“Lane.”
“You have so much conviction that you’ve been removed from the bench for—”
She got no further because Jennifer kissed her with the ambiguous ferocity of someone who either found her utterly irresistible or just really wanted her to be quiet. Which seemed the ideal reward for deliberately riling up an easily rilable person.
“See,” said Audrey, post-kiss giddy in a way that fifteen-years-ago-Audrey had taken for granted. Had assumed she would always feel. “We’re having a lovely walk.”
Jennifer just growled.
“There’s trees and grass and the moon.”
“Literally all things you can see everywhere.”
“What about that”—Audrey cast about for something more iconically countryish—“that tractor.”
“That’s a combine harvester.”
Audrey strongly suspected that Jennifer couldn’t tell a combineharvester from a cheese sandwich. But contrary for no reason seemed to be her love language. “That sweet little goat?”
“Are you sure,” murmured Jennifer Hallet, with a private smile, “it’s not a bull?”
“No. How could you possibly mistake a tiny goat for a bull?”
“To this day, I have no fucking clue.”
“Should I ask?”
“No.”
“But I’m curious now,” Audrey definitely did not whine.
“God you’re cute when you’re needy.”
“I’m not needy,” Audrey protested exactly the right amount. “I just like to know stuff. That’s a good trait for a human being to have. Otherwise, we’d still be eating raw mammoths and pooing in holes.”
“Are you implying that all human progress has been caused by slightly annoying people asking intrusive questions?”
That one glass of wine, or that one kiss, must have packed a hell of a wallop. Because Audrey was still feeling weirdly…bubbly? Hopeful? Happy? “Ooh,” she said, “I’m only slightly annoying now.”
“Stick around,” Jennifer told her, “and I might upgrade you to mildly vexatious.”
“Andyou want me to stick around.”
“Oh fuck off.”
Before Audrey could challenge Jennifer on her mixed messages re: around-sticking versus off-fucking, they crested a low rise, and the gabled roofs of Patchley pierced the skyline. Exterior lighting brushed the facade with gold and, although that was probably a recent addition, it made it easy to imagine a time when a house like that was its own fairy tale. Albeit one where the princess ran off to New York and Cinderella went back to Stepney.
You’re pathetic, said Natalie in tones that Audrey had once read as affectionate.Getting so worked up over something so…pedestrian.
And for once, Audrey let herself disagree. It wasn’t pedestrian, it was…it was complex. It wasn’t just complex, it was fucked. She’d been drawn to Doris because she’d wanted so badly to know that people like her had been at that house and walked on those floors and lived and loved in those rooms. To feel connected to the past as the whole of herself, not just the parts of herself that fit into the visible bits of history.
And you got it, said Natalie.So what are you complaining about?
Like her, Doris had fallen in love with a woman. Which was affirming. But like her, Doris had fallen in love with a woman who could never, ever love her back. And that was something else entirely.
Audrey sighed the messiest sigh she’d sighed in her life.
“What’s that about?” asked Jennifer, with an air of warranted suspicion.
