Begin Again | ongoing - Chapter 8: Chapter 8

"The fourth? Isn't that a Thursday?" Sylvia asks as she whisks eggs into oblivion for Sunday brunch.
"The fourth of June. It's a Sunday. I know it's still six weeks away but that gives us plenty of time to think of an excuse not to go," Martha says.
"I think the fact that it's only six weeks away is excuse enough," her wife says with a huff. From what Sunny can gather, they've been invited to the wedding of one of Martha's colleagues, someone neither of her parents much likes. "That screams last minute addition to me. Probably had a few cousins RSVP as no and they're trying to fill up the tables. Tell her, I don't know, your psychic warned you about a wedding so you don't want to risk it."
Sylvia snorts. Sunny pulls over the paper and flips through to the horoscope section, running her finger down the page until she lands on Libra. "Here you go – your horoscope says you need to pull away from the noise and focus on yourself and your own emotional state at the moment. I think that's code for stay away from the weddings of people you don't like."
"Shall I cut that out and stick it to my RSVP?" Martha laughs as she peers at the horoscope and then taps Aquarius. "Hey, Sylv, apparently you need to tidy the house today."
"Ha. Fuck off," she says, whisking a little too hard. Egg splashes the countertop. "What does it actually say?"
"You should focus on cultivating your family relationships and pay attention to the environment you surround yourself with."
"Sounds more like a family tidying sesh to me." She pours the egg into a pan of hot butter and stirs, scrambling the mixture. "What does yours say, Sunny? Anything about clearing the air with your girlfriend?"
Joking she may be, but Sunny gets a hot, prickly feeling in her chest when she moves her finger to Gemini and reads what it says out loud. "There are conversations to be had. Examine the events of the last week and know that relief will come in the form of openness and creativity."
It hits a bit too close to home.
"Well." Sylvia looks over. "You know I think this stuff is utter bollocks, but ... that sounds accurate for you, sweetie."
"Yeah." Sunny grimaces. For two days, she has hung out with her parents and avoided everything else. It's hard to care about things like work when she still feels so disconnected from this life – a dangerous feeling to have, considering she's pretty sure she's stuck here. Sooner or later she's going to have to take it seriously. But not now. Not yet.
At this rate, she's not sure she'll have a job or a girlfriend when she goes back to Black Sands. That would almost be a relief.
But it would defeat the object of being here. This is, according to that fucking well, what she wished for. What would be the point of all this if she doesn't even talk to the girlfriend fate has gifted her with?
"How about this: today we will enjoy the weather and focus on pleasure, and this evening, I'll drive you back to your flat and you face the music," Martha offers, her hands flat on the table. "Sound like a plan?"
As much as Sunny doesn't want to go home, she knows she has to. People are probably starting to wonder where she is. After dropping her bombshells on her friends two days ago, she has been totally incommunicado. Selfish, she knows. She is absolutely putting herself first at the moment, but as her parents have made her well aware, that will do her no favours in the grand scheme of things. If she wants to rescue what she has with Vivian – which, according to everyone else in her life, is well worth saving – then she has to make the effort.
"Okay," she says at last.
"Good." Martha taps her fingers on the table. "Any chance you want to do my nails? Sixty-three years in this wretched body and I still can't paint them without looking like a four-year-old did it in the dark."
"You can slice cancer out of a brain but you can't paint your nails?" Sunny asks with a laugh, which fades the moment the words are out and her joke reminds her that her own brain may well be playing tricks on her. The stomach curdling is back.
"Ooh, are we having a girly day?" Sylvia perks up. After decades of suits and shirts and dull colours and being stuffed into a box that didn't fit, she's by far the girliest of the three of them, in the most stereotypical sense – she loves make-up and pretty dresses and putting effort into her long hair. With the eggs safely scrambling themselves for a moment, she holds out her hands. Her nails are short and unpainted, her fingers long and elegant and perfect for playing the piano in the sitting room. "I'll jump in on that action. I could do with a bit of pampering."
Despite years of shunning anything that screams femininity too loud, Sunny looks down at her bitten nails and ragged cuticles and she agrees. Maybe it wouldn't be so bad for her hands to look nice. She does have a girlfriend now, after all. It might be a good idea to tidy up her fingers.
All three of them snap their heads up when, at half past three in the afternoon, they hear the unmistakeable sound of tyres on the gravelled drive. It's Sunday, too late in the week for deliveries, and none of them are expecting anybody.
"Maybe they're lost," Martha says, resting her head back on her wife's lap.
They've been outside all day, lounging in the garden with a week's worth of puzzle pages from various newspapers, a few bottles of nail polish, and DIY face masks made out of banana and honey (Sunny has eaten more of it than has stayed on her face). The weather has held up, despite April being an unpredictable month. The showers have stayed away and the clouds have stayed thin and wispy enough to let the sun through, and Martha and Sunny have shushed Sylvia every time she has cynically said that an unexpectedly warm April is not a good thing.
Maybe, Sunny thinks, they're here for me. Perhaps there's a secret society of timelords keeping track of people who turn up where they're not supposed to be, and she has broken the cardinal rule. As ridiculous as that thought is, she kind of hopes she's right.
The car doesn't turn around. It comes to a stop and the engine quiets, and there's the slam of a door and the sound of shoes on gravel, and none of them move in time before the footsteps come around the side of the house. Sunny isn't looking. She's staring at her freshly painted nails – Martha did them for her, all the colours of a sunset to match the lesbian flag – and she yelps when someone nudges an elbow into her side.
