by Sienna Blake
As she pulled a bottle of champagne from the freezer, I frowned. “What does that mean?”
Candace tucked the bottle under her arm, snatched two chipped mugs from mismatched hooks under a wonky cabinet, and sambaed toward me. She leapt onto the couch next to me and handed me a mug. “It means...” She grimaced as she struggled with the cork. “It means, ‘I’m incredible.’”
She cheered when the cork finally exploded from the bottle and careened across the apartment just as the front door opened. The cork whizzed past Aubrey’s head to crash harmlessly against the metal rail of the staircase.
“Jesus Christ, Candace!” Aubrey kicked the door closed behind her as she balanced two boxes of pizza, a bag of breadsticks, three containers of marinara, and a bottle of ranch dressing in her arms. “America brings a delicious peace offering and Brazil declares war?”
Candace leapt off the couch just as quickly as she had leapt onto it and galloped toward Aubrey with her tiny hands in the shape of guns. “That all depends on whether you got extra jalapeños the way I like, Aubrey dearest…”
Sending the ranch and the breadsticks toppling to the floor, Candace lifted the lid of the first pizza box and stretched her head back to yell at the ceiling. “World peace!”
Aubrey shook her head at me as she set down her food haul, including the fallen breadsticks and ranch, on the makeshift coffee table crafted out of two old trunks and a faded surfboard. She joined me on the couch as she finished the task of pouring the champagne that Candace abandoned.
“So,” she said, handing me a nearly overflowing mug that claimed “Put some whiskey in my coffee because it’s Ireland somewhere”, “what do you think?”
“She obviously loves it!” Candace shouted over a mouthful of pizza before grabbing the champagne to take a swig straight from the bottle.
Aubrey tossed a glistening breadstick at Candace, who was sitting cross-legged on a tasselled pillow on one of many clashing rugs that covered the wooden floors. The breadstick smelled intoxicatingly of garlic and butter.
“I asked Kayleigh,” Aubrey laughed. “Quieto!”
Candace grabbed another slice and grumbled, “Your Portuguese accent is terrible.”
Chuckling, I sipped my champagne to keep it from running down the sides and splashing onto my jeans. “I do love it,” I admitted to Aubrey truthfully.
The floors pulsed and vibrated from the pounding music downstairs, nothing inside the apartment matched anything else, giving it an undeniable sense of chaos, the Brazilian flag stretched across the exposed bricks to my left couldn’t possibly be bigger or brighter, but I did—I loved it.
Strings of lights, some white, some multicoloured, some shaped like tigers or snowflakes or roses, seemed to be strung from anywhere and everywhere. Old bossa nova music playing from a record player filled the room with an irresistible cheerfulness, and even I, with two left feet, couldn’t resist tapping a toe or two along. The vaulted ceilings made it feel spacious and the rugs and cushions and pillows and blankets scattered everywhere made it feel cosy. It was a hectic, disordered, messy Bohemian paradise. I really wasn’t sure whether I just moved into a new apartment or joined a cult, but either way I was wearing fuzzy socks, smiling and eating pizza.
“Don’t let her put that stuff on your slice,” Candace warned, nodding her head toward Aubrey.
“It’s called ranch,” Aubrey said as she squirted a pool of it onto her plate. “And Kayleigh, you should only try it if you’re ready for your mind to explode.”
“American slop.” Candace shuddered.
I reached over to dip the tip of my slice into the ranch. Both girls watched my reaction as I tasted it.
Candace groaned when I smiled. “That’s it!” she shouted. “I’m kicking you out!”
Aubrey raised her This Girl Runs on Coffee mug to me. “You have excellent taste, Kayleigh,” she said with a grin.
Candace swigged champagne before pointing the bottle at me. “Maybe not in food,” she said and then winked. “But your taste in sets of abs is superb.” She kissed the fingertips of her free hand. “Eoin is esplêndido.” She pressed her hand dramatically to her forehead. “Which in English means scrumptious, scrumptious, goddamn scrumptious.”
