by Katy Cannon
“True.” He sat up again, hunched over the keyboard like he might find inspiration there. “OK, well, how about this. We come up with three questions on writing, three on her latest book, three on her other books, and one on what she wants to write next.”
“Sounds good. Structure helps.”
“Exactly. So, questions about writing…?”
We knocked around a few ideas for a while after that. Our first ones were all too boring, too obvious. But once we’d got those ones out of the way, we started finding the deeper, more meaningful questions that we really wanted to know the answers to. It was strange, how easy it was to talk to Drew about these things. I wondered why my conversations with Zach couldn’t be so comfortable. Even if Drew and I mostly spent our time arguing, I was never lost for words with him.
“Happy?” Drew asked as he typed up our last question.
I leaned in to read through the list over his shoulder one last time.
“I think so,” I said, but my mind was already wandering. Had I ever been so close to Drew before today? I couldn’t have been. If I had, I’d have noticed the dark, spicy smell of whatever it was he used that smelled so damn good.
Huh. Something else new to like about him. His taste in fragrance.
I jerked back and put a good metre between us. “It’ll be fine.”
“OK then.” If Drew noticed anything strange about my behaviour, he didn’t mention it. Instead, he saved the document, and shut his laptop. “In that case, I’m heading home. We’ve been at this long enough, and I’ve got … stuff to do this evening.”
“Yeah. Right. Me too.” Like get ready for another attempt at a date and prepare to possibly get kissed. Or try to understand why the scent of Drew had me feeling more romantic than a whole afternoon at the fete with Zach had.
No. I really wasn’t going to be thinking about that. Not at all.
That was like … going through the looking glass. That way, madness lay.
“OK, then.” Isabella sat down on top of the bar, her bare feet resting on the stool beside him. Outside, the storm raged. And once the natural one was over, he knew there would be a man-made one to deal with. “What would you fight for?”
You, Henri thought. But he knew he could never tell her that.
Hallowed Ground (2013), Juanita Cabrera
I got ready for my date in record time and was still running a brush through my hair when I spotted Zach walking up the driveway. I ran down to try and intercept him before he reached the house.
I was too slow.
“Oh, Zach, I’m so sorry!” Mum was saying as I skidded down the last few stairs.
I took in the sight of Zach’s dark denim jeans covered in tiny, floury handprints. Finn and Freddie danced around him in the hallway, both covered in cake ingredients, while Mum tried to catch and contain them.
“They’re not normally like this!” Mum went on. This was a lie. The twins were always like this. “We were just trying to bake a cake together and, well, they’re a little overexcited.”
“Or on the ultimate sugar high,” I guessed from the cake mix smeared around their mouths. I looked at Zach again and winced. He frowned down at his legs, looking seriously annoyed.
I helped Mum herd the twins back into the kitchen, while Zach tried to clean the worst of the marks off his clothes. Then we left before my family could jeopardize our date any further.
“I really am sorry about the twins,” I said as we walked down into the town hand in hand.
“And I’m sorry again about Saturday,” Zach said. “You know what it’s like when you’re with the guys.”
“I guess,” I said and changed the subject. Apologies weren’t a great start to the night. “Well, maybe we can spend more time with my friends, if tonight goes well.”
“Yeah, sure,” Zach replied.
I’d arranged to meet Anja and Rohan at our favourite pizzeria in town, somewhere I’d eaten with them dozens of times before. Which is why I could tell that something was the matter the moment I walked in.
Anja and Rohan were sitting on opposite sides of the table, her staring out of the window, him looking down at his phone. That was weird enough, as normally they’d be chatting, or Rohan would be sharing whatever he was reading on the screen with her, or something.
But most odd of all was the fact that the bowl of dough balls on the table between them was completely untouched. Normally those things didn’t last five minutes with my friends around.
“Everything OK?” I asked, frowning at the dough balls as I slid into my seat beside Rohan. Had I even seen them together this week? Not since the fete, I realized. Things had been so busy.
