Cake at Midnight

by Jessie L. Star

  If Giovanna had thought his flat at Veronica Way had been soulless, and he knew she had, it was nothing compared to the stark white space his new company had rented for him on the thirty-third floor of a residential tower in Singapore’s downtown. There, her pink rose had been the only pinprick of colour. As the decoration had developed a powdery white film, he’d considered throwing it away, telling himself it made him feel worse to see it, not better, but he hadn’t been able to bring himself to.

  To go from only a cake garnish to remind him of Giovanna to the real thing, however, was something he hadn’t prepared himself for.

  She was clearly in just as much shock, her eyes wide, her plump lips parted.

  ‘But,’ she finally managed to say, ‘you’re in Singapore.’

  He cleared his throat, but he still sounded hoarse as he replied, ‘No.’ Realising how blunt that sounded, he added, ‘I was. I came back.’

  ‘Oh.’

  This wasn’t how he’d envisaged this scene playing out. He’d wanted to be direct and honest with Giovanna from the outset, had wanted her to be her usual buoyant self and leap into his arms at first sight of him. But they were both stiff and still and he, at least, felt too overwhelmed to do anything other than stare at her.

  If the clatter of footsteps and voices from the end of the corridor hadn’t made both of them start and come back to themselves, he didn’t know how long they would’ve stood there staring at each other. He was almost thankful for the interruption, right up until he realised it was O’Connor and Zoë charging down the hall. And that they didn’t look happy to see him.

  20

  I felt numb and kind of separate. As if the moment I’d realised it was Theo at the door, I’d split into multiple versions of myself. One Gio was simply staring, dumbstruck, at her old neighbour. One was leaping about squealing, ‘He’s here! He’s here! He came back!’ Another was so overwhelmed she was sobbing in the corner, while yet another ranted and raved, demanding to know why now? Why wait until she had just started to feel a bit better, able to get through a day without feeling like she had a Theo hangover? A fifth version kept her cool and let her eyes rove over him, drinking in his toned body encased in dark blue jeans and a soft white T-shirt (no suit!), the leather bag by his feet and his unusually tousled hair. Meanwhile, the final me wasn’t looking at Theo at all, she was watching with a sort of vague, anthropological interest as Dec and Zoë barrelled down the corridor.

  I wondered briefly who was coming to give Theo a piece of their mind and who was tagging along to provide damage control. Judging by their identical angry expressions, however, it seemed likely that they were both the former.

  Sure enough, as they drew up next to us, Zoë demanded, ‘You’re kidding, right?’

  At the same time, Dec snapped, ‘You can’t seriously be here right now.’

  Theo had watched my friends’ advance, but now he turned his attention away from them and back to me, his voice controlled as he replied, ‘I’m here to speak to Giovanna.’

  It’d been so long since I’d heard my full name spoken like that that I flinched at the impact and couldn’t meet his eye.

  ‘Yeah, no shit,’ Zoë said bluntly, ‘but I think you lost that privilege right around the time you decided to move to another country without telling her.’

  ‘Zo,’ I mumbled, but, as I put a restraining hand on her arm, Dec took up the fight.

  ‘Gio’s been miserable since you left. You made her think she’s the one who made you go, that she was too immature for you or something, and I don’t care how much of a hypocrite it makes me, fuck you for making her feel bad.’

  ‘Dec.’ I reached for him this time, but it was like herding cats as Zoë took the opportunity to once again get into Theo’s face.

  ‘What the hell d’you think you’re doing, turning up here again just as she’s started to get over you?’

  ‘Yeah, if you were going to go, you should at least have had the decency to stay gone.’

  ‘All right, that’s enough.’ I finally found my voice, unsure whether I wanted to laugh or cry at my mates’ over-the-top double act. Still, their appearance seemed to have at least chased the disparate parts of me back into one whole and, for the first time since I’d seen Theo, I was able to feel the floor solid beneath my feet.

  ‘No, they’re right.’

  I stopped trying to push Dec and Zoë back, and the three of us snapped our heads around to stare at Theo. He, however, continued to look only at me.

