A Story of Now (34 page)

She calls out, “Who wants another beer?”

“Yes, please,” they all respond.

She stops in the kitchen doorway. The room has been transformed into a one-person hive of activity. The bench is covered in flour and eggs and dishes, and Mia is busy with a bowl and a spoon and a measuring cup, a beer close at hand.

“Whatcha doing over there, Martha Stewart?” Claire asks as she heads for the fridge.

“I’m making a cake.” Mia takes a slug of her beer as if it’s the most normal thing in the world. She has flour in her hair and a smudge of something on her T-shirt.

Claire raises her eyebrows. “You are what? That’s…nuts.”

“You guys said you wanted dessert,” she says, flushed and grinning.

“We did…but…” Claire shakes her head and laughs. Mia looks kind of drunk to be baking. “Just how much have you had to drink?”

“I don’t know. Some.” She picks up the spoon and points it at Claire. A little flour scatters across to the countertop as she does. “I’ve finished exams. I’ve finished my hardest interview. I’m on holidays, and now I am drunk, and I want to make a cake. So I’m making a cake.” She nods, defiant.

Claire laughs at this enthusiastic tirade. Mia is cutely combative when she’s on the sauce. “And you just know how to do that? To make a cake?”

“Yup. Easy.”

Claire nods. She’s slightly impressed. She carries a handful of beers into the dining room and dumps them on the table.

Robbie takes one. “Thanks. So what is Mia doing?”

Claire shakes her head. “Being insane. And making dessert. I’ll be back.”

“Dessert?” Nina asks. “Awesome.”

Claire spins on her heels and goes back into the kitchen.

“Have you come to watch greatness in the making?” Mia laughs as she cracks an egg into a bowl and then drains the last of her beer.

“I think I should supervise this little drunken episode.” Claire sits on a stool at the bench, happy to feel that familiar lightness with Mia again. It’s great to find this ability to go back and forth like this, no matter how freaking confused she actually is. But she doesn’t want to think about that right now. Instead, she opens her beer and watches Mia bake, enjoying the cute look of concentration she gets on her face as she expertly measures sugar into a cup and uses a knife to swipe away the excess that spills over the top.

“Ah, thanks Claire.” Mia suddenly snatches the beer from her and swigs from it. She puts it next to the bowl and grins playfully at her.

Claire sighs and goes to the fridge to get herself another one. “I can’t believe we even have the ingredients to make a cake.” She shakes her head, unable to conjure a single instance in her memory when her mother or anyone else might have baked something here.

“We brought up the eggs and butter, and I found flour and sugar and cocoa and stuff in the cupboard.” Mia frowns. “That’s okay, isn’t it?”

“Of course. I just didn’t know my mother even knew what to do with things like flour and cocoa.”

“Well, they were here. So someone does.”

“How do you just randomly know how to make a cake?” Claire watches her sift flour into the bowl and stir it, still pretty impressed by this casual show of culinary skill.

“Dad. He taught me. And it’s pretty basic.”

“Yeah, for some.” Claire sighs and sips her beer. “I can barely scramble an egg. I can’t cook anything. And I can’t play poker, either, it turns out. I am seriously lacking in the skills department, I think.” She leans her cheek on her hand and watches the batter smooth out from a lumpy brown mess to a silky chocolate mixture under Mia’s ministrations.

Mia points at her with the spoon again. “That is so unbelievably not true. For one, you are a freakishly fast swimmer.”

“Yeah, well, that’s what my dad taught me so I wouldn’t drown in the lake when I was a kid. And it’s not about being fast, Mia.” She uses her best gruff-dad voice. “It’s about being efficient with your stroke.”

Mia laughs and goes on, “And you can insult people in French. In fact, you can read entire books in French.” She shakes her head. “I couldn’t read a bus timetable in another language if I tried. You have skills, Claire.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

Mia goes back to her cake.

Claire smiles and watches her work. Typical Mia. She wasn’t fishing for compliments or reassurance, but it doesn’t matter. Mia gave them to her anyway. Because she’s like that.

Mia lifts the spoon out of the bowl, taps it on the edge, and lays it across the top. “One thing I haven’t found yet, though, is a cake pan.” She leans over and starts hunting through the cupboards under the counter. “Any ideas?”

