Chapter 20
Dunk
The next morning, they took a long run through North Beach, then spent the rest of the day exploring San Francisco. Dunk was glad to see how happy Rash was, how well his job was going and all of the cool things he liked to do. But by the time they got back to Rashs’s and settled in to watch a baseball game on his truly enormous TV, Dunk was exhausted again. The city was so full of people, everything crunched together, that even though it was full of energy and excitement, it was too much for him.
Because of that, they spent their last day hiking in Muir Woods north of the city. Dunk had never seen anything like the giant redwoods; being such a big, tall man, he never really felt small or weak in comparison to anything around him. There was something peaceful about it, though, and Dunk found himself in a good, deep conversation with Rash about their jobs, their friends, the way they felt about being in their thirties.
It was there, while they were sitting with their backs against a redwood, munching on trail mix, that Rash commented, “I think it’s awesome that you’re coaching. As soon as you told me about it, I thought, yeah, man, that’s a perfect fit for Dunk. But… dude, a gym teacher?”
Dunk grunted, tossing a handful of nuts and raisins into his mouth.
Rash leveled him with a look. “I’m serious. You weren’t like the rest of us, coasting through some major we couldn’t even remember half the time just so that we could play. I know you aced all your classes after you got hurt and did that internship with the women’s athletic physio doc.”
“It was part of the offer to coach,” he said defensively.
Then he frowned, realizing that he shouldn’t feel defensive about his job if he truly enjoyed it. There were plenty of things that people made fun of him for and he never got defensive about any of that, really.
“I guess,” he said slowly, “I haven’t reconsidered it. I hadn’t been doing it for that long when I moved home and it helped out when my mom had all those medical bills. And after that, it was just… habit, maybe.”
“Complacency,” Rash said, making a face. “It’ll kill you, dude.”
“Thanks,” Dunk said sarcastically.
Rash wiped his hands on his shorts and stood up. “We should head back so we miss as much of rush hour as we can. But you should think about looking for something else. Isn’t there some fancy hospital in Maybelle?”
“Yeah,” Dunk said absently, his mind already turning over the idea. He’d never really meant to stay a gym teacher, but it had been an easy, solid offer when he was twenty-two. There were other coaches who weren’t teachers, like Aden, who coached baseball and softball. But somehow it had never crossed his mind to change up that part of his life.
But these days, he had a lot of free time on his hands now that he wasn’t dating Daisy, and maybe a new job—a new challenge—was just what he needed to finish bouncing back from the breakup.
By the time Rash was driving him down to San Jose, where he was meeting Chase at her friend’s house to pick up her car, Dunk was more relaxed than he’d been in a long time. He hadn’t even noticed a tenseness—or maybe it was a discontent—underneath his everyday happy attitude before his talk with Rash in the woods. But this weekend had given him back some measure of that.
… Which promptly vanished the second Rash turned into a driveway and Dunk saw the wrong woman sitting on the hood of Chase’s Shelby GT.
“Shit,” Dunk hissed, jerking back against the seat.
“What, dude?” Rash asked in alarm as he slowed to a stop.
Daisy Rhys climbed slowly down from the Shelby.
“That’s… that’s Daisy,” Dunk croaked.
“Shiiiiit,” Rash agreed.
Dunk slowly unbuckled, pushed open the car door and stepped out, feeling like he was carrying a two-hundred pound backpack.
God, she’s so gorgeous, Dunk couldn’t help but think.
She was in shorts, her beautiful thighs and strong calves bare, and a dark pink shirt that clung to her big breasts, one strap hanging over her carved bicep. That bouncy, silky mane was wrapped loosely around itself on top of her head, and green sunglasses hid her deep, empathetic eyes.
“Um, hi,” she said, tapping an envelope against her thigh.
“Where… where’s Chase?” Dunk squeezed out, then cleared his throat.
Strictly speaking, he’d seen Daisy a couple of weeks ago at most, but seeing her inside the bakery when he ran by wasn’t the same as this.
“She, ah, isn’t coming?” Daisy offered lamely.
