Page 30 of Once Upon a Thyme
Mika had kissed me. I didn’t know what it had been, a promise of more, a farewell or just the sort of thing he did all the time.
I’d watched him swinging Tessa around and draping himself over Genevra, careless and physical and affectionate.
It seemed to be how he was: touchy-feely with everyone and I was nothing special.
I kept trying to tell myself that the kiss had been nothing.
To him. To me it had been like someone half-opening a gate into Arcadia and showing me a glimpse of what could be.
‘Shall I ring Ollie and tell him to come back tomorrow?’ Zeb broke into my wistful dream-life.
‘What? Why would you do that?’
‘Because I work here. You employ me. Remember?’
I looked at Zeb now. He was draped too but not nearly as picturesquely as Mika, and over the chair rather than another person. Long limbs that seemed to have taken him by surprise by being hinged in unexpected places. Zeb always looked slightly physically awkward.
‘Do you really think you want to work here? With animals? When you’re a trained chef and qualified financial consultant?
Isn’t it a bit of a waste of education and experience?
I worry that you’re going to stick it for a fortnight and then realise that it’s actually just shovelling shit and moving a pig and you’d rather be somewhere where you get to use your brain. ’
There was a long pause. A stem of basil flopped exhaustedly in its pot and there was a short scratchy sound from behind the dresser. Otherwise everything was quiet.
‘Well done,’ Zeb said at last. His tone was level, not sarcastic or even particularly congratulatory, but it sounded as though he meant those two words.
I blinked. The sun had moved and was shining between us now, so I could only see him as a golden outline broken by swirling dust. ‘What on earth are you talking about?’
He sighed. ‘You asked me a serious question. That’s the first time I’ve ever heard you ask something about how someone else might feel. I know you said you were trained out of asking questions but I hadn’t realised it was so serious.’
I blinked again. It really was hard to focus on him with the sun glancing in at such an angle. It caught the edge of a bowl, reflected and refracted and hit me straight in the eye. ‘Don’t be daft.’ I tried to sound authoritative and like an employer. ‘I ask things like that all the time.’
‘You ask superficial questions. “What’s the weather like?” “How old are you?” “Would you like some milk in that?” That kind of thing. But you don’t ask anything where the answer might really be important.’
I stood up. ‘I have no idea what you are talking about.’ I pushed away from the table and over to the sink where I began running water to wash up our recently used tea mugs.
It kept my back to the glaring light which was giving me a headache, but it meant that I could see out of the window.
I could see Mika too, leaning against the wall of the barn with that half-amused expression on his face, watching something I couldn’t see at the far side of the garden.
He was undeniably gorgeous but all of a sudden there was something calculating about him.
Something about the way he stood, as though he were waiting to be admired, and his easy arrogance prickled at my skin.
Behind the beauty there was something showing that looked like overconfidence.
Did he really like me at all? Or had I been an entertainment to distract him in his downtime?
A silly girl to dally with under the trees amid the birdsong.
You don’t ask anything where the answer might really be important.
Zeb’s words echoed in my head, and I felt all those unasked questions from the past surging through me on a lava-raft of boiling anger.
My veins solidified with it, my blood burned.
I never felt angry, never. I might be cross, mildly annoyed, possibly suffer from that mixture of disappointment and thwarted intentions that can feel like anger, but never this fierce, driving rage that was forcing into me now.
‘Stay there,’ I said to Zeb.
‘I’m sorry?’
‘There’s something I’ve got to do.’ I pushed off from the worktop I’d been leaning against. I had to do this, and I had to do it now, while the unaccustomed fury was still in the driving seat. I marched out of the cottage and across the garden.
I’d never been allowed to feel anger. Any extreme emotion had been kept well tamped down, the embers smouldering and giving off the occasional whiff of infuriation like a too-damp bonfire.
Granny and Mum hadn’t just trained me out of questions, they’d trained me out of showing my feelings too.
It would upset Mum and send her to bed for a week if I permitted myself any more than a momentary bite of annoyance.