I picked at an olive on my pizza slice and smiled awkwardly. “Yeah,” was all I managed to spit out. “He’s very…muscular.” My cheeks reddened slightly as I stared at my plate. Thankfully Candace didn’t seem to notice as she continued.
“So Aubrey snatched the beautiful Noah from me,” she said, causing Aubrey to choke on her champagne.
“Snatched?” Aubrey’s eyebrows raised in incredulity.
Candace nodded. “Snatched,” she repeated. “Noah was moments from sweeping me off my feet and carrying me away in his strong, tanned arms when you ruined my fairy tale ending.”
Aubrey laughed. “I think the only thing that was going to sweep you off your feet was a strong gust of wind.”
Candace leapt to her feet, her champagne spilling. She pointed a fiery finger at Aubrey. “I’m five-two!”
Aubrey nodded. “Yeah, and I’m six-five.”
Candace whipped around to face me. “You believe I’m five-two, right, Kayleigh?”
Fearing for my life, I nodded.
“Porra…” Candace cursed as she returned to the floor, pushing her dark curls out of her face.
Aubrey winked at me and took another massive bite of ranch-covered pizza.
“So, as I was saying,” Candace said, calming down. “Calm”, I was beginning to realise, was relative for her. “Aubrey snatched the Greek god O’Sullivan and you scooped up Sporty Spice O’Sullivan.”
Aubrey snorted.
Candace sighed and consoled herself with the champagne bottle. “So I guess I’m left with Wall Street O’Sullivan,” she said. “He’d fall for me for sure if I could just get him to look up from that maldito phone.”
Still playing around with my food, I cleared my throat and asked as casually as I could manage, “Um, what about the other one?”
“Who, Darren?” Candace wrinkled her nose and shook her head. “Darren’s impossible to love,” she said and then added, “even with those grey-blue eyes of his.”
I caught myself before scooting to the edge of the couch, my interest peaked. “Umm,” I forced myself not to blurt out the words. “What do you mean?”
Candace shrugged. “All men are like eggs, you know?”
I had no clue, but I agreed nonetheless because I wanted to hear what she had to say about the withdrawn, moody O’Sullivan brother, the one who I was very much not dating.
Candance tapped her nails on the champagne bottle and continued, “The goal is to crack them, you know? To get to the soft, yummy, good stuff inside.”
“Right.” I nodded.
“Well, some guys are harder to crack than others. Some are really tricky, really, really tricky,” Candace said. “But I’m convinced there’s nothing to crack with Darren: he’s solid all the way through. So unless you like knocking your head on brick walls over and over again…” Candace shrugged again and then shook her head as if to clear Darren’s very name from her head. She winked at me. “Just be happy it’s Eoin who likes you,” she concluded.
Aubrey elbowed me. “Seems a bit more than ‘likes’, eh?”
I blushed and tried to hide it behind another sip of champagne. Was I blushing because I was embarrassed how much Eoin obviously adored me? Or was I blushing because Eoin obviously adored me and all I wanted to do was steer the conversation back to Darren?
“Are Darren and Eoin close?” I asked once my cheeks had cooled.
Aubrey glanced over at Candace and hesitated. “Darren’s not exactly ‘close’ with anyone in the family,” she explained. “I mean, maybe I should let you ask Eoin about this—”
“No, no, go on,” I insisted.
When both Aubrey and Candace raised their eyebrows at me, I realised I’d been too enthusiastic. I had to come up with a reason to cover my s
tupid, reckless ass. Stat.
“Umm, it’s just that I want to know about Eoin’s family, obviously,” I paused as my mind screamed since he’s the one you’re actually dating!, “but, umm, we’re so early in the dating stage that I’m not sure I’ll get an honest answer from him, you know?”
Aubrey and Candace both nodded.
“You’re still in the ‘say anything to get laid’ phase,” Candace offered.
I snapped my fingers. “Exactly.”
Aubrey grinned. “The ‘keep the family skeletons in the closet’ phase.”
I nodded.
Candace reached for another breadstick and added with a mischievous smile, “The ‘no, my family definitely doesn’t wear matching sweaters and go pumpkin picking each year’ phase.”
Aubrey’s mouth opened wide in shock. “I told you that in confidence!” she shouted indignantly.