“What!” Dunk shouted.
“Dude,” Rash breathed from behind him.
“Yeah. Her friend gave me the car keys and this letter. It says that she had a work emergency so she can’t come, but she’ll so, so owe us one if we do the drive together and bring her baby home.” She paused, then added unnecessarily, “Together. Just… just us.”
Rash gripped Dunk’s shoulder in solidarity, silently offered to do whatever Dunk needed, and breathed, “Dude, your friend set you up.”
Beneath the indignation was definitely some awe at Chase’s ballsiness and manipulativeness. Dunk couldn’t help but agree.
His mind whirled while he scrubbed his hands through his hair, studying Daisy, who was pretending to admire the Shelby as if there wasn’t a hiss-whisper conversation happening three feet away from her.
“Yeah,” Dunk said. “I should’ve known. Chase was cagey about this idea. And I kind of… Well, let’s just say I set her up a while back, to help her and my best friend Aden get their heads out of their asses.”
Rash’s concerned gaze shifted to amusement. “Payback, huh?”
Dunk walked over to Daisy, steeling himself against her scent, and hunched over like a linebacker so that he could twist his head and meet her downcast eyes. “Daisy? You want my friend to take you to the airport?”
“This is crazy,” Daisy blurted out, flinging her arms out.
He uncurled to his full height, then hooked his thumbs in his back pockets. “So,” he said cheerfully, “I have a sixty-hour Nineties playlist and you know I have a truly terrible singing voice. You sure you can handle it? If you strangle me, it’ll be a hell of a boring drive home after.”
Her chin jutted and a cheery smirk touched her lips, and he knew he’d said the right thing. She did have three older brothers and a competitive streak after all. She wouldn’t be able to back down from his teasing words and the challenging look in his eyes. “I’m taking the first driving shift,” she announced, twirling the keys, daring him to say a thing about it.
“That’s cool with me. City driving freaks me out,” he mock-whispered conspiratorially. “Just let me grab my duffel and tell my friend what’s up.”
He went over to Rash, who asked, “Are you sure about this, dude?”
“Six days cross-country with my ex-girlfriend? Piece of cake,” Dunk boasted, then snapped his fingers as an idea occurred to him. “There’ll be so many ways to get back at Chase—and probably all of my other friends who I’m sure are in on this. Passive-aggressive Facebook posts!”
Rash laughed and hugged Dunk. “Okay, dude, good luck with that.”
Dunk ducked back into the car for his duffel and then told Rash, “Thanks for the amazing visit. I appreciate you putting me up.”
“Anytime, dude. We’ll, uh, we’ll see you for the wedding, right? I mean, once I propose and Bessie says yes and all that sappy stuff?”
Dunk beamed and hugged Rash again. “Yes,” he yelled in excitement.
“Catch you soon, Coach,” Rash said as he got into his car.
Dunk waved as he backed out of the driveway.
He slid on his sunglasses and took his iPod and connector cable out of his duffel before putting it in the backseat. Then he slung a leg over the door of the Shelby and climbed in, testing out the leg room.
Daisy held up a thing that looked like an old handheld Sega and said, “Chase left us a GPS. I checked out a couple routes. It looks like we can go a little north, through like Wyoming and Nebraska and Indiana, or a little south, through Arizona and Oklahoma and Tennessee.”
“I’ve been looking at routes for, like, three weeks,” Dunk told her earnestly. “I sent Chase a hundred texts. I’ll summarize: Let’s spend an extra day so that we can take Route 66. We’ll hit more cities on it.”
Daisy chuckled softly and adjusted the rearview mirror. “I have two conditions,” she replied. “One, we can’t take it all the way to Chicago; I didn’t take that much time off work. Two, I’m not stopping at every kitschy place for fifteen hundred miles, Dunk. So choose wisely.”
“Daisy Rhys! It’s like you think I have no self-control!” he exclaimed.
“Hm,” was all she said as she turned on the car and they both paused to appreciate the powerful, smooth purr of the Shelby’s engine.
