Chapter 17
XVII
Celeste: Did you know Rafe started an Instagram account for the meadery? It’s mostly selfies of him in cat form looking aloof in front of the barrels, but it’s doing quite well.
“Ican’t believe we’re so close to opening.
” I affix my new alcohol license to the wall behind the counter.
It’s past dinner time, two days after the free mead samples.
We’re putting the finishing touches on the shop fitout.
Rafe, in his cat form today, prances along the counter, knocking off things with his paw in an attempt to make me down tools and fetch dinner.
His folk playlist blasts in the background.
I step back and admire the barrel wall with each mead’s name stencilled onto the wooden lids above the taps, and my new sink and kegerator for summery carbonated meads.
I did it. I actually did it. My very own meadery opens on Friday, and Warrick can’t do anything about it or talk me out of it because he’s—
“Hello!”
I turn to the doorway. A woman wearing a gorgeous lilac-coloured pantsuit hovers there, looking like she stepped out of a fashion magazine.
Behind her is a man who looked like he stepped out of a ‘hot medieval warlord’ magazine.
He holds a box in his arms and wears an expression of abject desolation.
“I’m sorry, we’re closed, but the grand opening is on Friday—”
“That’s precisely what I’ve come to talk to you about.
” The woman steps over a pile of folded napkins beside the entrance.
“I’m Winnie. I’m a friend of Celeste’s from her book club, and she said I should see if you might need ceramic mugs and tankards made by a local artisan and fellow member of the supernatural community. ”
“Er, well, I’ve already ordered glassware from a catering supply place. I’m on a bit of a budget.”
“This is Alaric.” Winnie pushes the man towards me.
“He’s a vampire. He has spent the last five hundred years living in that lonely castle overlooking the valley, perfecting every kind of artistic hobby you could imagine.
Which sounds delightful except that now his castle is full of stuff.
” She says stuff like it’s a dirty word.
Behind her, Alaric stares stoically ahead, as if this is a speech he’s heard several times now. Winnie takes the box from him and drops it on the counter in front of me.
“I’m his professional-organiser-turned-fake-fiance—it’s a whole story, don’t ask.
All you need to know is that I’m tasked with the job of taming his clutter.
We have a room filled with ceramics that we need to offload before a particularly important ball.
If you can cancel your order, these would be totally free. Take a look.”
Winnie unfolds the flaps of the box, revealing a stack of the most beautiful handcrafted ceramic mugs and tankards I’ve ever seen.
I pull out a tankard and hold it up to the light. A blue and purple glaze has been swirled around so it looks like a galaxy. “These are beautiful.”
“Yes, they are,” Winnie says proudly. “Alaric is talented at many things. So many things. How many can I put you down for? Four hundred?”
“Not that many!” We barely have the space to serve forty people at the meadery, let alone four hundred. “I’ll take a hundred. A mixture of the tumblers and the larger tankards, please. And a few of the small bread plates.”
“Two thousand is my final offer.”
“A hundred really is all I need—”
“Five thousand cups it is!”
“If I take five thousand, I won’t be able to fit any customers in the shop!”
Winnie sighs. She pushes the box towards me.
“Fine. A hundred is better than nothing. But if you need matching coasters or some large, ungainly medieval tapestries for the walls, let me know. Oh, or some teddy bears. Alaric had a teddy bear phase, too. Take what you like from that box, and we’ll bring the rest over tomorrow. ”
We spend the rest of the week cleaning and arranging the shop. Rafe moves the chairs and tables five times before he’s satisfied with their arrangement. I stack our new crockery in the back room, yell at the new POS system until Rafe sets it up for me, and wipe down the barrels until they shine.
Now there’s only one job left to do, and I’ve been dreading it.
The counter is covered with stacks of wine bottle labels with my new design.
To save money, I had one label printed with a blank line where we write in the batch and date.
But now we need to write on the labels and affix them to the bottles we’re arranging on the shelves, so customers can buy mead to take home.
