Chapter Nine: oh buoy

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Daisy had forgotten how to fall asleep. A relatively easy feat, she'd once thought.

Wrong.

Sprawled on her back, staring at the ceiling, she wondered how counting sheep made her feel more awake, more alert. Maybe because there was a shepherd in the pasture. Maybe because that shepherd looked a lot like the Shepherd currently in her bed. Maybe because her focus was veering from counting the sheep to estimating the length of the shepherd's crook.

Surely not.

It could have been because she was on high alert from having to lie all day? Because a part of her was certain that Amira and the concierge were seconds away from bursting into the treehouse and accusing her of fraud?

Yeah. That. She was going with that.

Restless, Daisy counted the laps of the ceiling fan as it looped around and around in its whizzy little dance. It was like she'd never shared a bed with a man in her life. She couldn't stop thinking. Couldn't sleep. Was she fidgeting too much? Breathing too loudly? And she was so hot in her night robe, but she couldn't take it off.

Could she?

No. Obviously not.

Right?

She swallowed a huff of annoyance, angeling her face to better leverage the cool air the fan breathed her way. She should have let Hunt sleep on the couch. She could have had the whole bed to herself, could have stretched out in her scrappy nightgown instead of being relegated to one side of the Great Wall of Shepherd, smothered and hot and so damn bothered.

Usually, when her mind was wide awake, she'd reach for whatever novel she was binging to make the cycling thoughts stop. She could happily live between the folded pages of a good book, and there was nothing quite like escaping into a world of enemies to lovers to ease her mind. But tonight, that wasn't an option. Maybe it would have been, had she brought some tamer reading material with her. Why couldn't she pick up a classic for once? Why was she such a whor—

"Are you awake?"

A smile niggled Daisy's mouth before she remembered to chew it away. "I am now."

"Sorry." Hunt's side of the bed shifted. Despite it only being them in the room—and both of them, apparently, being wide awake—he kept his voice at a whisper when he asked, "What was that about before?"

The blood drained from her cheeks. "What was what?" The way she'd looked at him in the bar earlier when he'd sang to her? Or the way her face had heated when he tucked that flower behind her ear, then slid a finger along the length of her jaw? Oh, god, he'd totally felt her pulse pick up, hadn't he? He was totally reading into it, totally taking it for something it totally wasn't

"When you called me Jerk Face?"

Oh.

"Seriously?" Daisy's sigh of relief mixed with a scoff. Her tone was casual, but Hunt's teenage face flashed through her head, making her see red. "Hunt. You're a jerk."

"Harsh."

"Well, what was Sugarplum about?" Really, like he had any grounds to judge.

"You started it," he insisted.

"Did not."

"You called me sweetheart."

"Sweetheart is a normal pet name."

"Am I your pet, tiger?"

Daisy scowled into the dark. "You know what I mean."

There was a long, strange pause. His voice softer, Hunt asked, "You don't like Sugarplum?"

She tugged the sheets higher, even though she was only growing warmer and warmer. "Does it matter?"

"Of course it matters."

Daisy wasn't sure why, when it seemed like irritating her in front of the others was Hunt's new favourite pastime.

"I just ..." She toyed with the sheets, bunching them in her fist. "Why not darling? Or baby?"

"I can call you baby."

Something inside of her heated. A different sort of warmth. She bristled. "Don't call me that."

"Sugarplum it is." She heard him smirk.

Clenching the tension in her stomach away, Daisy turned her face toward him—just an inch. With nothing but the wild tangle of trees and vines outside, with the moon swathed in clouds, it was too dark to see anything, even without that ridiculous pillow wall he'd erected between them. But she thought Hunt, too, might have tilted his face toward her.

"Do you even know what it's from?" she asked without thinking. She didn't know why it mattered. He couldn't even name a single superhero, for god's sake.

"The Nutcracker."

Shock seized her for a second. But ... No, it wasn't that surprising. Hunt had dated Vanessa, after all, and Daisy was sure she'd played the Sugar Plum Fairy at some point, too.

