Hothouse Flower (Addicted #4)(26)

I don’t stop her.

When the door shuts, my heart beats so fast, my lungs constricting, this pressure just mounting and mounting. I need to release it. I need to breathe. I look around my room, trying to find an escape.

“Daisy. Daisy, f*cking stop for a second,” Ryke says.

I grab my motorcycle keys out of a jacket pocket. “I’m going to go for a quick ride.” Just as I pass him, he grips my wrist and pries the keys out of my palm. “Ryke—”

“You can’t drive when you’re like this. The last f*cking time you did that, you almost highsided on the freeway.”

I remember. I was really, really close to flying over the handlebars of my bike. I applied too much throttle around a curve. I’ve never seen Ryke so scared before, but when we met in a parking lot, he looked like he wanted to simultaneously hug me for being alive and kill me for almost making a fatal mistake.

I blow out a deep breath from my lips. “I really need some air.”

“Run with me for half an hour,” he says. “You’ll feel better.”

“How so?”

He draws me closer, my feet touching the sides of his. “You’ll be able to f*cking breathe.” He studies my face quickly. “Or you could just cry and let it out for once.”

My whole body hurts, and those words somehow pain me more. “What?”

“Let it out.”

I shake my head. “I can’t.”

“Why the f*ck not? Stop trying to suppress your emotions, Dais. It’s okay to be upset right now. What your mom just did was shit.”

I shake my head again. Who am I to complain? I don’t want to be that immature, selfish girl. I don’t want to be what people probably think of me, the heiress of a billion-dollar fortune. Bitching over not going to Paris for fun anymore. How does that look?

“You have gone through hell since Lily’s sex addiction went public, and you’ve told f*cking no one about it but me. Stop trying to be strong. Just f*cking cry, Daisy. Scream. Yell. Be f*cking angry.”

Everything crashes into me. Stresses that I don’t like to confront. I’m not even ready to bear all of it right now. “Can we run?” I ask. “I’ll race you down the street.”

His features turn grave, but he nods. “Yeah. Get your shoes on—”

My phone rings, cutting him off. I look at the Caller ID. “It’s Mikey. I guess…” I have to go. I meet Ryke’s gaze, and he just shakes his head.

“I don’t want to f*cking leave you like this,” he says.

“I’ll be fine.”

“Are you going to be able to last the whole flight, sitting in your f*cking seat, not able to get up and move around that much?”

It sounds more confining now than it did a couple hours ago, only because my mom suffocated me with this news. “I don’t have much of a choice.”

“We all have choices,” he says. “Some are just harder to make than others.”

“Don’t worry about me,” I tell him. “I want you to go to California and climb those mountains.” I pause. “And be safe.” He can die out there. With no rope, no backup safety, he’s relying only on his training, his hands and body. One wrong move and he can slip and fall. He doesn’t talk about the risk that much, and I don’t want to dissuade him from pursuing the three-mountain, free-solo climb in Yosemite. It’s been his lifelong goal, and I won’t keep him from that.

“You too,” he says, his voice low and strained.

This is the part where we should hug again, but so many unresolved issues linger, things that my mom dumped and deserted.

We don’t touch.

We don’t say another word.

We just leave each other with a maybe—a sort of acceptance to move on. I can already see myself on that plane, visualizing him with another girl. Everything about this trip to Paris sucks, but I won’t screw over a handful of designers just to come back to Philly.

I can’t.





< 10 >

RYKE MEADOWS



Daisy is gone. With the time difference, I haven’t even had the chance to talk to her. She’s too busy to f*cking call at a decent hour, and so I have no idea if she’s sleeping or if she’s been awake for two days straight. I can’t stop thinking about the last look on her face—the one of pure devastation. Like someone physically ripped out an organ from her body. I’ve seen that expression before, and it only comes when she feels trapped.

I just have to trust that she’s fine.

And I try to ignore the fact that I gave her permission to f*ck other guys. I hated that, and even knowing that she may be hooking up with someone right now—it boils my blood. But I can’t stomach screwing girls here while she waits for me either. Because she’ll be waiting forever, and it’s not f*cking fair to her.

My brother lies on a weight bench, and I spot him. The gym is almost empty this early in the morning, the weight room desolate besides my brother, Connor and me. We always meet at 6 a.m. to avoid the paparazzi.

“How’s Lily?” I ask, my eyes flickering over to Connor as he does leg presses while watching Bloomberg on the flat screen television overhead.

“Fine,” Lo says, lifting the heavy bar off his chest with a grunt. I grab it from him and set it in the holder. He sits up, wiping his forehead with a towel. “How’s not babysitting?”