“Maybe in the pantry?” Claire climbs off her chair. “I think we used to keep some cooking stuff in there.” She goes over to the huge, old, walk-in pantry, a little room stacked with shelf upon shelf of cans and packets and jars and kitchenware accumulated through the years. Mia follows her in, and they comb the shelves.

Claire stands on her tiptoes and pushes aside large serving bowls to search behind them. “What am I looking for, exactly?”

“I told you. A cake pan.” Mia hunts at the other end of the shelf.

“Yeah, but what does it look like?” She yanks out a large, flat tray. “Like this?”

“What?” Mia laughs as she takes the tray out of her hands and holds it up. “What exactly do you want the cake to look like when it’s done, Claire? A doormat?”

“I don’t know, Mia.” Claire sighs loudly. “I told you, I plead ignorance on this whole baking thing.”

“I just didn’t realise
how
ignorant.” Mia turns on her. Her mouth is serious, but her eyes are laughing. “Really, Claire, you don’t know what a cake pan looks like?”

Claire shrugs. She really doesn’t.

Mia laughs and continues to rummage.

“Ah ha!” she cries a minute later and reaches deep into a shelf. She turns to Claire and holds aloft a deep round tin. “This, Claire, this is what a cake pan looks like, for future baking reference.”

“Hey, no judging.” Claire giggles and swats at her jeering grin. “You’re the one who is drinking and baking. Keep this up and I won’t help you at all.”

Laughing, Mia grabs at the hand and pulls it away. She doesn’t let it go, but holds it in the air between them instead.

For the longest moment they look at each other as some unnameable something passes between them. Mia bites her lip and then smiles a tiny smile, her face flushed with beer and baking and whatever is currently charging the air between them. She drops Claire’s hand but leans slightly closer to her.

Claire stares right back at her. There is a buzzing through her body as she wonders if what she thinks is about to happen really is about to happen.

And then they are kissing again.

Just testing
, Claire tells herself as she automatically responds to the thrill by clasping the back of Mia’s neck with one hand. And the kiss shifts quickly from something tentative to something deeper.

At first, Mia doesn’t touch her. Her hands stay put, somewhere down where she’s leaned back against the shelves. But then mouths open, and tongues are suddenly, electrifyingly, involved, and Claire feels a hand ease cautiously around her waist and stop on the small of her back. Mia’s fingers rest lightly on the exposed skin where her top has ridden up.

Oh shit
. A rush of blood centres on the feel of that hand.

This is going to be a problem.

Because it’s the small but somehow mammoth presence of those fingers alighting on Claire’s bare skin that answers her question about Mia. It’s the place where the thrill starts and radiates outward as they lean deeper into the kiss. It’s the epicentre of the newfound truth that she’s into Mia in a way she can no longer just fleetingly suspect, let alone try and push away.

Claire reaches out and steadies herself on a shelf. Cans and jars shift as they lean back, but their lips don’t part ways for a second. At first, all she can hear is this kind of loud humming in her ears and the sound of their breath as she slides her hand from under Mia’s hair and cups her cheek. Those fingers on her back press in just a little harder in response.

They are jolted from this moment when Pete shouts from the dining room.

“Hey, Claire, are you in this round?”

“And Mia!” another voice calls. “Where the hell is this dessert?”

She hears the sound of a chair scraping against the wooden floor. And that’s all it takes for that hand—and that feeling—to desert her, and for the charge in the air to evaporate.

Footsteps come toward the kitchen. Claire pulls back, and her eyes go wide as she gulps for air.

When Mia meets her gaze and sees her expression, her face also changes.

Just as Claire is about to smile, to try and say something to keep them in this moment, a look passes over Mia’s face. She places a hand fleetingly on Claire’s hip, but only to use it as leverage to edge her way out from between her and the shelves. She slips out of the pantry and back into the kitchen, the cake pan somehow still miraculously held, jeeringly mundane, in her other hand.

Claire is left alone to regain her breath and her grip on what just happened and why the hell it
stopped
happening. She tries frantically to assess what that look on Mia’s face might mean while it’s still clear in her mind. Was it disconcertion or regret?