"I think it's for you," Sylvia whispers. Sunny looks up, and her heart drops to her feet when she sees a halo of sunlight pouring through bright pink curls.
Vivian. She's here. The real world has collided with the haven Sunny has made out of the last couple of days and she breaks out in a cold sweat because this is how it falls apart. This is how her parents and her girlfriend find out that she's an intergalactic criminal, that she has broken the rules of space and time and whatever Sunny they've known for the past year is most definitely not the one sitting in front of them now.
"Sunny! Oh my god. Thank fuck you're here!" Vivian cries out.
Martha pats Sunny's knee and says, "I think we'll leave you two to it." She stands and helps her wife to her feet and after a quick hello to Vivian – complete with hugs – they head inside. Sunny and Vivian are alone. Sunny gets to her feet, trying to rub grass stains off her bare knees and the seat of her shorts.
"Hi, Vivian," she says, the name a foreign object in her mouth.
Vivian recoils. Fuck. How has she fucked up already? Aside from the whole abandoning everything and holing up in her parents' house thing, of course. Two words and she's managed to upset her girlfriend.
"Shit. Vivian? What'd I do to deserve the full name treatment?" Her walk slows; her frown deepens.
Shit. Does she have some cutesy nickname they use? Everyone she's talked to since waking up in this year has called her Vivian. Except ... she searches her brain and Delilah's voice comes to mind. Delilah called her Viv. Is it as simple as that?
"Sorry, Viv," she tries, and it brings out a smile. Bullseye. But it's a guarded smile, one laced together with concern and apprehension. Rightly so. Sunny doesn't know how things are going to play out. She hasn't even decided if she's going to go with the truth. "How'd you know I was here?"
They're standing a few feet apart. Vivian's hugging herself, hands around her elbows and her feet together. It makes her look small, though she must be close to six feet tall. That tracks. Sunny's always had a soft spot for girls who are taller than her.
"You didn't come back on Friday so I figured maybe you wanted a night to yourself, but then you weren't around on Saturday and when I went to Percolatte, Mack said you never turned up for your shift so I went asking around. Fenfen had no clue and Ravi was acting kind of odd but he said he didn't know where you were." Vivian – no, Viv, Sunny reminds herself – runs a hand through her curls until one snags on her rings and she pulls her hand away. "I was starting to shit myself when you still weren't around on Saturday and you missed your shift."
So she was supposed to be at work. She'd figured, seeing as she's had the same shift pattern since she was twenty-one, but she found comfort in not knowing for sure. Like it gave her an excuse not to be there.
"I finally got hold of Delilah on my break today and I don't think she was going to tell me anything until I told her you'd dropped off the face of the fucking earth and I was scared you were dead in a ditch somewhere." Her eyes are wide and fearful and fuck, she was really scared.
It all comes crashing down on Sunny in that moment. The reality. The consequences of her actions. Her girlfriend is not theoretical. She's a real person whom Sunny has ditched and disregarded for the last fifty-six hours. Guilt rips a hole in her stomach and she wishes she could crawl into it, fold in on herself.
"She told me that you spoke on Friday and that you were going to come here, so I told my manager I needed to leave early and I came straight here." Her worry is slowly morphing into irritation. "You had me so fucking scared, Sunny, and you're just here? Doing what, chilling with your parents? You didn't think to tell me you were taking off?"
"I'm sorry. It's been ... it's been a really weird couple of days," she says, barely even stroking the surface, let alone scraping underneath.
Viv scoffs. "You're telling me. I was starting to think we'd had some massive fight I couldn't remember. Especially the way Ravi and Delilah were being so shifty. Can you just tell me what the fuck is going on? This isn't like you, Sunny. Since when do you skip work without letting Mack know? Since when do you run away?"
Since I woke up in the wrong year and don't know how to process it, Sunny thinks. She'll have to work her way up to that. First she needs to calm Viv down, and she's sure there's some tried and tested method, but she can't remember it. It would really help if she could've at least retained the memories of the Sunny whose life she's taken over. Then this wouldn't be a problem. There'd be no mess to deal with.
"Just tell me if this is your shitty way of breaking up with me," Viv says.
"No! It's hard to explain, I don't know what to say, Viv. I..." She trails off, trying to find a way out of this, but the only avenue she can see is the bastard fucking truth. "We need to talk."
Viv seems to crumble. Her face falls and her shoulders droop and her dark eyes glisten. "That's what I'm trying to do," she says, "because I don't understand. Everything was fine on Thursday. What's happened since then?"
It's the worst possible time to laugh but Sunny can't help it because what hasn't happened?
"This isn't fucking funny, Sunny."
"No, no, I know it's not. It's the opposite of funny. I've had the worst fucking time since I woke up on Friday and I'm trying to figure out how to tell you without you, like, trying to have me sectioned or something."
Viv's face changes entirely. This time her expression is one hundred percent what the fuck.
Sunny looks at the house. Her parents are nowhere to be seen but she doesn't want to risk them overhearing because there are only so many people she can talk to at once, so she nods towards the gate in the hedge at the end of this section of the garden. The garden is Martha's pride and joy, filled with tall hedges and climbing flowers and brick walls and wooden fences that separate it into countless sections. There's always somewhere to go for privacy.