the art of loving ; lord tewksbury

nineteen

"I don't really have a nickname. Everyone calls me Daisy."

Chapter Nineteen

"Would it be believable if my reason of death was because of a tree?" Daisy wondered aloud. She stared blankly through the heat waves at the ceiling, her gaze trained on a specific point in the wooden structure. On the contrary, her mind was not focused on her present surroundings. It reeled with a number of different ideas, as if customary gears had been fitted into her head and were meshing together in a rotary motion, willing her brain to keep working. She was deep in thought. It brought her to a place far away, away from the foliage around her and the treehouse built into them.

  Daisy reached to rub her back, an attempt to ease the uncomfortable feeling which had emerged from laying on the hard platform for a lengthy amount of time. She flipped herself over so that she was now lying on her stomach, propping an elbow up to serve as a support for her chin.

  "I mean," she went on when she received no response, "do you think people would believe I died simply because I accidentally fell from a tree?" She heavily enunciated the word accidentally to give effect that it would, in fact, be on purpose. She could already imagine the exaggerated title splashed across the front page of the daily newspaper: TEENAGE GIRL MEETS TRAGIC DEMISE AFTER BATTLE WITH BRITTLE TREE BRANCH.

  She smiled at the thought, amused. Daisy crawled to the mouth of the treehouse, peering over the base of the man-made structure at the dirt ground beneath her. She squinted her eyes, trying to estimate the distance between both spots.

  Would it be high enough for death to occur? She thought. Or would she need to go somewhere even higher?

  "It isn't impossible," the boy laying beside her finally answered. "But it will be difficult, don't you think? They need a body as evidence to rule it an accident. You aren't actually going to die."

  A resigned sigh left her lips and she let her head fall forward and onto the wood. "Then I'm out of ideas. My energy level is depleted. I don't think I can come up with anymore ways to fake my own death."

  "Don't be defeated," Tewksbury soothed. "You just need to let your mind rest for a bit."

  "But I don't want to waste anymore time," Daisy groaned.

  "We've been at it all morning," Tewksbury said. "An exhausted mind is not going to help." He pushed himself into an upright sitting position and poked the jaded girl in the side. "Why don't we move to a different place? A change of scenery might help. We could move to the kitchen."

  She lifted her head to look at him, catching his suggestive tone of voice. "Is this your way of hinting that you want to eat?"

  "It wouldn't hurt to eat," Tewksbury told her. "We both need food. It will help replenish our energy levels. Then, when we are finished, we can come back here and spend the rest of the afternoon thinking up more ideas."

  Daisy hesitated, weighing his suggestion. She knew he was not wrong—if they went on like this without a break, they were not going to come up with anything fruitful. It was then that she noticed the feeling of emptiness gnawing at her stomach, the sensation increasing by the minute as it plead for her to fuel it with food. Hunger, she realised, and it made sense considering how she had not had a meal since she had awoken.