“Fine,” Anja said, too fast. “Shall we order?”
“I haven’t looked at the menu yet,” Zach said with a laugh.
“Right. I forgot you haven’t been here often enough to memorize it,” Anja replied.
Rohan still hadn’t said anything at all.
Zach and I kept the conversation going as I gave him the lowdown on what was good on the menu, what was better, and what was truly sublime. Then, once we’d all ordered, I tried to get Rohan involved in the conversation by asking about The Real Star School – which I knew his little sister, Dalia, had been hooked on.
It worked a bit but I couldn’t help but notice that Rohan and Anja didn’t speak directly to each other. At all.
As Zach told us tales of the auditions, I remembered Anja’s sudden headache on Saturday and the way that Rohan had been nowhere to be found.
Had something happened at the Spring Fete?
“So, how come you moved to St Stephen’s?” Anja asked Zach. “I mean, why would you want to leave the Harrington School of Performing Arts after you worked so hard to get in there?”
Zach reached for the last of the dough balls – they hadn’t lasted long once we’d arrived. “Basically, I realized I’d got everything I could out of Harrington. It was time to move on, I guess.”
“On to the next big thing?” I asked, wondering exactly what he planned for that to be. St Stephen’s wasn’t exactly renowned for its drama department – and Zach had spent more time in the sports pavilion, anyway. Maybe he was moving on, looking to be someone different, here.
“Perhaps.” Zach flashed me his best smile but somehow it didn’t seem to have the same effect as usual. “Mostly I’m just enjoying being an ordinary guy again, without the pressures of filming and fans and stuff.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how your gran does it, Tilly. I mean, her fans are famous in their own right at this point.”
“Mostly for being a little bonkers,” I admitted. “But Gran loves it. She loves them. She feels an … obligation to them, I guess. To give them the best stories she can. The romances they deserve.”
I needed to talk to Gran. To ask her when she was going to take back her book. It had been a fun, exciting challenge to start with, but now … I couldn’t keep putting off asking Gran the difficult questions, like why she wanted me to do this in the first place. All I knew was something still didn’t feel right about it.
Much like this dinner, I thought, as Anja and Rohan glanced at each other for a second, then looked away again.
“I totally get that,” Zach said, apparently oblivious to whatever was going on with my friends. “I mean, it gets kind of dull after a while, signing autographs for all these pre-teen girls. But you know. It goes with the territory.”
Anja reached under the table for her bag. “Sorry, Zach. Could I get past?”
Zach let her out and Anja headed for the ladies. I glanced back at Rohan, then said, “I’ll go with her,” ignoring the inevitable jokes about girls always going to the loo together.
If the ladies was the only place I could get Anja alone to find out what was going on, then it would have to do.
“OK, spill.” I dropped my bag on to the surface by the sink and leaned next to it, watching Anja’s reflection in the mirror. “What’s going on with you and Rohan?”
Obviously everything w
asn’t OK between them. Anja’s eyes were red around the rims, and she looked like she hadn’t slept all week.
But still, she shrugged and said, “It’s fine.”
“Of course it is.” I rolled my eyes. “Anja. I want to help. So come on, tell me. What happened with you and Rohan?”
With a sigh, Anja turned her back on the mirror and faced me. “You know how I left the fete early on Saturday?”
“Yeah. I’m guessing it wasn’t really because of a headache?”
Anja shook her head. “Something happened with me and Rohan.”
“I’d figured out that much. What, though? Did you have a fight?”
“Not a fight. In fact, I’m not even sure I can put my finger on how it started. It was … it’s always been the three of us before, you know? But since you started dating Zach, for the first time it was just me and Rohan. And I started realizing all sorts of little things about him. Like the way his stupid jokes always make me laugh. Or how I like it when he wears his brown coat. But I didn’t put it together until the end of the fete.”
