Just Like Her

Chapter 76

Tom

"So you said you were just... popping by?" Peter asked again as he returned to the small table with a tea tray ladened with a pot and two sets of cups.

A smirk tugged on my lips as I realized the tea pot's knit-cozy bore a remarkable resemblance to the Infant Emma's knitwear. "Erh, yes."

"And you said Emma was visiting Alice?"

"That's what she told me," I confirmed as I watched him pour us both a cup of tea.

He nodded to the filled cups and I murmured in thanks as I took possession of the one closest to me. Peter's cup and saucer rattled against one another until he brought them to rest on the wooden arm of his chair.

He had sat us in a small room at the back of the shop, furnished only with bookshelves, a rickety-looking table shoved in the corner, and our two wingback chairs with a worn ottoman currently being used as a tea table.

I grinned, as I imagined a vision of Emma hunched over the table so engrossed in her writing she paid no mind to the smudges of ink that tattooed the edge of her hand.

"Well," Peter started, waking me from my daydream. "It is kind of you to come by yourself... without notice."

I grimaced slightly and nodded in acknowledgement. "I do apologize for not calling ahead. I—"

Peter cut me off with a wave of his free hand. "Nonsense. Any acquaintance of Emma's is always welcome."

"Well we're a bit more than acquaintances," I chuckled.

"Friends, then," Peter supplied with an increasingly coy smile.

"Is that how Emma tells it?"

Peter blew on his steaming tea. "Oh, I'm strictly forbidden from telling you how Emma tells it."

His words brought me back to this morning's paper, and the chair subsequently whined in protest to my nervous shifting. "See the thing is, Peter—"

"It is fitting," he smirked, "that you should be as anxious today as you were the day you skittered in here to call on my Emma."

I blinked, momentarily forgetting myself and my purpose. "I—what?"

Peter nodded deeply and then sighed heavily with an equally dramatic wave of his hand. "Get on with is then, lad."

"Today's paper," I finally managed. "It published an interview you gave them... about Emma."

Peter's well-affixed sage visage faltered then as his brows dropped into a low furrow. "And here I was thinking you were seeking out my blessing to marry Emma-dear."

A self-conscious laugh escaped me before I could cover my mouth with my first. "I think you and I have a long wait ahead of us before Emma gives me the blessing to even start such conversations..."

"And if she never were to be ready?" He asked over the edge of his teacup before allowing himself a careful sip. "To marry, I mean. If this... arrangement you have with each now is all, well, if it were all she could offer you."

I frowned. His words were too strategically selected to be casual in meaning, and yet, I couldn't quite parse what apparently less-than-tactful question he was hinting at. "Well..." I started unsurely. "If that's what made her happy the, I suppose it would be fine?"

Peter arched a heavy brow at that. "You suppose?"

"It would be," I repeated more definitively this time.