Becca Ritchie - Hothouse Flower

Daisy rests her head on the wooden headboard, her shirt stained with sweat, her limbs sagging like she just ran a marathon. I watch her foot cramp and her calf muscle spasm, and she brings her leg to her chest and massages it herself with a wince.

Normally that’d be me.

But I stand at the edge of the bed, close to coming clean about everything right here. I just want to hold her. Even if I told my brother the truth, I can see Lo kicking me out of the room, tossing my bag in my face, telling me to get on a plane.

Like he said before, he let me into his life, and it seems like I went after his girlfriend’s little sister like a predator.

That was never my fucking intention.

Sure, I want to fuck her. But it’s more than that. It’s always been more than that.

I stay quiet and rub my jaw, so much taken out of me tonight. If I do right by her, I do wrong by him. I wonder if the only way to move forward is to unearth my past with my brother.

I don’t know if I’m ready for that shit storm.

I just want to forget with him—but I wonder who’s been the stronger brother all this time.

Lo has confronted our father. He’s worked out his feelings. He’s rebuilt a relationship with him while trying to stay sober.

I’m the one who can’t deal.

Maybe that has to fucking change.

DAISY CALLOWAY

“Ryke, what’s with the busted lip?” Cameras flash, and paparazzi swarm me. Mikey has his arm braced out, standing in front of me with his dirty blond hair and Bermuda shorts. Ryke grips my shoulder, guiding me towards the glass hotel doors.

“Did you get in a fight with one of Daisy’s ex-boyfriends?”

“Ryke, did your brother punch you?”

“What happened?”

They all ask roughly the same questions, and Ryke says nothing. A bruise has begun to form on his cheekbone from my thumb ring hitting him. I wish I could rewind time, shake my half-coherent body and tell myself to stop freaking out.

I’ve hit him before in a night terror, but not this badly.

Once we enter the sanctuary of the hotel, the noise dies down. Mikey spins towards me. “I’m going to grab something to eat before the buffet closes, but I’ll escort you to your room first just to be safe.”

“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 fucking 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 fucking 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 fucking 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.”

“Same fucking thing.”

I wear the ring a lot. I had it resized to fit my thumb, and the jeweler told me that the design on the front was an Irish coat of arms.

A family crest.

I never brought it up, but now that we’re together, I kind of want to. “You told me it wasn’t an heirloom,” I say while he watches me closely.

“It’s not.”

“It’s an Irish coat of arms, Ryke,” I say. “Your dad is Irish.”

He shrugs. “So it was my father’s. It’s not like it was passed down generations to fucking generations. It was his, and he gave it to me when I was eleven or twelve. I don’t even remember. It means nothing.”

“I know,” I say, “because people don’t put family heirlooms that mean something to them in poker kitties.” He’s so detached from his dad, and this proves it. He’s also so unlike Lo, who has an antique pocket watch from his father that he keeps in a safe. He brought it out once to prove to Connor that he owns something historic.

Ryke ignores his mom and dad like he’s trying to erase them from his life. Maybe it’s easier for him to just forget the past than be consumed by hurt and hate.

Ryke hits the “up” button again. He rubs his lips and then stares down at me with that swirling darkness. “Truth,” he says, “I don’t want you to take off the ring. I’ve fucking loved that you wear something of mine.”

I smile. Loved. I wonder for how long. We played that poker game on a flight back from Cancun.

I was sixteen.

I take a step towards him, despite being in semi-public. I scrutinize his bottom lip, cut from where I slapped him.

“Does it hurt?” I ask.

“No,” he says, looking at me with those brooding features, reminding me that of all the guys I’ve dated, no one has been as dangerous and mysterious as him.

The elevator chimes again. I drop my hand and slip inside, Ryke behind me. Thankfully an old couple with luggage waits for the next one.

We stand a few feet apart, and I realize that the fifth floor is just too close. We’ll have time to make out for maybe thirty seconds. He leans forward to press the button, but instead of hitting my floor, he taps the 28.

“Are we going for a ride?” I ask him, my lips pulling higher.

“You are.”

The doors shut, and he turns on me with this masculine power that draws me towards him in curiosity and need.

He’s my wolf.

And instead of biting me, he kisses my lips passionately, our bodies igniting as soon as they connect. I moan the second his tongue meets mine, and his hands possess my ass, lifting me around his waist. The air leaves my lungs. And I grip the back of his hair, yanking hard.

A deep, throaty noise escapes him.

“Ryke,” I cry, my head knocking into the wall as he pins me to the corner of the elevator. His kiss slows, eking out the tension that clenches my core. And I shut up, being consumed by his tongue, his hold, his experience.

His hand dips down between my legs, on the outside of my jean shorts. He cups that spot, and my legs spasm. Ahhh! The smallest nerves react like he drove his dick right into me.

 I’m usually told to give hand jobs and go down on guys. I love that I now have choices, able to do whatever my mind wants. So I kiss his neck, lightly at first while his other hand rises underneath my shirt.

And then I suck deeply, clenching his hair with two hands. He stops going towards my breast, and he uses that hand as a support against the wall.

“Fuck,” he breathes.

I cry again.

His favorite word is so overused, but I melt every single time he says it like that. Our lips find each other, as though they can’t be apart for long. If he had more time, I wonder if he would go beneath my shorts.

I think he would.

He pauses so I can control my breathing. “What floor are we on?” he asks me.

I look over his shoulder. “Twenty-four.”

He kisses my cheek, which turns into our lips locking again. As soon as we part, he drops me on my feet, and he hits the fifth floor button. The elevator stops on the twenty-eighth floor, and unfortunately, a hoard of female models slips in, laughing loudly and wearing clothes to go clubbing.

They speak in Russian and barely acknowledge us.

Ryke comes back to my side. “So you like my hair?” he asks with raised brows.

I stand on the tips of my toes and run my fingers through it, knowing he’ll let me now. But even so, the tension winds between us, causing my body to curve towards him like a magnetic pull. We really need to find more time together. “It’s soft, and I love that it’s long enough for me to grab.”

His muscles tighten, and his eyes flicker cautiously to the Russian girls, who’ve begun to whisper even more, their eyes flitting to us. He grabs my hands, forcing them down to my sides. I frown, confused. But he suddenly speaks, not to me though. To them.

In Russian.

I can’t understand a word of it, but he has a lilt that matches theirs.