Hothouse Flower (Calloway Sisters 2)

I can’t see the couch from here or Daisy seated on the cushion. I’m nervous for her, but I’m also relieved that she’s finally going to get this shit off her chest. Before we left the bridge, she said, “I don’t want to drag myself down anymore.”

There is no good time to release news that hurts people.

Lily said something like that tonight, and I think Daisy has finally learned that too.

“Is she okay?” Connor asks me.

“She’s better. She just needed to scream,” I say, twirling a fucking salt shaker on the counter.

“That’s not surprising.” Connor hands me a cup of coffee. “I have to force Rose to scream every now and then. Must be a product of being raised by Samantha.”

Lo shakes his head. “Lily doesn’t have that problem.”

We both look at him. He doodles fucking circles and squares on a paper napkin, and his pen stops at our silence.

Connor tells him, flat out, “That would be because Samantha didn’t raise Lily.” Lo’s best friend, his girlfriend, his fiancée—she was pretty much the undesirable daughter, I’ve come to realize over the years. She was the one Samantha let run off to the Hale residence, the ugly fucking duckling, even though she is beautiful, just too shy for Samantha to understand.

Lo doesn’t deny the claim, but he doesn’t say anything either.

“You can’t control the past, Lo,” Connor adds. “And I raised myself too. It’s not such a shameful thing.”

He resumes drawing on the napkin. I nudge Lo’s shoulder. “How you holding up?”

“Ask me again when it fucking sinks in,” he says.

“That you’re going to have a kid?”

“Yeah,” he nods. “And I already feel fucking awful for the thing.”

“He may not have addiction problems, Lo,” I say.

“No, it’s not that.” Lo looks up from his napkin and points the pen at Connor. “Our kid is going to have to compete with theirs. It’s already fucked and it’s not even born yet.”

I can’t help it, I smile. Connor tries hard not to, hiding his grin into the rim of his cup. “Connor’s kid is also going to be a snot, so you can rest assured that yours won’t be totally fucked,” I say.

Connor opens his mouth, about to retort, but sudden sobs come from the living room. I straighten up. Hell, we all do.

“Should we go in there?” Lo asks, gripping the edge of the counter, ready to jump.

Connor’s the only one who seems at ease. “Five more minutes.”

I hope I can wait that long.

DAISY CALLOWAY

Lily has started to cry and I’ve barely begun. I sit on the hardwood floor while they’re bunched together on the couch. They offered me room on the cushion, but I decided to face them directly, head-on. No more breaks.

Rose gestures to me. “Keep going. She’s hormonal.”

“I am,” Lily nods and accepts the tissues that Rose throws on her lap. “I’m sorry, Daisy. I just think I know where this is going. But yeah, keep going. Please.” She nods again and lets out a slow breath.

First I explain how my sleep has been terrible for almost a year. How I’ve had to see a therapist, and how all the doctors and sleep studies concluded that I’m an insomniac. How I was prescribed Ambien with night terrors attached. I skip over the whys and save those for last. They’re the most difficult to even admit.

Rose is quick to fill the silence when words escape me. “You’ve been going through this alone, this whole time?” Her expression transforms into regret and guilt. I try not to focus on the pain in her eyes, or in Lily’s. I’ve only ever wanted to make people smile, not cry. But there’s no avoiding this.

“I had Ryke,” I say. “He’s been there for me.”

“But you didn’t have us, your family,” Rose says, clasping the box of tissues with an iron grip. “You know you can come to us with anything, Daisy, right? We love you.”

Lily nods in agreement. “Whatever it is, we’re here.”

I believe it, but they haven’t heard the whys yet. They just have part of the story, but I know I have to paint a clearer picture. I describe the easiest moments first. The ones that I’ve recounted to my therapist and Ryke a million times over.

The cameraman who broke into my bedroom.

The pissed off pedestrian that attacked my motorcycle and then attacked me.

But the story that hurts the most is after all of those. It’s the one begging to be released, pleading to be shared and let go. It’s just a matter of starting.

Beginnings are the hardest because they’re the parts that pull people in, that make them want the ends. And endings are the most painful, the parts that can leave you bleeding out.

I don’t have any more time. I just have to begin.

