“You think I haven’t noticed?” His voice is soft. “You agonise over writing a shopping list. You doanythingto avoid people seeing you reading or writing. You forget sequences of numbers. You’re dyslexic.”
He’s too close, his azure eyes shimmering, and I’m horrified by the idea that he might pity me, but I see no pity in his gaze. Only anger that turns the edges to fire.
“H-h-how did you know?”
“My sister has it. You do all the same things she did when she was struggling, before my mammy talked to a specialist and she learned ways to cope with school.”
“But…you said your sisters are all clever!” The bees beneath my skin crawl over each other to escape. “You said they went to university.”
“They did.” He presses his lips together.Why am I looking at his lips?“She went on to become a lawyer. Because there are so many tools that can help. It’s an extra challenge, sure, but it’s not a reason you can’t succeed. Let me guess – you were having a hard time coping with the workload, and Warrick told you that you couldn’t do it, and you decided he was right.”
“Yes, no, I don’t know.” I shrug, as if it’s no big deal, as if admitting it isn’t tearing me up inside. “I’ve never been tested.”
“It’s not an STI. You don’t have to be tested to know your brain works in a unique way.”
His words ooze through my veins like molten honey. I’m hot all over, shaking, humming with wanting. And he’s soclose, and that look in his eyes is forme, and I want want want but I can’t, and so all that wanting falls out of my mouth in a stream of word vomit.
“My teachers at school always said I was a slow reader, but my mother never made me feel like it was a big thing. She would read tome, or we’d watch documentaries, or find creative ways to fulfil my assignments. I was eleven when she died, so I think they put down my falling grades to my grief, which isn’t inaccurate. I started dating Warrick in year 13. He absolutely saved me. And I know all the rotten things he’s done now, but at the time, it was true. He held me through the hardest years, when I missed her the most. He wasn’t sure about me going off to uni, but I won a prize for history, and my mother always wanted me to go, so I did it for her. Only, it was a disaster. There was so much reading to do. I did okay in essays and assigned work, but I failed every exam. It was so hard. My failures were a weight on my shoulders, crushing me into dust. I cried every day. Warrick and I were still dating. He was living here in the village and doing a business degree at the local polytech, and every time we talked, he reminded me that I could come home, we could get rid of the tenant in Mum’s cottage and live there. And I guess I just…I’d been drowning trying to look after myself, and he offered me a liferaft. I dropped out at the end of my first year and came home, and every day I went out into the garden and talked to the bees, and it felt like being close to my mother still. Shortly after, Warrick’s business took off, and so I didn’t need to think about getting a job.”
“He didn’t save you.” Rafe makes a noise normally reserved for discovering another cat asleep in his favourite patch of sunshine. His tail flicks under my chin.
“You don’t understand. He?—”
“Hedidn’t save you.He couldn’t stand the thought of you being better than him, going off to university and leaving him behind. He wanted tocontrolyou.”
“That’s not…that’s not true.”
“I’ve known men like him. The kind of man who could never love a cat, because he wants a pet curled up in his lap, not howling at ghosts or falling in the bathtub or jumping on the roof because you fancy the view. He wanted the honey but never respected the bees. You should have seen the man I stole orchids for – he was a piece of work. I never met your husband, but I see his marks on you as clearlyas if he hit you. He clipped your wings because he couldn’t bear to see you soar.”
I open my mouth to protest, but I can’t find the words. I see Warrick’s concerned face the first time he visited me on campus, and I excitedly showed him my dorm and the library and the junior common room where I hung out with the other history students, and that same face when he suggested I didn’t need a driver’s license, or when he convinced me to shut down my honey stall.
“I know.” I sniff back the tears that are threatening to fall. “Iknow. I put up with it for so long because he made me feel safe. Because anything was better than being alone.”
“That’s what he was counting on. He was afraid that you’d discover you never needed him in the first place.”
“I miss my Mum so much.”
“I know you do.”
There it is. The tears spill over, falling down my face.Oh Mum, I wish you were here. I wish you could tell me what to do.
Rafe opens his arms. I sag against him, something in me breaking as the grief rushes to the surface, fresh as the day Grandmother Mags picked me up from school and with unusual gentleness told me that she was gone. She would love my meadery. She would be sitting at the counter with Rafe, writing labels with her loopy handwriting, cracking jokes with him, shuffling back and forth to the kettle to make sure we were never wanting for cups of tea.
Sometimes, Rafe reminds me of her – his wildness, his determination to never be what anyone expects, his love of sunshine and meat pies – but I’ve been stamping down the niggles of grief because I didn’t want to think about how much I miss her, how much I wish I could talk to her one last time, and how sad she would be to see what little I’ve made of my life.
Well, now the grief is here, a great wave crashing over my body, oozing out of me in salty tears and snot trails.
“Okay.” Rafe strokes my hair. It’s something she used to do, and it makes me cry harder. “Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to pourus two mugs of that calming mead. I’m going to write these labels, and you are going to stand over my shoulder and tell me that I’m doing it wrong, and then we are going over to eat far too much of that leftover cake Celeste left for us and drink far too much mead and dance madly around the shop, because you’re opening tomorrow and that’samazing. But first, I need to change my shirt. How can one tiny human produce so much snot?”
XVIII
The morning of Bee-Witching Brew’s grand opening, I wake to rain hammering the roof.
“It’s a sign,” I moan, stroking Rafe’s soft fur as I lie in bed listening to the windows rattling and the drips plinking into the bucket from the leak in the bathroom ceiling.
It’s not a sign. It’s weather. And it won’t hurt anyone. I shall demonstrate.Rafe stands and grandly prances towards the window, where he scratches to be let out. I open it, and he darts outside, only to race back in two seconds later, fur sodden.
The sky,he howls pathetically as he butts his damp head against me, trying to burrow into my pyjama top.It has betrayed us.
