Page 3 of Chaining Daisy
Shit.
Shit.
“Well, there are worse names. One of the nurses who used to work here was Matthew Bates. Can you guess what his nickname was?”
Her teeth come out to chew her lip as she thinks, and I’m captivated by the sight. I can tell the moment she gets the joke because she gives a startled little gasp and those eyes, those beautiful big eyes stare up at me, scandalized. “Masturbate?” she whispers, gaze darting around to make sure no one else in the hall can see us. As if that word is still wicked and shocking to her.
Fuck, I hope it is.
Before she can see my dick rising to full mast, I spin around and face the vending machine. I shove my card roughly into the chip reader and punch a code twice in repetition. Two granola bars fall into the collection pan and I retrieve my card and them, subtly putting my hand in my pocket and then tucking my boner into my waistband in the process.
Then I turn and hand one to Daisy. “Breakfast.”
Her mouth purses. “Ugh–”
I shake a finger at her, and then, out pops a phrase that sets the tone for everything to come between us. Low and husky, I state, “Daddy knows best.”
* * *
5 monthslater
I shouldn’t have doneit. I shouldn’t have gotten involved. Her mother’s case wasn’t surgical, but the way Daisy’s eyes lit up when I offered to review her mother’s case clinched it. I had to.
That was just the first meeting of many I had with them, until meetings became hang outs, and hang outs became dinners. Trying to be helpful, but also because I couldn’t stay away from that laugh. I’d stop by with flowers, card games—any excuse to try and wrangle a laugh out of Daisy.
Her mother, Darla, was sweet and kind, but it was Daisy who made the room light up. Daisy whose shy smiles and snarky retorts made my stomach skip like rocks across a pond.
I thought about asking her out dozens of times. Hundreds. I’m not shy; I typically consider myself aggressive. But hitting on a woman in a bar is so completely different from hitting on a woman with heartbreak haunting her eyes.
No matter how much we talked and laughed, her worried gaze always slid back to her mother. It never stayed on me. Her face always grew pensive and haunted.
I knew what I had to do—what she needed.
There was an experimental trial I could get her mother into … I had a friend who owed me a favor. But insurance wouldn’t cover it, the costs were out-of-pocket.
Daisy and her mother would never have taken a check.
So I came up with another solution. It was probably a terrible idea. I was probably shooting myself in the foot by doing it. But that’s when the demon appeared on my shoulder. Because if I did it, Daisy would always be mine. Maybe not the way I wanted, but still …mine.
The funny thing about morality is … it’s not nice and neat like science. It can't be put into a box. It’s more like water in a glass. Once that glass is cracked, all of the water will slowly trickle out.
Mine.
That word started to become an obsession for me.
The trickle began before I even proposed to Darla. The crack widened when she said yes.
On the surface, the marriage ensured Darla could get better insurance and that special treatment, though other people made all the romantic assumptions they wanted about us. But underneath, in this dark little corner of my head that I tried to ignore … it ensured that somehow, some way, Daisy would always be mine.
Even as Daisy walks her mother down the aisle in the hospital chapel—a room set up with empty wooden benches, linoleum, and scented by antiseptic instead of flowers—it’s Daisy’s long, slim legs I look at, her svelte figure, the column of her neck where her brunette hair is swept up into a ponytail full of curls.
There is no audience. She and her mother don’t speak to extended family. Grandparents gone. Daisy’s biological father is a mystery …they didn’t have anyone to invite. Daisy’s mother is the only family she has in the whole world … and she’s about to lose her—which is how I justify everything to myself.
But I didn’t invite anyone on my side, worried they’d see through me, worried that my depravity would leak out through my expressions, that they’d take one look into my eyes and realize how utterly fucking evil I’d become.
Because it is evil.
But I can’t stop myself from doing it.