  ‘I handled my leaving badly, but I’d like the opportunity to talk to you. To explain.’

  ‘Well–’ Zoë and Dec blustered in unison, but I lifted a hand to stop them.

  ‘Really. Enough. I appreciate it, but it’s fine. I’ve got this.’

  They looked extremely sceptical, as well they might. I myself was about ninety per cent sure I in no way had ‘this’, but I was one hundred per cent sure that, whatever the ‘this’ was, it was between Theo and me. And nobody else.

  ‘Fine.’ Zoë was the first to crack, albeit ungraciously. ‘We’ll be nearby if you need us. C’mon, Dec.’

  Dec glared at Theo for a moment longer, then nodded reluctantly, pressed a hand briefly to my arm and followed Zoë out.

  I stared down at my feet as they left, an apology for their behaviour on the tip of my tongue until I realised that, actually, I wasn’t sorry for the way they’d stood up for me. And, anyway, I wasn’t the one who’d flown across the Indian Ocean – or was it Pacific? I really needed to bone up on my geography – with something to say. Surely it was Theo’s job to make the first overture?

  Still, as the silence stretched on, I stepped back into my flat and gestured him inside. Whatever it was he wanted to say, I assumed he didn’t want to say it in the corridor. Sneaking a sideways glance at him as I shut the door behind us, however, I saw that he was now looking around at my more-is-more approach to festive decoration with a somewhat stunned expression.

  ‘I like tinsel,’ I muttered, twisting my fingers together uncomfortably. But, of course, he just nodded.

  There were another couple of beats and then another tentative glance at him showed me how tired he looked, how totally drained of colour and vitality, and I blurted, ‘Did you come straight from the airport?’

  He nodded again. ‘Yes. I didn’t want to wait to see you.’

  I sat down hard on one of my dining chairs and, after the briefest pause, he slipped his bag off his shoulder and followed suit, dragging a chair over so that he could face me without the table between us.

  Despite the time that had passed, I instinctively inclined towards him, yearning to be as close as possible to his familiar warmth and scent.

  ‘Firstly,’ he began, also leaning in and clasping his hands together so that his knuckles were millimetres from brushing against my knees, ‘I just want to tell you how sorry I am for the way I left things back in September. I should’ve tried harder to say goodbye properly, but I was a coward and didn’t want to have to face your disappointment.’

  I almost laughed. The way I’d moped about that first month, ‘disappointment’ didn’t really cover it.

  ‘Secondly, I want you to know that this isn’t just a visit or a work trip, I’m back in the country for the foreseeable future. Back here specifically.’

  While too overwhelmed to really focus my thoughts, one thing at least was clear: I was glad, powerfully glad that, no matter what Theo had to say, at least he wouldn’t be saying it and then cutting and running.

  Spying a scrap of paper on the table that I’d been using to bookmark recipes I was interested in the night before, I snatched it up and began nervously rolling it between my fingers.

  ‘But it’s only been a couple of months–’ I started to say before a horrible thought occurred to me and I added, ‘Is everything okay? With your family? Ari?’

  ‘They’re fine, everybody’s fine. The truth is–’ He shook his head before repeating, ‘The truth is that I just wasn’t very go
od at what I was sent over to Singapore to do.’

  I scoffed. The idea of Theo doing anything other than excelling seemed absolutely ridiculous to me.

  ‘I wasn’t,’ he insisted. ‘The job required an element of immediate relationship building that I wasn’t able to offer. Too much of my attention was still focused here. It wasn’t fair to the people I was working with. Besides, it only took me about two minutes after I arrived to see that the woman who’d been running the in-house consultancy before my appointment had been doing so much more effectively than I could have on my best day. When I presented the evidence to the executives, they were good about offering me a job back in the local office.’

  It was a weirdly dispassionate speech to hear while my nerve endings rippled with emotion, and I struggled to grasp at the significance of it. ‘So,’ I said slowly, ‘you’re back because you didn’t like the job?’

