Chapter Twenty-Eight
Kivi
“What am I doing?” she muttered aloud as she grabbed a cold bottle out of the fridge.
Toto followed her into the kitchen, ever-hopeful for a snack, and she glanced over at him.
“Can you tell me what I’m doing, Toto?” His ears lifted at his name.
“Why am I inviting her to have a drink with me when we’ve just spent the last ten minutes arguing? ”
Unfortunately, he had no answer, but she grabbed him a doggy chew anyway. He practically shoved his nose in her hand as she walked back outside with it, spinning in circles and prancing like a show pony in front of a clearly impressed Saskia.
“Doggy dressage?” She raised her eyebrows at Kivi as she sat back down, a now-frantic Toto in front of her.
“He has a number of tricks.”
“I am intrigued.”
Kivi put Toto through his paces – sit, stand, back up, lie down, and so on. By the time they got to spinning, she took pity on him, and so she decided to skip the rest and go with the show-stopper.
“Toto, do you hear a siren?” she asked. His ears pricked in recognition – this was a new one, and she wasn’t sure whether he’d committed it to memory yet.
But she didn’t repeat herself, just waited, while his two Golden Retriever brain cells slowly made contact.
Then the lightbulb moment. He sat down, lifted his head, and let out a slow, mournful howl.
“Oh my God,” Saskia laughed. Kivi threw the treat at Toto, and he caught it in his mouth, triumphantly taking it back over to his old position in between their chairs to chew on it.
“I decided to make something positive of the sirens we get around here,” Kivi said. “He never used to be able to howl. When he was younger, he’d let out the most pathetic sounds, more like a dolphin call than anything else. But he learned. And learned to do it in response to sirens.”
“Well, there’s certainly a lesson to be had in that,” Saskia said, accepting the bottle of beer that Kivi realised she was still holding. “Creating something positive out of something negative. Like us.”
“Like us?” Kivi wrinkled her nose.
“Well, ten minutes ago, we were practically scratching each other’s eyes out.” Saskia motioned between them. “Now look at us. Having a companionable drink while we attempt to re-find the common ground between us.”
“I suppose,” Kivi said.
“Although…” Saskia now gave a rueful chuckle.
“What?”
“In the nicest way possible… this whole drinking business might be easier if you’d taken the top off this bottle of beer.”
Kivi leapt out of her seat as if she’d been electrocuted, and dashed back inside with the bottle, muttering curses the whole way there.
But the indignities didn’t end there – her arms seemed to have lost all power, and she wrestled with the cap for what felt like an interminable minute until it finally popped off.
And even then, she’d jostled it so much that it promptly began to fizz everywhere, spilling out onto her jeans.
The resulting damp patch couldn’t have been in a worse place – it looked like she’d had rather a different accident.
By the time she handed the almost-full bottle to Saskia and dropped the bottle opener into the grass beside her, it was pure social propriety that was preventing her from hurdling the fence and hiding in the long grass in the field opposite.
She flapped a hand under her T-shirt to get some air.
Saskia, meanwhile, looked as cool as a cucumber, drinking her beer and pretending not to notice Kivi’s fluster.
They sat in silence for a little while, as Kivi’s heart rate began to climb back down to normal levels. But then…
“Did you have any luck finding a celebrant?” Saskia asked, just as Kivi said the first thing that came to mind, which was, “So how was your day?”
“Oh. No, you go first,” they both said together.
“No, no, you go,” Saskia said.
“No, what were you saying?” Kivi said.
They both stared at each other for a second, then cracked up.
Kivi couldn’t help it – a tremendous whooping laugh burst out of her before she could stop it, probably from the leftover adrenaline of her embarrassment as much as from humour.
Saskia wasn’t quite as loud, but she did join in with soft chuckles – they made her entire face change, the corners of her eyes crinkling and lines forming between her nose and the corners of her mouth.
I want to see her grow old. I want to see those lines deepen and her body age and-
“Look at the pair of us,” Saskia chuckled, wrenching Kivi’s thoughts back to the present.
Saskia was visibly pulling herself together, dabbing at the far corners of her eyes with the pad of a finger, and taking a couple of settling breaths.
Take a leaf out of her book, Kiera. Pull yourself together.
“What a pair we make,” Kivi said light-heartedly, although her heart wasn’t exactly in it. It was still skipping beats at the thoughts that had just raced through her mind.
“Anyway, I was asking about the celebrant,” Saskia said. “For the wedding. Do we have one yet?”
“Anyone who overheard that out of context would probably think you and I were getting hitched,” Kivi teased.
Saskia’s face blanched – clearly she was running back over what she’d said in her head – but Kivi decided to take pity on her.
“And yes. I sent some emails off yesterday, and so far I’ve had one response.
I’m going to set up a meeting between her, Cass and Felicia, so that they can get to know each other. ”
“Sounds good,” Saskia said. “And what were you going to say?”
Kivi screwed up her face for a second until she remembered. “Oh yes. I was just asking how your day was.”
“Oh. Uneventful. Had a headache before dinner, but it’s gone now.”
“The power of chicken Caesar,” Kivi commented dryly. “And you’ve been eating all right, I take it?”
She knew it sounded an odd thing to say, but the alcohol must have affected her filter. In the back of her mind, she still had a gut feeling that something was – or once had been – amiss with Saskia when it came to eating.
“Yes,” Saskia said stiffly. Kivi’s stomach clenched at the sudden change in tone. “Why do you ask?”
Kivi opened her mouth, but then Saskia cut her off. “Actually, don’t answer that. I don’t want to know. I just… no, forget it.”
“Saskia,” Kivi sighed, fearing that she’d lost the woman again just as they were getting back onto solid ground.
Saskia glared at her, with such ferocity that it nearly took Kivi’s breath away.
But there was something else under there – fear?
Apprehension? Whatever it was, it confirmed Kivi’s suspicions.
“I said forget it,” Saskia said through gritted teeth, but didn’t move away when Kivi leaned forward and put a hand on her arm.
“I just… that time you collapsed. I’d noticed that you hadn’t been eating properly. And then I watched as you started starving yourself, and I thought-”
“Starving myself,” Saskia scoffed. “As if.”
“It’s nothing to be ashamed of, you know. Anorexia. If that’s what you have. It’s more common than you’d think – loads of famous people seem to have it – and-”
“I am not anorexic,” Saskia growled, with such conviction that Kivi actually believed her.
She opened and closed her mouth for a second while her brain scoured for a different avenue of conversation.
Preferably something that would make Saskia forget this one had ever happened. Sadly, her brain came up dry.
“But you weren’t eating properly,” she said numbly. “I could tell. You were skipping meals, and only eating half-”
“That doesn’t make me anorexic,” Saskia said through gritted teeth.
“Okay, yes, fine, but it does point towards an… an eating disorder. Of sorts. You… you never considered that before?”
Saskia’s eyes fixed on Kivi’s. Her face had turned to stone, the laughter lines deepening now as her expression hardened into something that Kivi could only describe as a death glare.
It made a surge of panic flood through Kivi’s body, right down to the farthest reaches of her fingertips, adrenaline crackling like electricity and-
“All right!” Saskia barked. Kivi nearly shot out of her seat. “All right. I used to make myself vomit, okay?”