Candace just laughed. “You told me that in drunkenness.”
“They’re one and the same,” Aubrey said, grabbing the breadstick before Candace could take a bite and adding when she whined in protest, “You’ve lost your breadstick privileges.”
“Right, right,” I said, more than eager to hear more about Darren. “I just want an honest perspective, that’s all.”
Aubrey leaned back against the cushions on the couch and munched on her breadstick contemplatively. “Darren loves his family,” she finally said. “He never misses any time with them: holidays, events, Sunday lunches. He’s always there…”
I waited as Aubrey paused, searching for words.
“…but he’s also not there in a way, not really. He…”
“He comes to The Jar sometimes,” Candace jumped in when Aubrey trailed off. “But he doesn’t talk to anyone except for Noah and Aubrey. And he always looks like he’d rather be anywhere else in the world. Girls go up to him, even send him drinks sometimes, but he refuses them all.”
Aubrey nodded along as Candace spoke.
“He says he’s happy to be there though,” Candace finished with a shrug. “Happy to support Noah and Aubrey.”
“He says he’s happy to be with the family, too,” Aubrey continued. “But his face always says something different.”
“That’s it,” Candace agreed. “His face gives him away.”
I drummed my fingers against the side of my mug, thinking. “What does his face say then?” I finally asked.
Aubrey and Candace looked at each other, as if confirming answers. Finally, Aubrey met my eyes. “Honestly?”
I nodded.
She sighed. “That he’s being tortured.”
Her words shocked me and I turned to Candace for confirmation. She just nodded. “Like he’s being tortured and he wants more.”
A sombre silence settled over the three of us despite the up-tempo Latin music playing from the vintage record player in the far corner. It was finally Candace who hopped to her feet and raced toward the freezer to fetch another bottle of champagne.
“Okay, enough downer stuff, Kayleigh,” she grinned. “Let’s get down to the nitty gritty, the juicy details, the yummy, yummy stuff.”
I frowned.
She rolled her eyes at me as she struggled again with the cork. “Eoin’s galo, chicka! Spill the beans.”
I laughed and shook my head as the cork exploded from the bottle like the next two after it would. Or was it three?
“I’m so sorry,” I winked up at my new crazy roommate. “I’m afraid I don’t speak Portuguese.”
Darren
I didn’t pray much anymore.
I didn’t even open the Bible Ma placed in the bottom drawer of my filing cabinet when she thought I wasn’t looking.
I couldn’t remember the last time the multicoloured light from a stained-glass window coloured my cheek.
So my mornings alone in my garage were the closest I ever got to a confessional. The hazy first light of dawn cast growing shadows from my toolboxes and spare parts scattered across the cold concrete floors; those shadows weren’t all that different from pews lining the floors of the church. Silence hung over my workspace just as heavily as it hung over the shoulders of boys and girls who waited with hushed breaths for the priest to enter so they could recite, “Bless me, Father, for I have sinned…” No one could convince me there was any difference in the tight, unmoving air of a wooden confessional booth and the dark undercarriage beneath a car.
One I needed like a drug, one I avoided like the plague, but they were both the same thing: goddamn coffins.
As I drove my motorcycle up to my shop early that morning to be absolved from the same sin I confessed day in and day out, I found my church ruined. The garage door was already raised, a ritual only I performed. The floors were swept clean, the stiff, stale air disturbed by the wafting scent of fresh coffee, the silence violated by blasphemous pop-diva music in my sacred space.
There, in the middle of it all, stood my greatest temptation.
“How’d you get in?” I barked after tugging my motorcycle helmet off my head.
Kayleigh paused mid-sweep and looked over her shoulder in surprise. I slipped on the fine layer of frost coating the asphalt, but continued to stalk toward her in irritation.
“Did you break in?”
Kayleigh’s only response was to shove the broom handle into my hands and walk away. I stared at the broom and then at her in confusion. She returned with a steaming cup of coffee.
“Do you take sugar?” she asked.
“No.”
She nodded. “Milk?”
I shook my head.
“Surprise, surprise, he takes it black. Like his heart,” she mumbled as she took back the broom and handed over the coffee. “Drink.”
