Page 6 of Ex Somnis

Natasha Bedingfield’s “Unwritten” is playing from somewhere, but there’s no speaker I can identify and no radio I can see. The music is in the walls, in the flour dust illuminated by the light through the window, hanging there a second too long before it settles, and in the way Tessa’s hip connects with mine on the downbeat.

I sing along, unable to resist any longer.

“You’re flat,” Tessa says without looking up from the frosting she’s making, even though I told her we’re baking muffins and not cupcakes.

“I am not flat.”

“Lenny.” She finally glances over, so fondly it almost hurts. She’s wearing the apron with the dancing lemons she stole from me second semester and never gave back. Her dark hair is up in a scrunchie that has absolutely no business being that cute. “I love you with every single fiber of my soul, but you are flat as a parking lot.” She bumps her hip into mine again, almost making me stumble sideways into the counter. The mixing bowl still rattles, and batter splashes onto my wrist.

I lick it off before I can think about it. So good.

“You can say a lot of things about me…” I lift an eyebrow and point directly at my chest, “… but flat is not one of them.”

Tessa laughs. “That’s not what I meant, Dolly. Your singing voice is flat.”

“How dare you. I’m harmonizing.”

“With what? The refrigerator?”

I flick a pinch of flour at her. She laughs before it even hits her, then shrieks when it does. The sound is so bright, so entirely Tessa, that the joy of it spears right through my chest.

“Girls,” Mom warns from where she stands beside the stove, though a smile tugs at the corner of her mouth. “Watch what you’re doing instead of bickering.” She reaches over and takes the bottle from Tessa’s hand. “You were about to put cardamom in that.”

Tessa frowns. “Why can’t I put cardamom in the cupcakes?”

“Muffins,” I correct.

“Because you don’t put cardamom in lemon muffins,” Mom states like a law.

Tessa drops both elbows onto the counter. There’s flour on her left cheek, flour in her eyebrow, and somehow on the back of her neck as if she got into a fistfight with the bag, and the bag won. She tips up her chin.

“Alice Waters would.”

“Alice Waters would not,” I argue, maybe a fraction too fast, because the truth is I’ve thought about cardamom in lemon muffins before. Once. Briefly. I would never say that out loud, because it’s not my mom’s recipe.

“Alice Waters would at least consider it.”

Tessa is not wrong.

My mom chuckles and tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. I turn my head, and she’s right there, close enough that I catch the smell of her moisturizer and the laundry detergent she refuses to switch from. When they stopped making it, she had to order it in bulk from a weird website.

She smiles at me, and normally, her face does the thing where her eyes go first, crinkling at the corners, and her mouth follows a half beat behind, like the smile needs a running start. This time, her mouth moves first, then her eyes catch up.

I lean into her palm anyway. Her hand is warm, dry, and exactly the right size against my cheek. She pats me twice, hums under her breath, then moves past me to check the oven.

“Come on, Lenny.” Tessa grabs my hand and spins me, and I catch a glimpse of my fingers as they blur past—five, exactly right, no breadsticks—the floor solid under my feet and the frosting sticky on my wrist. Everything is too real, somehow wrong real, but I don’t care.

I don’t care at all.

I’m singing, and I am flat. The sun is coming through the yellow curtains, and none of it matters.

At the kitchen table, my father sits with his legs crossed at the ankle. He’s talking to the man beside him, a man with dark hair and green eyes.

I know that man.

He’s leaning back in his chair like he’s been sitting at my father’s table for years.

Is that why he feels familiar?