“Okay, you’ll come to mine for dinner?”
“And revision.”
“Yeah, yeah, we’ll do some of that, too.” But not too much.
8
FLYNN
We retrieve my car and drive to Jimmy’s. I sit at his breakfast bar, quizzing him on his flashcards while he cooks. I’m impressed; he can cook cheese sauce from scratch, although I’ll withhold full judgment until I’ve tasted it. The sizzling bacon smells good, though.
I learnt to cook when I was living at Jimmy and Billy’s. It was one of the ways I could help out and say thank you to their parents for letting me stay so often. Once I turned sixteen and Billy and I were a couple, I moved in. It was my home for five years, sort of seven. I miss it. I miss their parents. Mr and Mrs Reynolds were kind and welcomed me as part of the family. I wished that they’d been my parents instead of the ones I’d been born to. Even after Billy and I split up, and I moved out, Mrs Reynolds would drop by Grandma’s to check on me.
“This is helping, thanks,” he says.
“The flashcards?”
“Yeah, but I meant your system. I think I’m recalling more than I was this morning.”
“You are, yes. See? You know this stuff.”
“Yeah, I just had to pull it out of my grey matter.”
I laugh. “Exactly. You’ll do well in your exam.”
He crosses his fingers. “I need to have done well in the others, too. Although, to be fair, I don’t need a degree to work in a gym.”
“Maybe, maybe not. But what you’ve learnt will be invaluable. Besides, you had fun, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, lots of fun. It’s been a great three years.”
“And your gap year, before that?”
“Oh, yeah, that was amazing.”
“Tell me about it?”
He serves up the mac and cheese with bacon and sits beside me. The breakfast bar isn’t very long, and his muscles make him pretty wide, so we end up brushing upper arms. My pulse picks up. I focus on my food, rather than on how nice the light touch is.
“I travelled as cheaply as I could—coaches, hitching rides, and staying in hostels, or on campsites—and carried as little as possible. I did odd jobs here and there. I even did some farm work.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, nothing major. Just fruit picking in the autumn. But a couple of weeks of that helped my finances. Are you going to eat? I promise my cooking won’t give you food poisoning.”
“Uh, sorry.” I’d been captivated by his tale. I try the mac and cheese. “It’s good!”
“No need to sound so shocked.”
My cheeks flood with heat. I dip my chin. “Sorry.”
“No worries. If you can only cook one meal, learn to cook it well, right?”
I chuckle. “Right.”
“Maybe you could double my repertoire.”
“Me?”
