Hothouse Flower (Addicted #4)(56)

“You can go eat now,” Ryke tells him. “I’ll watch her.”

Mikey looks to me for affirmation since, technically, I’m his boss. “Go,” I say. “Eat something yummy for me.”

“Squid.” He rubs his stomach in mock hunger.

Right now, that actually sounds delicious.

“Hey, stay outside!” a hotel concierge yells at a cameraman that opens the door. The lenses are pressed to the tinted glass, still trying to capture photos of us.

“We better go,” I say. We split from Mikey and wait for an elevator in the hotel lobby.

Ryke watches Mikey disappear and then nods to me. “It’s good that he’s here, even if he can’t keep up with you most of the time.”

A camera flashes in my eyes, a large body behind the lens. I blink, and my heart jolts. I look around for the source, but there’s nothing around us but people rolling their suitcases to the lobby elevators.

“Daisy,” Ryke says. He holds my face, trying to get me to look at him.

Sweat gathers on my forehead. “It wasn’t real,” I whisper. That flash was in my head.

He stares at me with more concern. “What’d you see?”

I take a deep breath. This has happened before. “I think it was when the cameraman broke into my room.” The incident was when I didn’t have Mikey, when all six of us were rooming together in Philly for a period of time. We were under a bigger spotlight than usual, and pictures of us were worth a lot of money.

“Can you tell me about it?” he asks, his hands warm on my jaw. I hold his wrist to keep him here, not wanting him to break away from me just yet.

“You know what happened,” I whisper. “You were there.” I’ve repeated it to my therapist before, and it still feels the same. It still feels like the past, but why does it constantly creep up to scare me? I want to let it go. I’ve tried to let it go, but it won’t let go of me.

“Just two sentences, Dais.”

As I remember the event, cold washes over me, and I shiver. He draws me closer to his body. I swallow hard and say, “He started taking pictures while I was sleeping, and I woke up from the flashes. I called you, and you arrived from across the hall and beat him up. The end.”

“Not the end,” he retorts.

All of my sisters and their significant others think it’s the end. It should be. The cameraman got fined for trespassing. Ryke bruised two knuckles. And my dad hired more security outside of the townhouse we were living in. It all turned out okay.

Except maybe my head.

“Oh yeah,” I continue with a weak smile, “after that, you used to watch movies with me every night.”

He rolls his eyes.

But he knows that one night he spent with me turned into a week and then a month. And we never really looked back. Every night, the television would play in the background, and I’d drift off. When I woke up, a blanket would be tucked around me and Ryke would be gone.

He says, “And then you moved back to your parent’s house and everything was a f*cking mess.”

I had ten months left until I graduated prep school, until I could move out. I thought my mom would fight me on it—the idea of me living in an apartment alone so young. But she saw how much I wanted this.

It was her greatest kindness. One that I won’t ever forget. She let me live on my own, and in doing so, I was able to live close to Ryke. I could have stayed with Rose, but she was already so worried about Lily and Lo’s addictions. I knew if I lived with her, she’d be consumed by my problems too.

And I wanted her to live her own life. I didn’t want to be the center of attention or cause anyone more grief. Pulling Ryke into my mess was enough of a burden. I couldn’t imagine doing that to more people I love.

Ryke runs his thumb beneath my eye. “Those ten months when you moved back home—they drove me f*cking insane.”

“Why?”

“It was ten months I couldn’t placate your anxiety, I couldn’t shield you from anything that came through your doors. I wasn’t a hallway away, not a floor, not a room. I was a half an hour from you, Dais.” He pauses. “And we both f*cking know it was those ten months that changed you.”

Something happened that I don’t like to talk about. It’s the one thing that tightens my throat.

It was when my simple fear of nighttime turned into waking up screaming. It was when every horror in my life met me repeatedly in my dreams.

The elevator chimes. I flinch, but the noise cuts into the tension.

We let a family of five on ahead of us, the small children tugging their suitcases through the doors. I eye Ryke’s bruise again and my stomach flips. I slide the gold ring off my finger and put it in his hand. “Here. You can have this back.” I’ve already apologized for hitting him. And he did what he always does when I say I’m sorry for things I can’t control.

He glared.

Ryke appraises the ring, and his features darken. “I gave this to you. I don’t want it back.” He grabs my hand, and instead of just handing it to me, he slides it slowly on my finger.

We’re about to be alone together for the first time since the stairwell.

If the elevator would ever get here, that is.

“You didn’t give it to me,” I rebut. “I won it in a poker game.”