Page 12 of Hot Tea & Bird Calls (Kissing At Work #2)

E arly Monday morning, Elise and Ajay parked their car behind Celene’s.

That was when Celene’s headache started.

Thanks to Byron’s big mouth and tendency to look past Elise’s disinterest, he allowed her input on the Yielding property venture. While the house bore an arduous presence in her life, this big, ugly house with the flu-ish pallor was her renovation, and she’d direct every aspect of its changes.

Celene made it clear before Ajay’s foot touched the patchy ground—he and Elise were guests. Assistants. Extra hands.

She allowed them to chit-chat with her about their impending honeymoon, pass out on the couch for an hour, and eat what little she had in the kitchen.

In turn, Elise reacted to the fresh Poconos air wretchedly—congestion, swollen eyes, dry coughs.

Pretty much a disaster, given her profession: voice acting for audiobooks and corporate explainer videos.

Ajay ran to buy a pharmacy’s worth of allergy medicine, glued to her side until Celene recruited him.

“Byron told me there’s a TV,” Ajay said, shutting the awful window behind him. It whined so sharply, they both cringed. “Elise wants to watch PayDate.”

PayDate: an inane reality dating show where people hungry for internet fame disliked each other for cash. Quinn used to binge it. “I removed the flatscreen.”

“Please say sike.”

“I won’t.” Celene barely watched television, and it disrupted the living room’s harmony. “She’ll have to rot her brain on a smaller screen.”

Ajay double-blinked. “Well, damn, sis.”

“Are you handy?” Celene asked a man who spent most of his professional life in the arts. Music, theatre—he had to have assisted in set design or wielded a hammer for stage work. Some approximation of manual labor.

“I can build IKEA furniture without reading the directions,” he simply answered.

Celene crossed her arms, wondering how that correlated. “I get some local help, but I’ve subjected myself to more cobwebs, rust, grime, and ugh, bug carcasses than anyone should.”

Ajay tidied his Ivy League haircut in offbeat pats. For the wedding, he’d chopped off his billowy curls, and Elise sobbed for a week. Dryly, he replied, “Got anything from IKEA?”

“Change into something you can get a speck of dirt on and install these.” From a large cardboard box next to the front door, she presented one of many parcels delivered that morning.

“The security system Dad set up is surprisingly sound, but I want this video doorbell and six cameras. It’s peace of mind if I’m in and out for however long it takes. ”

“Six? I thought this was a vacation.” Ajay poked the contractor-laid gravel in the driveway with an expensive sneaker. Celene prayed he brought backups that could take some damage.

“You’ll be in Aruba next week. This is family business.” She pointed to the far side of the house; her over-six-foot brother-in-law gaped. “I left you a ladder. Though for you, that feels redundant.”

“Aw, thank you.” He began to gloat, effectively grating Celene’s patience. “I hit my biggest growth spurt when?—”

“It was an observation , not a compliment, Ajay.”

“That’s Big J.”

“No.”

Celene closed herself in the house, massaging her temples. Three adults, and none of them excelled at physical labor. Societal successes, practical blunders.

She pulled her phone from her pocket. The entrance not attached to the deck needed painting, if not a total substitution. Byron insisted on preserving the home’s vintage qualities, but many of them were gaudy and timeworn.

“Look at my man work,” a stuffy Elise Vale Mehta crooned from the 80s-style dining table—one of the things Celene didn’t consider rubbish. “I heard the great outdoors heightens testosterone.”

From the clunky glass window doors, they watched Ajay chase the paper directions from one end of the deck to the other in the sporadic breeze.

Celene sat opposite her, choosing to hold her tongue.

Ajay was a talented guy, yet he could remember to get the tires rotated, and everyone acted like they’d erect a float for him.

Elise rubbed at neatly groomed, rounded eyebrows, her other hand fluffing ‘Ariel Red’ hair, as her stylist named it. Nonetheless, those Vale genes were ruthless. Her roots were already fighting back, dark at her scalp.

Growing up, the sisters got ‘you look so alike’ too many times. Elise took care of that.

In fact, Celene coming out as a lesbian was probably the greatest gift she’d ever given her sister—more valuable than the designer luggage she’d bought off their wedding registry.

Even in Celene’s tender elementary years, boys—specifically ones who bullied girls—caught her ire.

Progressing into middle and high school, she’d perfected caustic, expletive-heavy rejections for guys risking their lives to ask her out.

Meaning all male suitor traffic flowed to Elise, the nice sister.

“Ajay called this a vacation.” Celene rapped her short, pewter manicure on the tabletop. “He knows we’re here to make headway on renovations, right?”