She couldn’t cope with me being anything other than calm and reassuring.
So, no tantrums, no teenage door slamming, no thrown accusations; I had had to stay calm and sit on my emotions.
I balled my fists as I walked, stomping the gravel underfoot as though it had personally upset me.
It was all starting to make sense. I’d learned to keep it all shoved down.
No anger, no fear, no curiosity. No questions.
I hadn’t been a daughter, I’d been one of those paper dolls that Granny had let me play with from her Sunday Box, where she kept interesting buttons and bits of shell, things to keep me out of mischief.
A flat, two-dimensional creature that they’d kept in her box.
It was as though Zeb’s congratulating me for asking him a question had unlocked that secret compartment inside me that held back all the things I wasn’t allowed to do.
All this seething emotional fallout meant that I could confront Mika without being rendered dumb by his sheer beauty. ‘Hey, hi, Tallie!’ He waved an insouciant arm. ‘We’re nearly packed and ready to go.’
He still looked elfin, in his textured green. But now, in my state of writhing anger, his dark eyes didn’t look as twinkly as they had before, and his hair just looked messy rather than attractively tousled.
‘Mika.’ I was slightly out of breath. ‘You kissed me.’
His beautiful face creased into a frown. ‘Yeah?’
‘And I have to know now.’ The question caught in my throat. Asking questions means rejection. It means having to pacify and cajole and make yourself small. Not knowing is better, it means you can always pretend… The anger rose again. ‘I need to know if you meant it.’
The words came out in a single syllable, rushing into the air before I could try to stop them. Mika’s frown deepened.
‘Meant it, how? Like, what, wanting something more with you?’ Then his face cleared and the eyes were dark and shining again. ‘You might have got it wrong there, Tallie, my darling. It was just a kiss, you know? Nothing heavy.’
He stepped closer to me and the smell of him was intoxicating, as though he were trying to bewitch me. I remembered some more of Granny’s hair-raising fairy stories about the Fair Folk and what they could do to people, and thought they didn’t know the half of it.
Mika was almost laughing now. ‘You’re cute and I’m a terrible flirt, I’m afraid.
Tessa always says it’s my worst feature.
’ He didn’t look remotely ashamed. ‘Tessa and I are getting married at the end of the summer,’ he said.
‘That one’s a secret though. We’ve sold the rights to some magazine or other.
’ Another step forward and a hand came out and touched my hair.
‘So I couldn’t have anything with you, even if I wanted to. She’d have my balls under cheese wire.’
The anger rolled back a little to make way for a tiny cool feeling of smugness. So he actually had fancied me. I hadn’t imagined it all.
‘I’m sorry if you took it the wrong way,’ Mika went on in an apology that was no kind of apology at all, and still made it my fault. ‘I shouldn’t have messed with someone so na?ve. I ought to know better. I’ll learn, one of these days.’
There was a shout across the garden and he raised a lazy hand in acknowledgement, flicking another glance at me.
‘No hard feelings, eh? You’re a lovely girl and this place is amazing.
’ A quick step right up to me, the soft drift of hair against my cheek and the merest brush of lips.
‘You work too hard,’ he whispered. ‘Learn to party.’
Then, like the elven being he resembled, he was gone, dancing across the herb beds towards the summons.
The rest of his bandmates were waiting, carrying instrument cases and, in the case of Tessa, an enormous bunch of herbs that she’d clearly spent much of the morning picking.
I briefly priced it up, and then shook my head.
No point. I’d just add it on to what Simon needed to pay.
But I’d done it. The immense relief almost made me drop to the ground with the lifting of its weight.
I’d confronted someone and the world hadn’t ended.
I may have felt mildly miffed that I’d been quite so easy to bowl over with good looks and charm and a touch of hero worship .
Na?ve? I’d give him bloody na?ve, the lecherous sod.
Although, I had been, hadn’t I? Na?ve enough to think that someone as famous and glamorous and generally a person who could have anyone in the world that they took a liking to, might want me.