The next week of work couldn’t compare to that Saturday at the gallery with Chris. In fact, the closest thing I’d had to it was on Sunday, when we’d both spent the majority of our day watching the other person play ‘The Simpsons: Hit and Run’ and staring at crappy Sunday afternoon films on TV through drooping eyelids. But then, any time that I was at work felt like a surreal blur to me, so nothing felt notable compared to Saturday. Everything was so regular and predictable that I simply submerged myself in the routine.
I knew by midweek, once I’d been left alone with my thoughts for hours on end whilst I worked, that I definitely had feelings for Chris. He may act like an arse, use sarcasm as a weapon and think that I was acting plain stupid most of the time, but he wasn’t all that. He had this core of almost gentlemanly sweetness, where he’d worry that I’d hurt myself, be concerned and want to cheer me when I was upset, and would gently correct me if I made a mistake whilst we both laughed it off.
I was so disgustingly cheery that it made me want to rip my heart from my chest and throw it against the wall. On the other hand, this gooey, soppy, pining feeling was new and intriguing. I may have had relationships in the past, but I’d never felt this vulnerable to my emotions. It creeped me out. I found myself eager to leave work at the end of the day because then I could see Chris and find out what he vlogged about that day, or what new achievements he may have unlocked on whatever video game had taken his fancy that morning.
When I got home from work on Thursday, I felt drained and exhausted. Much to the dismay of the theatre, a mass flu outbreak had started, which had apparently started with one of the Elphaba’s having a coughing fit or something. This made the numbers at the theatre very small, meaning that I was trying to make up for the work that the Drones were unable to do because they’d stayed at home ill. It made me want to play sick myself.
Of course, how Chris and I were unable to sleep very well at night was also a factor in my fatigue. It was all well and good that Chris could sleep during the day like an owl, but I had to go to work. This meant that Chris was practically hyper when I came home in the evenings, like an over affectionate dog, or something. I really wanted to be that eager in seeing him too, but I was just so tired all of the time.
On that Thursday, Chris was actually waiting outside the flat when I climbed out of the lift. He didn’t seem to be locked out, judging by the open door behind him, but the suspicion that he was waiting for me wasn’t something that I could shake.
“What’s wrong?” I said sceptically when I saw him through the widening gap between the lift doors.
Chris smiled at me, showing off his teeth as he practically grinned. “We need to cook food.”
“Now?”
“Yeah, now,” he persisted as he held the door open for me to trudge through into the flat. “Do you remember how I offered to draw up a cooking rota on your first day here?”
I looked over my shoulder at him as he ushered me into the kitchen space. “I thought you were joking!”
“You thought wrong. I’ve been cooking all week, and it’s your turn. I’ll write a rota while you cook.”
I groaned as I moved into the kitchen. “Do we have to do this now? I’m tired.” I removed my bag from my back and shrugged myself out of my jacket as I set them down in one of the dining chairs. “I appreciate how you’ve done food this week, but I really need to just take a few bites of a sandwich, and then go to sleep.”
Chris raised an eyebrow at me. “But you’re always tired… unless it’s four am… And besides, we went shopping on Saturday. Surely, you can remember the random crap that you put into the shopping basket? It was all so fancy!”
“Philadelphia cream cheese and leeks are not fancy,” I pointed out as I folded my arms defensively.
“But who actually enjoys leeks? They taste of nothing.”
“You’ve never had the cheese and leek combo, have you?”
“I have. I just tasted cheese.”
I rolled my eyes and took a deep breath. Chris was always able to turn my evenings on their heads, which I usually enjoyed after ridiculously boring days of glue gunning stuff that the Droids and I had made onto the set. Today, cooking wasn’t what I wanted to do. I liked cooking, I was okay at cooking, but having next to no time to efficiently plan out a meal? That was not enjoyable in my book. “If you help me with one or two things cooking wise for this one time, then I’ll comply with your stupid cooking rota.”
“Just go and look in the fridge,” Chris huffed as he opened up one of the kitchen draws and fished out an old envelope and a pen. “I’ll write out a rota, or something.” He started to scribble on the envelope, leaving me to search for cooking inspiration by myself.
Only mere seconds passed before Chris spoke again after loudly clearing his throat. “Hey, I need to ask you something.”
I opened up the fridge and looked through its contents miserably. “What?”
“Could you help out with the ‘I Can’t Even’ filming on Sunday?”
I stopped searching through the fridge to turn at look at him, the cold of the fridge clinging to my back as I stayed in the alcove of the fridge door. “You want me to tag along?”
