That wasn’t embarrassing.
Keren decided that continuing to eat was the best idea. Then she wouldn’t be expected to speak.
The four women stared at her until she’d finished what was in her mouth. She wasn’t going to get away with this. Unless..
Rayah smacked her hand away from the goats’ cheese pizza. “No. Talk. You. Scott. Study.”
“Nothing to tell. We’re trying to get along. We figure it can be embarrassing for our friends when we’re constantly bickering,” Keren said.
“I’d have thought you were used to embarrassing your friends, honey.” Scott’s baritone came from behind her.
She closed her eyes and wished the man himself could be teleported to South America. In a rainforest. With man-eating termites or something.
“No,” she said, looking up. “That’s just you. Only you can’t help it, being aweird muso.”
She watched his face as she said the words. The light that had been in his eyes as it always was when they bickered died, leaving him looking as if she’s kicked him in the stomach.
“Have Bez serve you tonight, Keren,” he said, picking up a couple of empty glasses and walking away.
His shoulder were slumped and he went straight into the kitchens, away from them.
“Holy fuck,” Rayah said. “I think you just castrated my cousin.”
“He’s being dramatic and trying to make me feel bad.” Keren could absolutely kick herself for using those words.
Rayah shook her head. “That’s not Scott’s style. His would be to come back with an equally devastating comment. Usually about your teeth.”
“One he knows wouldn’t hurt,” Keren said, one or two, or even a hundred, things clicking into place.
She slid out, forgetting about the goat’s cheese pizza. This needed to be put right.
The kitchen wasn’t somewhere she generally entered. Mel, the chef, was particular about who was allowed in and that didn’t include customers. His wrath was far preferable to Scott’s hurt.
She sneaked passed Mel, through to the small yard that led out of the kitchen. Scott was sitting outside, his back to the building so he could face the peaks. He had his guitar and was softly strumming something.
“I’m sorry,” she said, having no clue what else to say. “That was so far below the belt it was underground.”
“Yep,” he said, the music stopping. “It was. But I shouldn’t be surprised.”
“I never did call you those words.”
“But you did just now. Even though you must have a fucking clue now that I don’t hate you…”
“So why make that comment about me embarrassing my friends?” she said, bubbling inside like a stewpot about to boil over.
He stared at the hills. “If I had come over and been… pleasant… what sort of questions would they have thrown at you? For fuck’s sake, you looked so uncomfortable…” he shook his head. “Help me out here, Keren, because I haven’t got a fucking clue what I should be saying or doing or even where I should be fucking looking.”
“Scott!” she waved her hands in the air. “I don’t fucking know either. For the past fourteen years you’ve acted like you seriously disliked me. Now I find out it’s because you think I said something I didn’t? When was I ever a person to call you ‘weird’? When did you think I was the sort of person to call you weird? Or be horrible to you, Scott? When was I the type of person to say shit about anyone?”
“I was twenty-one. I saw you every time I came home from university. Every time I saw you, I wanted to be more than just the friends we’d been as kids. I met loads of girls while I was at uni – but none of them were a fucking degree of what you were. And each time I came home you were more. But I never knew how you saw me. I was going to ask you out – fucking ridiculous given you were going to uni – but I didn’t want to wait until I was twenty-six or older because your course was five years.” He finally turned around. “But I didn’t know if you’d changed. When someone said that you’d completely dismissed the idea of going out with me I figured I didn’t know you at all and you were just some kind of dream girl I’d made up in my head.”
She looked to the peaks, hoping that some kind of inspiration would hit and tell her what to say. She remembered this Scott: the boy and the teenager who would sit with her while the rest were jumping off the cliff into the tarn; the boy who would talk about books and songs and movies with her; the boy who was upset when his dog got old and had to be put to sleep and when he heard his parents discussing that they were going to split up.
“But you believed something somebody told you over asking me about it. That I don’t understand. The boy I knew would never have listened to gossip,” she said, feeling anger expand like a bomb inside her.
Scott looked at her. “Keren, if I had confronted you, I risked you seriously rejecting me. There was the possibility you’d have said the same words to me that I heard you’d already used. I risked you turning me down. My whole point in telling someone that I liked you was to get an idea what your reaction would be like. If you’d even thought of me that way.”
“That makes it sound like you weren’t confident, which is bullshit,” she said. “You played concerts to huge audiences; you sang in front of big crowds. There was no way you were worried aboutmeturning you down…”
