Three Cups Of Tea

iced

//unedited\\

02

The next day at forty-five minutes past eleven, Carter Jones was standing outside Lorenzo's Cafe, wondering where the hell Mila Stone is.

Of course, Carter has never been stood up before. With intense green eyes, perfectly styled brown hair and an incredible jawline, he's never had trouble with girls.

So after he spent half an hour in a cafe that subtly smelt of apples, checking the door to see if the girl who fell in a lake would walk in, he's feeling humilated and angry by the time he realises he's been stood up. He's done his fair share of standing girls up, but never, in the history of the world, has Carter ever been stood up, and God forbid he should be.

He walks home in the rain wishing he'd never met Mila Stone.

While Carter is pitying himself in his room, therapy consisting of Call Of Duty and two bags of salt and vinegar chips, Mila is hiding out in her room.

Which, for her, isn't something different at all, but the distinct feeling that Carter Jones is standing outside her house, ready to murder her family is unsettling to say the least. When the clock struck eleven, she felt like Cinderella.

Although there was no ball. There was a cafe date. That she didn't go to.

Basically, a very, very modern day Cinderella because her hair was a birds nest on her head and the next episode of The Simpsons was flicking onto her laptop screen.

She wasn't going to say that she felt bad for standing Carter up, because she didn't even like Lorenzo's Cafe, because it smelt like apples, and she didn't like apples. So to say that she was guilty was quite a stretch of words because Mila didn't often feel guilty, being the selfish and stubborn girl she was, but she did feel a twinge of pity for the boy she knew would of been sitting at an empty table when eleven o'clock came.

Last night, when she came home drenched, her shoes squeaking on the tiled floor (because she could not walk home barefoot) her mother freaked out. Mila being an only child was used to said freak out, but assuring her mother that she had not in fact drowned in a lake that made her only black shirt smell like tadpoles.

Mila's dad calmed his wife down, and Mila managed to sneak upstairs into her room, after showering off the days humiliating moment, to stare at a blank document for twenty minutes, then realising that she really wasn't going to need to write that history essay now did she? And the Ancient Egyptians could wait anyway, so she went to bed early, thinking of the boy who pulled her out of the river and asked awkward questions.

*

Carter woke up to the screeching that was his five year old sister, Stacy.

He rolled out of bed, and headed into the kitchen to see Stacy crying over a bowl of fruit loops and hitting her mother over the head with her fairy wand.

"Stace" Carter groaned and the little girls eyes lit up.

"Catty!" She exclaimed, using the nickname he was sure would follow him until he was on his death bed. She leaped into Carters open arms, and their mum wiped her eyes tiredly.

"Morning Mum" Carter said cheerily, kissing her on the head as Stacy crawled onto his back.

Carter's mum was a nurse at the local hospital, and the long shifts weren't the best part of the job, she told Carter one night. Carters dad had left his mum when she found out she was pregnant at sixteen. They'd never heard from him since, except for the monthly child support fees, signed by James Greene.

"Catty, can we play princesses!" Stacy cried and Carter rubbed the sleep out of his eyes.

"Yep, definitely" He said and Stacy shrugged off him, running into their small lounge room.

"How'd your date to yesterday?" Carter's mum asked, and suddenly the embarrassing ordeal came flooding back to him.

"Don't ask" He replied, following his sister into her 'princess castle', at the same time Mila manages to crawl out of the lair that was her bedroom.

"She awakes!" Her dad says as she steps into the kitchen, her mum scooping out a plate of bacon and eggs for her. "Would the sleeping beauty like some orange juice?"

"Dad, it's literally like ten o'clock, I know young children that can sleep in longer than that. And yes please" She says, her glass filling with juice.

"Is there pulp?" She asks, and her dad nods his head absently, looking back down at his phone. Mila dreamt about geese and soggy shoes, which together proved to be an odd combination, but it made her feel more guilty about ditching Carter yesterday. "Mum" Mila started, not knowing where this conversation was going to go.

"Hm?" Her mum hummed.

"In a hypothetical situation" Mila started, and immediately her mum knew, that if Mila started a sentence with 'in a hypothetical situation' she did not mean in a hypothetical situation. She turned off the hot plate and spun to look at Mila.

Oblivious of the wheels turning in her mums head, Mila continued. "If you were to stand up a boy, how would you be feeling? About standing up the boy?"

"Well, in this hypothetical situation, I'd be feeling guilty, and also a little bit disappointed in myself for not giving this guy a chance" Her mum told her, silently willing her to bring this boy home, and maybe a friend or two. Mila wasn't a very sociable person.

"I know that, but how do I apologise to him?" Mila asked, before realising what she'd said. "I mean, in a hypothetical situation"

"Follow your heart, I guess" Her mum told her and Mila rolled her eyes.

"I was looking for advice, not pretentious bullshit mother" She joked and her mum hit her with the spatula.

"Language!" She said as Mila chuckled, sipping her juice.