When I label my bottles at home, it’s never mattered that my handwriting drifts in strange directions or that I sometimes write the wrong letter and mix up capitals and little letters, since I’m the only one who reads them.
But I need customers to be able to read these, which means I need to concentrate.
I’ve been sitting here for ten minutes and I’ve only finished two labels, and one I threw out.
My fingers already hurt from gripping the pen so hard. It’s going to be a long—
“How about I write, and you stack the shelves.” Rafe holds out his hand for the pen. “That way you can arrange the bottles how you like.”
“Okay. Sure.” That was easy.
Rafe shoots me an amused look as he starts writing. My stomach churns with nervous energy. I feel like my veins are made of bees about to swarm, like I’m so close to having this thing I never dreamed I’d be allowed to want, and at any moment I’m certain it’s all going to be taken away.
“Did you know that African tribes have been drinking fermented honey for 20,000 years?” I blurt out.
All that nervous excitement apparently wants to leave my body in the form of mead facts.
“They tell stories of how their ancestors saw bees acting strangely after drinking from a puddle in the twisted roots of a tree where a beehive had fallen. Archaeologists have found traces of a fermented drink made of honey, rice, and fruit in Chinese pottery dating back to 7000BCE. They’ve also found traces in jugs in Tutankhamun’s tomb.
Before viticulture was widespread, Dionysos was the Greek god of bees, honey, and mead, so we know the Ancient Greeks drank it, too.
The Vikings had mead-making down to an art, with two different types – one reserved only for royalty, and another for everyone else.
Mead only declined in popularity because beer and wine were cheaper to make and able to be made at a larger scale—” I clamp my hand over my mouth.
Rafe stares at me, mouth open.
“Sorry.” I duck my head back to the labels. “I get excited about mead.”
“I can tell. That’s the most you’ve ever said to me about anything,” Rafe says. “I wish you could see your face. You light up when you talk about this nerdy stuff. Why aren’t you still at university, nerding out over the history of paper and having a torrid affair with your hot older professor?”
I shake my head. I’m not talking to him about it.
“Does it have anything to do with that bastard of a husband?” Rafe growls. “He’d better hope he stays missing, because if he comes back, I’m going to kill him.”
“Warrick didn’t make me quit.” I slam two bottles on the shelf with more force than I intend. I return to the counter to affix another label. “And I don’t want to—”
“Okay, then it’s got to do with why I’m the one writing on the labels even though my handwriting looks like I wrote graffiti on the walls of Tutankhamun’s tomb.”
I freeze, my hand trembling, a label stuck to my finger.
Rafe’s tail reaches up between us and circles my wrist. The orange fur is so soft and warm. He plucks the label from my fingers. He brushes his tail under my chin, tilting my head up, forcing me to look at him.
“You think I haven’t noticed?” His voice is soft. “You agonise over writing a shopping list. You do anything to avoid people seeing you reading or writing. You forget sequences of numbers. You’re dyslexic.”
He’s too close, his azure eyes shimmering, and I’m horrified by the idea that he might pity me, but I see no pity in his gaze. Only anger that turns the edges to fire.
“H-h-how did you know?”
“My sister has it. You do all the same things she did when she was struggling, before my mammy talked to a specialist and she learned ways to cope with school.”
“But…you said your sisters are all clever!” The bees beneath my skin crawl over each other to escape. “You said they went to university.”
“They did.” He presses his lips together.
Why am I looking at his lips? “She went on to become a lawyer. Because there are so many tools that can help. It’s an extra challenge, sure, but it’s not a reason you can’t succeed.
Let me guess – you were having a hard time coping with the workload, and Warrick told you that you couldn’t do it, and you decided he was right. ”
“Yes, no, I don’t know.” I shrug, as if it’s no big deal, as if admitting it isn’t tearing me up inside. “I’ve never been tested.”
“It’s not an STI. You don’t have to be tested to know your brain works in a unique way.”
His words ooze through my veins like molten honey. I’m hot all over, shaking, humming with wanting. And he’s so close, and that look in his eyes is for me, and I want want want but I can’t, and so all that wanting falls out of my mouth in a stream of word vomit.