“Way before that—like right now—can we go to the Monterey Bay Aquarium?” he pleaded, making his most exaggerated puppy dog face at her. “They have a whole exhibit of jellyfish, Daisy! Eensy weensy jellyfish!”
She struggled to hold back a smile, he could tell by the way the faint dimple in her right cheek flashed in and out of existence. But she gave up and laughed, shaking her head almost fondly, and conceded, “Alright. Who doesn’t love aquariums? Put it in the GPS and let’s go.”
Dunk fiddled with the unfamiliar GPS until a soothing, accent-free woman directed Daisy to turn left.
“Our first direction,” Dunk breathed in exaggerated reverence. “And it’s a left turn, my favorite of all turns. It’s a sign. This is awesome.”
“Screw the GPS, this car is awesome,” Daisy countered, grinning like a madwoman as she drove very carefully through the busy town.
Since he knew she wasn’t used to driving in big cities either, let alone handling such a fabulous, expensive car, he didn’t start music yet and stayed quiet while the GPS led them out of San Jose south on the 101.
Which meant Dunk had nothing to distract him from the situation.
It was late August now, almost three months since he had broken up with Daisy, who he’d dated for about three months. They said it took half again the length of a relationship to get over it. Their breakup hadn’t involved cheating or some other horrible, scarring thing. There hadn’t been poisonous words or actions that couldn’t be forgiven or taken back.
So he should be over it.
Especially since his life was so good right now. He was on vacation, he got to ride in and drive a Shelby GT, and once they were out of the crowded Bay Area, if he took a very deep breath and let it sit on the back of his tongue, he could almost taste the salt from the Pacific Ocean.
Dunk wasn’t a man who believed in regret.
Mistakes were useful, if painful, and he’d always done his very best to go with the new course his mistakes had set him on, gone with the flow. He certainly didn’t regret a minute he’d spent with Daisy. So, no, he felt no regret as they wound towards Monterey, but he was very aware of how much better this moment would be if they were still together.
But he also wasn’t a man who wallowed, so he allowed himself the thirty minutes to Monterey to imagine how it could be. How it could be if he could reach out and play with the curls that were slipping free of Daisy’s knot of hair in the wind. If he could know that they were going to spend that night and the next five tangled up together in motel beds, love and sex drenching the air around them and the sheets beneath them.
And then, when Daisy parked at the aquarium, Dunk shook it off.
He got out of the car, helped Daisy pull up the roof and secure it, and then they got into line to buy tickets. It was the longest they’d ever been near each other without talking, unless they were sleeping.
“Did you know that my favorite animal is the sea turtle?”
“It’s because of Finding Nemo, isn’t it?” Daisy teased without missing a beat.
“Righteous! Righteous!” Dunk cried loudly, quoting the sea turtle in the movie, making some of the kids around him giggle in recognition.
Once they were inside, Dunk honed in on the food options and felt his stomach gurgle. “I think I need some food, or I might try to turn some of these fish into sushi,” Dunk said to Daisy out of the corner of his mouth, as if the fish could overhear and be offended.
Daisy snorted and they went into the cafe and scarfed some burgers.
When they were done, Dunk grabbed Daisy’s hand and pulled her into the nearest exhibit, not noticing the gesture until her fingers spasmed around his before she slid them free.
He debated apologizing, but then he gasped at the animals around him, the faux pas forgotten. “This is amazing,” he breathed.
“Look!” Daisy cried, slipping through the crowd to stand right in front of one of the thick glass panes to get as close as possible to the fish.
They darted from one tank to the next quickly, then stood side by side for long minutes at each in awe, studying the fish, the rays, the jellyfish, the sea turtles, and all of the other creatures they’d never seen before. Dunk had been to the zoo in Richmond, but this was incredible. He read all of the facts listed alongside the tanks and Daisy bobbed her head and giggled with the little kids crowding around them, pointing and bouncing.
When they found the room with the touch tanks, Dunk practically body checked some other adults out of the way to get close enough. He reached beneath the water to gently touch the starfish and skimmed his fingers over the weird, slimy muscle of a sting ray’s wings.