Anja had fallen for Rohan. Wow. Now I thought about it, it made perfect sense. Which only made it worse that I’d not seen it coming. It was a classic Friends-to-Lovers story! How did I miss that? Maybe I wasn’t as hot on romance as I’d always thought.
I stayed silent so she’d keep talking, just to fill the space.
“After we left you and Zach, we went over to the arena. We were standing at the front of the crowd, right by the rope barrier to the display square. Rohan was making jokes, guessing what lame puns the mayor would open the sheep racing with this year. And he was leaning close, so I could hear him over everyone else and the music from the jazz band that was playing at the other end.” She bit her lip, her cheeks turning pink at the memory. “I could feel his breath against my ear and … and it made me shiver. Just a little. But Rohan noticed. And he reached up and pulled off his jacket and put it over my shoulders, pulling it closed so I wouldn’t be cold. And I looked up at his face – he wasn’t even looking at me, he was concentrating on the jacket. But I stared at his eyes, his mouth, his whole face and I realized…”
“You liked him,” I finished for her, when she trailed off.
“I realized he was perfect for me. That he’d always been perfect for me and I just hadn’t been paying attention. I’d always assumed he’d be there, and he was, so I never thought any more about it. But right then, I realized I wanted to … I wanted to lean up and kiss him so badly…”
“So you did?”
Anja shook her head. “I started to. I sort of went up on tiptoes, and then Rohan suddenly caught my gaze. I guess he figured out what I was about to do, because his eyes went really, really wide, and he stepped away from me so fast he fell head-first over the rope barrier. Then he pulled himself up, started to run away some more and tripped over the leading sheep in the sheep race. There was a lot of bleating and swearing and then one of the lambs escaped and did a runner and that was it. Moment over.”
I winced, picturing it. It was worse than Rohan slipping on horse manure the year before. “Yeah, that’s not great.” And I’d been laughing as the runaway lamb used Zach as a hurdle.
“What about you and Zach?” Anja asked, in an obvious attempt to change the subject. “How are things going there?”
I shrugged. “Honestly? I don’t really know. I mean, I know how much I like him, I just … I didn’t expect romance to be this hard. Shouldn’t it just happen? Like, there’s a perfect moment and he kisses me, or something?”
“In my experience? No. Nothing about love is that easy.”
“Sorry,” I said, pulling a face. Never mind my first kiss woes. Back to Anja and Rohan. “Has anything else happened with Rohan since?”
Anja shook her head. “He’s barely even looked at me all week, so how could it? We haven’t hung out alone, so we’ve hardly spoken ten words to each other since the fete.”
“I think you need to,” I said. “Seriously. I mean, even if there’s nothing else between you, you’re friends. We’re all friends. And we can’t just lose that because of a stupid thing with a jacket and a sheep.” Plus, now I thought about it, I reckoned that if they ever sat down and actually talked about things, they might discover they were a lot more in tune than they thought. I didn’t know what had made Rohan act like a clumsy idiot but I was pretty sure it wasn’t because he didn’t feel the same way.
Like I said, classic Friends-to-Lovers. Just like Rosa and Huw in the Aurora books.
Of course, that meant I probably had to have this conversation with Rohan, too. Great.
“I guess.” Anja didn’t sound convinced but then the bathroom door opened and another woman walked in. The time for talking was over. It was up to Anja to take action, now.
“And you need to kiss Zach,” Anja murmured as we headed back into the restaurant. “I bet that will make everything clear.”
I hoped she was right. And that I’d get the chance to find out.
We finished up dinner pretty quickly after Anja’s confession, so were on our way home again before ten o’clock.
“Is everything OK with them?” Zach asked as we headed up the hill back to Gran’s house.
“It will be, I hope,” I replied.
The moon was almost full overhead and as we walked, hand in hand, I realized that this was the most romantic – and least disastrous – date we’d managed so far.
