Chapter 18
Chloe
The bus ride to the farm was particularly bumpy that Thursday, which made writing in my journal a challenge, but I needed to get my thoughts out before I had to face Teddy again.
My handwriting was a disaster of jolted letters and crossed-out words, but the act of writing still helped calm the nervous energy that had been building since yesterday.
What does it mean when someone says you’re their only friend and then runs away?
The pen skipped across the page as we hit another pothole.
Was that about attraction, or just loneliness? Am I reading too much into everything?
I couldn’t stop replaying the events from earlier in the week.
The way Teddy had been waiting for me with tea, like she’d been watching for me through the window.
Wearing her clothes, the smell of her – sweet and herbal – surrounding me all day, feeling weirdly intimate.
The moment when our fingers had brushed, and hot tea had splashed everywhere, and then she’d only fucking sucked it off her fingers? What the hell had that been about?
And the fucking hair thing. The way she looked at me, like she … idk, wanted me??? Then the car ride, the music, the tension so thick I could barely breathe, fogging up the windows just from existing so close to one another…
But then she’d said I was her only friend and fled like she would burst into flames if she stayed a moment longer. Which left me wondering if I was just convenient company for someone who was lonely, or if she felt the same magnetic pull I did whenever we were close.
I supposed I had been the one to put a stop to the moment the last few times.
It had been a gut reaction – a panic-driven instinct – but as I journalled, I realised it was more than that.
I didn’t like the way my relationship with Teddy was changing.
Sure, I liked that we worked well together; that she was nicer to me.
But did she actually believe the things she’d said to me?
Or was she as caught up in these charged moments as I was?
It felt impossible to parse out her feelings when my own were such a jumbled mess.
The bus lurched to a stop, and I shoved my journal back into my bag.
I spent the walk steeling myself for whatever version of Teddy I’d encounter today, letting the apprehension propel me up hills and around bends.
I’d been getting stronger from these morning walks and all the manual labour, and it felt good to get some fresh air between the cacophony of smells on the bus and the panic-inducing proximity at Gwenynen.
I found Teddy in the small greenhouse in the veg garden, repotting seedlings with the kind of aggressive efficiency that suggested she was working through some feelings, too.
She barely looked up when I walked in. Willow did, though, leaping up from the hard floor to trot over to me.
I rewarded the affection with some of my own.
“Morning,” I said, aiming for casual brightness. “Thanks again for the other day. The ride home, the clothes, the tea, what you said about my work … it was really nice.”
“Rain makes everything soft,” she said without looking up from her work. “Don’t read into it.”
Alright, then. It seemed we were back to brusque, defensive Teddy.
I wondered if the stress of the coming weekend’s artisan market was adding to her mood – we’d agreed to repeat our successful cheese festival strategy, this time bringing plenty of sample cups and swapping the dice for a wheel people could spin, but I supposed that had been my strategy, after all. Maybe she was salty about that?
“Anyway,” I said, ignoring that line of thinking for now, pulling out my phone. I could slip into work mode, too. “I had an idea for some content I’d like to film today. I thought we could do a blind tasting, where everyone tries to guess which honey varietal is in each of your five meads?”
Teddy finally looked up, her expression sceptical. “Everyone?”
“You, me, Jen, Maggie. Make it fun; a bit competitive. People love watching other people fail at things.”
“And you think we’ll fail?”
I grinned. “If any of us goes five for five, I’ll be shocked.”
“Game on,” she said, standing up and dusting her soil-covered hands on her jeans as she pushed past me out of the greenhouse.
* * *
Twenty minutes later, the four of us gathered outside the warehouse.
I’d set up a folding table there, wanting to get some content outside now that the weather was cooperating, even if it was rather sweltering.
I had five bottles, one of each mead, and five jars of honey, plus some sampling spoons.
The plan was that, one at a time, we would blind taste each honey and try to assign it to the correct mead.
And blind was the key word – there were obvious visual differences in the honey, so I’d worn a green silk scarf in my hair to use as a blindfold.
