by Mara Webb
“Oh, I am running some classes for amateur bakers, I thought it would be a nice new way to bring in customers. Are you interested?” she asked. The flyer advertised that the first week of the classes would teach us how to make the gooiest chocolate fudge cake any of us had ever tasted. I signed up on the spot.
Leaving the café, I looked up and down the high street to plan my next move. It would help me out massively to be walking through the front door of the house with some snacks for the cats, otherwise my evening would be unbearable. I wandered over to the small grocery store to see if they had any taffy, they did. Jane, the cashier, rang up nine boxes of the stuff and fought the urge to comment.
“Having a party, are you?” she finally blurted out.
“Yes.” My blunt reply caused her to recoil from wanting to interacting with me further. “Sorry, not really. Sending them to my mom, belated Mother’s Day gift.” Jane smiled at the sweet little lie I had told her and waved as I shuffled out with my goods.
By the time I had made it back to the house, I was feeling exhausted.
I had only been out for a few hours, but I felt drained. It might have been all the nitty gritty about my license application with Cecily, it was really boring, and I had needed all my energy to keep my eyes open. I put the carrot cake slices into the fridge and hoped that I managed to wait until Ryan showed up before eating my share.
An email hitting my inbox caused my phone to ‘ping’. The University of Awa, the place where I was employed as a research associate, was hosting a team building exercise next month. It was a huge camping trip out to the Malign Mountain, and they had colleagues from other schools attending to make it a huge social event.
Normally I wouldn’t get excited about sleeping in a tent covered in dirt, but I suspected it would be different to any other camping trip I’d ever been on. That many witches and wizards in one place were sure to keep things interesting.
While I waited for Ryan to show up, I distracted myself from eating carrot cake by cooking the savory part of our evening meal. The pizza on the yacht had pushed me into an all-consuming cheese obsession and the best way to get my fix was to make my own Italian dishes, that way I could add as much as I wanted.
With Quin off my back tucking into the second box of taffy, Ryan and I were free to talk about his day, eat pizza with wine and then both pretend that we wanted to wait a bit longer before dessert, then immediately cave and devour the cake.
I read out the email about the camping trip to Ryan and realized that there was a ‘plus one’ invitation that I had initially missed. It turned out that Ryan was a very keen camper, so there was plenty of equipment at his place for us to take.
After the disastrous yacht getaway, I was hopeful we might actually get to have a nice vacation away together, and this camping trip sounded like a perfect opportunity. We’d already had one botched trip; the odds were extremely low that this camping trip would be anything other than perfect.
…Right?
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