Page 44 of For My Finale
George turned to her and raised an eyebrow. “You could learn from a stone wall, far as I can tell. You’ve got a lot to figure out.”
“Yeah,” Lilah sighed, settling back down to the fence. “I suppose you’re right. I’m pretty bad at this whole living in the country thing.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” said George. “There’s more to life in Bankton than being a farmer. You’re popular enough, from the sounds of it. You just got to work out what it is you want.”
“Yeah, that’s the difficult part,” Lilah said, looking at the sheep.
“Not for them, it’s not,” said George.
“Great, now I’m being outdone by a flock of sheep. Perfect.”
George chuckled again, but said nothing more. He simply leaned back on the fence, content to watch his animals as if the answers to life’s mysteries were hidden in their woolly heads.
“Am I popular?” Lilah asked, after a while.
“You won’t be if you ask questions like that,” grunted George.
Lilah groaned and stood up. She had a walk to finish. And things to think about. What did she want? The problem with that question was that increasingly the answer was becoming Blossom. Whichwasa problem. Wasn’t it?
???
Blossom sat at her kitchen table, the dim light of the single overhead lamp casting a glow over the scattered papers in front of her. They were a mess. Notes scrawled in the margins of bank statements, half-formed ideas on napkins from the cafe, a print out of an article about running a small business.
She needed a plan. Something real, something that could keep the cafe afloat. The bank loan was a start, but it wouldn’t last forever. She couldn’t tread water forever. If she wanted the cafe to survive, she needed to make it different enough from thechain store coming in. She had to make it something people would choose over Coffee-To-Go.
“What goes well with coffee?” she muttered to herself, tapping her pen on the table.
Pastries? Well, yes. But if she made them, half the village were likely to go down with food poisoning. Music? Again, yes. But she couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket and her music tastes stopped somewhere around enjoying ABBA and knowing vaguely who Chappelle Roan was.
“What about books?” she said.
Books and coffee?
The pen-tapping got faster. It wasn’t a new idea, but it could be a good one. There wasn’t a bookshop in Bankton. It could be a cozy place where people could browse a small selection of books while getting their coffee. There could be events, book clubs, something that made the cafe more of a community space.
“Books,” she said thoughtfully, tasting the word.
But then reality crashed in. A bookshop was a big thing. Too big. It would take money, organization, risk. She couldn’t pull off something like that. She wasn’t a business mogul. She was no confident Lilah Paxton.
The thought of Lilah made Blossom’s skin tingle with warmth.
Lilah could do something like this. Lilah had confidence, drive, energy. Lilah. Blossom sighed. She really shouldn’t be thinking about her, but it was sort of impossible not to. The way she looked, the way she’d felt when Blossom had hugged her. Yeah, that had been a mistake.
A mistake, because she obviously had feelings for Lilah. Feelings that she was pretty sure Lilah didn’t reciprocate. Not given how quickly Lilah had stepped out of that hug.
Blossom shook her head, trying to clear it. She needed to focus on the cafe, not on impossible crushes.
A noise from outside made her jump.
Her breath caught, ears straining to catch the sound again. A rustling, something moving just beyond the window.
It was probably an animal. A fox, perhaps, or one of George’s sheep, lost again. But the sound made her uneasy somehow.
She stood up, grabbing a torch from the drawer by the sink, and moved toward the door. She took a deep breath and one step outside. The night air was cool against her skin, a sliver of moon cast a faint silver light. She stood still and listened.
Something was out there.
???
