A Story of Now (46 page)

She cannot deal with any of this right now.

* * *

It’s just past dawn, but Claire’s already up. She leans against the porch railing and watches Blue run around and hunt out scents as the sun lifts itself up over the lake through the trees. She packed her bags, showered, and dressed. And now she’s waiting until they can leave and get away from this awkward situation.

She knows her parents are up, too, going about the business of their day; neither able to sit still for long. However, when she finally committed herself to the morning and went inside to the kitchen, she didn’t find anyone there, just a half-full coffee pot and an empty room. No sign of Mia either.

The screen door opens quietly behind her. Claire steels herself for the potential assault of her mother.

“Hey.” It’s Mia.

Relieved it’s not her mother, Claire turns briefly, long enough to note that Mia’s dressed and ready for the day but not long enough to meet her eye. She can’t.

“Hey.” She clears her throat and puts her coffee mug down on the railing. “We should get going soon.”

Mia comes over to stand near Claire. “Sure, I’m ready.”

They stand there suspended in a long silence, and both stare out at the lake and the trees. Claire chews on her lip. She wants to apologise for not answering her message last night, but she also doesn’t want to bring it up. Because that will bring all the unspoken weirdness of this last twelve hours into a firmer reality. And maybe if it stays in the land of unspoken, it can be ignored.

“Awkward, huh?” Mia suddenly says. She, on the other hand, is clearly not willing to let the situation go by unmentioned.

Claire nods, not quite sure what to say.

Mia takes a step closer to her. “Are you okay?”

Claire tenses, suddenly wary about the unknown whereabouts of her parents.

“Of course I am.” She tries to sound as light as possible. “Let me know when you’re ready to go.” She picks up her coffee cup from the railing and slips back into the house before Mia can come any closer.

CHAPTER 57

Claire takes a deep breath and dials the number. She breathes as steadily as she can through the short voice mail message, nervously awaits the beep, and plunges in.

“Uh, hey, I’m just calling again to tell you Rhiannon—the little girl from the lake—her mum called my mum. Apparently Rhiannon is fine. She’s just going to have to have her arm in a cast for a while. And her mum said to say thank you, again. So…uh…anyway, I just thought you might want to know.” She bites down her lip until it hurts, urgently trying to decide which way to go next. “Anyway, I hope your grandmother is okay too. Um, okay, I’m going to go. Maybe call me if you, I don’t know, want to catch up sometime?” She cringes and grips the edge of her doona. “Bye.”

She hurriedly hangs up the phone before she can say anything else dumb. She pushes her face into the pillow and blushes even though no one else can see her.

Catch up
. It sounds so ridiculous given this new direction their relationship has taken—or
not
taken. But she didn’t know what else to say in her desperation to sound casual, to not let on just how much Mia’s sudden silence has thrown her. She pulls the covers over her head, curses loudly, and wishes she could take that message back and start again.

Maybe if she weren’t so hungover, she would have been better at it. And maybe if she weren’t so crazily fixed on the fact that she hasn’t heard anything from Mia that she can’t seem to hold a sane thought in her head, she
might
have come up with something better.

She slowly pulls the covers down, blinks into the muted morning light of her bedroom, and listens to the remote sounds of her mother as she charges around the house. She has a day off, and Claire is supposed to go to lunch with her today. Any minute now, she’ll rap on Claire’s bedroom door to tell her to get ready. And more than most days, Claire wishes she didn’t have to. All she wants to do is lie right here and stew on the fact that Mia didn’t pick up the phone when Claire called. Again.

They haven’t seen each other since the lake. And it’s been six days. Six whole, impossible, nerve-wracking days of Claire putting out tentative feelers and Mia doing nothing in response. Well, barely anything. And it’s been six days of Claire freaking out more and more about it.

In fact, they haven’t even
spoken
since the day they left the lake, after her parents unexpectedly turned up. That experience was awkward as hell, and Claire knows it’s partly her fault that it was so uncomfortable. But how could it not have been? When she’d just asked Mia to stay there another night with her and most definitely
not
to hold hands and play Scrabble. And then her parents show up? And then to turn around and introduce her as a new friend? Not ideal. Claire also knows she didn’t do much to make that encounter any easier. But she couldn’t. She was too paralysed by their sudden, invasive presence to do anything but merely function.