A gravelly chuckle thawed the silence. "I can't get through one phone call with my brother without my niece rehashing Clara's life story."

Surprise surged through Daisy again. That time, she didn't resist indulging the small, defiant smile that tugged at her lips. She peered up at the fan, listening to the steady hum of the leaf-shaped blades. "How old is she?"

"Four."

"Ah. The f-you fours."

"You've heard of them?" There was that fleck of mirth in his voice—the one that meant Hunt's right dimple was out on parade. "She's relentless with all that ballerina stuff."

Daisy's smile wilted, but she felt the memory of it light in her eyes. "I can imagine."

The mattress dipped again, and Daisy sensed Hunt shifting further onto his side. Maybe he was sitting up—just a bit. Maybe he was resting his cheek on his fist, his arm on the bed, eyeing her over the mountain of pillows. Just because she had crappy eyesight, didn't mean he did. Could he see her? Maybe he was watching her, studying her—like some soaring night beast that zeroed in on an unsuspecting mouse scurrying along the forest floor, getting ready to swoop, to play, to feed ...

She didn't know why the thought sent a thrill through her. Wasn't she supposed to be orchestrating his murder?

Hunt fidgeted again, like he was running a finger along the seam of a pillow. "Why did you stop?"

Daisy's brow furrowed.

"The other night," he clarified, "when I asked if you danced, you said you used to."

Daisy's mouth dried out.

"Why did you stop?"

Her heart dropped to her stomach. She heard her pulse against her pillow. It echoed through her head twice as loud.

"I ..." She licked her lips. "I can't."

She thought she knew what would come next. The prodding. An interrogation. Maybe a sarcastic comment.

Neither did. Only silence swept through the room, a veritable breeze that was cool and soothing and ... safe. But in that silence, curiosity buzzed—a living, breathing thing.

Still, Hunt said nothing. And, maybe like earlier that night, when she'd been in the bathroom and he'd been on the other side of the door, a part of her forgot he was even there.

"We were in an accident. Laia, Kenji, me—" Daisy drew a sharp breath, the next word lodging in her throat. She breathed through the knot. "It was after graduation. It was late, and we were all sober, but ... but the other driver wasn't. Their lights weren't on, and—" She cut herself short, letting the heavy silence spell out the rest. "It was bad. It took a while for the ambulance to arrive, and I ... I thought I'd lose my legs completely. Thought I'd—"

She couldn't breathe around it that time. The emotion. The panic. The fear. Blood. There had been so much blood. And her friends' breathing ... laboured. One didn't breathe at all. One's eyes didn't blink, didn't shine. They stared straight ahead, stared right at her, unflinching and firm but forever frozen in a declaration of irrefutable love—

"Daisy ..." She winced at the sound of Hunt's voice, tight and shadowed. Loaded with regret. "God," he murmured, "I shouldn't have asked."

"It's fine." It was far from fine—what happened all those years ago. But it wasn't Hunt's fault, and he couldn't have known where the conversation would lead when he asked the question. It had been Daisy's choice to answer it the way she had. To answer at all.

Remembering that he had asked a question, she pulled herself together. "It was a rough recovery," she whispered. "And even after the injuries healed, and they weren't as bad as they were predicted to be, my leg ... it was never the same."

An ache shot through her thigh then, almost in reply. Not a true, physical pain. Something a bit deeper. A bit harder to ignore.

Hunt loosed a breath. Somehow, she sensed the entirety of his attention on her. Sensed he was seeing her, even if he couldn't. "But you can walk, right?"

"Right."

"So you must still be able to dance."

Daisy's hands tightened around the sheets. She thought her knuckles might have been white. "I was training to be a ballerina, Hunt. Ballet is about perfection. And I wasn't perfect anymore."

"Why do you need to be perfect to do what you love?"

It was like he didn't know her at all.

Because he didn't, she remembered. Because none of this was real. They were making the best out of an awkward situation, but their arrangement ... it was just mutually beneficial. Daisy got to save face in front of her friends, and Hunt got to show his ex that he'd moved on from her betrayal. That he was fine without her. Fake. A lie. Everything in between was just ... passing time.

