She laughed. “I like cookies, but not brownies. Have fun with that.”
“If we’re still here at Christmas, I will make you all the biscuits you want,” he promised. “I’ll make you a bloody castle made of gingerbread.”
“I think I would like it if we were still here at Christmas. I’d have people to spend it with. I haven’t had that in a long time,” Cordelia said.
“I think I would, too. So…you and Lancaster?”
She shook her head. “Yeah, we’re not going to talk about that now.”
“All right then,” Brendan said.
12
Cordelia
Before coming to the bayou, Cordelia had reached a certain level of comfort and complacency in her everyday life. She was not used to glancing over her shoulder every few steps, trying to see around corners. Because well, she hadn’t left her house that much in about ten years.
She told herself that maybe she should stop walking places, but the grocery store was just a few blocks away. And she wanted to bring something to the baby shower favor-building thing. She felt so guilty, with everybody bringing food to her house all the time and her never making a return gesture. It was uncomfortably close to her mother’s manner of friendship.
Cordelia wasn’t entirely comfortable cooking for people who were obviously very good at it, but she could pick out some nice cheeses and fancy crackers and wine. That was the sort of thing people ate at a baby shower favor-building party, right? Not that she’d ever been to a baby shower favor-building party.
Now that she’d thought about it, she’d never been to a baby shower.
Anyway, now that she was spending her days scanning the sidewalks for her mother, she’d come to recognize just how many people she’d come to know in this town, and how much she liked them. She had Zed and Clarissa. She had Jillian and Dani and Sonja. She had Bonita. And she was pretty sure Siobhan was cutting her bigger slices of pie than was necessary.
She still hadn’t convinced Bonita and Walt to date each other, but she couldn’t have everything.
And what about Brendan?
She stumbled a bit at the thought of Brendan and the things they’d done together. She’d thought she’d die without knowing that kind of pleasure, and she’d made her peace with it. But knowing what she’d been missing all of these years—in order to protect her brain, which seemed reasonable at the time—all she wanted to do was climb back in Brendan’s bed and explore those pleasures over and over again. In fact, she’d persuaded Brendan to explore them with her three times the previous night, but he insisted that they had to leave the house, otherwise they would be reported missing and Zed would kick their door down, and the embarrassment would have been life-changing.
Right, back to non-sexual thoughts. Brendan didn’t count as a local, but she certainly felt connected to him. Spending time with him was the closest thing she’d ever had to a mature adult relationship. And yes, it was sort of sad that something as simple as eating dinner, watching movies, and then having sex was the closest thing she’d ever had to a mature adult relationship, but she was basically on relationship training wheels.
For the first time in her adult life, she was part of a community and it wasn’t nearly as painful or scary as her mother made it out to be…or the way her mother actually made it. She had those neighbors and friends she’d always wanted, without the price of discomfort and displacement and other undesirable “dis” words.
What would life be like when it was time to leave? While things didn’t look great with her casket-related work, eventually, her assignment here would end. It was hard to imagine just going back to her apartment in DC and her old, quiet, boring life, without her friends, without Brendan. Would Brendan just go back to Dublin? Would she ever see him again or would they be reduced to that awkward sort of acquaintance who only emailed out of a sense of obligation?
And what about Alex? Eventually, he was going to return from his assignment in Mystic Bayou, too. Now that they were both aware that they worked in the same office, was he going to show up in the artifacts department, asking her to talk to him? Because that was getting old.
“Cordy?”
She paused on the sidewalk, closing her eyes. She shouldn’t have thought about him. It was like she summoned him.
She turned to find Alex standing behind her. He was as polished and handsome as always, dressed casually in a cable-knit sweater and very dark jeans, except he had shadows under his eyes and little lines were starting to appear around his mouth. Fancy moisturizers could only do so much when you spent most of your days frowning.
“Let me guess, you want to talk,” she said, throwing up her arms. “Despite the fact that I’ve made it clear I have no interest in talking to you. Multiple times. I’ve made that clear so many times.”
“Yes, and I don’t understand why,” he said. “Things were fine between us when I came into town. I had some hope that we might be able to reconnect or at least figure out what happened between us, but you just shut me down.”
“What do you mean, what happened to us?” she cried. “I told you—”
“Yeah, you let your mom take you away,” Alex said.
“I let her? You met Bernadette,” she argued. “Do you really think I had a choice in it? You know what my mother was like. And your father wasn’t exactly giving us his blessing.”
“I never stopped loving you. I never stopped looking for you. My wife knew it, that’s why we imploded. I married a perfectly nice girl from a nice normal family with a good job. Everything was just so nice and normal, and I couldn’t handle it. She didn’t know me. She couldn’t know the real me. She knew the image I’d created. I tried to be someone who wasn’t me and it didn’t work!”
“You didn’t tell her about the carnival, did you?” Cordelia asked.
“How could I!” he exclaimed. “No one is going to understand growing up like that!”
“You might be surprised,” she said. “There are plenty of people around here who just accept weird baggage.”
“What? Like your creepy banshee friend?” Alex asked.
“He’s not creepy, and yes, we’re seeing each other, and he understands. He gets it,” she told him. “He doesn’t treat my gift like it’s an inconvenient teenage phase I can just get over.”
“I never said that!” he cried.
“No, but you made it clear that’s how you feel!” she yelled back.
At this point, people were starting to stare. Two of the pie shop regulars, Jeb Cho and Earl Webster, were standing near Ice Cream Depot, their expressions concerned.
“You all right, Miss Cordelia?” Jeb asked, frowning at Alex.
“I’m fine,” she called back.
Earl Webster’s glare towards Alex was equally harsh. “You just let us know if you’re not fine, all right, cher?”
“I will, thank you,” she assured them. She turned to Alex and gestured toward the gazebo. “Let’s just calm down OK?”
They walked to the town square in awkward silence. Cordelia was aware that if Alex had told her any of this just a few months ago, she would have told him that she had only ever loved him. But to be fair, at the time, she’d had rare opportunities to love. And now that she’d had more opportunities to know people and love them, she knew that she was capable of much more, that she wanted more. And she still hadn’t settled just how loyal Alex was to Messina, if Messina was an evil mastermind and how much Alex had to do with those evil mastermind plans.