  ‘No . . . Given time, I’m sure the job would’ve been fine, but . . . Look, trust me when I say that I know how ridiculous this sounds, but Ari gave me a self-help book before I left–’ He broke off and gave me a half-smile as I made a small noise of disbelief.

  ‘Yes, exactly. But, against my better judgement, I actually opened it on the plane on the way over and there were some things that . . . resonated.’ He clearly had to force the word out and I found myself smirking at how mortified he looked.

  ‘Have you learnt to love yourself, then?’ I asked cheekily and the corners of his mouth pinched down.

  ‘Not exactly. It was more that it asked a question, the answer to which bore some consideration.’ He glanced up and, seeing my exasperated expression, gave another smile. ‘Too cryptic?’ he asked and I nodded.

  He unclasped his hands and ran them up and down his thighs a couple of times, a strangely nervous gesture from him, before relinking his fingers.

  ‘“Are you putting more time and energy into the past than you are into the future?” That was the question. And I realised that I was. Even as weeks went by in a totally new environment, more often than not I was still thinking about the circumstances that’d prompted me to leave, rather than focusing on what I was doing once I had.’ He paused, then flicked those startlingly green eyes up to mine and added, ‘Still thinking about you.’

  My heart gave a heavy thump, but I made myself ask, ‘I prompted you to leave?’

  ‘No. Not anything as straightforward as that. I just . . .’ He sighed heavily. ‘I told myself that it’d be easier for you to get on with things if I left.’

  ‘Get on with things?’

  ‘The situation with Declan, I–’ He stopped again and then continued more fiercely, ‘And then you came over that night and I realised that what’d happened meant you needed more, not less, of my support, but the decision had already been made. I’m sorry, Giovanna, truly sorry for the timing of it.’

  It was nice to hear but, giving it a moment’s thought, I decided it was also unnecessary. I knew he was sorry, it’d been written through every line of his body from the second Vanessa had exposed his plan to leave. Now, though, I saw there was something new in his posture, something obvious even through his jet lag and uncharacteristic nervousness. The Theo I’d known before had always been sure and steady, but there was an extra layer to that now and, as I realised what that layer was, I said, ‘You seem more relaxed.’

  ‘Do I?’ He looked surprised. ‘I’m not sure relaxed is exactly what I’m feeling, but–’ He sat back slightly and gave it some thought. ‘The whole time you knew me before I left I was in negotiations regarding the job in Singapore: weighing the pros and cons, trying to determine whether leaving was the right choice. Having gone and then made the decision to come back, I suppose it’s answered the question I always had in the back of my mind.’

  It made sense, but it also made something inside me shrivel up at the idea that, the whole time we’d been together, he’d been thinking about leaving.

  To distract myself, and to make sure I was truly understanding his newfound self-help book-inspired sangfroid, I asked, ‘But what about the other things that must’ve made you want to leave? Your family?’

  ‘Are never going to change. So I need to develop strategies to deal with them.’

  ‘Easy as that?’

  He let out a puff of laughter. ‘No, not easy, but necessary. As Ari once told me, they’re always going to be my family, no matter where I am.’

  ‘And your reputation? The people who think you got ahead through nepotism?’ Maybe it was cruel to prod him on this, but I had to ask, had to feel that the wound had been scraped out before I could move forward in the conversation. And he didn’t shy away from answering.

  ‘I did get ahead through nepotism, I can’t deny that. But if my work isn’t enough to convince those I want to work with of my value, I shouldn’t be in this industry. Besides, my plan is to do only a year of the in-house work that brought me back here, and then start my own consultancy. My assessment of the market is that there’s room for niche work with small organisations, particularly start-ups.’

  I pushed some of my hair back as the still distantly whirring fan swept it forward, and muttered, ‘You’ve given this some thought.’

  ‘I have. I’m more confident in my decision to come back than I’ve been about anything in a long time.’

  ‘Even though you only just got back?’

  ‘Yes.’ He lifted his head and looked at me squarely. ‘Because I’ve seen you.’