It was why Daisy kept opening up to him, she thought. Why she told him things she couldn't tell anyone else. Because this was temporary. It was pretend. So it didn't matter if she told him why she couldn't dance anymore, or how she sometimes felt like she was floating between who she was and who she was supposed to be. She'd said it herself: at the end of the week, they'd go their separate ways. They'd pretend none of this happened. Daisy could shout her truth into the void, let that void seal, and walk away.

But that conversation ... God. Daisy hadn't spoken about the accident in years. Hadn't dared to think about dancing for almost as long. It wasn't just passing time for her. That conversation ... it was the root of everything.

So she tried to answer his initial question in a different way. A simple way. The way she should have to begin with.

"It hurts now."

"Your leg?"

Sometimes it did, yeah. But that wasn't what she'd meant. "It hurts to dance, to think about dancing. It's not just a physical ache, but ..."

"An emotional one."

She nodded against her pillow. "Dancing ... it makes me remember. Everything I've lost. The person everyone said I was going to be. The life I dreamed about since I was a little girl watching The Nutcracker at Christmas. It—" She stopped herself short, eyes shuttering. When she danced, it was too easy to let her heart run away from her, to fall in love with every turn, every leap, and feel whole.

But the music always stopped. And when the music stopped, the illusion shattered, and her heart would break all over again. So it was easier—to walk away. To pretend that the person she used to be never existed, that her dreams weren't still hers, that her future wasn't an empty chasm she no longer knew how to fill.

They shared a long silence, and Daisy's lids finally felt heavy. There was a sudden noise. The rustling of sheets. Like Hunt was untangling a hand, debating whether or not to breach that wall he'd made. To rest his hand over hers. To comfort her.

But he never closed the distance.

Daisy wondered why something inside her deflated.

"You're strong, Dais." His voice was soft, was smoother than the silken sheets bunched between her fingers. "To move on from something like that ... Strong, and brave. Not a lot of people could have."

She didn't know how to tell him—that after all this time, she hadn't moved on. That she was so very stuck. Where did she go, now that her dreams had been stolen? Where did she go, if she didn't know who she was?

"It was just ... it was bad." She drew a shallow breath. "Really, really bad."

"Sounds like it. You're lucky you all survived."

Daisy squeezed her eyes shut. Something jagged scraped along the walls of her heart, peeling what was left of it, never letting it heal, letting her heal. There was the other pain—the one that was even more consuming than the thought of her lost dreams, more horrifying than the knowledge that she'd never be the person she used to be again, that she grew more and more distant from that version of herself every day. A bundle of hot, thick air rose to her throat, her whole chest tensing as the urge to cry burrowed under her skin like tiny, icy needles.

She didn't know why she kept doing it, kept letting her guard down. Why she kept opening up to him, and why Hunt was acting like he cared when she did. Her hand had crept to her throat without her realising it. She toyed with her necklace. The one she never took off. Never. It burned, the tiny ballet slippers branding themselves into her skin.

"Daisy—"

"Go to sleep, Hunt." She turned her back on him, staring at the wall of glass that looked out into darkness, into nothingness. It was like she was floating in a starless sky. And as she drifted without anything to anchor her, she pretended she couldn't feel the heat of Hunt's hand—the promise of it—burning through the pillows behind her.

Snapping her eyes shut, she said quietly, but sternly, "We have a long day of lying to my friends tomorrow."

The accident chased Daisy into the depths of sleep. Familiar eyes refracted a confession made too late. The hand in hers turned limp, and even as she struggled against the force ripping her away, those fingers couldn't hold on. They let her go.

They always let her go.

Hunt rose first the next morning. He was in the shower when Daisy woke, and she'd managed to calm herself from her nightmare by the time he slipped back into the bedroom. She grumbled a greeting as she stormed into the bathroom, not really wanting to meet his eye after everything they'd discussed the night before. Part of her hoped that opening up to him had been a dream, too.