I knew that the filming for the show hadn’t been done in over a month, due to how Mia’s birthday had fallen on the last available date two fortnights ago when they usually filmed. Chris had told me that none of the episodes had gone online yet, but that he wanted to film as many as possible to have an almost store of them to upload later on. The fortnightly recordings were the only time that Mia, PJ and Chris were all free, let alone the messy schedule that special guests on the show had. It all sounded very complex, but I didn’t admit to Chris that I did really want to go, rather than spending my one day off during the week alone at the flat. That’s how much London and my time here had changed me: I didn’t want to be alone all of the time.
“Kind of,” Chris shrugged. “I kind of need a stand-in for Becca, seeing as I’ll be hosting.”
“Becca’s going to be in it?”
“She’s always in the show somehow, but she’s a special guest as well this time,” he elaborated whilst he continued to write something down on the envelope. “Could you put on my Becca costume and just sit in her place whilst I play the ‘quiz master’? I’ve got a vague script outlined for you, so if you could just perfect my accent and stand-in for me, that would be great. I’ll reshoot with my teammates for any actual head-on Becca shots, mind.”
So he was asking a favour of me? I could really milk this… “What’s in it for me?” I said mysteriously as I turned back to the fridge. I’d already decided what I wanted to cook, by that point, but tormenting Chris had a fun element to it which I really enjoyed.
“You could come and watch all of the other shows,” Chris suggested hopefully.
I shrugged as I started to gather the ingredients in my arms. “Tempting…”
“We can have your sesame seed noodles thingy on Sunday night.”
“Hm…”
“I’ll buy you Jaffa Cakes.”
“Maybe…” By this point, I had all of the ingredients I needed, so I transferred the small selection back to the sideboard. Hopefully, I could just get this cooking over and done with before I could collapse on the sofa to play videogames. Chris really was a bad influence on my productivity. The amount of writing I’d done for my blog had dropped dramatically since I’d moved here. I was, on the other hand, having more fun.
“What the fuck?” Chris said in confusion as I arranged the ingredients out on the counter in the order that I’d need them. “I’ve never seen cooking done like that before…”
“What? Done methodically so that it’s ready quicker?” I quipped whilst I set a chopping board, sharp bladed knife, wooden spoon, frying pan and fork beside the potatoes, leeks, eggs, Philadelphia, bacon and cheese. I could hopefully make bacon, leek and cheese potato skins from this collection.
Chris grumbled something about ‘neat freak’ before he went back to scribbling on the envelope.
“Just chop up the leek,” I told him as I set to work scrubbing the two baking potatoes free of dirt in the sink. The dirt had an irritating habit of getting caught under my nails and wriggling into my nail beds. It was a good thing that my black nail varnish mostly masked this, I suppose.
“Fine,” he grumbled, shoving the envelope into his pocket. He moved to the chopping board and picking up the leek, scrunching his nose up at the offensive green vegetable. Then, he proceeded to enthusiastically swing the leek from side to side like a green lightsaber. He even made the ‘nyoom’ sound effects.
The leek flew towards the side of my head as Chris pretended to behead me. “Schush!” he spat as he pretended to slice through my neck. “Oh no! Jamie’s dead! Ahhhh!” he continued to play in a high pitched voice as he glared up at me from his crouched position on the floor. “Why aren’t you playing dead? You’re supposed to be dead.”
“Blaeugh, I’m dead. Oh no…” My lip quivered as I tried to suppress my smile and force down the temptation to pick up the wooden spoon and engage in lightsaber combat with him. Instead, I reached out and grabbed the leek from his hands to wash it in the sink under the cold stream of water.
“Aw, you spoiled it,” Chris sulked as he tried to grab the slippery leek back.
A giggle escaped through my clamped lips as I tried to forcibly set the leek down on the chopping board. “Just chop, would you?”
Chris caressed the leek before lifting up the knife. “Goodbye, my dear lightsaber. Unfortunately for you, you taste disgusting.” He savagely chopped down on the leek right through the middle, his face delighted at the viciousness of the motion.
I stopped stabbing the potatoes with a fork and looked to Chris. “That’s not how you chop up a leek,” I said slowly, feeling internally outraged at how the leek was a victim of his massacre.
Chris shrugged and continued to hack at the vegetable in a blind and messy manner. “You asked me to help. I’m helping.”
I clenched my jaw as I went into the cupboard to retrieve a baking tray to set the potatoes on whilst they were in the oven cooking through. “Just how often do you cook from scratch?” I asked my flatmate as he discarded a perfectly good part of the leek by putting it into the bin.
“Why do I get the feeling that pasta isn’t ‘cooking from scratch’ to you?”
“Because it’s not,” I smirked. I let my gaze wander over to the pitiful job that he was doing of preparing the leek. “You’re cutting it wrong.”
“I don’t see a manual.”
“That’s because the only cook book you own is a second-hand thing called ‘Cooking for Blokes’, which you’ve never read.”