They stayed until Dunk started to feel guilty for taking up space when there were tons of kids dancing and skittering back and forth trying to reach too, and then they found the Giant Pacific Octopuses.
“These are the craziest animals,” Dunk said in awe.
“There’s one!” Daisy said, bouncing again, grabbing his sleeve and yanking at it in her excitement while she pointed with her other hand.
“Eew, holy shit, look, sea cucumbers,” he said a minute later, staring slack-jawed at the insane-looking worm-like creature on the bottom of the tank. “They have a super creepy thing that’s, I don’t know if it’s a tongue or what, but it looks like an eel, and it’s basically my nightmare,” he said with an exaggerated shudder, unable to tear his eyes away from it.
Daisy giggled and said, “I think squids are my nightmare, if we’re talking about deep sea nightmares. They have teeth, Dunk. Teeth.”
He shuddered and shivered and said, “Let’s go look at penguins!”
“I wish we could touch one,” she sighed as they navigated around until they found the penguins.
She sat on a bench and although Dunk was happy standing after the hours in the car, he joined her, leaning forward, his forearms draped on his thighs. Even though there were dozens of people around them, their exclamations and laughter echoing strangely in the large space, Dunk felt like he was on an island, just Daisy and him.
His chest tightened and he had to clear his throat and announce as cheerfully as possible, “I think we should do fun stuff like this the whole way.”
Daisy’s head cocked, almost peeking up at him with the way her lashes were shielding her eyes. “Okay,” she said, her voice matching the way she was looking at him, a little shy, as if maybe she was feeling how it was just the two of them, despite all of the people around them, too.
Dunk felt his muscles start to lock up, wondering if Daisy was really feeling this same… togetherness that he was, or if it was only him.
“Did you know that penguins have one hundred feathers a square inch?” he blurted out, hoping it wasn’t as awkward and loud as it felt.
“There’s a type of sea turtle that can be underwater for five hours,” Daisy responded in kind, her soft mouth quirking. “I guess maybe we both watch a little too much Animal Planet, huh?” she asked sheepishly.
Putting his hand on his heart and gasping like his life depended on it was really hard when all he wanted to do was stare into her eyes and ask her if she was having a moment too. But he pulled it off, making her giggle softly, while he cried, “Daisy Rhys, there is no such thing as too much Animal Planet! Take it back!” When she just kept giggling, shaking her head, he crossed his arms and scowled, then repeated, “Take it back!”
“Your scowl isn’t scary, you know,” she giggled, standing up and smoothing her hands down the tops of her thighs as if she were wearing one of her sexy sundresses instead of those tempting shorts.
“It would be if you were a freshman football player,” Dunk defended himself with a huff, bracing one big hand on the bench behind him and looking up at her. “You ready to go or you want to go see the sharks?”
She tugged her phone out of her pocket and checked the time. Flashing the display, which read 5:23 p.m., she said reluctantly, “We should get back on the road for at least a little bit longer.”
Dunk hopped to his feet. “Probably a smart plan,” he agreed.
They left the aquarium slowly, practically dragging their feet like little kids who didn’t want to leave the toy store. Once they were at the car, they put down the roof, turned on the GPS and studied the map.
“Oh,” Daisy said, some of the curls in her knot escaping to brush Dunk’s cheek, “we’re pretty close to Carmel. There’s a lot of amazing galleries, I’ve heard. Maybe we could spend the night there?”
“Okay,” Dunk agreed immediately, dazed by her nearness again.
She beamed and Dunk put the GPS in its stand while Daisy started driving. Dunk turned on the radio, lazily flipping through stations until he found one playing classic rock, and hung his arm over the door. He tipped his head back against the headrest, freed his sunglasses out of where they were hanging from the vee of his tee shirt, and slid them on.
The setting sun was dancing through the swaying tree branches they were passing under, heat dappling his face and his bare throat and arms.
He hummed, all of the ups and downs of his emotions subsiding beneath the simple pleasures of feeling the sun and the wind, of hearing the purr of the engine, of listening to “Have Love, Will Travel.”