I stare at my hands, unable to look them in the face. “I was sixteen when your sex addiction became public, Lily.” I pause and take a deep breath before continuing. “I remember the day I went back to school. My friends asked all these questions.” At first I hesitate on repeating them, but I look up and Lily actually nods at me, encouraging me to continuing.

She says, “It’s okay.”

My sister’s strength floods into me, and it propels me to continue, like a gust of wind blowing me in the right direction.

Even if it hurts, I say it.

“My friends would ask: Does your sister just sit in a room and fuck all day? Does she bang girls?” I cringe as I remember more. “How bad does she want it? Would she fuck me? Would she fuck a homeless man?” I swallow. “And I didn’t have any answers for them. And I didn’t know if it was true, but I defended you anyway.” I’d still defend her today. I’d do it all over again. I can’t ever regret that. “The questions started to change though.”

“To what?” Rose asks with a frown.

I shrug. “They started asking me things. Like, do you do it all the time too? Do you like it in the ass, Daisy? Would you fuck me? Would you blow me?”

“God,” Rose says, whipping out her cellphone. “Who are they?”

Lily reaches for Rose’s hands and whispers in a small voice, “Let her finish, Rose.”

My fiercest sister reluctantly turns off her phone and waits for me to continue.

I rub my eyes and keep my gaze on the hardwood as the seriously deranged part takes ahold of me. Please say it, Daisy. Please don’t be a coward. I breathe deeply. “The entire time…I thought my friends, Cleo and Harper, were still my friends. I mean…” I let out a weak, tearful laugh. “I grew up with them. I knew Cleo since she was six, and I thought childhood friends were the ones that last…like you and Lo,” I say to Lily. My eyes drop to my fingers. I scrape the yellow paint off of my nail.

I see the rest play out in my head. I see the scene like it was yesterday. A flash bulb, a memory that surfaces to haunt me and to release me from this hell.

Cleo and Harper had called me to go shopping with them, but their breath stunk of booze. They’d been at a “brunch” party with a handful of other kids from school. Hunch punch was served apparently. And they said that I was talked about a lot, but they never said what. They just giggled and laughed, in a drunken stupor.

I should have left, but I was worried they’d do something stupid, like sh

oplift. So I stayed with them, and I rode with them up the elevator to Cleo’s penthouse apartment—where she lived with her parents and this pretty black cat named Shadow.

And then Cleo, with her silky blonde hair and coveted Birkin bag on her arm, did something…she pressed the emergency stop.

I smiled at her devious grin, thinking they wanted to pull a prank on maintenance. “What are we doing?” I asked.

“Seeing if it fits,” Cleo said, and she shared a furtive glance with Harper. They both giggled again. Cleo wobbled in her heels, and Harper dug her hand in a shopping bag, revealing a pink dildo.

My smile vanished. “What’s going on?” I asked.

“Some of the guys wanted to know,” Cleo said, “how many inches fit inside you. We told them we’d find out.”

I tried to laugh it off, charm her. She was drunk. Harper was buzzed. They didn’t know what they were doing, right? “Very funny,” I said. “Come on, let’s go up to your place.” I tried to hit the buttons, but Cleo blocked me while Harper stood off to the side, the sex toy in her hand.

The hairs on my neck stuck up in alarm. “Cleo, come on.” My voice was no longer joking. I wasn’t playing around. “It’s not funny.”

Harper waved the dildo at me. “You’ve probably had ones like this in you all the time.”

“Yeah,” Cleo said. “You’ll love it. Whore runs in your family.” And then Harper grabbed my arms.

“Stop!” I screamed. I jerked out of her hold and instinctively backed into the wall. I was frozen with this horrifying shock and fear, and then Cleo made it even worse.

She said, “If you don’t do this, we’ll make your life a living hell until graduation. Every day in the hall, every day in class.” I learned that the guy who prodded Cleo to do this to me in the elevator was Houston Boggs, a senior that she had a crush on.

She had to follow through, and if she didn’t she’d look bad in front of him, all talk, a tease. And she wanted to show him that she could play in the big leagues. She wanted to fuck me over, and I just wanted to be left alone.

“Stop,” I said. “Please.”