Hothouse Flower

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DAISY CALLOWAY

I open my eyes, disoriented. My vision blurs, everything out of focus. I blink sluggishly, my arms and legs heavy. My mind hasn’t processed anything beyond my physical abnormalities—the lightness of my head, the numbness along my face, the tingling in my fingers.

I make out shadows, dark and light, first. A figure rises from a chair, standing closer to me.

I’m not waking up after a night terror.

This feels so different.

I try to recall my last memory, the last picture I had before this—before lying down.

It’s not coming as quickly as I’d hoped. It’s just fuzzy.

Thankfully my ears are working. “Daisy,” the deep familiar voice says, still rough but full of unbridled concern. “Can you hear me?”

I try to nod. I think I’m nodding. I blink two more times, and then my vision clears. Ryke towers beside a hospital bed. My hospital bed. But I focus on his features, the scratches along his cheeks, the bruises that blemish his eyes and jaw. The stitches on his eyebrow.

“Ryke,” I whisper, raspy.

Tears build in my eyes. I’ve never seen Ryke so battered before. My hand instinctively goes to my mouth to hide my emotions, but the movement tugs an IV stand. I glance down to inspect the source. Tubes are stuck in the top of my hand, running across my lap.

Ryke takes a seat on the edge of the bed, by my legs. He rubs them, even though they’re underneath a light blue blanket. “Do you need water?” He’s just as overwhelmed as me, his features hardening to hide that burgeoning emotion.

I shake my head. “Can you…come closer?” I reach for his hand, but I grasp air. I try to sit up in the bed so I can see more of him, but my whole body is sore like I was hit by a truck. Was I? Did I accidentally run into traffic? Please tell me I didn’t do something stupid that got him hurt too.

I burst into tears because I’m terrified that’s what happened.

“Daisy, don’t cry,” he says. “We’re going to get through this.” We. I focus on this one pronoun while he presses a button on a remote. The bed groans as it rises to a sitting position. Then he scoots forward so he’s beside my thigh.

I let out a breath to stop the waterworks, and then I reach out, my fingers skimming his cheek. He watches me inspect the damage with a trembling hand, and I zoom in on the stitches. “Your eyebrow…”

“It’s fine.” He clasps my wrist to stop me from poking at it.

“It’s going to scar,” I murmur.

His face almost breaks. He shakes his head repeatedly. “I don’t fucking care.”

I smile weakly, but the motion stings. Why does that hurt? My lips fall. “What happened?” I ask.

His Adam’s apple bobs. “You can’t remember?”

“No,” I breathe. “Did I…did I do something stupid? You didn’t…you didn’t follow me into traffic, did you?” The fact that this could be a possibility, I realize that reflects poorly upon me. I can be unthinking and selfish when I try to live fully. But I’ve always loved that Ryke never stops me.

Whatever wild thing I do, Ryke Meadows does too.

Down a ski slope.

In an ocean, caged with sharks.

Off a cliff.

Off a cliff. I was fifteen. I dove into the water. He jumped in after me. I couldn’t imagine any other guy willing to do that for someone they hardly knew. In that moment, I had fallen for Ryke. Literally, figuratively—I knew, if we couldn’t be together, he would be my friend.

Here we are now.

In a hospital. “Maybe I should have left you alone,” I whisper.

“What are you talking about?”

“You wouldn’t be hurt…” I scrutinize the way his muscles tense, sitting rigidly. I grip the bottom of his white T-shirt—that doesn’t look like one of his.

He holds my hands, stopping me. “Daisy,” he says with force. “I’m fine.”

“Take off your shirt.”

“No.”

I smile again. Ow. “I must be the only girl you’ve rejected.”

“That’s so fucking not true,” he growls. He glances at the hospital bed, me in it, and then he sighs heavily, giving in. He lifts the shirt off, and my mouth plummets.

My hands zip across the yellowish purple bruises that mar his abs and chest, some bleeding into his phoenix tattoo. “Turn around, please,” I say softly.

He rotates only halfway, and I see even worse ones, deeper yellow, deeper purple. I want to kiss the wounds, but as soon as I lean forward, he puts a hand on my collar and leans me back against a fluffy pillow.

“What’s the last thing you remember, Dais?” he asks me seriously.

I strain my mind. “The bar.” We went to the pub next to the hotel. “Lo…” He drank alcohol. “Christina—I saw her in the pub and…” Ian. “You didn’t…did you guys…” Did they fight? “Ian…” I blink a few times, the picture starting to form. No, that fight ended early. That’s not what happened. “I was outside with Christina. We were about to go to the hotel.”

Flashes of the next events ripple through my mind. I was watching these two big guys screaming on the sidewalk, pushing each other in the chest. One punch flew, and then I was swept in a hurricane of drunken men and violent acts. I immediately shoved Christina back, and someone’s jacket zipper caught in my long hair. I was dragged backwards.

