Like Bees to Honey | gxg

25. Without a Responsible Adult

The thing Sabina wanted the most, other than to keep kissing Mel forever, was to tell Riley.

Her first kiss. Step four of her plan. She'd always imagined they would be there to share in these triumphs with her. She would have put up with their teasing, their I told you so's, to have them there in the van the next morning. Riley would have laughed at her puffy eyes, evidence of how much sleep she'd lost because she'd stayed with Mel on the cliff until the chill of night drove them home, and then longer in the car out of sight around the bend from the Verger's big white house. For the first time, she'd been glad that her parents didn't care about curfew.

Telling Riley might have helped it feel less like a dream. As she set up her display of candle kits in the smoky morning light, the whole memory seemed surreal. Sunset skinny dipping and moonlit kisses weren't things that Sabina did. She wasn't the kind of girl who jumped off cliffs or had summer flings.

Music drifted over the thin early crowds, as it had every morning since Mel had added the speakers to the Verger Orchards repertoire. After putting the finishing touch on her display by plugging in the twinkling string lights, Sabina took a sip of water that she wished was coffee and nodded along to the smooth beats. Then she began to make out some of the lyrics. She almost spat out the water as she stared down the row with wide eyes.

Those lyrics were highly inappropriate. Sabina gulped a lot of water and wondered if it might not be a good idea to murder that girl, after all. How was she supposed to sit here and sell honey and candles when the sweetness she wanted was waiting for her just a couple of stalls down?

A few minutes later, the music cut off. When it restarted, it was the twangy tones of one of Otis's country songs that saturated the air. Sabina didn't know whether to be relieved or disappointed. She turned to Riley to make a joke about the duelling playlists before she remembered that they weren't there. The sight of the single empty folding chair cooled her like a bucket of cold water over the head.

She sank moodily into that chair to watch Marie arranging rings on a velvet cushion across the way.

Distracted by her dumb hormonal brain, Sabina had forgotten that her feelings hadn't been the only casualty of her fight with Riley. Unfortunately, Mr. Chibana's sharp eyes picked it up the instant he saw her stall during his rounds that morning. He marched right up and peered over his clipboard at her.

"Riley home sick today?" He pointed his pen at the mini fridge, stocked full of perfectly chilled mead. "You can't be selling that without a person of legal age working the stall."

That was, of course, the whole reason she'd bullied Riley into waking up at 3 AM every morning in the first place. Sabina regretted not putting out a second chair, just for plausible deniability.

"They'll be back tomorrow," she said. Tomorrow was a problem for future Sabina. "But you can let it slide just this once, right? I'm responsible. You can trust me to check IDs."

He rubbed the back end of his pen through his mop of white hair, leaving a strip of it standing on end. "Rules are rules, Sabina. And I haven't forgotten that incident with the samples."

Mead was one of her top-selling products. It would be a blow to have to pack it away. Sabina looked around desperately for a solution. "Marie!" She held her hands out, pointing across the lane.

Hearing her name, Marie looked up. "Hm? What's that?"

"Marie is a responsible adult, and she'll be right there all day. She can vouch for me, can't she?"

Although she still looked confused, Marie always wanted to help. "Of course, I can vouch for you."

But Mr. Chibana shook his head. "Marie has her own stall to mind. You need an adult who can be with you at this stall at all times." He scribbled something on his clipboard. "I'll give you an hour to sort this out. When I come back, I expect that you will have found yourself a person of legal age, or you've put the mead away."