Still fuming about the invasion to my shop, I nonetheless lowered my lips to the hot cup and took a sip, breathing in deeply the strong, invigorating aroma. When I looked back over at Kayleigh, she was smiling sweetly. “Good morning.”
I stared at her unflinching smile before muttering a reluctant “mornin’” of my own. She folded her hands over the top of the broom handle and rested her chin on them, blinking up at me with those wide, green eyes. When I finally realised she was waiting for something, I rolled my eyes and sighed. “Thank you.”
She lifted an eyebrow, which disappeared under her soft red bangs. “‘Thank you’ for the coffee? Or ‘thank you’ for taking the initiative as your new employee to get the spare keys from Michael, get here early, sweep, brew coffee, and make it inviting for you when you came in?”
A tiny grin tugged at the corner of her pink lips. She wasn’t even smiling and already church-inappropriate thoughts were flooding my mind. I had to get away from her.
“For the coffee,” I answered and tried to shoulder right past her.
She ran with her broom to move back in front of me. “Okay, okay, okay,” she said, holding her free hand up against my chest to stop my retreat to the office before realising how intimately she was touching me and then dropping her hand like I was on fire. “Okay,” she said again. “I wanted to come in early and do something nice on my first day as a sort of…as a sort of apology, I guess.” She lifted her eyes hesitantly to mine.
“An apology?”
She nodded, biting her lip. I wanted to tell her not to do that. I wanted to tell her we wouldn’t make it through the workday if she kept doing that. I bit the inside of my own cheek to keep my bleedin’ traitorous mouth shut.
“Listen,” she said. “I think maybe we got off on the wrong foot the other day when we, umm, when we met.”
I watched a baby-pink blush creep across her freckled cheeks, because we both knew exactly what “met” meant. Her eyes ducked to her feet as she fidgeted with the broom handle.
“I don’t know what got into me at the grocery store,” she continued, clearing her tight voice. “That’s not like me at all to argue or even raise my voice. It’s just that, you…you…” She paused, watching me through a curtain of long, fluttering eyelashes, her lips parted like s
he was about to finish her sentence, but there was nothing. Her green eyes searched mine as if the words were somewhere in their depths. But I knew she wouldn’t find any answers she would like in there.
It’s just that you…have eyes that I wanted to study like the rarest of emeralds.
You caught me by surprise and it scared me. I’d been walking a tightrope over an endless canyon and you were a sudden gust of wind and I’m falling and I’m reaching for safety and I’m angry because I know it’s already far too late.
It’s just that you…will never—can never—be mine.
I wasn’t sure how long we stood there, silent and staring into each other’s eyes.
Kayleigh suddenly shook her head. “Anyway,” she smiled and extended her hand out to me, “let’s start over. I’m Kayleigh.”
I didn’t even glance down at her hand. There was no way I could bear to touch her. “I’m busy and you know my name.”
This time she didn’t stop me as I manoeuvred around her and continued my path toward my office. When I heard her pitter-patter steps behind me, I sighed and pleaded with the dusty ceiling fans overhead in lieu of a crucifix hanging high above an altar.
I shoved the door to my office, not bothering to hold it open for her, hoping that would send the message I wanted to be alone. There was no rattle of blinds as it slammed closed behind me, so I knew I had only succeeded in trapping us in an even tighter space together. Great.
“I’m trying to be nice here, and, well, I don’t want to be rude or disrespectful, especially seeing as you’re my boss now and all, but—”
“Just spit it out,” I interrupted as I tossed my motorcycle helmet onto a stack of invoices I had yet to send out despite the stack of red-stamped bills right next to it I had yet to pay. Or rather, I had yet to have the necessary funds to pay.
Kayleigh sighed behind me. “It’s just that maybe you don’t have to make this so difficult, is all.”
I had a feeling that was not what she had wanted to say at all. Not even close. I had a feeling there was a string of curses flying through her pretty head, each more accurate than the last. I found myself wanting to hear them, the way I heard them in the grocery store when she’d apparently had no problem at all speaking her mind freely and uncensored.