“Ryke…” The fear as I fell on the pavement returns, and the heart monitor’s steady beep, beep, beep picks up pace. Feet clobbered around me, on my stomach, my legs, and finally I yanked my hair free, only for it to snag in something else. This time, it pulled hard near my forehead. The pain seared beneath adrenaline. Beepbeepbeepbeep.

“Daisy, look at me,” Ryke says, his hand sliding on my thigh, holding me tightly.

I meet his concerned gaze just as the last memory hits me. I picked myself off the concrete. “I saw you,” I whisper. “You were right there.” I remember meeting his eyes. And they were full of anger, full of desperation, full of gut-wrenching pain.

He screamed my name. I heard it only once before something hard met my face.

My face.

For the first time, I raise my hand to touch my cheek. All I feel is tape, gauze, maybe. But whatever lies underneath it—that’s what hurts each time I begin to smile.

BEEPBEEPBEEPBEEP!

“Take deep fucking breaths,” he tells me, rubbing my arm.

Someone knocks twice, and then the hospital doors open. A nurse in pink scrubs sticks her head in. “Daisy, you’re awake.” She smiles, and then she turns slightly to whisper to someone else. “Can you go let her friends know?” She shuts the door behind her and pads closer to me. “My name is Janet. How are you feeling?”

She pours a cup of water and passes it to me. I take a sip and hand it immediately to Ryke. “Can I have a mirror?” I ask her.

Beepbeepbeepbeep.

I can’t articulate my feelings beyond panic. I just need to see my face first to understand these emotions that blow through me.

“Do you want me to call the hospital psychologist first?”

What? “Ryke.” I turn to him with widened eyes.

“Can you just give her a mirror?” he asks Janet with a hard gaze.

She nods. “Okay.” Janet tentatively picks up a handheld mirror from a drawer, and I take it from her.

I raise it up to my face. BeepbeeepBEEPBEEP.

Bandages cover my left cheek down to my jaw. But my lip is swollen, and dark purpled bruises sit beneath both eyes. I look…so much worse than Ryke, no wonder he stared at me like stop fucking talking about my injuries.

I start picking at the tape, to uncover the bandage, and Janet swats my hand away. “Don’t touch.”

“I need to see it.” I don’t even know what it is.

And then another nurse in blue scrubs waltzes in with Connor and Lo.

“Hey,” Lo says with a weak smile. “How are you doing?” He touches my feet above the blanket. I want to return the smile, but it hurts too much to do so.

“Okay,” I say.

Connor just nods. “Has anyone told you what’s happened?”

“Sort of,” I murmur. “I want to see what’s wrong with my face.”

“She doesn’t know?” Lo frowns and glares at Ryke like it’s his fault.

“We’re fucking getting there.”

“Let me help,” the other nurse says, sidling to the bed. “We have to put new dressings on the wound anyway.”

Ryke stands up while both the nurses hover over me. He joins Lo and Connor at the foot of the bed, and my heart rate stays at the same beepbeepbeepbeep pace.

Janet slowly removes the tape, peeling back the bandage that clings to a few stitches…no wait, a lot of stitches.

“It was a deep gash,” Janet explains in the kindest way possible. “You’ve had an MRI. Everything came back normal. The doctors said you may have a slight concussion, but otherwise, you’ll be fine in about two weeks, no more stitches. Just a—”

“Scar,” I finish for her. They free my face of gauze and tape, and there it is: a reddened gash that runs from my temple, across my cheek, to my jaw. I move my tongue in my mouth, along my gum, feeling the backs of the stitches, as though my cheek was cut open at one point.

“How…” BEEPBEEPBEEP. I look up at Ryke, my eyes like saucers.

“You were hit with a fucking two-by-four. The doctors think there was something sharp on the board that sliced you.”

“You were given a tetanus shot,” the blue-scrub nurse assures me.

Janet says, “We can get the psychologist in here.”

Because I’ll have this scar forever. Because I’ll never be the pretty Daisy Calloway in magazine spreads or down runways. I am no longer a model.

I am no longer the person my mom aspired me to be.

But I am more me now than I was before.

I shut my eyes and lean my head back. And my heart rate—it slows. I take a deep breath. What feels like my very first one ever, and silent tears fall. A pressure so heavy begins to rise off my chest.

“It’s okay to be upset,” Janet tells me.

I open my eyes and shake my head, a weak laugh escaping. “I’m not upset.” My chin quivers. I wipe the tears and I say, “I’m relieved.” My gaze meets Ryke’s. “How sick is that?” And then I burst into tears because I know I shouldn’t feel this way.

He’s by my side in seconds, and I wrap my arms around his chest.

I didn’t realize how trapped I was until this very moment. Until something so horrifying could actually feel good.

And I know I’m partly to blame. If this doesn’t tell me that I need to stand up for myself, then I don’t think anything could.