“It does. Except I’m staying open until three this week, and I need to prep for tomorrow.”
“Oh.” Brandon scratched the back of his neck and looked around. Alex followed his eyes—the kitchen looked like absolute chaos. It was organised chaos though. Organised to him, anyway. “Where do you need me?”
“Cakes. Please. Christmas cakes. I have thirty six being picked up tomorrow.”
“Thirty six? What the fuck? It’s still four days until Christmas.”
“Tell me about it. Some crazy woman is driving down from Cambridge. She ordered eight.”
“Jesus.”
Instead of arguing or asking any more questions, Brandon went to the sink and started washing up.
Alex had closed the door between the kitchen and the bakery. Normally he was happy for people to stick their head around for a chat; that was part of life in the village, and he genuinely liked talking to his neighbours and regulars. Right now he didn’t have either the time or the brain space to make small talk, and if he had to listen to any more of the Christmas music on the radio out there he was going to lose his God-damn mind.
He’d already set his phone up to play Kings of Leon through the Bluetooth speakers on a high shelf. That felt slightly more sane, even if it was less festive.
Brandon worked in an easy silence, mostly prepping the cakes so he could set up a production line to decorate them. Alex kept stealing glances at him. Mostly of how his arse filled out those fucking loose grey joggers, and how his T-shirt stretched over his back and shoulders.
Millie stuck her head around the kitchen door and grinned at Alex when she noticed he had help.
“Everything’s cleaned and prepped for tomorrow,” she said.
“Great. Help yourself to any leftovers.”
She laughed then, like he was the funniest guy in the world. “Leftovers. Yeah, right. We sold out of everything before two, Alex.”
“Fuck. I’ll make more for tomorrow. Do you want anything?”
“I’m good,” she said, waving away his offer. “I’ll see you in the morning.”
“Thanks, Millie.”
She left via the back door, since everything was locked up out front, and Brandon didn’t say anything until she’d gone.
“I can come back,” Brandon said. “In the morning. And help.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Alex said automatically.
Brandon shrugged. “I don’t have anything better to do. And this is fun.”
Alex stretched both his arms over his head until his spine popped in several places. “You want a drink? I’m not in the mood for coffee, but I have a few Cokes in the fridge.”
“Yeah. Please.”
This was his other secret vice, along with the coffee. Mid-afternoon, when everything had been crazy all day, there was nothing better than something ice cold and fizzy. Some of the mince pies were already cooling, so he slipped two onto a paper plate for a snack.
“Come on,” he said. “I need a break.”
Brandon wiped his hands and dutifully followed Alex up the stairs.
The rooms up here were pretty bare, but the smells from the bakery still wafted up, so it was warm and cosy. Alex had bought a sofa and dragged it upstairs with his dad, so he had somewhere to nap when he’d been working so hard he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to walk home.
Apart from that, the space was completely bare; not even wallpaper or paint on the walls, and bare floorboards that let the heat from downstairs rise up.
“We used to use this for storage,” Brandon said.
Alex nodded and flopped onto the sofa. He handed Brandon one of the Cokes, and held the plate out for him to take a mince pie.
“There were still sacks of flour up here when I moved in. But when I rearranged the pantry I didn’t need to use the room up here any more.”
“Dad had meant to do that for years. The pantry, I mean.”
Alex wasn’t sure how to talk to Brandon about his dad. David’s presence was baked in to every last inch of the bakery, to the point where Alex felt like he knew him, in some strange way. He’d read all of David’s hand-written recipe books, so well thumbed that the papers were stained brown. It was almost impossible to separate this building from the Walkers who had worked here for over a hundred years.
He was about to ask Brandon if he missed him, but that was clearly the stupidest question in the world. So instead he asked, “What was he like?”
Brandon cracked open his Coke and grinned. “He was just… a big bear of a man. One of those work hard, play hard people. You know? Because he started work so early in the morning he was always around for dinner, so I remember him spending a lot of time with us in the evenings. He liked puzzles.”
Alex took a big bite of his mince pie and nodded.
“I think he would have liked you,” Brandon said suddenly.
“Yeah?”
“Yeah. He had loads of people helping over the years. But no one really stuck around. He’d like the way you work—how organised everything is, and how you have systems for how to do things.”
“You have to,” Alex said. “Otherwise you’ll end up with burnt bread and undercooked cakes.”
Outside, the frigid rain that had been pounding them for days had turned icy, slushy. Snow was predicted before the end of the week.
“This year changed everything.”
Alex snorted and chugged his Coke. Then burped. Loudly. “You can say that again.”
“London changed. Like, a lot. Half of the people who work at the agency don’t even come into the office any more. We could always work from home before the pandemic, you know. When we had deadlines and needed some quiet to get stuff done. But actually being in the office is different.”
“Isn’t it the same job though?”
“Yeah, but….” Brandon made a face. “This sounds really wanky, but it’s a creative job, right? I do a lot of creative design work, and before, I’d be working with the lead on a project and everyone in the team would be in the same room, throwing ideas around, there was a whole collaborative effort going on. And I think we’ve lost something by trying to do that virtually.”
Alex picked at the crumbs of pastry that were left on his plate. “Do you think you’ll do this job forever?”
“I don’t even know any more. I’ve been building this career for the past ten years, so it seems stupid to throw it all away now. I like working for an agency because I don’t get stuck in a rut, the way you could if you worked for one company doing the same thing all the time. Like, this year I worked on a campaign for a bank, another one for a company that makes crisps, and a big marketing push for a safari park.”
“Wow.”
“So where do I go from here?”
Alex laughed. “You’re asking the guy who makes bread for a living for career advice?”
“Yes!” Brandon exclaimed. “How do you have your life together?”
“I don’t,” Alex said simply.
“You’ve travelled though, you have your own business—”
“Brandon.” Alex interrupted him. “After four years and two spectacularly bad relationships with real asshole guys, I came home with my tail between my legs. I reached the grand milestone of turning thirty years old and I’m now back living with my mum because I can’t afford to buy a house in this very small, very white, very expensive village.”