“I can’t argue with that.” Saskia’s tone would have been a bit more biting, but she was concentrating on trying to fold up the chair. “How do you collapse this bloody thing?”
“Leave it,” Kivi waved a hand. “I’ll do it later. Actually…” Now she turned and actually looked at Saskia. They both paused, and it alarmed Saskia how much she wanted to reach for her.
“Yes?” Her voice came out in almost a whimper.What the fuck?
“Why don’t you stay? Have a beer with me? Again?”
Sorry, what?
But Kivi was being deadly serious. Saskia could tell from her expression.
“Um… okay.”
Kivi smiled, and Saskia couldn’t imagine anything further away from the cold expression she’d worn only a few minutes ago. “Great. I’ll go get you one.”
Talk about a complete one-hundred-and-eighty…
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Kivi
“What am I doing?” she muttered aloud as she grabbed a cold bottle out of the fridge. Toto followed her into the kitchen, ever-hopeful for a snack, and she glanced over at him. “Canyoutell me what I’m doing, Toto?” His ears lifted at his name. “Why am I inviting her to have a drink with me when we’ve just spent the last ten minutes arguing?”
Unfortunately, he had no answer, but she grabbed him a doggy chew anyway. He practically shoved his nose in her hand as she walked back outside with it, spinning in circles and prancing like a show pony in front of a clearly impressed Saskia.
“Doggy dressage?” She raised her eyebrows at Kivi as she sat back down, a now-frantic Toto in front of her.
“He has a number of tricks.”
“I am intrigued.”
Kivi put Toto through his paces – sit, stand, back up, lie down, and so on. By the time they got to spinning, she took pity on him, and so she decided to skip the rest and go with the show-stopper.
“Toto, do you hear a siren?” she asked. His ears pricked in recognition – this was a new one, and she wasn’t sure whether he’d committed it to memory yet. But she didn’t repeat herself, just waited, while his two Golden Retriever brain cells slowly made contact. Then the lightbulb moment. He sat down, lifted his head, and let out a slow, mournful howl.
“Oh my God,” Saskia laughed. Kivi threw the treat at Toto, and he caught it in his mouth, triumphantly taking it back over to his old position in between their chairs to chew on it.
“I decided to make something positive of the sirens we get around here,” Kivi said. “He never used to be able to howl. When he was younger, he’d let out the most pathetic sounds, more like a dolphin call than anything else. But he learned. And learned to do it in response to sirens.”
“Well, there’s certainly a lesson to be had in that,” Saskia said, accepting the bottle of beer that Kivi realised she was still holding. “Creating something positive out of something negative. Like us.”
“Like us?” Kivi wrinkled her nose.
“Well, ten minutes ago, we were practically scratching each other’s eyes out.” Saskia motioned between them. “Now look at us. Having a companionable drink while we attempt to re-find the common ground between us.”
“I suppose,” Kivi said.
“Although…” Saskia now gave a rueful chuckle.
“What?”
“In the nicest way possible… this whole drinking business might be easier if you’d taken the top off this bottle of beer.”
Kivi leapt out of her seat as if she’d been electrocuted, and dashed back inside with the bottle, muttering curses the wholeway there. But the indignities didn’t end there – her arms seemed to have lost all power, and she wrestled with the cap for what felt like an interminable minute until it finally popped off. And even then, she’d jostled it so much that it promptly began to fizz everywhere, spilling out onto her jeans. The resulting damp patch couldn’t have been in a worse place – it looked like she’d had rather a different accident. By the time she handed the almost-full bottle to Saskia and dropped the bottle opener into the grass beside her, it was pure social propriety that was preventing her from hurdling the fence and hiding in the long grass in the field opposite. She flapped a hand under her T-shirt to get some air. Saskia, meanwhile, looked as cool as a cucumber, drinking her beer and pretending not to notice Kivi’s fluster.
They sat in silence for a little while, as Kivi’s heart rate began to climb back down to normal levels. But then…
“Did you have any luck finding a celebrant?” Saskia asked, just as Kivi said the first thing that came to mind, which was, “So how was your day?”
