Page 39 of Once Upon a Thyme
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 thoughtthey 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 actuallyhadfancied 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 naïve. 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. Naïve?I’d give him bloody naïve, the lecherous sod. Although, I had been, hadn’t I? Naïve 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.
Here came the burning embarrassment to fry my ears and make me feel as though I was wearing a brushed-wire suit. How could I even have thought…? Me, little Tallie Fisher, how dare I allow myself to step outside the role allotted to me by life and imagine that someone so… so…Mikamight have been serious? I turned away and began pulling faded petals off the rose clambering its way over the wall, feeling the hot-cheeked mortification dying back to the usual background bewilderment. Hehadfancied me, he had practically admitted it. He was marrying Tessa. Nothing could have come of any attraction, because he was marrying Tessa.
Focus on that, Tallie.
Slowly, to give myself chance to adjust from fury-driven or fiery with humiliation back to base level, I walked back to the cottage. Zeb was still where I’d left him, which felt odd. Inside I felt as though I’d aged a century, as though letting out some emotion had released several pent-up decades which had settled on me like dandruff.
‘All right?’ he said cheerily.
‘Yes,’ I replied, still slow. ‘I just had to have a word with Mika.’
‘I saw.’ Now Zeb looked down at the table, tracing a crack with his fingernail. ‘I was a bit worried for a minute. You went off looking as though you wanted to rip his immaculate head off.’
‘Were you?’
‘Actually.’ Now he looked up and met my eye. ‘I was worried you were going to offer to leave with him.’
Zeb sounded serious. Although the words had been lightly spoken, almost like a joke, there was nothing amused about his expression. He really did look as though he’d been afraid that I was going to throw myself at Mika and ask to be taken away from all this.
The last of the anger drained away completely to be replaced by a different kind of warmth. The sort of warmth that feels as though it creeps out from your heart rather than being forced in from outside. A hot drink, as opposed to an acid bath.
‘How could I leave all this?’ I waved an arm. ‘I’ve got seeds to bring on and a fennel bed that’s still got trotter prints in it. Plus the possibility of a barn full of birds and a potential donkey.’
‘Which is why’ – Zeb came in now with what seemed to be a burst of cheerfulness – ‘you have me as Pig Wrangler and Shit Shoveller. There’s still an element of financial management creeping in to my role of course. Hence me persuading Simon to pay to build us a new barn. One with proper fastening gates that Big Pig can’t open.’
There was a moment of quiet into which the future settled. No rock stars. No life on the road, being an accessory to a man who flirted like he breathed. Instead, a future here, with my herb garden and my animals.
I shook my head. ‘It was too easy,’ I said, clanking china as I put the used mugs away in the cupboard. ‘He didn’t even quibble.’
‘Yes,’ Zeb said slowly. ‘I wondered about that.’
