Chapter 29
Twenty-Nine
Now
Mae was up at ‘em, like every morning. Getting ready for the day. No thoughts of red-hot kisses. She achieved this by pinging a little rubber band on her wrist every time her brain tried to go there. It was going great.
Just keep doing this, she thought. It’s over now. You won’t see her again.
It was supposed to be a comforting thought. So why did it make her chest feel tight? Why did it make her heart race? Why did it make her hands shake?
Snap it out of your head, Mae told herself, her fingers trembling slightly as she reached for the band again.
But this time, the snap was different. She pulled the band back, harder than she ever had before, and let it go with a vicious crack. The band snapped in half, its rubber strands falling away, broken in her hands.
For a moment, Mae stood there, the broken pieces of the band hanging loosely in her fingers.
You’ll never see her again.
Mae’s mind went fuzzy for a second, and before she knew it, her fingers were typing the text. Fine. You can use the bakery today. Same fees apply. Then she quickly fired off another one to Ricky—another paid day off for him—and hung the ‘closed’ sign on the door.
Ten minutes after that, she was pacing between the counter and the ovens, asking herself what the hell she’d done.
Now she was muttering into the oven while she cleaned it. ‘Why did I say yes? Why?’
The ovens didn’t answer.
Back Then
Mae had never been this aware of time before.
Usually, evenings at home blurred. Tonight, every minute lasted a hundred years. Five twenty-three, five twenty-four, five twenty-five. Each one closer to half seven, when her dad would leave for darts at the pub and the house would be theirs.
She checked her phone for the seventieth time. At the most recent text exchange between her and Callie.
You want to come over tonight?
Yeah, what time?
7.30. I’ll leave the door open.
She hadn’t added, My heart will also be open, as well as my legs. Please be careful with both. That felt a bit much.
She’d cleaned her room like a maniac. Not that Callie cared about dust, but it gave her hands something to do.
She stripped her bed and put on the good duvet cover.
She lit one candle, then decided it made the place look as if a séance was about to take place rather than…
She blew it out again. She changed her bra twice.
She had time to think, which was the problem. About her body. About the fact that nobody had seen it properly, not like this. About how Callie had, undoubtedly, seen plenty.
At seven fifteen, her dad shouted. ‘I’m off, love.’
‘Good,’ she called back and then realised what she’d said. ‘Have fun,’ she added.
‘Back about eleven.’
The front door closed. His footsteps faded down the street.
The silence that followed was enormous.
You don’t have to, she thought, for the hundredth time. You can just have her round, watch a film. You can take another month, another year—
But she didn’t want a year of imagining. She’d spent so long running from what she wanted, and now she was running towards it. She wanted this to be real. She wanted to give herself fully to Callie. If she could.
Her phone buzzed.
Outside.
By the time Mae got to the front door, her hands were shaking. She wiped them on her jeans, took one breath, then another, then opened it.
Callie stood on the step in her battered leather jacket. She looked like sex on a stick, which was not what Mae needed to calm herself.
‘Evening,’ she said, as if this were nothing. But she knew. She had to know.
Mae’s fingers tightened on the door. ‘Hi,’ she managed. ‘Come in.’
Callie stepped past her, bringing the outside chill and her own familiar scent with her. She glanced around.
‘Your dad out?’ she asked, uber-casually.
‘He’s terrorising the darts board,’ Mae said, shutting the door. ‘Wanna drink?’
In the kitchen, Callie hopped up onto the counter. Her dad would hate that, but Mae couldn’t worry about that right now. She opened several cupboards before she found the glasses. Which was odd, because the glasses had always lived in this cupboard.
‘You all right?’ Callie asked as Mae finally put her hands on some wine glasses.
‘I’m fine,’ she said without looking at Callie.
‘Alright,’ Callie said.
Mae shoved a glass of wine into Callie’s hand a bit more violently than she intended. There was a small slosh overboard.
‘I don’t think you’re fine,’ Callie said, rubbing dribbled wine off her hand. She cocked her head at Mae. ‘We don’t have to… do anything tonight. We can just hang out like always.’
Mae’s face burned. ‘I know.’
Callie suddenly looked mortified. ‘Oh, wait. Maybe you weren’t even thinking—’
‘I was,’ Mae said quickly. And then blushed.
Callie took a very big drink of wine.
