Page 65 of The Little Board Game Café

‘I do my best.’

So far, Emily was managing to be a pretty good house-guest, (almost) living up to Kate’s high standards of neatness: the midnight-blue cushions in neat lines on the two pale-grey sofas; not a single dirty coffee cup on a small oak coffee table; nor a book out of place on the bookshelves, all aspirational titles arranged – by Kate – according to colour. Emily knew for a fact that Kate kept her self-help, find-a-man books under her bed out of sight of any guests.

She went into the kitchen, poured them both a glass of Pinot Grigio and popped the pierogi into the frying pan.

When she returned to the lounge, Ludek was sitting on the sofa. She handed him the wine and he patted the seat beside him, indicating for her to sit down. Emily hesitated. She really ought to go back to the cooking, but the pull to be close to him was so strong. She sat down. Close but not too close. Close enough that her heart started to pound but not so close that their thighs were touching. She could imagine Kate saying, ‘Don’t look too keen. Be encouraging. Not desperate.’

‘Cheers,’ said Ludek, and chinked his glass against hers, just a little too eagerly.

A little wine slopped onto the pale-grey velvet.

‘I’m so sorry,’ he said.

‘My fault,’ she said, jumping up. ‘I filled them too full.’

She found a tissue and began to dab at the fabric. ‘I don’t think it’ll show,’ she said. ‘No harm done.’

She was about to go back to check on the cooking when Ludek said, ‘I’m sorry about not replying to your texts. I just…well, to be honest, I felt a bit awkward. Intruding on you and…and then making you that game. I felt silly.’

‘The game is brilliant. I love it. We should play it. And you shouldn’t feel awkward…’

She was about to say that he hadn’t been intruding, that Peter had just been helping with her business, when he said, ‘Is something burning?’

Emily hared back into the kitchen to find one side of the pierogi was completely black. The pan was black as well. Probably ruined. She never had got round to putting the batteries back in the smoke alarm.

She scraped the charred remains of the pierogi into the bin. She was a terrible house-mate – wine on the sofa and now a ruined pan. She filled the burnt pan with water, leaving it to soak on the off-chance she could rescue it; if not, she’d buy Kate another. Not that Kate ever cooked. She probably wouldn’t miss it.

The plan to win Ludek’s heart by cooking like his mother clearly wasn’t going to work, but she could still rescue the evening and ask him about borrowing his board games.

‘I think we might need to order a curry,’ she said, going back into the lounge.

She opened some windows, to get rid of the smoke from the kitchen whilst Ludek phoned the order through to the Bengal Spice in Hebbleswick.

‘It’ll be twenty minutes.’ Ludek tucked his phone back into his jeans pocket.

‘Shall we play Masala! whilst we wait?’ Emily said.

‘Yeah, why not?’

As they made up the different curry recipes in the game, she marvelled once again at how much care and attention he’d lavished on the home-made ingredient cards; the hours it must have taken to find each picture online, print and laminate them and trim them all to the exact same size. He’d even rounded each one so there were no sharp corners.

They’d just finished the game when the doorbell rang. Emily sprang to her feet. ‘That’ll be the curry.’

When she went back into the lounge, the brown paper bag in her hand, Ludek was packing the game away, organising all the cards into separate piles and slipping each one into a small plastic bag as carefully as he would a shop-bought game.

‘Thank you for making the game for me,’ she said. ‘It’s really beautiful.’

‘I enjoyed doing it. I used to make a lot of games when I was a kid.’

She recalled what he’d said, about how his family hadn’t had much money, and suddenly she knew that she couldn’t ask to borrow his games. Not for the launch party where there’d be food and drinks and people they didn’t know. Something might get damaged.

Both her missions had failed; she hadn’t won his heart with her Polish cuisine and she still had no board games for the launch.

*

Next morning, Emily was surprised to find Kate in the kitchen. She’d spent the night at Freddie’s yet again, but had come home before work in search of a keto breakfast – yet more eggs - and clean clothes. The washing machine was already churning away.

‘Hey, Kate. How’s things? How’s it going with Freddie?’