Now that we were here, it did seem a bit at odds with the rustic farm aesthetic, but we would make do.
Jen was delighted by the whole thing, and Maggie was surprisingly on board – she’d been reluctant to be on camera, but she sidled up next to Jen with a smile, so I wasn’t going to question it.
As I set up my tripod, I wondered if I would post it all as one part or as separate parts – as a viewer, I loathed multi-part videos, but having run the social accounts for a couple of months now, I couldn’t deny that they worked.
Jen was up first. I blindfolded her gently, made sure she couldn’t see, and then arranged the samples in front of her.
I told her when I started recording, and she felt her way along the table to the first sample spoon.
She brought it to her mouth and tasted it for a few seconds before confidently stating it was the original honey mead, and I glared daggers at Maggie as she started to giggle.
In the end, Jen got three out of five right.
I’d worried she would be embarrassed and not want me to post the video, but I needn’t have; she took it all in good fun.
Maggie did abysmally, somehow only getting one right after I’d shuffled them, and Jen stuck her tongue out in victory.
They were like a couple of teenagers sometimes, those two.
I’d wondered if maybe there was something between them, and watching the way they literally poked at one another did nothing to dissuade my suspicions.
But I’d never seen them actually show any honest physical affection towards one another.
When it was Teddy’s turn, I stepped up to tie the blindfold around her head, and she stiffened slightly as I got close.
“I won’t bite,” I said, and she let out a puff of laughter.
“I’m not worried,” she said, her voice low, and I felt it all through my body.
I stepped away once the knot was tight enough, then shuffled the bottles and jars on the table before replenishing the samples.
Teddy fumbled around for the first one long enough that I had to guide her hand, trying not to let the exhilaration I felt at the contact show on my face. I was on camera, after all.
Like Jen, Teddy ended up with three correct guesses, which clearly infuriated her to no end.
She actually picked up each of the jars of honey, examining them by holding them up to the light, and re-tasted them.
I saw the moment she seemed satisfied that I hadn’t tampered with them and accepted her defeat, her face going slack and her mouth dropping into a slight frown.
I couldn’t help but chuckle, and she shot me a withering glare.
“Let’s see you do better,” she said petulantly as I stepped up to the table.
“Easy,” I said, putting on the bravado I knew would be entertaining on camera, especially if I flopped like I was sure I would.
Teddy stepped up to blindfold me in turn, and the proximity made me hold my breath, though she was efficient and professional about it.
Nothing like the hair-braiding at the cheese festival, or the now-infamous tea-sucking incident.
I heard the scrape of glass on plastic as she shuffled the bottles and jars, and the shuffle of the wooden sample spoons in their box.
With the blindfold on, I could hear so much more, too, like the tractor on the next farm over; I hoped it wouldn’t be audible in the video.
I could smell the sweetness of the honey in front of me, and the pleasant beehive smell that I’d come to love – a mix of beeswax and resin and something earthier.
“Ready,” Teddy said, and I stepped forward to where I knew the first sample should be. I worried for a moment that Teddy would be messing with me by moving them around to new positions, but my fingers found the spoon straight away.
The first honey was delicate. It was unmistakably floral, with the slightest fruitiness to it.
It was probably the easiest one to identify, belonging to the Honey Rain mead, the lemon balm from the farm’s herb garden clearly present in the flavour profile.
I voiced my guess, then moved on to the next one.
This second one was far more complex. It wasn’t actually the most pleasant to eat directly from the jar, and I wouldn’t be drizzling it on my porridge anytime soon.
But there was no mistaking the goldenrod flavour of the autumn varietal, and I knew from experience that it made the most delicious mead.
“This is the metheglin,” I said. “Henford. My favourite.”
Next up was one I couldn’t immediately put my finger on.
It, too, was delicate and floral like the first one, but with a smoother taste – almost vanilla-like.
It had virtually no aftertaste at all, making it hard to judge.
I panicked for a moment, but then I decided to move on to the next sample, hoping it would add some clarity.