She decided to tell Callie about her neighbour, whose car had been shat on by so many squirrels, day after day, that he’d started talking about it being a targeted attack. Today, it had all culminated in him yelling at the trees, begging for mercy in full view of the bakery.
By the time it got to Mae’s impression of him, Callie was laughing her arse off. ‘But what did he do to bring on the vendetta?’ she asked through her mirth.
‘That’s the question we were all asking,’ Mae chuckled.
With every giggle, the knot in Mae’s stomach loosened a little. This was still Callie. The girl whose laugh she could pick out in a crowded room.
They took their glasses to Mae’s bedroom. The room suddenly looked very small with both of them in it.
Callie’s gaze took it all in like she hadn’t been here a million times, lingering on the framed photo of the two of them at thirteen, pulled faces and crooked fringes.
‘God, look at us,’ she said, going closer. ‘You’d never know we’d turn out this hot.’
Mae didn’t know what to say to that, so she sat on the bed instead, putting her glass down on the floor.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then Callie crossed the room, slow and deliberate, and sat beside her. The mattress dipped under her weight, tilting them closer together.
‘We can stop at any point,’ Callie said quietly.
‘OK.’
‘Seriously.’
‘I know.’
‘I mean it. I don’t want you to be nervous.’
‘I’m not,’ Mae said quickly. She didn’t know if that was true, but she wanted to stop feeling like the little kid in the situation.
‘Good.’ Callie paused. ‘I think I am, though.’
Mae looked at Callie. She could detect no flippancy. ‘Why would you be nervous?’
Callie shrugged. ‘This is my first time too.’
Mae gave her a look.
‘I meant with a girl, so you can put that eyebrow down,’ Callie told her.
‘Oh, right.’ Mae smiled. ‘Good.’
‘Good? What if I’m… terrible?’ Callie asked anxiously.
‘What if I am?’ Mae asked, but she was no longer as scared as she’d been a minute ago.
Callie hooked her pinkie finger onto Mae’s. ‘We don’t have to rush, right? If all we do tonight is kiss and then, I don’t know, eat toast, that’s fine.’ She shook her head at herself. ‘Sorry, not fine. It’s great.’
Mae cleared her throat. ‘Callie.’
‘Yes?’
‘I don’t want toast.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I want…’ Mae summoned all the bottle she had. Truly, it took every last drop of bravery. ‘I want to not be scared of… wanting you.’
Callie reached up and caressed Mae’s cheek, smiling at her shyly. And Mae knew it was going to happen.
It started softly. Mouths closing over each other, the initial exciting and explosive rush of hormones. The kiss intensified bit by bit. The hand on Mae’s cheek slid back into her hair, cradling her.
Heat spread through Mae’s chest, her stomach, and lower. She made some helpless noise against Callie’s mouth and felt Callie answer with a low sound of her own.
Callie’s hand travelled. Down Mae’s neck, along her shoulder, over the soft cotton of her T-shirt. She moved slowly, telegraphing every shift, leaving space for Mae to pull away.
But Mae didn’t. She leaned into it, amazed at herself, at the fact that her body seemed to know what it wanted more clearly than her brain ever had.
When Callie’s fingers brushed the hem of her top, she hesitated, eyes questioning. Mae nodded, flushed and determined.
They shed layers in a series of slightly clumsy, breathless movements. T-shirts coming off over heads, socks kicked away, jeans tugged down. There were awkward bits—a caught arm, a tangle of fabric—and they laughed through them, which helped.
At one point, Mae caught sight of herself in the wardrobe mirror: hair tussled, standing in her underwear in front of Callie Price. It might have made her bolt if not for the look on Callie’s face. It was not disappointment. Very far from it.
‘You’re staring,’ Mae muttered, crossing her arms instinctively.
‘You’re gorgeous,’ Callie said with a sigh, as though she had no choice but to acquiesce to the fact.
Mae let out a shaky laugh.
They ended up on the bed, covers pushed aside. Callie lay partly over her, propped on one elbow, giving her space to slide out any moment.
So Mae pulled Callie onto her.
The nerves didn’t disappear entirely. They sat in her, buzzing, reminding her that she was new to this, that she had no frame of reference. But the more she let herself feel instead of think, the less they mattered.
Calie moved down her body, and when pleasure came, it wasn’t a tidal wave but a rising swell, one that built and built until she couldn’t think, couldn’t do anything but ride it.
She clung to Callie, to the sound of her name on Callie’s lips, to the dizzying realisation that they were both here, fully, nowhere else.
