Confessions from the Quilting Circle - Maisey Yates Page 0,10
She’s been keeping me going hard for weeks.”
“Good thing,” Hannah said. “What else have you been up to?”
“Photography, which is a lot of hiking. Cooking classes.”
“Cooking?”
“If I don’t learn now I won’t learn. Might as well.”
“I guess. Is Mom doing any of it with you?”
“You know how she is. She likes her routine. And if she went to a cooking class and couldn’t figure it out she’d break all the eggs in a temper and storm out.” He laughed when he said it.
Hannah walked out of the bedroom, flipping the light off, the darkness taking her memories along with it. The shag carpet beneath her feet was plush, completely different to the wood floors in her apartment. The linoleum in the kitchen was the same ochre that had been there since she was a child. It was a bit scarred and worn now, but it spoke of home, and she liked it.
The kettle on the stove was already whistling, and her mom was standing there waiting. Then she poured her a generous amount of hot water and plunked a Lipton tea bag into the cup.
Hannah’s British friends in the symphony would recoil in horror. Even more so if she confessed to them that half the time her mother made the water for the tea in the microwave.
The kitchen felt so small now. Every time she came home it surprised her. The cast of the light was yellow, the wood too warm. It was nothing like her big, open apartment with black and chrome and high ceilings that carried her music up and filtered it down all around her so she was consumed with it.
A space all her own.
A space dedicated to what mattered to her.
One where no one ever told her to stop playing.
“I’ll have a beer,” Hannah said, when her mom went to pour a second cup.
Her expression was vaguely disapproving. “You smell like cigarettes.”
“Am I fifteen?”
Her dad turned to her, holding the beer and handing it to her. “Does being over eighteen make you immune to the negative effects of cigarettes?”
“How’s your cholesterol, Dad?” she asked sweetly. “And did you have steak for dinner?”
“It’s not your job to monitor my health, Hannah Banana.”
“Well, seems fair since you’re doing it to me.”
“And are you seeing anyone?” he asked.
“Saw a man a for a whole night a couple of weeks ago.”
That earned her a gruff grunt.
But a smile tugged at the corner of his mouth. Because as much as she knew he disapproved, even when she was irritating him she knew he enjoyed it. He had raised his daughters to be strong women with their own minds.
Even when those minds weren’t quite the same as his.
And in her mind, marriage was silly. It was for people who wanted houses in neighborhoods like this one. Who wanted kids and who wanted to be normal.
She wanted to be something more than normal.
Her dad took a sip of his beer. “I just hate the idea of you being all alone over there.”
“I have a lot of friends. Playing in a symphony is a whole group thing.”
“It’s not the same as being in love,” he said.
Her dad was a romantic, beneath all his alpha bluster. Hannah had always found that funny because her mom really wasn’t. Joe Ashwood liked to bring his wife flowers just because and Mary appreciated them...but Hannah had a feeling she’d never have asked for something so frivolous.
Hannah appreciated her dad, but she wasn’t like him.
She could remember when she thought love was supposed to be bright and blinding like a summer day. That it was supposed to consume you and keep you up at night. That it was okay if it hurt, or didn’t fit quite right.
That it burned with the ferocity of the rest of her dreams. But she knew better now. That was... It wasn’t anything you could live with.
Not when you wanted something else. Not when you had a big and bright dream to follow.
But even though she’d let that go, being in Bear Creek always reminded her of that kind of summer. That kind of feeling.
It was uncomfortable, but an uncomfortable she accepted as part of coming back. It was why she only did it once a year.
Knowing she was settling in for a couple months was unsettling.
“How’s the fiddling going?” Her dad leaned against the counter and crossed his arms, fixing her with his thousand-yard blue stare that had never failed to strike fear into her heart when she’d been a teenager, contemplating any