Which meant it was perfect for my first kiss. Finally.
My blood seemed to hum in my veins just thinking about it, like my whole body was buzzing with anticipation. Tonight was the night.
I leaned in a little closer to Zach as we walked, so our arms were touching. That counted as a signal, right? My heart seemed too loud in my chest in the quiet of the night, though, so maybe that was doing the job for me, too.
Our footsteps crunched over the gravel as we approached the door, climbing the couple of steps up on to the porch to the kitchen door. I fumbled in my pockets for my key.
“Did you have a nice time tonight?” Zach asked, his voice soft, and I stopped searching and turned to look at him. There was something behind the words I hadn’t heard before that evening. Something private. Just for me, instead of our double date that got gate-crashed by my friends’ romantic dramas.
“I did,” I murmured back. “In fact, I think it might count as our best date yet.”
OK, so it didn’t have much competition but still. It had been nice, talking about Zach’s life on TV, spending time with friends, walking home together. It felt like a date was supposed to.
“I agree.” Zach smiled. And then, in a flash of movement I barely saw, Zach moved in close, one hand warm at my waist and his lips just inches above mine as he dipped my head.
“In fact, the only thing that could make it better was if I got to kiss you goodnight.” His whisper brushed against my mouth.
Swallowing, I nodded. “I’d like that.”
This was it. My first kiss. Proof that I really was ready for romance – fictional or real.
My mouth felt dry and my knees were shaky but I was ready. It was time.
And then his lips were on mine, pressing against me as his hands held me to him. It was happening at last.
I tried to remember every second, to log every feeling, every sensation, ready to write them down to use in the book. I squeezed my eyes tight as Zach’s tongue thrust into my mouth, pushing hard against my own, while his hand slid down from my back to my bum then back up again.
And then it was over, and Zach was stepping away, grinning like Alice’s Cheshire cat.
I blinked as I watched him descend the steps backwards. That was it? That was what I’d been waiting for?
The buzz in my blood had gone and my knees felt perfectly capable of holding me up again. In fact, I just felt … disappointed.
“I’ll see you in school tomorrow?” Zach called as he reached the driveway.
“Of course.” Where else would I be? “S
ee you then.”
“Night, Tilly.”
And then he was away down the drive and gone, leaving me alone on the back porch, still looking for my keys.
I woke up on Thursday obsessing about that kiss.
I’d always imagined that my first kiss would blow me away, make me feel things I’d never experienced before. That was the whole point of this romance plan – to understand how falling in love felt, so I could write about it.
But my experiences of romance, dating and kissing so far were definitely nothing to write home about.
It couldn’t be Zach. He was perfect romance hero material – gorgeous, famous, romantic when he wanted to be. And when we’d started this, just looking at him or seeing him smile at me had given me a buzz.
So what had gone wrong with the kiss?
Was it me? Was I just not great at kissing? I mean, it wasn’t like I had anything to compare it to.
Maybe my expectations really were just too high. I’d built the kiss up in my head for weeks – picturing it like the first kisses in Gran’s books. No wonder it hadn’t lived up to my imagination.
I’d just have to try again. It was probably one of those things that couples got better at with practice, right?
But first, I had a full day of lessons and a literary event to put on before we broke up for the Easter holiday.
Still, before I got out of bed, I couldn’t help but quickly check my email. And there, waiting for me, was the reply I’d been hoping for from Morgan Black.
Thanks.
This time I smiled at the succinct response. Morgan Black might be a correspondent of few words but he or she definitely made up for it in their fiction. If I was lucky, there might even be another chapter of Looking Glass over the weekend, as a reward for all my hard work.
Once I’d got through interviewing my favourite author in front of an audience of two hundred readers.
I jumped out of bed and got ready for the day ahead.
“But where are the miniature fish and chips?” Rachel shrieked down the phone, while the catering staff she’d hired avoided her gaze and laid out the canapés that had been delivered.