“My teachers at school always said I was a slow reader, but my mother never made me feel like it was a big thing. She would read to me, or we’d watch documentaries, or find creative ways to fulfil my assignments.
I was eleven when she died, so I think they put down my falling grades to my grief, which isn’t inaccurate.
I started dating Warrick in year 13. He absolutely saved me.
And I know all the rotten things he’s done now, but at the time, it was true.
He held me through the hardest years, when I missed her the most. He wasn’t sure about me going off to uni, but I won a prize for history, and my mother always wanted me to go, so I did it for her.
Only, it was a disaster. There was so much reading to do.
I did okay in essays and assigned work, but I failed every exam.
It was so hard. My failures were a weight on my shoulders, crushing me into dust. I cried every day.
Warrick and I were still dating. He was living here in the village and doing a business degree at the local polytech, and every time we talked, he reminded me that I could come home, we could get rid of the tenant in Mum’s cottage and live there.
And I guess I just…I’d been drowning trying to look after myself, and he offered me a liferaft.
I dropped out at the end of my first year and came home, and every day I went out into the garden and talked to the bees, and it felt like being close to my mother still.
Shortly after, Warrick’s business took off, and so I didn’t need to think about getting a job. ”
“He didn’t save you.” Rafe makes a noise normally reserved for discovering another cat asleep in his favourite patch of sunshine. His tail flicks under my chin.
“You don’t understand. He—”
“He didn’t save you. He couldn’t stand the thought of you being better than him, going off to university and leaving him behind. He wanted to control you.”
“That’s not…that’s not true.”
“I’ve known men like him. The kind of man who could never love a cat, because he wants a pet curled up in his lap, not howling at ghosts or falling in the bathtub or jumping on the roof because you fancy the view.
He wanted the honey but never respected the bees.
You should have seen the man I stole orchids for – he was a piece of work.
I never met your husband, but I see his marks on you as clearly as if he hit you.
He clipped your wings because he couldn’t bear to see you soar. ”
I open my mouth to protest, but I can’t find the words.
I see Warrick’s concerned face the first time he visited me on campus, and I excitedly showed him my dorm and the library and the junior common room where I hung out with the other history students, and that same face when he suggested I didn’t need a driver’s license, or when he convinced me to shut down my honey stall.
“I know.” I sniff back the tears that are threatening to fall. “I know. I put up with it for so long because he made me feel safe. Because anything was better than being alone.”
“That’s what he was counting on. He was afraid that you’d discover you never needed him in the first place.”
“I miss my Mum so much.”
“I know you do.”
There it is. The tears spill over, falling down my face. Oh Mum, I wish you were here. I wish you could tell me what to do.
Rafe opens his arms. I sag against him, something in me breaking as the grief rushes to the surface, fresh as the day Grandmother Mags picked me up from school and with unusual gentleness told me that she was gone.
She would love my meadery. She would be sitting at the counter with Rafe, writing labels with her loopy handwriting, cracking jokes with him, shuffling back and forth to the kettle to make sure we were never wanting for cups of tea.
Sometimes, Rafe reminds me of her – his wildness, his determination to never be what anyone expects, his love of sunshine and meat pies – but I’ve been stamping down the niggles of grief because I didn’t want to think about how much I miss her, how much I wish I could talk to her one last time, and how sad she would be to see what little I’ve made of my life.
Well, now the grief is here, a great wave crashing over my body, oozing out of me in salty tears and snot trails.
“Okay.” Rafe strokes my hair. It’s something she used to do, and it makes me cry harder.
“Here’s what we’re going to do. You’re going to pour us two mugs of that calming mead.
I’m going to write these labels, and you are going to stand over my shoulder and tell me that I’m doing it wrong, and then we are going over to eat far too much of that leftover cake Celeste left for us and drink far too much mead and dance madly around the shop, because you’re opening tomorrow and that’s amazing.
But first, I need to change my shirt. How can one tiny human produce so much snot? ”