Page 47 of Cream & Sugar

I return to the kitchen a few minutes later, cortados in hand. “Coffee to the rescue!”

“Thank you,” he says, turning his back before taking a sip.

“Good?”

“Fantastic!” He sets the cortado down and I notice it’s still almost full. Maybe it’s too strong for him? I take a sip of mine. It tastes nice, but I’m a bad point of reference—I’d drink coffee pitch black and thick as treacle without batting an eye.

Freddie finishes breaking the chocolate into a plastic bowl and sticks it in the microwave on a low heat. Without any prompting, he starts weighing out flour. All feelings aside, I’m oddly proud of him.

“So, have you always baked?” Freddie asks as he sieves the flour. I realise I’ve been staring at the back of his neck as he works and turn my attention back to my breakfast cake.

“No actually, I only started baking at uni. My flatmate and I were on the rugby team and one day he let slip that I made good cakes. I brought some muffins for them next practice, one thing led to another, and I ended up baking for them every week. We had a kitty and everyone put in a few quid each practice for ingredients—” I break off, feeling like I’m talking too much again, but Freddie’s turned around to face me now, an open bag of caster sugar in his hands. If he’s uninterested, he’s hiding it well. “After that, I never really stopped. I practiced a lot, watched YouTube videos, and now here. Humble beginnings, but who knows, maybe one day I’ll be Paul Hollywood.”

Freddie raises an eyebrow. “Who?”

I gasp. “From Bake Off!”

He shrugs. “Never seen it.”

“You’ve never watched Bake Off? Tsk tsk tsk,” I hover a forkful of cake in front of my mouth. “What kind of a homosexual are you?”

I blurt it out before I can stop myself. Mortified, I’m about to apologise when Freddie looks me dead in the eye and says: “A power top, normally.”

I gasp mid-mouthful, inhaling the cake like a hoover on carpet mode. It hits my tonsils and before I know it, I’m violently choking on cake crumbs.

“Oh shit, are you okay?” Freddie asks, his expression shifting to one of genuine concern.

My face grows hot. I can’t speak. I’m making noises I’ve never made before, like the frantic wheezing of a beached orca. Shit, is this how I die?

Freddie steps forward and gives me a firm slap on the back, dislodging the killer cake in an instant. It goes all the way down and I take a long, rattling breath, my eyes streaming.

Well, that was embarrassing as hell, but at least I’m still alive.

After a fit of coughs and a gulp of water, I decide to brush over Freddie’s sex preferences and my subsequent near-death experience.

“Sorry about that! Where was I?”

Freddie chuckles and goes back to weighing sugar. “Um… Phil Hollywood?”

“Paul.” I correct him, taking another sip. “He knows everything there is to know about baking.”

“And you don’t?”

I shake my head. “Not even close, but I want to one day. I want to be so good that when people tell their friends about the best cake they ever had, they talk about my café. They’ll say ‘Shaun at Cream and Sugar makes the best cake in the world. You haven’t lived until you’ve tried it.’ I want my passion to speak for itself.”

Freddie sets the bag of sugar down and turns around again, leaning on the counter with the heels of his palms.

“Well, I’m sure you don’t need to model yourself after a celebrity to do that, no matter how talented they are.”

I eye him up and down. “Says you, walking around like a hipster Kurt Cobain!”

Freddie frowns. “Who?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

His face breaks into that devilish grin. “Duh.”

Freddie pushes himself off the counter and takes a step towards me, and another. Time slows down. A tingling starts in my fingers and spreads through my veins like wildfire. What’s he doing? He can’t be about to—oh shit, he’s way too close!