Sweetest Thing Read online

  Sweetest Thing

  By

  Natasha West

  Copyright © 2019 by Natasha West

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

  With enormous thanks to Brooke for making time to help a very grateful author.

  One

  Robyn Vincent sifted castor sugar with ground almonds and tried not to get annoyed about what was happening in the next room. It was fine. It was fine.

  As she whisked egg whites, she could feel her blood pressure beginning to lower. It was always this way. The rhythms of baking were her saviour. She couldn’t help what happened in any other part of her life. But this? Measuring, stirring, proofing, spreading, kneading, piping, she was in charge here. In the kitchen, she was queen.

  Laughter slipped through the wall, barking and loud. It spurred Robyn on, and she put her rage into beating the egg whites into submission, stiff, glossy peaks appearing. Once they had taken shape, she folded in her almond mixture gently.

  ‘No, no, you fuckin noob, get outta the way!’ her girlfriend Alex screamed from next door. Why did she have to be so horribly loud when she gamed? Actually, the real question was, why was she gaming in Robyn’s flat at all? She didn’t live there, or wasn’t meant to anyway. But piece by piece, her stuff began to show up at Robyn’s place. And then, inevitably, she’d turned up a few weeks ago with a desperate story about getting evicted, ‘Because, like, the landlord hates me,’ asking to stay for a bit until she found another place.

  Robyn strongly suspected that now her feet were under the table, Alex wasn’t really looking for a place of her own. Because Robyn baked, kept a nice home, and brought in good money from her job selling insurance and was generally everything someone like Alex - nomadic, periodically unemployed and a terrible cook – could want. Robyn knew that if she ever said any of that out loud, to a friend at work maybe, then that friend would be compelled to ask, ‘If you know that’s what she is, why are you putting up with it?’

  Why indeed.

  Robyn supposed she liked things about Alex. She was fun, she didn’t take herself too seriously. That had relaxed Robyn enormously when they’d first met, to be around someone like that. Relaxing didn’t come naturally to Robyn. She was naturally anxious, her body always on alert for a disaster that never arrived. Alex was the antidote to Robyn’s condition. At first. Then came the gradual yet endless arrival of red flags. Alex was a slob, uncouth, and she checked girls’ bums out right in front of Robyn.

  Still, Alex could be very sweet, Robyn tried to remember that as she added violet food colouring gel to the mix. She told Robyn she loved her all the time. Maybe this was just how it went, Robyn pondered as she spooned her mixture into a piping bag and began to squeeze it out onto her baking mat. Maybe you just had to take the rough with the smooth. Maybe this was just the reality of relationships. It was nice at first, and then they drove you up the fucking wall, but eventually, it all settled down. Just like her macaron mixture was doing now in nice, even circles. If love was like baking, then you had to see your recipe through to the end before you knew it had come out alright.

  Ten minutes later, the biscuits came out, and Robyn put them on the side to cool while she whipped up the filling. The door banged open, and Alex flew in. ‘Just need a boost,’ she said, flying to the fridge and grabbing an enormous energy drink. Robyn, gathering the ingredients for a buttercream, prayed Alex wouldn’t see the unfinished macarons on the counter, still cooling.

  ‘Ooh, making biccies?’ Alex said as she turned from the fridge, cracking open her caffeinated monster.

  ‘Yes, but they’re still-’

  ‘Ow! Fuck!’ Alex cried as she picked up a biscuit from the still very hot wire rack. She drew back her hand too quickly, knocking the entire tray off the counter. Every last biscuit landed on the floor, most of them broken.

  Alex ran to the sink and stuck her burnt finger under the tap. ‘Why didn’t you say it was hot?’

  ‘I tried,’ Robyn sighed, getting a tube of Savlon and plasters from the first aid kit under the sink. Once Alex was repaired, Robyn picked up the shattered results of half an hour’s work, putting it straight in the bin. Even the ones that could be saved.

  ‘You didn’t have to chuck ‘em. I’d have still eaten them,’ Alex complained. ‘Three-second rule.’

  ‘I don’t adhere to that rule. If I make something, I do it right, or there’s no point. I’ll make more,’ Robyn said, going back to the cupboard and getting out her ingredients again.

  ‘You know, you’re really good at baking,’ Alex said.

  Robyn felt this was as close as she was going to get to an apology for ruining her biscuits. ‘I’m alright,’ she replied.

  ‘I don’t know why you went into insurance. You should have been a baker.’

  ‘Baking is my hobby. If you do your hobby for a living, what are you supposed to do to relax?’

  Alex peered wistfully into the bin. ‘You could switch it. Sell insurance for fun,’ she joked.

  ‘Great plan,’ Robyn said, rinsing her mixing bowl and sifter and putting them on the rack to dry. She tossed Alex a sideways glance. ‘You seen any places lately?’ She knew the answer. She was really only asking so Alex knew she wasn’t just taking this whole thing lying down, the sneaky move-in.

  ‘I’ve been on Right Move all day. There’s bugger all out there. Unless I want to pay a grand to live in a fishbowl,’ Alex lied effortlessly.

