Page 63 of Hot Tea & Bird Calls

Who knew Nature Girl had it in her?

Her toast necklace glinted in the daylight. The kiss had been so fucking brief; their pendants didn’t even connect. That woman defied science. Celene breathed out a laugh, started her car, and set her Bluetooth for distraction music instead of any shitty cross-dissolved radio stations.

She’d finish what Skye started. And there was nothing fake about that.

16

“Oh, Skye, sounds like you kissed the fuck outta her,” Zinnia exaggerated, eyeing the underside of a copper pan for the price. “Aren’t pennies plated with copper? Why is this so expensive?”

“Maybe we should recruit Skye’s girlfriend to talk the price down.” June jabbed Skye with an elbow in one of hundreds of aisles crammed with vintage items (and admittedly, some junk) of the four-floor consignment shop.

It was Saturday, days since Skye subjected herself to the astonishingly silken wonder that was Celene’s lips. She’d lost any bit of breath doing what little she had—parting her lips hadn’t even been a conscious decision.

Nonetheless, she’d supped from the promised land. Skye knew no reality before that anymore. Even at home that evening, she shrugged off Luce’s brittle mood because she’dkissedCelene Vale.

And Celene had bent forward formore.

“I can give you book two ofNorwood’s Scientific Method’s series. It’s nonstop wet and wild women-on-women fucking.” Zinnia blushed when a lady pushing kids in a double strollersucked her teeth at them. Holding back a guffaw, she said, “Maybe you and Celene can recreate some scenes.”

Skye brought her smoothie to her lips, needing a cooldown, remembering Celene’s mention of foreplay before any four-finger action. “Yes to book two. Roleplay: to-be-determined.”

Though more than once or twice, her mind would drift to Celene in the raven-haired Mistress’s image. Then, she’d blink away and realize minutes had passed and she’d been staring at the same page that whole time.

June dropped the copper pan and pot into their basket, blowing dust off first. “Do your parents know about Celene?”

“They do. I’d mentioned there’s an old friend back in town that I think about all the time.” She appreciated how she could open up to her parents and voice the sappiness she even shied away from around her best friends. Her family thrived on love. She reminded herself that for Luce, too. “They’re excited. If not for Luce, Larkin’s videos from the Toast Festival would’ve outed us.”

With Larkin as social media mutuals with Skye’s parents, they inevitably saw the cuts of Skye and Celene shoulder-to-shoulder, edited between scenic shots and festival food reviews. Unambiguously an item. They’d done their duty; they looked authentic.

“You’ve kind of gone ghost.” June pointed out someone’s subpar acrylic painting, where all the people’s hands were missing. Must’ve been too hard to render. “What have you been up to?”

Complicating Celene’s fuchsia project. A fourth into her modeling the freeform, flowing sculpture, the size of the stems turned Skye’s stomach. An indicator of her going wrong. So she scrapped everything and began anew, increasing the scale. Deceptively more fragile, but she knew this would please her client-slash-fake girlfriend.

Skye played off a shrug, fitting her sleeves to her elbows. This part of the store needed a fan. “Mosaic life. Nothing new.”

Zinnia left fingerprints on several glass ornaments, perusing for the largest. “Do you and Celene talk? Like, if you hit her up right now, would it irk her, or would she roll with it?”

With a second shrug, she asked, “Why?”

“Long distance isn’t the end of the world, ya know. Drop this fake dating shit and stop denying your real connection.”

“I can’t do that.” Skye sipped from her cup, chewing residual apple peel. “This dating thing’s opened my eyes. I want everything from my next partner. A life together, some traveling. Our own home.” She could hear one of the stroller kids beg for something breakable. “A child, if that’s in the cards. Or a dog? I don’t know.”

June nodded, albeit slowly, suspiciously. “Years back, you wanted to escape Yielding. Now, Luce calls the shots in your life.”

“Luce needs me.”

“Sure, but what doyouneed?”

“I’m figuring that out.” Skye evaded June and Zinnia’s sympathetic stares, picking at a bowl of cuff links she certainly didn’t want. “Celene’s a big fish in a big, metropolitan pond. She’d dry up here.”

They wandered further, to a section comprised of nothing but old clocks. Skye lost herself in the swinging brass pendulum of a grandfather clock. Unlike the copper cookware, someone took the time to keep this area polished.

Not as nomadic and outgoing as her parents. Not in prosperous comfort like her grandmother. Not into the stable suburban lifestyle Cosmo prospered in. Skye couldn’t find her place.

This clock would count the seconds, minutes, days, and years Skye couldn’t control. Had she accomplished enough? Relaxed enough? Had she wasted her degree?

Celene came with a time limit. Sooner or later, they’d converse about their supposed breakup and be free of obligation to one another. Skye thumbed her phone, where she’d been scrolling through Celene’s socials full of trips in and out of the country.