She shoved it all down—the nightmares, that conversation, the fact that she'd been weak and vulnerable and said some damn cheesy things—and methodically applied her face. Her mask. When mascara-coated lashes and perfectly contoured cheeks stared back at her in the mirror, Daisy nodded to herself. She was okay. At least, she looked like she was okay. Another day, another lie. What was one more?

In a tight-fitting crop, black leggings, and runners that met Amira's reminder the night before to wear athletic gear today, she stepped into the bedroom.

And passed away.

Hunt was lying on his side of the bed, dressed in a tee-shirt and shorts. He rested one hand behind his head, his bared arm corded with muscle, the golden skin finding and loving the fractured light spraying through the windows, basking the room in a gentle glow. In his other hand was a book. In his other hand was her book. In his other hand was her copy of Movie Moment that she'd sworn she'd shoved in the nightstand drawer the night before. It was open.

Because he was reading it.

Because Hunt was reading Movie Moment.

Daisy dropped her makeup bag.

"What are you doing?" she asked, voice shrill.

Without taking his eyes off the page, Hunt mumbled, "Waiting for you."

"You're reading."

"You sound surprised."

She wasn't surprised. She was mortified. If he picked up where her bookmark left off ... 

No, she told herself, forcing down a sobering breath. No—he was only a few pages in by the looks of it. The meet-cute. There was nothing spicy there. It looked like the first red tab wasn't until at least chapter ten—

"What's with all the red tabs?"

Daisy's face heated. Her whole being heated. If she believed in auras, she would have said hers was flaming red.

She blinked. "Nothing."

Hunt lifted a hand. It looked like he intended to turn to the first red tab. To turn to chapter ten. "There's a lot of them—"

"I just like the colour red."

"Since when?"

She opened her mouth to answer, then stopped, frowning. "What do you mean since when?"

"Your whole wardrobe is blue and green." He looked up briefly, shooting her light green crop top a triumphant grin over the open book. Before she could react, his eyes were back on the page. "So ... she's facing a PR scandal that's ruined her acting career, and he's an up-and-coming television star trying to transition into film?"

Savannah and Atlas from Movie Moment. Holy crap, Hunt knew about Savannah and Atlas, because he was reading Movie Moment, and his fingers were still dangerously close to turning to that first red tab.

Daisy shuffled on the spot, so close to tackling the book from his hands.

But that would probably be a tad suspicious.

Unaware of her mini-freakout, he continued, "And they met a few years ago when she was one of the most in-demand movie stars, and he was an extra, and she had him fired from the shoot because he drank her coffee?"

Heart hammering, she managed to nod.

"And now they're starring in a movie together, and the production company wants them to pretend to be a couple to boost their profiles before the release of their film?"

She swallowed. "Yes."

"Shit." His hand fell away from the red tab to comb through his hair—which was remarkably tousled today. "Talk about complicated."

That was one word for it. Another would be pure, rom-com trash. Her kind of trash—but not the kind she needed her fake boyfriend-not-boyfriend knowing she read.

"It's ... not very good." Deciding that standing there and staring at him might be just as suspicious as tackling him to the floor, Daisy began roaming around the room, packing a small handbag mindlessly. "Honey recommended it." She mentally cringed. That was the worst lie she could've told; everyone and their mother knew that holier-than-thou Honey was suddenly too pure to touch anything steamier than Pride and Prejudice.

"You seem to like it," Hunt pointed out. "You're on page ..." His fingers were moving again. Moving toward her bookmark—and the beginning of that steamy cloakroom scene she knew was coming up in the next chapter.

Screw playing it cool.

"We have to go!" she exclaimed, throwing her bag on the bed—and narrowly missing his most tender, intimate parts.

Hunt's eyes were wide when they shot up, but damn it if he didn't look like he was in any hurry to move.

Daisy took another deep breath, willing herself to look calm and collected and not like she'd walked in on her fake boyfriend-not-boyfriend reading a very questionable novel wherein the main character graphically described the impressive length of her enemy with benefit's—quote—silk-wrapped rod of steel.

Letting that breath go, she said, "We're already on Amira's hit list, okay? I don't want to be late."

Hunt's features softened, his expression becoming the

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