And that awkwardness stayed with them as they drove back to the real world again, leaving behind the bubble of their short, glorious little holiday. Claire climbed into the car that morning harried and annoyed by her mother’s last-minute round of reminders and instructions. It was as if Claire had never made the drive between the lake and home before, as if she didn’t know the blind spots on the roads, or she didn’t know to disable the security alarm back home in Melbourne or anything else her mother felt the need to remind her of.

She was in a foul mood by the time she got in the car. But once on the road, she took in a deep breath and then turned to Mia and smiled.

“I’m sorry. My mother makes me a little tense.”

“That’s okay.” Mia smiled and stared at the road ahead. “She seems like an intense person.”

And that’s all she said. And that’s all Claire could bring herself to say too. For the rest of the drive home, they didn’t talk about anything to do with what had passed between them, let alone touch or look at each other. In fact, they were mostly silent. Claire played music to quiet the silence, but it was still irrepressibly there.

Then, when they finally arrived at Mia’s house, and it was time for goodbyes, Mia’s father was out on the footpath. They’d given him uncomfortable waves as he approached the car and greeted them exuberantly. He didn’t even notice the mood, just asked about the trip and helped Mia with her bag as Blue jumped and whimpered with excitement.

All Mia gave Claire in that moment was a quick smile and goodbye and told her she’d talk to her soon. Then she turned and walked inside with her father without looking back.

Claire rolls onto her back and contemplates getting up to nip her mother’s nag in the bud. But she really doesn’t want to. If Claire has her way, she’ll lie in bed all day and stew and wait. That’s all she wants to do right now.

And it feels as though, if Mia has her way, they will just lapse into silence altogether. For the umpteenth time in the last few days, Claire scrolls back over her messages between them since they got back from the lake, the few that there are.

She sent the first one a couple of days after they got back after she hadn’t heard anything. Unsure what this sudden protracted silence meant, she sent it to Mia just to gauge her response.

My mother didn’t say a single thing about the state of the house. We must have actually done a good cleaning job.

The response was brief.
Ha, I’m glad.

Then there is another message a couple of days later when, embarrassingly unnerved by Mia’s three-word response followed by days of silence, she sent another trivial message.

My mother just used the word
potential
in a lecture eight times in ten minutes.

This time the response doesn’t arrive for eleven hours.
Wow. Highly annoying, but actually kind of impressive.

I know, right?

But then nothing.

As she scrolls through the next couple of days, she only sees messages from Robbie, Nina, and Cam. She didn’t hear anything else from Mia until Friday. That was the day
after
Claire cracked and tried to call her. But, getting Mia’s brief, cheerful voice mail, Claire backed out and hung up at the last minute.

Later that day, Mia messaged.

Hey, sorry, my grandmother is in hospital, and we had to go up and see her this weekend. Back Sunday night.

That message calmed Claire a little. But it was only temporary because now it’s Tuesday, and she still hasn’t heard a word. And she’s too scared to call again after this morning’s clumsy message.

But it freaks Claire out because she knows it’s a change. A significant one. She knows if she were to scroll back to the time before the lake, she’d see at least a message a day, if not more, between the two of them. Not now.

She keeps reviewing every single moment they spent together. What does it mean? Is Mia completely regretting it now? Or was it nothing to her? It didn’t seem like nothing. And Mia certainly didn’t treat it like nothing at the time.

That night at the lake Claire feels as though she went over a precipice and she—maybe stupidly—assumed Mia had gone over with her. But maybe she didn’t. Does Mia regret this thing they started? This thing
Mia
started but now seems to have stopped participating in?

Claire thumps her phone against the covers a couple of times, contemplative. These short, polite messages throw Claire. She’s not used to such brevity or distance from Mia. And she isn’t used to it in her romantic life either. Guys who are interested in her are usually pretty persistent, a response to Claire’s knee-jerk cold shoulder act, which is her usual means of testing the water and their interest.

