All in the Stars
"Oh, come on you miseries. It'll pass the time of day." It was a playful tone and one which broke the Sunday teatime silence quite suddenly. George practically leapt out of his seat, and Mitchell glanced over warily.
"Annie, no. It's a load of old tosh. I'd rather you read out the sports pages or something."
"Awww, c'mon." She gave him the cow eyes. Anything but the cow eyes. For God's sake, he was only a man. Vampire. Male vampire. He met George's eye and both of them shrugged in defeat. May as well indulge her. She was unbearable when she got like this. The three had only been house sharing for a month and they were still finding their feet, as it were. Annie was effusively friendly, George was almost terminally shy and Mitchell sat in the middle absorbing both moods perfectly: a natural conduit. He grinned at Annie and relented.
"Go on then." She clapped her hands like a little girl.
"So. Who's first?" She flattened the Sunday magazine out on the table and looked from Mitchell to George and back again. "I know, Mitchell. Sagittarius, right?"
"You know that by now."
"Ssh. Let's see. Sagittarius, Sagittarius...here we go. 'Being disappointed by the reaction of people around you, you will act cleverly against them, even if this is against your character. In love, you will dream of creating a place of your own to share with your partner."
"Riiiight," said Mitchell. "Fantastic, thanks for that. So what you're saying basically is that in most situations, I act stupidly? And as for the love thing...well." He shrugged his shoulders eloquently. "The thought of setting up a place of my own to share with anybody? I've gone right off that since having to live with you two."
"S'funny," Annie observed, not listening. "They give 'love' a capital 'L'. Why do they do that, do you suppose?"
Nobody knew.
"George. Pisces. Ahem." Annie cleared her throat importantly and put on a serious expression. "Not so good for you, I'm afraid. The Stars will not favour you so you'd better put off important decisions. At work, if you want to avoid finding yourself in a difficult situation, don't be resentful. In love, don't forget the capital 'l', avoid taking important decisions, as you may not be able to carry them through."
"The key point there being the avoiding of important decisions?" George frowned, despite his apparent disinterest. "They said so. Twice." He took a sip of his tea and grimaced due to the fact it was now cold. "It's not the stars not favouring me I'm worried about," he added, grouchily. "It's the moon. And honestly, Annie, who believes all this rubbish anyway?"
"It's just a bit of fun. Let me find mine. Here we go: Capricorn. You will have excellent opportunities to conclude a good business deal, so investments and real estate purchases are well advised. In love, an inconvenience will make your partner nervous. Tip: call your partner frequently." She furrowed her brow. "Isn't that a sort of contradicting itself? Maybe it means that if I call my partner frequently, it'll inconvenience him and make him nervous?"
"Do you have any immediate plans to call him?"
"Owen?" The by-now familiar faintly wistful expression came over Annie's face whenever her fiancé came into the conversation. Mitchell hated the expression. He'd hated Owen the first time he'd met him, sensing on an intrinsic level that the man was ... well, a wanker, quite frankly. And Mitchell had known some first class wankers in his time. "No, no immediate plans to call him."
"Well, you won't be inconveniencing him then, will you?" George chipped in. Annie stuck her tongue out at him when he wasn't looking. There was a definite friction between the ghost and the werewolf. Mitchell suspected it had more than a little to do with the fact that George hadn't been expecting a ghost to make up their supernatural little group when they'd moved in. As always, he poured soothing balm on the troubled waters.
"Honestly, you two. It's like house-sharing with a pair of nine year olds sometimes." Mitchell smirked. He loved this sort of banter. It was comforting and familiar and was helping them get to know one another better. Annie was scrutinising the pages of the magazine intently.
"There's one of these 'what sort of personality type are you' tests here," she observed. "Either of you want..."
"No," they chorused.
"You're no fun."
A companionable silence fell during which Mitchell put his feet up on the coffee table only to have Annie swat them down again and during which George wandered into the kitchen to put the kettle on. The sink, as usual, was full of cups. Annie's tea obsession was beyond the point of ridiculous now.
"Ooh," she exclaimed from the sitting room. "There's a recipe here for sticky toffee pudding." She looked up at Mitchell, wistfully. "I love sticky toffee pudding," she said, more than a hint of resentment in her voice. "Just think, I'll never get to eat it again. Not ever. Oh, God, it's more than I can bear to think about."
Women were weird creatures. Mitchell had always thought so. Of all the things in life that Annie would miss, she picked a dessert. Not walks on the beach with the sea spray in her face, or kicking up the fallen leaves in the woods in the autumn. Not winter days sitting with a mug of hot chocolate and watching marshmallows become a goopy mess on the fire on Bonfire Night. Not anything you'd think someone who was bound to the mortal world for an unknown length of time would otherwise pine for.
No.
Sticky toffee pudding.
What, Mitchell thought, a weirdo.
The rest of Sunday evening passed uneventfully. Annie's hopeful suggestion that they sit around the table and play Monopoly was met with frosty stares that could have frozen a side of meat for a month and George's brief (but mildly entertaining) rant about the lack of tea cups broke up what would otherwise have been a peaceful night.
And then, later, after George had gone to go to sleep and Mitchell had retired to his room to do whatever it was that vampires did when they weren't watching 'Top Gear', Annie lay on her sofa, gazing at the sticky toffee pudding recipe longingly, a warm glow suffusing her very being. She iliked/i her new house mates. They were the most normal people she'd ever met.
Which didn't say much for the people she'd known in her brief life, of course.
She read her stars again and wondered. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe tomorrow she would try calling Owen, or even text him. Get him to come round.
"Fancy not believing in it all," she said, dismissively, her mind made up. It had to be the right thing to do.
Her stars said so.
(c) S. Cawkwell, 2009