Have you always looked so cute?

tête-à-tête

Embarrassment was a feeling Amity Blight had felt before. Who hadn’t? She felt embarrassed when her siblings teased her. She felt embarrassed when her parents sent backhanded comments her way. Amity had felt embarrassed before...

But this was the first time she had felt truly mortified.

“Amity?” Luz’s voice was cautious and uncharacteristically quiet, “What’s… up?”

“I… knocked over your chair.” Amity gestured in the general direction of the toppled piece of furniture. Luz looked confused.

“I never did apologize for knocking it over did I? How weird is that? Usually, I would have said how sorry I was if I tipped something over, but I didn’t do that, did I?”

She found that her hands were shaking in her lap. Luz put her own hands over them.

“I am sorry, by the way. For the chair,” she said, her voice almost wavering. Luz let out a breathy, relieved laugh

“Of course you are Amity. You don’t have to apologize.”

Now, this is the Amity I know.

A pair of clinks were heard. They looked away from each other to see two steaming cups were placed in front of them. They hadn’t noticed the fact that Eda had left to fetch them.

“I’ll leave you two to talk,” Eda said with a gentle smile, before heading upstairs to probably do a whole lot of nothing. The silence that followed her departure was tense and deafening. The only sound was made when Amity moved to cup the warm mug between her hands. She took a sip and recognized it to be made from Hibiscus. It was pleasantly tart and sweet.

“Soooo,” Luz drawled out, neglecting her mug, “there’s an elephant in the room.”

Amity looked up from her cup, which she was holding tenderly with both hands, to look around the room confused. “What? Where?”

Luz chuckled. “Uh no, sorry. It’s a human saying. It means that there’s something we need to talk about?”

Amity nodded, looking back down to her drink. She suddenly felt clammy and awkward. In the loaded silence, Luz had a revelation. If Amity remembered knocking over the chair then… “How much of what happened do you remember?”

Luz asked, her voice hesitant. Neither of them had to clarify what she was asking about. Amity hesitated. Red returned to her face as she thought about what she had done. What she had said. Her memories were crystal clear, and a part of her wished they weren’t.

She took a deep breath, before admitting, “Everything. I remember everything.”

Luz couldn’t tell if she was relieved or disturbed by the news. On one hand, she had avoided the surely awkward talk of informing Amity what she had said and done. On the other hand, no details could be omitted. There was, she supposed, a certain relief at having everything out in the open. That didn’t mean that they wouldn’t need to talk about what happened.

“Define ‘everything’.” She said it more like a question than a request.

“Well, I remember eating that gum, then having a harder and harder time not” -she blushed looking away from Luz- “complimenting you. I lost control over my actions around the time we started studying.”