  Robyn wondered if she should call Alex out. Because she’d been on Right Move today too. For ten minutes. And she’d seen at least three places that she would have moved into herself, for reasonable rent.

  As Robyn scrubbed her bowl, she felt arms around her waist, a mouth at her ear. ‘Look, I know we never had the living together conversation, and I know it wasn’t really fair to do it this way, but I’ve been thinking, I love you, and I like living with you. Maybe we could just keep doing this?’

  So here it was. The conversation. Robyn’s opportunity to tell Alex she liked living alone. Only, if she said that she didn’t want Alex to live here, then didn’t that mean she didn’t want to commit to Alex? And if she said that, then might Alex just say, ‘Well, if that’s how it is, why waste our time?’

  Robyn didn’t want that to happen, she didn’t think. She hadn’t decided if she and Alex could make it yet. They were still in the proving stage of the bake. It was too soon.

  So that meant there was only one answer to Alex’s question. She turned around to face Alex and said, ‘I guess we could give it a go?’

  Alex grinned. ‘Great.’ She kissed Robyn on the nose and walked out, grabbing her energy drink en route.

  Robyn made a decision. If she was now living with Alex, however that had come about, she was going to try to enjoy it. She was going to let it bake to completion.

  She mixed up a fresh batch of macarons, and she heard more yelling from next door. ‘Who the fuck fires an RPG inside a hut, you utter twat!’ Alex rebuked someone, presumably in the game she was playing.

  Robyn sighed as she put the biscuits in the oven, wondering whether she could really do this. She’d just agreed to live with Alex, and she was already feeling the squeeze on her nerves. Noi
se and clutter, she needed her life to be free of these things if she had any hope of maintaining her sanity. And Alex represented both. She was chaos. That had appealed to Robyn at first, like a holiday from herself, her opposite.

  But the holiday was over, and now Alex was here, in her space, in her face, eating all her food, gaming loudly, breaking stuff, making a mess; until Robyn either got used to the intrusion or couldn’t take it anymore.

  As Robyn watched her biscuits rise through the oven door, the timer reached seven minutes, set to go off at ten, she found herself unsure. Alex’s little kitchen visit had thrown her off. Though she’d made macarons a dozen times, she liked to be sure. She wasn’t one to leave such things to chance and rinsed her hands and took out her phone to check her recipe app.

  Yes, ten minutes. Of course it was ten minutes. She knew that, where had the doubt come from? The timer told her nine minutes had passed, and she was about to put her phone away when she saw a little ad pop up at the bottom of the screen. It was a call for contestants for a cooking programme, Bake It! Robyn watched it religiously. It was a TV show for amateur bakers to show off their skills, eliminating contenders week by week until one reigned supreme. Robyn had daydreamed about applying, once upon a time. But for the same reasons she didn’t bake for a living, she had never applied. Baking was therapeutic, and going on that kind of huge TV show would stop it from being that. It would become about pressure; she’d seen how the contestants cracked up over the weeks. Tears were shed over many a sunken sponge on Bake It!

  ‘Oh, my fucking god,’ Alex yelled from next door as Robyn took her biscuits out once more and laid them on the wire rack. ‘Is this guy just a shitty player or some crap NPC? I genuinely can’t tell anymore.’

  While Robyn’s biscuits cooled, she decided to do a load of laundry. The hamper was always overflowing these days. She began to sort through its contents. Alex never emptied her pockets, and Robyn didn’t want another tissue finding its way into the machine. That cardigan had been ruined.

  But as she went through Alex’s pockets, she found something. A square something. She pulled it out, and it looked like a ring box. She cracked it open and yep, ring. Modest but nice enough.

  Only Alex would buy an engagement ring and then leave it in the laundry, Robyn thought with a shake of her head. Then the enormity of the situation fell on her head. Panic set in. No, this was too fast. Not five minutes ago Robyn had been pressed into letting Alex move in. Now she wanted to get married?

  Robyn looked at the ring for a moment and then she put it back where she’d found it and stood, calmly. She went into the living room.

  ‘I think we should talk,’ she told Alex.

  Alex didn’t turn straight away. ‘One sec,’ she muttered. On-screen, her character’s head was blown off. She angrily whispered, ‘Ball sacks,’ and then put the controller down. She turned, at last, to Robyn. ‘Something up?’

  ‘Yes. I want to talk about the future.’

  ‘You haven’t changed your mind, have you? About moving in?’

  ‘No,’ Robyn said. It wasn’t a lie. She’d never been sure in the first place. ‘I want to talk about the bigger picture.’

  Alex’s eyes widened, and she smiled. ‘Yeah? Because actually-’

  ‘I’m going to apply for Bake It!’ Robyn said, too loudly.

  Alex stopped. ‘You’re… What?’

