Sweet Forty-Two(70)

“I’ll help you.”

Damn it if she didn’t work those facial muscles to prevent a full smile. “You will? I mean ... do you even have time?”

“I’ll make time. Look. I need something to do when I leave the studio, something so nonmusical I can forget what the violin is for a while.”

She smirked. “When you say violin ... and some other words ... you sound like you have an Irish accent. What the hell is that?”

I laughed, watching the way her eyes studied my mouth, as if the answer were written on my lips. “It’s kind of ... God, you caught me. I just like how it sounds. I’m not conscious of it all the time...”

She smacked me with a white dishtowel. “I knew it!”

I put my hands up. “To be fair, my grandparents have Irish accents as thick as fog.”

“Just your grandparents? Not CJ’s?” Georgia went back to her mixing.

“Other side of the family. My mom’s parents. I’m nearly one hundred percent Irish.” I pointed to the reddish and unruly hair on my head.

“So you just ... like it?”

“Well, I spent a lot of time with my mom’s parents when I was in high school. They lived closer to the boarding school than my parents did. They’re the reason I decided to teach in Ireland when I was done with college. Being a musician, my ears are always training me to match pitch, so when I’m around lots of thick accents I just kind of ... adopt them.”

“Ah,” she nodded, “so if we stuck you in Texas for a while—”

“My head would explode. I don’t ... do the south.”

She snorted, a sound so perfectly unguarded it made me laugh louder than I had in a long time. And it felt good. She didn’t know it, and I had a feeling I couldn’t tell her—at least not yet—but Georgia had the captivating ability to make me feel better. Not by forgetting anything, because everything was at the forefront of my mind. Rae. The loneliness. But Georgia had this way of making it bearable. I knew she wouldn’t try to throw loads of inspirational quotes at me, because she’d been there. The bottom of the barrel. She knew that those quotes were designed more for the talker than the listener. A tool to help people feel useful.

I had no idea why a guarded, spiky-skinned Georgia would ask me with help on something so personal as her bakery. Maybe those prickles were just origami spines, after all. It was clear that she trusted me, but what was clearer was that she didn’t want me to vocalize it. To make real the trust she so rarely doled out. I didn’t even want to call CJ about this. It felt like a perverted thought on its own. No, this would be just us.

I would take her up on her offer to help get this nameless bakery off the ground. I needed time. Around her. To see if a rewiring my insides was, in fact, what I was feeling, or if it was just the hopeless romantic in me.

She felt anything but hopeless, though, and that scared the hell out of me.

In my mind I pictured Georgia standing on the rock wall. Her face lifted to the sky and her palms forward in a peaceful second before she jumped.

I wanted to jump. I didn’t know how far down the bottom was, but as I poured cupcake batter into the twelve perfect circles of the tin, I found myself hoping Georgia would be waiting for me down there.

Our eyes met as she closed the oven door and set the timer.

“Are you feeling okay?” She didn’t make a move to put a comforting hand on my arm like Ember would have. Georgia knew her words were enough and didn’t ever try to suffocate me with more than the situation called for.

I put my hand over my mouth, a throat clearing effort to cover a pending sob with a laugh. “No. Not at all.” I shrugged and smiled.

And she did too.





Georgia

So, Regan said he’d help me. I can’t say I was surprised by his reaction—it was the one I’d hoped for—but there was still an overexposure at his words. He really wanted to be here, with me. And I had no idea why. Or, really, why I wanted him to want to be here.

That’s a lie. I wanted him to want to be here. I needed him to want to be in the bakery. With me. After long nights and days of sitting by my sobbing mother’s side, I needed an escape. I needed to be able to make someone feel better. Customers with my food. Regan by helping me. He seemed to need to be needed.

Oh, the sobbing mother? That’s just a fun side effect of the ECT. I haven’t teased out if it’s a direct side effect, or if it’s residual from some of the other ones, but during the several hours following her release from her first two treatments, she cried. Just cried and sobbed, and sniffed, and cried some more. There were no words or acknowledgements of my presence. It was such a heavy sob I almost felt bad for not joining her.

I don’t know if she was having regrets about the procedure because she didn’t want to talk about it during the days in between appointments. Maybe she wept over memories she thought she lost, or hours or days in the vortex of potential memory loss.

Yeah, last week was a goddamned doozy. I was able to distract myself in the bakery with Regan, and I was back for more distraction tonight. We were doing a late-night session. Him because of some rearranging of the recording schedule, and me? Well, I told him I switched days off with Lissa. That wasn’t a lie. What I wasn’t doing was talking about the ECT. I wasn’t talking about it with my mother, and I certainly wasn’t talking about it right now with Regan. I needed to see him smile. I needed to get lost. Forget.