Afterwards, they lay tangled, breath slowing, skin damp. The room smelled different now.
Mae stared at the ceiling, Callie’s weight a warm, solid reassurance at her side. For a while, that was enough. They lay there, fingers tracing idle patterns on each other’s arms, the quiet between them easier than Mae had expected.
She’d thought she’d feel exposed, fragile, like a nerve ending. Instead, she felt oddly whole. As if something that had been missing had slotted into place.
It might have stayed like that if Callie hadn’t gone quiet in a different way. Not the contented sort. The thinking sort.
Mae felt the shift immediately. It was the slight stiffness in Callie’s shoulders, the way her gaze slid past Mae to the window, to the strip of dark sky beyond.
‘Whatever it is,’ Mae said, ‘don’t.’
Callie’s mouth twitched. ‘Don’t what?’
‘Don’t start worrying aloud and ruin how good I feel.’
‘I need to tell you something,’ she said.
Mae’s stomach tightened. ‘You’re scaring me.’
‘I don’t mean to.’ Callie shifted, propping herself up on one elbow so she could see Mae’s face. ‘It’s just… I can’t keep pretending this is all indefinite. That I’m going to be here forever.’
‘You’re leaving,’ she said, before Callie could.
A flicker of pain crossed Callie’s face. ‘Yeah.’
Callie Price had always been bigger than the village. The surprise wasn’t that she was going.
It was that she was saying it now. Here. In this bed, they’d just made new.
‘When?’ Mae forced out.
‘Not yet,’ Callie said. ‘But soon.’
‘So that’s it, then,’ Mae said quietly. ‘We squeeze in what we can before you go, and then…’
Callie flinched. ‘That’s not what I want.’
‘What do you want?’
Callie looked at her properly, as if trying to pin her down.
‘I want you to come with me,’ she said.
‘What?’ Mae said stupidly.
‘I want you to come,’ Callie repeated. ‘We could find a place. We could get jobs. We could do it together. Like everything else.’
Mae’s head filled with images faster than she could process them. A city. Noise. Anonymous crowds.
Waking up next to Callie.
But…
‘My dad,’ she said. ‘The shop.’
‘I know,’ Callie said. ‘But he’d… cope.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘I don’t,’ Callie agreed. ‘But I know he’s a grown man running a business. He’d find a way. And you…’ She reached out, brushing a strand of hair from Mae’s face. ‘You deserve more than the same four streets until you retire.’
‘What if I like my four streets?’ Mae asked.
‘Do you?’
Mae opened her mouth. Closed it again.
She thought of the way her stomach had dipped when her dad talked about giving the bakery to her one day, the way the path had stretched out in front of her like a conveyor belt.
She thought of the ash tree. Of lying in the grass with Callie, listening to her talk about leaving this place forever. But she’d never asked Mae to come before. It had been understood that she couldn’t. They’d both been trapped, but Mae didn’t have a shovel to dig a tunnel out.
‘I can’t imagine not being here.’
Callie didn’t speak.
‘My dad would see it as betrayal.’
‘Parents are very good at making their feelings your problem,’ Callie said bitterly. But her voice changed. ‘But he loves you. He’d be upset, and then he’d adjust. It’s allowed, you know. Leaving.’
Mae stared at the ceiling, pulse roaring in her ears.
Leaving. What a concept. Her father, the bakery, the village that had wrapped itself round her like the strings of a tight apron. With Callie.
It was absurd. It was also, she realised with a jolt, the first time anyone had ever looked at her future and said out loud: you could choose something else.
‘I can’t promise,’ Mae said finally. ‘I have to think. Talk to him. Work out if there’s a way without… breaking everything.’
Callie nodded, a flicker of relief and disappointment mingling. ‘I didn’t expect you to answer tonight.’
Mae thought of her dad at the kitchen table, talking about flour costs and rotas and ‘you’re lucky, love’.
‘I am thinking about it, though.’
‘I’m happy you’re even thinking about it.’
They shifted closer, bodies finding each other. Mae tucked her head under Callie’s chin, listening to her heartbeat, feeling the rise and fall of her chest.
For tonight, though, the bed was warm, the house quiet, and Callie’s arm around her felt like something she’d spent half her life reaching for without knowing.
She closed her eyes, holding two truths at once: that she might leave, and that she might stay, and that either way, everything had already changed.