A/N: If I owned any of Meg Cabot's work, I wouldn't be posting this here, would I?... So, this is just a little idea I came up with today. It's set during the first winter of Suze's stay in Carmel, aka mandarin season in Central California. Jesse is, whether fortunately or unfortunately, still a ghost (unfortunately for me at least, because I can't see him to snatch him away for myself). If it totally sucks, don't hesitate to tell me.
Oranges (for lack of a better title)
I will never eat another mandarin orange again, I thought to myself as I peeled yet another miniature citrus.
Now that it was mandarin season, Andy had taken it upon himself to fly down to Palermo, California (wherever that is), which is supposedly this prime mandarin-growing spot, where he proceeded to buy ten five-pound boxes of barely ripe mandarins to experiment with. Which meant, of course, that I was the lucky bastard to peel them – every last one.
My cuticles were ruined.
Oh sure, Sleepy or Dopey might come in to the kitchen every so often to peel a few – which they promptly shoved into the bottomless pits that are their stomachs. Not very helpful, you see.
And what's more, I haven't seen Jesse in four days. I know he thinks things are getting "a bit out of hand", as he puts it, between us, and feels like he's doing "the right thing" – rolls eyes - by staying at the rectory, but you'd think he would at least say hello once in a while. I mean, what if I, like, fell down the stairs or something when I was the only one home? I could crack my head open! It could happen.
My musings were interrupted by a sharp sting in my eye. I looked down at my hands in confusion, only to see a drop of orangey fluid well up out of a small hole in the latest mandarin's skin before dribbling onto my fingers. Realization hit me. Shit.
I dropped that spawn-of-Satan orange back in the box like it was on fire as my eye started watering. I ran to the sink, where my mom keeps a bottle of saline handy, and was unsuccessfully trying to juggle a towel under my eye and the saline when a pair of cool, faintly glowing hands gently tugged both the towel and the saline bottle out of my grasp.
"Here," a deep, velvet-smooth voice said quietly from behind me. "Let me help you with that."
A/N: Okay, so it's not much. But really, can you blame me? I didn't want to write an entire novel or something only to have a bunch of people tell me it sucked. So please, before I continue, let me know if I even should! I would appreciate it like crazy!
