Unlikely You (Sapph in the City #5)

Chapter 13

Chapter Thirteen

Bren

The lunch with Honey had been…weird. Not for any specific reason, but I’d left feeling unsettled and itchy. The second I got home I threw myself into work so I wasn’t thinking about Honey and her smile and her tits and her legs or any other part of her body. I definitely wasn’t thinking about her laugh, which kept echoing through my skull as if it was playing on a loop.

I didn’t think about her while I packed orders and stacked them by the door to take to the post office. I didn’t think about her while I printed more stickers and cut out fabric and heated up some leftovers for dinner and fed and played with Arson.

She’d sent me a message and I wasn’t going to respond. I wasn’t going to respond to any of her messages ever again. We’d had the lunch, she’d “paid” me back for the drink and whatever thing we’d been doing was over. Concluded. There was no reason that we needed to have further communication.

Except…I typed out several different responses before deleting every single one and putting my phone down again.

I tried to go to bed, but the spiders in my brain were spinning too many thoughts for sleep to be an option.

Instead, I went to the Holloway Apiary account and scrolled through the posts. Watched the videos. I knew Honey would probably get a notification, but I didn’t care.

There were videos of Honey rescuing bees from various locations. Those were the ones with the most views and comments. Her voice soothed me from the voiceover as she explained what she was doing, and it was no wonder so many people had watched the videos. Her voice was magnetic. Before I knew what had happened, I’d watched dozens of videos narrated by Honey. She really had done a ton of work on this account. The number of followers and engagement was impressive for such a small business. I wondered if she’d ever had media inquiries and if she knew how to handle that kind of thing?

I wanted to ask her, but I didn’t want to talk to her.

I didn’t.

Your social media account for the apiary is really impressive I typed out and sent before remembering it was practically the middle of the night and she was probably asleep. Whatever. Hopefully she had her phone set on silent.

Thank you. That means a lot. I work really hard at it. Didn’t know anything when I started it.

That was even more impressive.

The videos rescuing the bees are my favorite I sent the message before I realized what she was going to take from it. Shit.

That’s high praise indeed, thanks Bren!

Hell. I never should have said anything to her. Now she was going to think that we were friends.

You’re welcome I responded because I would have felt like a bitch otherwise.

What are you doing up so late? Burning the midnight oil?

No. Lying in bed and obsessing about her was more like it.

Something like that I sent.

You should go to sleep. Get your rest so you can conquer the world tomorrow.

Fuck. Those simple words made me feel like I could bust through a wall. Like I could do anything.

Goodnight Honey.

Goodnight Bren.

I did not punch through a wall the next day. Not even close. Things went wrong from the start when I’d somehow burned my eggs. Then I saw the fabric that had been on back order that I’d been waiting for had a printing mistake in the pattern and there was no way I could use it. Then I got a nasty customer review for something that wasn’t even my fault and had to waste many precious minutes dealing with that.

I’d decided to order lunch from the fancy salad place that was way too expensive, but seriously delicious. They swapped my order with someone else’s, so by the time I got the right order, I was ravenous and would have eaten the cardboard container the salad came in.

The queen bee says hello. The message was accompanied by a video of Honey holding up a clear plastic clip that had a large bee in it. I’d take her word for it that that was the queen bee. It was wild that Honey would just handle bees with her bare hands.

Have you ever been stung?

Oh yeah, lots of times. I’m not allergic. Ellie says hello too. There was another video of the youngest girl, Ellie, waving.

Hello I responded because it would have been rude not to.

Okay, now I have to get the rest of this hive into this box. They’ve been living in an upturned baby pool.

I didn’t know why she’d reached out to me in the first place. I guess it was cool what she did. And I had watched a bunch of her other videos.

I went back to work and about an hour later she sent me a picture of a white beehive in the back of a truck and a hand flashing a thumbs up sign.

For a moment, I considered telling her that she didn’t have to give me constant updates. That I didn’t care what she was doing. That I was literally going to see her tomorrow, but I didn’t.

In their new home.

Another picture of rows of beehives from the farm.

Feeling weird and squirmy, I took a picture of my piles of fabric that I was pinning together with the foam for the ereader sleeves.

How long does it take you to make one?

I’d done some process videos on my social media and considered sending those to Honey, but I didn’t.

So I told her. I put my work aside and took pictures and even just sent her a video of me narrating because I didn’t want to type everything out.

Honey asked insightful questions and before I knew it, we’d been talking for a long time and I didn’t know how it had even happened.

I was helpless to defend myself against her, even when she wasn’t here with me. She’d crawled her way into my brain and had made herself cozy in the nooks and crannies and made it impossible to not think about her. I should be angrier about this kind of infection, but I wasn’t.

It was…nice. Having someone to talk to wasn’t horrible. She made me laugh and she was interested in what I said, and she was paying attention to what I said. She listened.

A little flame flickered in my chest as we kept talking and she sent me videos from the farm.

“These guys go bonkers for frozen peas. Watch.” She filmed a video of her cute ducks as she gave them bowls of frozen peas in water and they did seem very excited, making lots of noise and gobbling at the peas while Honey laughed.

Fuck, I wanted to pour that sound into my ears every single day. I wanted to absorb it into my skin. I wanted to drink it and breathe it into my lungs.

What was she doing to me?!