Mia chats to someone in the kitchen as if nothing of any magnitude even happened, as if there hasn’t been a seismic shift between them in the last few minutes. Claire orders herself to pull it together. She takes a deep breath, tugs at the back of her top, and quickly grabs up something she’s pretty sure is baking related—some vanilla essence—and brings it out into the kitchen as an alibi.

It doesn’t matter anyway. Nina is too busy delightedly watching Mia pour the cake mix into the pan to even notice her. Mia slides the cake in the oven, then takes the mixing bowl and spoon to the sink. She glances at Claire and meets her gaze for the briefest of seconds before she returns to her task. Her expression tells Claire nothing.

Claire puts the small bottle on the bench and walks unsteadily past. She stalks into the living room and takes her seat at the table.

“Good timing.” Robbie holds up a bottle of tequila. “We’ve decided this deal is the tequila deal. Shot?”

“Yes.” Claire nods numbly but doesn’t meet his gaze. She wonders how many minutes have passed in real time since she left the table. And yes, she’d really like a drink. A serious drink. A tequila-shaped drink.

Then Nina returns with Mia behind her, fragments of that unreadable look still on her face. She sits at the far end of the table. As far away as she can possibly get, Claire can’t help noticing.

Robbie turns to her. “Shot, Mia?”

She nods, definite. “Shot.”

* * *

Later, thoroughly drunk but unable to sleep, Claire lays on top of the covers and tries to make sense of this night and of the way something partly unconscious has suddenly become very, very conscious.

Just to be sure, she asks herself the question again.
Claire, do you have a thing for Mia?

This time she’s pretty damn sure she knows the answer.
Yes.

It doesn’t matter if the kiss was cut short. It confirmed all she needs to know. There is no point telling herself otherwise. She has some sort of crush on Mia. And it’s more than emotional. This truth no longer comprises wanting to talk to her, to be in her radius. No, what she wants from Mia has just as much to do with that kiss and that hand on the skin of her back as it does with as any other connection they’ve made. There’s no other way to explain away what she felt during that kiss.

It explains
everything
, in fact. It explains that strange, slightly sick feeling that rippled queasily through her when she saw that girl first touch Mia and then lead her off the roof. Claire knew full well in the pit of her gut what was about to happen. It explains why she hasn’t stopped thinking about it. It explains why she left Jeremy on a street corner instead of going home with him and why she hasn’t returned his calls. It explains her awkwardness in the café on the Sunday after the party and her unwillingness to hug Mia this morning, to show affection despite her surge of pleasure at her arrival.

And she knows she would have kept whatever was going in the pantry going if they hadn’t been disturbed, and if Mia hadn’t backed off like that.

And now, faced with these feelings, she’s also confronted by that fact that Mia didn’t talk to her or look at her for the rest of the night. And Claire has no idea what this means, or what the regret she thinks she saw in Mia’s eyes means. Was it regret that they were caught or that it happened at all?

Even though she has her question answered, Claire isn’t sure it leaves her any better off given the way Mia reacted. She crawls into the bed fully dressed and focuses on the nauseous twist of her stomach and the slight spin of the room as she shuts her eyes.

Tomorrow is going to hurt.

CHAPTER 43

Uh-huh. Morning hurts.

Claire pulls the sheet up around her head to block out the insistent light. It doesn’t help much, though. The bright sun easily pierces the white cotton and beams doggedly at her eyelids. She woke in that very unsweet spot that is late morning when the sun makes a pass straight through the trees by the lake and hits the sleeping porch at full, early-summer throttle. Usually when they come to stay, she’d be up and out of bed well before this moment of torture. But not today. Not after last night.

All she can hear of the world outside is the distant motor of a boat and the busy, argumentative strains of magpie song from the trees nearby. She feels the makings of a solid hangover in the thrumming ache just above her eyes and the queasy bass notes in her stomach. She eases herself onto her back, drapes her arm over her eyes, and frowns. It would help if the curtains were closed, but she clearly forgot to do that in her drunken lurch toward bed last night.

Last night.

At the very thought, she pulls in a breath, holds it for a moment, and then lets it out in a fitful sigh. Last night was all over the messy place. In just a few hours, she managed to run the gamut of moods. First it was fun and easy, then it was hopeful, and then it was kind of hot and revelatory. And then, somehow it was depressing and uncomfortable.