collarbone, she traces the black lines at the base of my throat.

“Yes, but in the best way. If we were too similar, I don’t think we’d be here right now.”

I rub her arm, soaking in the way the simple contact soothes the strike of fear that follows her statement. It’s there and gone before I can examine it fully.

“You’re right. My relationship with Vic was never meant to last, considering we were almost the exact same person.”

Daisy straightens slightly, her head lifting so we can look at one another. “I don’t remember her much from before I left for Calgary. You weren’t together then, right?”

“No. It was a couple months afterward and lasted just shy of a year. By the time Anna moved to town, we’d been broken up for a few months.”

“For what it’s worth, I’d have broken his dick too.”

A smile rips my lips apart. “So, you do know what happened, then. I wasn’t sure.”

“I think everyone in Cherry Peak knows what happened, Frosty. It’s not every day someone breaks a guy’s dick in the supermarket parking lot and gets driven away in the back of an RCMP car. Kristen called to tell me about it in the middle of one of my classes.”

My smile slowly falls as the heavier part of the story comes tumbling free. “She’d been cheating on me for months. I figured she was, but I was too headstrong to call her out on it, only to be wrong. When I did find out . . . I might have overreacted.”

“It’s too late to go back and change your actions now. If you could, would you?”

I roll a couple of answers around on my tongue before going with my gut. “No. The prick deserved it.”

She beams, eyes twinkling. “Yeah, that’s what I figured. My girl’s vicious when she wants to be.”

“Your girl?” I rasp.

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