Chapter 6
CHAPTER SIX
Winnie was trying, with no small amount of desperation, to act cool and chill and normal. Like she belonged.
She was starting to feel that this was simply not in her nature, however.
Take, for example, her posture. A simple thing, right?
Nope.
Eleanor was casual in her armchair in the book club room, and Diana looked both elegant and comfortable in her wide-legged trousers.
Cadence and June were sprawled on an overstuffed old loveseat, and Miriam, with far more flexibility than one might have expected from a woman her age, was sitting cross-legged on a squat settee.
And Winnie? Winnie was perched on the edge of her seat like she was about to make a bolt for it.
She had tried to relax. She had really, really tried. But every time she stopped focusing on looking relaxed, she returned to this state.
She wasn’t an expert, obviously, but she was pretty sure that if you had to try this hard to be relaxed, you weren’t actually relaxing.
“What do you think, Win?”
Winnie jolted at the sound of her name.
“Sorry,” she said. She was hoping for a smile, but she had the sneaking suspicion that she looked like she was wincing. “Woolgathering.”
Eleanor didn’t look anything but kind as she repeated her question. “Time travel. Is that a yes or a no from you?”
“Oh!” Winnie chuckled. “Well, I’m a historian so…”
“So totally yes?” Diana filled in.
“So totally no!” Winnie corrected. “Do you know what I love about living here and now? The absence of smallpox! The presence of indoor plumbing!” She pointed to her jeans. “Women getting to wear pants.”
“Hm,” Miriam said thoughtfully. “An intriguing perspective. You know how much bad stuff there was back in the seventeenth century.” This was the time period of the time-travel novel they had read for this book club session.
“I’ll stick to studying history from this side, thanks,” Winnie agreed with a smile.
The conversation drifted on from there, and Winnie’s worry rose back up like the tide. That had been fine, hadn’t it? She hadn’t said anything bad or strange or wrong, had she?
She was pretty sure it had been just fine, but still. Her anxiety remained.
“I’m going to go grab some snacks,” she murmured, suddenly needing a break.
Diana, who was sitting closest to her, gave her a friendly, encouraging nod, and Winnie headed into the kitchen and set her hands to the task of assembling a few more fruit kebabs, which had been her contribution this evening and a huge hit.
The most frustrating part about her anxiety, Winnie decided as she indulged in some therapeutic stabbing of fruit onto skinny wooden stakes, was that she knew what was happening.
She knew that she was building up walls between herself and these new friends of hers, and she knew that wasn’t how you made friends.
She didn’t need to have experience, but she knew that much.
But knowing it and doing something about it were two very different things, it turned out.
But every time Winnie tried to just let it all go, tried to unclench her shoulders and let down her walls, she heard this little voice in her head. And that voice pretty much just said no, no, danger, don’t do it, nope, stop while you still can.
It didn’t matter that Winnie recognized that this voice was just a tad histrionic. After all, it was a rare thing to find any actual danger at a book club.
She had used those walls to protect herself through all those miserable years when she’d been bullied as a kid, though. And she was starting to worry that she wouldn’t ever be able to move beyond being the “Ice Queen of Magnolia Shores.”
She had run out of kebabs to assemble, but she wasn’t quite ready to head back into the fray. Her nerves were too frazzled to sit and try to focus on having a productive conversation.
She poured herself a glass of wine, more so she could have something to do with her hands for a little while longer than anything else. If the wine happened to help her feel calmer… well, so much the better, but she wasn’t going to count her chickens.
Winnie swirled her wine around in the glass as she snuck a peek back into the main room.
The rest of the club was animatedly chatting about something that Winnie couldn’t quite make out.
They didn’t seem to have noticed her absence.
Winnie wasn’t certain whether she found that encouraging or disheartening.
She had wanted to be unobtrusive when she had slipped away, but it also felt like a confirmation of her worst fears.
She wasn’t needed. She wasn’t wanted. She was just here because of… pity? Because they were all so nice? She didn’t know, but it didn’t really matter the reason.
Winnie Burnett, friendless again.
She took one sip of her wine before looking at the rest of the glass and deciding against it. What she wanted wasn’t really this glass of wine.
What she wanted was to get out of there.
She hovered near the kitchen door, trying to figure out if she could sneak back in to the main room and grab her coat without being noticed or if she should just “forget” her jacket and come back some other time.
If she timed it right, maybe Eleanor would even be too busy with other customers to quiz her about why she’d ducked out without saying goodbye.
If she even cares, that critical voice needled her.
Winnie was so consumed with this scheming and consequent self-recrimination that she didn’t hear the key in the lock or the quiet clicking as the door began to open.
Which meant that, when a man stepped into the kitchen with a startled, “Oh, excuse me!” Winnie…
Well, she screamed.
Just a little.
The man yelped back.
And suddenly, they had the attention of the entire book club.
“I am… so sorry,” the man said politely.
Winnie barely processed his words, too busy staring in astonishment at this newcomer and the startled faces of her friends, such as they were, managed to stammer out only the most preliminary of responses.
“No, it’s—I’m fine,” she said. “I, uh. I think I’m just going to—”
“Wait, Winnie, are you leaving?” Eleanor asked, her face creased with concern.
Something about this well-intentioned worry made a part deep inside Winnie feel as though she was going to crack into pieces. She gave a brittle smile.
“I—yeah, I’m just feeling a little tired,” she managed. “I think I’m just going to…” She waved vaguely toward the door.
Eleanor’s eyes darted over Winnie’s shoulder, but she was looking at the man, not the door. “Shane, give me a second, okay?”
“Sure thing,” the newcomer replied easily. “Nice to meet you,” he said politely to Winnie, which she thought was generous, given they hadn’t really met.
“Yeah,” she said absently. “You… too.”
He gave her a quick smile, which Winnie couldn’t help but notice was a nice one, then headed through to the main room.
Eleanor put her hand on Winnie’s arm.
“Are you sure you’re okay, sweetheart?” she asked gently. “You don’t want to stay?”
Winnie shook her head, feeling strangely overwhelmed.
“No, no, I just think I should…” She shook her head against her rising panic. There wasn’t a reason to feel panicked. This was the irrational worry back again. But still. It was what she felt.
Eleanor still looked a little worried, but she nodded. “Okay, honey. We’ll talk soon?”
“Sure.” Winnie might have agreed to anything at that moment.
“Okay,” she repeated, sounding a little sad.
Winnie couldn’t meet her eye as she scurried over to grab her coat, and she tried not to look at the other book club members as she grabbed her coat and headed toward the door.
Again, she faced the dissonance between her feelings and her mind. It wasn’t logical to think that everyone was judging her for her early departure, especially since Cadence and June both had young children and had needed to duck out before.
But it still felt like judgment. She couldn’t banish the feeling.
Winnie hurried out to her car, then took a long, deep breath when she was safely in the front seat.
She was fine. She was just still… getting her feet beneath her with this whole friendship thing.
She had talked herself all the way around to believing that right up until she turned the key in the ignition of her car…
And it didn’t start.
This felt like the last straw. Winnie let her head drop to the steering wheel, her hands covering her face.
Changing was hard. She knew that.
But still. Today? Today, this felt like just a little bit more than she could take.