Andre raised an eyebrow. "You want to smoke?"
"I don't want to smoke," Liam said, tossing the bag onto the coffee table. "Smoking is terrible for the vocal cords. I want to eat it."
Talia leaned forward, picking up the bag and examining the small, pungent green buds. "We could bake it into something." She looked up at Andre, her dark eyes bright with sudden inspiration. "Scones."
"Scones?" Andre repeated, amused.
"Yes! But not with blueberries this time. Let's top them with vanilla icing. Liam, look up how to make vanilla icing on your phone."
Andre hesitated. He hadn't touched any kind of drug since a brief, ill-advised experiment with hashish at a party in Paris when he was seventeen. The strict, regimented life of a professional athlete had precluded any such indulgences. But he wasn't an athlete anymore. He was a painter. He was sitting on the floor of a flat in Waterloo with his friends, and Blake was ten thousand miles away.
"Why not?" Andre said, setting his wine glass down. The wine was already making him feel warm and loose, the sharp edges of his anxiety about the Paris commission softening. "Let us bake."
The kitchen was even smaller than the living room, the counter space barely large enough to accommodate a cutting board. They worked in a chaotic, laughing tandem.
Liam ground the cannabis, complaining loudly about the smell, and then turned to making the vanilla icing recipe he had found. Meanwhile, Talia measured flour and sugar, and Andre took charge of the butter, demonstrating the precise, delicate technique required to create the perfect flaky texture.
"Remember what Talia taught us," Andre said, his hands coated in flour as he worked the butter into the dry ingredients. "Gentle. If you overwork the dough, the gluten develops too much, and the scones become tough. It is about respect for the ingredients."
"Listen to him," Liam teased, leaning against the refrigerator. "The Picasso of pastry."
They folded the finely ground cannabis into the dough and then shaped it into perfect scones before placing them in the oven. The flat quickly filled with the warm, comforting smell of baking bread, underscored by a sharp, unmistakable herbal scent.
When the scones were done and slightly cooled, Liam slathered them with his vanilla icing. And then they waited for the icing to set. As soon as the icing crusted over, they began to eat the scones.
"Even with the icing, they taste… earthy," Talia observed, chewing thoughtfully.
"They taste like sugar-covered dirt," Liam corrected, taking another bite. "But the texture is magnificent, Andre. Your father would be proud."
They waited. Ten minutes passed. Then twenty.
"I don't feel anything," Liam announced, lying flat on his back on the rug, staring at the ceiling. "Theo is a liar. Puck cannot be trusted."
"Maybe we didn't eat enough," Talia suggested. She reached for the plate and took another scone, breaking it in half and offering a piece to Andre.
Andre took it. He didn't feel anything either, just the pleasant, heavy warmth of the wine and the comfortable fullness of the food. He ate the second half of the scone, washing it down with the last of his wine.
Another twenty minutes passed.
And then, slowly, the world shifted.
It didn't happen all at once. It started as a slow, creeping heaviness in Andre's limbs, a feeling that gravity had suddenly doubled its pull. The colors in the room — the faded red of the sofa, the bright yellow of a poster on the wall — seemed to vibrate with an intense, unnatural saturation.
He looked at Liam, who was still lying on the floor, but Liam seemed very far away, as if viewed through the wrong end of a telescope.
"Oh," Talia said softly.
Andre turned his head. The movement felt incredibly slow, as if he were moving underwater. Talia was sitting next to him on the sofa. Her dark hair was falling across her face, and her eyes were wide, the pupils dilated.
"Are you…" Andre started to speak, but his voice sounded strange to his own ears, thick and resonant.
"I feel like I'm floating," Talia whispered.
Liam let out a sudden, loud bark of laughter from the floor. "Puck," he gasped, dissolving into a fit of giggles. "Puck speaks the truth after all."
Andre tried to laugh, but the sound caught in his throat. The heaviness in his limbs was being replaced by a strange, buzzing energy, a tingling sensation that started at the base of his spine and radiated outward. The room felt too warm. The air felt thick, heavy with the smell of the cannabis and the lingering scent of the baking.
He looked at Talia again.
