Lack of electricity made it a challenge, but I was determined to try and excited to discover if baking a cake on top of a wood-burning stove was even possible. If nothing else, it would make an amusing anecdote for the Rainbows and Cupcakes blog.
For the next thirty minutes I allowed myself to get lost in something that felt as familiar and natural to me as breathing. Baking calmed me, soothed me, in much the same way as I suspected working with wood did for Josh. That was something we still had in common, and something which perhaps Adam hadn’t initially understood ...
‘Lily?’ Adam said, wiping his eyes blearily as though he couldn’t quite believe what they were seeing.
I looked up from the large earthenware mixing bowl, momentarily lost behind a cloud of icing sugar. I took a moment to appreciate theflat planes of his taut stomach and how the boxers he slept in left very little to the imagination.
‘Sorry. Did I wake you? I was trying to be quiet. I didn’t use the mixer.’
Adam had the look of someone who was still more asleep than awake as he shook his head, as though he wasn’t quite sure whether this was a dream.
‘Lily, it’s’ – he glanced down at the watch he wore, even when sleeping – ‘it’s three o’clock in the morning. Why are you baking a cake?’
I bit my lip guiltily, tasting the sweetness of the airborne sugar particles.
‘I couldn’t sleep,’ I said, as though that explained my peculiar middle-of-the-night activity.
Adam padded barefoot to the worktop and pulled out one of my breakfast bar stools.
‘You couldn’t have tried counting sheep?’ he asked, taking a seat.
I shook my head regretfully. ‘That never works for me.’
Adam was staring at me, with a look halfway between bemusement and bewilderment. I’d been here before with previous boyfriends, and to be honest it had never gone well. It was, admittedly, a very peculiar habit. ‘Whisking up a Genoise sponge isn’t quite as sexy as getting down and dirty with a potter’s wheel in the middle of the night,’ my friend Andie had observed, when yet another guy had referred to my nocturnal baking as ‘downright crazy’. It had become a kind of relationship litmus test, I suppose. And so far, every person I’d dated had failed it.
Adam leant forward and scooped up a blob of dropped mixture with his finger. He lifted it to his mouth, and all at once my attention was a million miles away from the ingredients in the bowl. I watched, fixated, as the finger travelled past his lips and he took the raw cake mix into his mouth. I swallowed noisily and felt something stir down low between my legs.
‘So,’ Adam said, his eyes locked on mine in the half-darkened room where I’d been working by the light of the under-cupboard lamps. It made the small kitchen in my flat feel curiously intimate. ‘Does this happen often?’
I gave a small, almost helpless shrug. ‘Now and again,’ I admitted, before shaking my head. ‘No. Maybe more than that. Once a month or so?’ I felt small and vulnerable, almost naked, despite the silky camisole and shorts I’d pulled on when I’d slipped out of his arms and the bed we’d been sharing. ‘It’s usually when I’m overthinking stuff or worrying about something.’
Adam’s eyes clouded. ‘And are you worried about something right now?’
The middle of the night is made for honesty and the sharing of secrets.
‘Is it us? Is it me?’ he asked, and there was no trace of sleepiness in his eyes anymore.
I leant across the worktop between us, touching his cheek gently with flour-covered fingers. ‘No. It’s definitely not us. I’m really happy with where we are right now ... with where we’re going. I know it’s only been a few months, but it feels ... it feels ...’ The small hours of the morning aren’t the best ones when you’re trying to express something that important, and I had a horrible feeling I was going to say it all wrong. ‘It feels right,’ I finished lamely.
Adam’s smile lit up everything around me – the kitchen, the worktop, my heart. Everything.
‘It does, doesn’t it?’
We shared a smile that I took a mental photograph of, because it was one I knew I wanted to keep forever.
‘So, what is bothering you?’
I blew out my cheeks in a long sigh. ‘Work. Bank loans. Juggling finances. Letting people down. Disappointing customers. Disappointing anyone.’
‘Well, there’s one person you don’t ever have to worry about disappointing ...’ Adam reached for the bowl, dipping his finger into the mixture, but this time lifting it to my lips. ‘Me,’ he completed, his voice as low as a purr as he slid his forefinger into my mouth. My knees almost buckled. Baking was a lot of things to me, but erotic wasn’t usually one of them.
‘And for what it’s worth,’ Adam continued, ‘I don’t think any of your customers could ever be disappointed in you. You put so much of “you” into your work. It shows, Lily. It really does.’
His words felt like walking into sunlight after being in the shadows.
‘It’s why making cakes – especially these types of cakes – has always been my dream,’ I confessed, wanting him to know me, really know me. ‘People are celebrating something important in their lives, whether it’s a wedding, an anniversary, a birthday ... or the birth of a baby. And I get to be part of that. And I love that about my job, I really do.’
‘And I love you.’
