‘You’re also creative and artistic with a good eye for detail. And I think it’s been a long while since you let that side out. Christmas is the best time of year for letting your imagination run wild, so let yourself go and imagine you’re a child again and it doesn’t matter what it looks like as long as you enjoy it.’
‘I’ve only got one working hand!’
‘Yeah, but it’s your dominant hand. Squeeze the top of the bag with your right hand; all you need to do with your left is guide it. Say if it’s too much and I’ll take over.’ I twist the top of the icing bag, pick up his hand and place the filled bag into it, and he lets me curl his fingers around it in roughly the positions they should be in. ‘Use this thicker mix for the outlines and then we’ll make it up thinner for filling in or just go to town on the sweets over there.’ I nod towards the tray of various sweets and chocolates I bought last week for this sole purpose.
I decide not to overthink it or let him talk himself out of it and I go across and start filling the sink with the empty bowls we’ve used so far and wash up the ones I’ll need for the Christmas cake, trying not to watch James as he stands in silence pondering the gingerbread house, turning the base occasionally, looking like an artist contemplating his next art exhibition.
I set out the mixing bowls I need on the other side of the kitchen unit with the sink in between us. ‘Before you start covering things, can I scribble down an inventory of what we still need to make?’ I grab my notebook and pencil and go over to him. ‘Another door, that bit of the chimney that broke, and the outside stuff. Another path, a couple of bushes, and some Christmas trees.’ I write them down as I say them. ‘Oh, and we need a gingerbread man and woman to stand outside, inviting guests into their open door.’ I give him a pointed look but I can’t stop myself smiling. I don’t think I’ve ever smiled as much as I have in the past few weeks.
‘Oh, yeah, because that’s realistic. A happy couple, even made of gingerbread, is laughable.’
‘It’s Christmas. We’re supposed to believe in the impossible.’
He looks up and meets my eyes, and for just a moment, I see something in them. Understanding. Hurt. A pain that for once isn’t caused by his physical injuries.
His gaze flickers and he looks away. ‘Can we have her bit-on-the-side hiding round the back and the husband holding gingerbread divorce papers in his hand?’
I’m not sure whether to laugh or not, but he speaks again before I have a chance to figure it out. ‘Sorry, that was cynical even for me.’
‘I’m kind of … adapting … to your cynicism.’
He smiles but it doesn’t reach his eyes, and I want to question him, but I force myself to go back to my side of the sink. I start getting Christmas cake ingredients out of the cupboards, filling the unit with packets of dried fruit and nuts and spice bottles, but by the time I’ve measured out the wrong amount of brown sugar and used the wrong kind of flour, I realise it’s because he’s all I can think about. I risk a glance at him and he’s concentrating intensely on piping lines of royal icing onto the gingerbread roof. ‘What happened?’
‘What?’ He doesn’t look up although I’m certain he knows what I mean because his lines on the roof are so neat that I couldn’t possibly be talking about the icing.
‘Even you couldn’t reach that level of cynicism without being hurt somewhere in the past. Whoever did a number on you before … what happened?’ I wonder if I’m being too pushy. It’s easy to forget that I’ve only know him for two weeks. We’re friends, yeah, but are we close friends? Close enough that I have any right to pry into his past when he doesn’t look like he wants to talk about it?
‘I was cheated on,’ he says eventually.
I carry on weighing out the dry ingredients one after another, moving from the dried fruit and mixed peel to the almonds, deliberately not saying anything because he looks like he’s struggling to find the right words.
‘I was in a long-term relationship, seven years, not married but living together. She wanted to have her cake and eat it too. She didn’t want to disrupt the apparently happy life we had and thought she was doing me a favour by sleeping with someone else rather than ending things with me. She genuinely didn’t grasp that she was doing anything wrong. She honestly said, “I thought you’d be happy because I was getting what I needed without bothering you.”’
‘Wow.’ My nails make dents in my palms as I try to stop myself going over to hug him. ‘Are there really people who think like that?’
‘Apparently so.’
‘And since then?’
He shakes his head. ‘What’s the point? I mean, what is the point in relationships if even when you think you’re happy, your other half’s off having an affair with her married colleague, who was also apparently doing it for some sort of payback on his own wife because he suspected she was cheating on him in some never-ending cycle of revenge shagging.’
As usual, his way of putting things makes me snort and I have to cover it quickly.
‘She blamed me entirely,’ he carries on. ‘And don’t get me wrong, I know I settled into the relationship and got a bit too comfortable and worked too much, but to be told it’s your own fault for making the person you loved sleep with someone else once