Elise gave a sidelong gaze Celene knew too well. She was not listening. “I got my IUD removed. Wouldn’t it be romantic to conceive our firstborn here, in my old summer bedroom?”

“No, that’s hideous.”

Snapping out of her wedded bliss, she confessed into a tissue, “I saw you talking to Quinn at the wedding. My plan worked.”

“Your plan?” Celene’s temperature hit an instant high. Neck tensing, she stood to fetch the water filter. “You’re attempting to manipulate my life.”

“I had no idea she’d RSVP with a plus one.” A layer of whininess stretched Elise’s confession out. “Aren’t she and Ramona too cute, though? They’ll be married with kiddies in no time. I wonder which one of them will carry.”

“They seem compatible,” Celene relented, staring off at a scratch on the wooden table’s leg.

It’d taken Quinn a year to express her love openly. At the time, Celene had been too enamored to nitpick about it.

Well, until things weren’t so romantic. Celene began criticizing everything about their shared life, and she hadn’t been proud of herself. But when their interactions became a chore, her best self departed.

She never wanted that to happen again.

Elise found her way to the Formica counter, leaning on an elbow.“You invested a lot in that relationship, Celene. Ajay saw it, too. I swear he copied some of the romantic gestures you did for Quinn. That’s why we bothered you about our vows.”

At their wedding ceremony, during A Troca de Aliancas, Ajay recited his vows as spoken word poetry.

Elise’s lines were in iambic pentameter.

Cute, but artists continued to elude Celene.

“What I’d love is to bring this house into the current century.

I thought you came to relieve me of some physical work, not obsess over procreating. You could do that at home.”

“Sure, but my allergies?—”

“We’ll find low-impact errands for you, god.”

“Fine.” Elise squeezed Celene’s forearm. Traces of henna still decorated her hand in complex swoops and paisleys. “I don’t know where to start. Any leads?”

After a long, generous drink from her glass, Celene pulled away to the bar section of the counter, where her handbag sat. From it, she took out the card for Gertrude’s Home Improvement. “Here’s a promising referral. Please look them up, and we can put our heads together on what services we’ll use.”

“Ooo, woman-owned? Go, Gertrude.” She flicked thick hair from her cheek as she read, bearing a sniffly smile. “Can we start with this place’s ghastly, ashen facade?”

“Yes, please.” Celene returned the smile. In a rare moment of holding Elise’s short-term attention, she said, “You were a gorgeous bride.”

“Thanks, I know.” Betraying a sliver of shyness, Elise spun the card on the counter with her fingertips, her wedding band and princess-cut ring flashing prominently. Then, her face lit up. “Do you know what this is like? It’s like playing house.”

The unlimited budget. The freedom to change anything. “You’re right.”

Then, their agreeable moment got knocked down by Elise mentioning, “Remember the girls next door, back then? They had that humongous wooden playhouse in their backyard.”

Celene located her shoes by the door with her eyes, muttering, “I remember.”

Those neighbors moved away, she’d discovered. Good.

“Amazing times. Those girls owned every Beanie Baby, I swear. It’s like...” Elise faded off, but Celene was too busy tossing on a light jacket to notice what for. “Are we depriving future kids if we sell this place?”

Of course, Byron sent someone in the ‘keep it’ camp. Celene rolled her eyes. “It’s not the locale; it’s the company.”

“Oh, that’s touching. Is Yielding making you soft?”

“I’ll be out. Dad must’ve stuffed a thousand menus in a kitchen drawer. Order away.”

Elise had already begun rummaging. “Should we save you anything?”

If it were up to Celene, she’d stay out all night and avoid Elise’s walks down memory lane. “I don’t care. Also,” she waved to her visitors’ bags strewn in the middle of the living room, “I sleep in the primary. You and Ajay take any of the other rooms.”

“Those beds are only full-size!”

She should offer them the weirdly-shaped blue room with too many windows. Just to irritate Elise. “The mattresses are new. We can replace one with a queen, but until then, you’ll be close and personal. Happy babymaking.”

“Celene, seriously.”

“I sent you a blueprint showing where I’d like the cameras installed. Show Ajay.” She shot a sharp look at Elise. “I mean it. Don’t touch the primary.”

And she slammed the tacky door on Elise, who’d shouted back, “But we’re married !”

With an hour left until Luce’s Mosaic Wonderland closed, Skye hadn’t bounced back from her morning. Usually, she drifted through her cinematic dreams in deliberate lucidity, diverging from all potential nightmares.