  All the air left my lungs in a rush and I crushed the roll of paper in my hands.

  ‘I don’t mean to put the responsibility on you, or say that you’re the only reason I returned,’ he said earnestly. ‘It’s just that, god, it’s good to see you. I’ve thought about you constantly.’

  ‘Really?’ My voice was little more than a squeak, shock and excitement trembling through me.

  ‘Really. I missed you and it didn’t get better as time went on– it got worse.’

  ‘I missed you, too,’ I confessed, before my hard-won confidence of the last couple of months elbowed forward to add, ‘but I got on with things as well. I’ve been working really hard and Céleste has noticed. I didn’t just collapse into a heap without you.’

  ‘I don’t doubt it.’

  Confidence may have been my new buddy, but honesty was an old friend and it made me also admit, ‘But I didn’t sleep well.’

  ‘Me neither.’

  We shared a quick smile of solidarity, but his fell from his lips almost instantly.

  ‘I still haven’t really said what I came here to say and it’s . . .’ He made a hopeless sort of gesture as he faltered yet again. ‘I don’t have your frankness, I can’t just say what I’m feeling as bravely as you. So, whenever I couldn’t sleep over the last couple of months, whenever I was going over and over in my head what I wanted to say, what I should’ve said to you, I’d go to this twenty-four-hour bookshop near where I lived and look for books that reminded me of you.’ He grabbed his bag and pulled out a handful of volumes of varying sizes, clattering them onto the table next to us. ‘I got these. Because I saw you in them and I hoped their words would prompt mine.’

  He spread them out with a swipe of his hand so I could see them more clearly. A black tome with The Last Flight of the SR71 Blackbird in gold lettering across the front. A book called Patisserie Precision, the front cover of which looked almost like a photo of Pickle, Peach and Plum’s front window packed with mouth-wateringly beautiful pastries. An intricately patterned, obviously second-hand cookbook titled in what looked like Chinese characters. A squat, chunky and decidedly eighties-looking volume titled Meat and Tarragon, and Other Unusual Food Combinations. And, finally, a small book with a gossamer-fine silver dust jacket peeked out behind the rest, tiny black letters spelling Truths across its cover.

  ‘I read one every night, read them over and over, thinking that I’d try to inscribe each with what I wanted to say to you. But I didn’t have the words and they all came out the same.’

>   It took me a moment to realise what he was saying. I hesitantly reached out and picked up Truths. It was soft and delicate in my hands and, flicking to the title page, I saw that Theo’d written four words there in his neat, precise script.

  Giovanna,

  I adore you.

  A feeling like panic, and yet the opposite of panic, washed over me, like the floor had opened up beneath me and I’d been safely swept up and away from any danger at the same time.

  I grabbed at Patisserie Precision and opened it up to see the message repeated, then another book and another until I had all five open before me, saying the same thing.

  Giovanna,

  I adore you.

  ‘That was all that came to me each time,’ he said quietly as I stared, stunned, at the identical inscriptions. ‘And I thought I could send the books to you, but that was too spineless, even for me, so I decided to bring them to you instead.’

  It seemed to be my turn to speak then, but all I could muster was a faint, ‘You adore me?’

  ‘As you see.’

  I dragged my eyes away from the evidence before me and repeated, almost accusingly, ‘You adore me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But . . .’ I spluttered, ‘you’re you. And I’m me.’

  A hint of amusement hovered at the corners of his mouth. ‘That’s the most pertinent part of it, yes.’

  He didn’t seem to understand the ramifications of his own declaration, and I tried to find some way to make it clear to him. ‘We’re incompatible, though, we must be.’

  ‘Why must we be?’

  ‘Because . . .’ I trailed off, breaking the habit of a lifetime and stopping talking before I blurted, You’re a grown up and I’m not!

  ‘Giovanna, if you don’t feel the same way, I understand. It’s been months and–’ He stopped as I made a sudden movement, reaching out to him. He was very still for a moment and then seized my hand with his, pulling it up to press a fierce kiss to my knuckles.