  ‘Yeah. I’m going for it,’ Robyn said. ‘It’s a massive process, so I’m going to be busy. Loads of practise bakes. I’ll practically be living in the kitchen, so, you know… we might not get much time together.’ Robyn didn’t know why she was saying this. She’d come in here to confront the issue. But she’d never been great at that. This was apparently the evasive manoeuvre her brain had tossed her when the shit hit the fan. But it did make some sense. Robyn would hide in the kitchen while she figured out her next move. Alex wouldn’t be able to propose if they didn’t spend any time together, would she?

  She would bake her way through the problem. It was what she did.

  Two

  Jodie Jacobs put down the phone calmly, turned to her brother Billy and raised an eyebrow. ‘Well.’

  Billy, nowhere near as calm, was almost jumping up and down on the spot with tension. ‘Well, what? What did they say?’

  Jodie sat placidly on the dumpy sofa in the small house she shared with Billy, shrugged, and put her phone down on the coffee table and said, ‘They said…’ and then picked up her mug from the coffee table, taking a languid sip of tea. Billy reached over and took the cup from his sister. Jodie nearly spat tea everywhere as the cup was wrenched from her lips. ‘Easy, tiger,’ she rebuked him mildly.

  ‘Stop it, you sadist. You got in, didn’t you? Didn’t you?’ Billy demanded. ‘Say it.’

  Jodie allowed one corner of her mouth to slip up fractionally. ‘Yeah. I’m in.’

  Billy’s arm jerked, and tea went everywhere. ‘Wooh!’ he screamed. ‘We did it! I mean, you did it! I can’t wait to tell Sasha.’ Sasha was Billy’s girlfriend. They’d been together since they were twelve. It was all quite nauseating. ‘Are you gonna tell anyone?’

  ‘Like who?’

  ‘Whatserface… Bella?’

  Jodie laughed. ‘I haven’t seen her in weeks.’

  ‘Oh. Anyone else?’ he shrugged.

  ‘Don’t be daft, Billy,’ Jodie told her brother. He should have known better. Jodie dated, but she didn’t date. She was strictly casual with women. They weren’t always pleased about that, but what could you do?

  ‘Daft, yeah,’ Billy laughed, shaking his head at her. ‘I forgot about your policy.’

  Jodie looked at the carpet, at a spot of tea Billy had thrown from the cup in his excitement. ‘I hope you’re gonna clean that up because I’m not doing it.’

  ‘Jodie, what the actual fuck is wrong with you? You just found out you’re gonna be on Bake It! It’s probably gonna change your whole life. I know you’re not really the type to scream the house down about big news, but even you must be freaking out about now.’

  Jodie shrugged. She did want this, but not for standard reasons. It was part of a plan to save the day. The house the family had rented since before either of them was born was going up for sale. The landlord had felt bad about it, but he was moving to Australia to be near his new grandkid and needed the cash. He’d given them first refusal to buy it.

  ‘We’re broke,’ Jodie told him in no uncertain terms. ‘I mean, I could maybe cover the mortgage payments. But I don’t have deposit money to get the mortgage in the first place.’

  The landlord chewed his lip. ‘Look, tell you what… I won’t put the place up ‘til I have to, in a years’ time. Maybe you could figure something out by then?’

  ‘Thanks, I’ll see what I can do,’ Jodie said. She hadn’t a buggering clue what she meant by that. But she didn’t want to move out, she knew that much. This was the house she and Billy had lived in all their lives, the house her father, Luke Jacobs, had lived in. Died in, too. Jodie had been sixteen when he got the diagnosis. She’d been wrecked by the news but bore it somehow.

  But somehow, things got worse. Their mother announced she was leaving. She couldn’t deal with their father’s health issues, she wasn’t cut out for ‘that sort of thing’. Jodie was shocked and devastated. Her mother had always been a bit checked out in the parenting department, but this was a new low, even for someone as selfish as her. Jodie wanted to weep. But she reserved her tears for the man with pancreatic cancer sitting on the couch, looking shattered, the one who deserved them. Jodie looked her mother in the eye and said with all the disdain she could muster, ‘Go, then.’ She had. Jodie had half thought she’d come back a few days later, tail between her legs. But they never saw her again.

  That left Jodie to look after her father alone in his last months, as well as her brother. The hardest year of Jodie’s life.

  After they buried their father, social services came over and talked to Jodie and her ten-year-old brother and asked if t
hey wanted to be fostered.

  No. Jodie was staying in the house with her brother, and that was the end of the conversation. After her father’s savings were gone, she’d get a job and pay for the place herself. The social had to agree. Sixteen was technically an adult by UK law, and Jodie had the right to take her brother on if she wanted.

  So she did. Six months later, she was in full-time work at a greasy spoon café - the sour-faced waitress customers were willing to consider ‘a bit of a character’ - paying rent on what was luckily a cheap house in a poor area.

  Nine years passed, and now Jodie was twenty-five, her brother nineteen. She was still waitressing, still scraping by on the bills until that call from the landlord.

  Jodie quickly moved into crisis mode. She talked to banks, building societies, a few dodgy loan companies. But as she suspected, on her small pay, she couldn’t cover repayments on a loan for the deposit, along with the mortgage payments. She just didn’t make enough money.