“I skimmed through it… Look,” Chris sighed as he paused in his ‘chopping’. I kept my eyes on the bacon that I was slowly cutting up but kept my ears alert to his voice. He almost sounded serious. “What would it take for you to come with me to help out with ‘I Can’t Even’ on Sunday? Do you want noodles, front row seats and Jaffa Cakes combined?”
I pretended to ponder over his offer. He didn’t sound like he was just asking a favour anymore. He sounded more like he really did need someone to stand-in as Becca for Sunday. “That would be nice, but there’s one thing…”
“Fucking hell, what is it?”
I looked up from the bacon to him. He had one hand against one cheek as he almost gripped his skull through the skin of his face. I felt a coy smile grow on my face as I went back to preparing the bacon. “Do you know how tempting it is to ask that you beg me to help? Because that’s what’s going through my mind right now…” You could also dare him to go on a date with you. Oh, shut up, brain.
“Please, would you be a Becca stand in for this week’s ‘I Can’t Even’? I’d…I’d appreciate it,” Chris sighed, whilst I watched him run a hand through his hair from the corner of my eye. “If you say that the only reason that you didn’t accept straight away was because I didn’t say ‘please’, I’ll disown you.”
“Oh, I’m your property to disown now, am I?” I started, taking particular vigour in chopping down on the bacon very firmly. The whole ‘please’ thing may have been my reason for gambling a little…
Chris groaned and picked at the large chunks of leek that were on his chopping board. He frowned at the pale lumps of leek from under his fringe, prodding them cautiously as if he thought the chunks would bite him or something. “I was thinking more that I could kick you out of the flat, disown you as a flatmate.”
My heart pounded forcefully, making my breathing uneven. “What?” I said in a strangled cry. “Would you really do that?”
He lifted a piece of leek up and waved it in my face, making me flinch away from him as he wafted the limp piece of greenery across my nose. “For the first few days that I knew you, yes, I would have done that,” Chris admitted whilst he chuckled and enjoyed watching me bat away the vegetable. “Now, you’re a good friend, so why would I do that?”
I wasn’t sure what hurt more, the fact that he would have thrown me out without a second thought before or that he only considered me a ‘good friend’. Ow.
I rolled my eyes. “Because you’re evil,” I pointed out whilst nursing my hurt silently. “Oh, for fuck’s sake, let me chop the leek.”
Chris smirked at me as we swapped places and I chopped the leek into fine disks. “So will you do the Becca thing?”
I’d decided that I would go to the ‘I Can’t Even’ thing as soon as he’d asked me. The game of playing ‘hard to get’ when it came to agreeing with him, was just too addictive to miss. When he toyed with me most of the time, how could I pass up the opportunity to do the exact same thing? “Fine.”
Chris grinned goofily at me. “Cheers.”
“But I expect front row seats for the shows, lots of Jaffa Cakes, and for you to live up to that promise of sesame seed noodles.”
“A deal’s a deal,” Chris muttered. “I can’t believe I said I’d do that. I hate you sometimes, you know that?”
I looked up from the now prepared ingredients and surveyed the childish grin which was plastered on Chris’ face, where the humour met his eyes. He was too adorable. I did hate how we’d barely known each other two weeks and yet here I was struggling to identify the opposing emotions that I felt towards this man. Just thinking of him made my brain nope out of the whole thing, because he was just that much of an anomaly to everything that I’d wanted from returning to London. And he could never know, because he and Mia were perfect for one another. I could probably work on RandomStickz a little more on Sunday, at the very least. Chris would be happy, Mia would be happy. I should be happy too, but I wasn’t.
I kicked my feelings away as I recalled how I wanted everyone to be happy despite what I felt. That was what I’d have to do: make RandomStickz work.
“No worries, the feeling’s mutual,” I assured him with a forced smile, before turning back to my cooking. In the back of my mind, I now wished that last Saturday hadn’t happened at all, because it just made everything so much more complex. Well fuck.
'·.¸¸.·´´¯'··._.·'·.¸¸.·´´¯'··._.·'·.¸¸.·´´¯'··._.·'·.¸¸.·´´¯'··._.·'·.¸¸.·´´¯'··._.·'·.¸¸.·´´¯'··._.·'·.¸¸.·´´¯'··._.·'·.¸¸.·´´¯'··._.·
A/N: Hello peoples *waves*
Right, I know that this update is a tad shorter than some of the others, but blah blah blah, variety and all that :) Thank you to my leopard-tastic @Beckyisaleopard for helping me a little with the idea for this update, as I didn't want to bore you all with having a update which centred on two conversations... (which was what my first draft included, and I hated the idea of doing that). Please go and check out her stabtakular writings if you haven't already :D
Also, I now own The Sims 3 game, so my productivity is going to plummet into negative digits, it seems. I apologise in advance if that happens *cringes* (3 DAYS LATER EDIT: I am addicted)
Please leave a comment and give this update a vote :)
*salutes*
Em >^-^<