She didn’t even think to do that with Mia. But now it seems Mia’s doing the silent thing to her. And Claire’s fairly certain Mia isn’t doing it for the same reason. She’s way too nice for that. So, Claire has spent hours turning this over and over in her mind, wondering why. And now she’s frightened that maybe this thing isn’t as serious for Mia as it feels as though it might be for her.

Claire has stewed over this last message, particularly. The one that said she’d be back on Sunday. Didn’t that mean Mia would call when she got back? She hasn’t yet. Then she chastises herself for being crazy about it and tries to force herself to chill, which is why she made herself go out with Nina for a drink last night. It was no fun, though. In fact, she was so anxious and despondent, she nearly told Nina everything. But all Nina wanted to do was dance and check out guys and for Claire to join in. And Claire suffered through it, receiving an unwanted phone number and a hangover for her troubles.

And Mia didn’t call. So, she
still
feels anxious and despondent. With this hangover, she adds sick and tired to the mix too. And her clumsy message this morning might be the last bit of brave she has left. She doesn’t know what she’ll do if she continues to hear nothing.

She rolls over on the mattress, too committed to her misery to move. This silence has frightened her in a way no silence ever has before. And she hates it.

At first she thought maybe Mia needed some space or some time away from her after the intensity of those few days. Because it
was
intense. And it’s not as though Claire isn’t feeling those aftershocks too. Every now and then, between her anxieties over Mia’s silence, Claire runs her mind over the fact she’s so deeply, perplexingly attracted to a girl in a way she’s never been attracted to anyone before. Her thoughts touch on the seismic shifts that this is likely to set off in her life but then abandons them. For now, she can’t bring herself to care such is her need to make sense of
her and Mia
. But to do that Claire feels as if she needs Mia in her actual sights. It’s a pity Mia’s not cooperating with that one.

Fighting tears, Claire squeezes her eyes shut and wishes she could backpedal right into sleep and erase this morning, maybe even erase this week. But when the loud knock on her door sounds, when the call to arms comes, she knows she doesn’t have a chance in hell of either of those options.

CHAPTER 58

Before she knows it, Claire parks down the street from the café. Before she can stop herself, she climbs out of the car. And before she can decide whether or not it’s a dumb idea, she heads straight for the door.

She sees Mia the minute she walks inside, busy at the coffee machine. An immediate conflicting trill of fear and happiness swirls in Claire’s stomach, a sensation so sharp that she knows she has to do this no matter what response she gets.

She orders from the girl at the register and then hangs back with the other customers and watches Mia work. Her face is a study of concentration as she works busily and occasionally swaps a joke or a word with the guy by her side. Her hair is pulled up into a loose knot on the top of her head, and stray strands hang around her neck. She looks hot and tired but still so freaking damn cute.

Claire stares so embarrassingly hard she witnesses the very moment Mia sees her name on the order and then glances up as if she wonders if it’s her. When she spots Claire, she looks taken aback for a second, but then she gives her a timid smile. And it’s the very existence of the smile that gives Claire the courage to move forward until she’s leaning on the counter in front of the machine.

“Hey.” She clenches her jaw, surprised by just how nervous she feels.

“Hey.” Mia frowns at the milk jug. “How are you?” She reads a ticket and calls out a name.

“Fine.” Not wanting to be the only thing standing between “Richard” and his latte, Claire ducks out of the way. “You?”

“Good.” Mia puts another two cups on the counter. “Meg!” She gives the customer a smile and turns back to Claire. “Yours is next.”

Claire nods and bites her lip. She doesn’t care about the coffee one little bit. The only thing she cares about is how weird it is to be making this level of clumsy small talk with the person who, only a week ago, she was naked in a bed with, getting to know every part of her body. Claire blushes. Not just at the thought of naked Mia but at the whole damn impossible awkwardness of this encounter. So, to save face and fear, she cuts to the chase and steps back up to the counter.