“If I want something interesting, I’ll listen to the radio. Right now, I just want some bloody tea.”
“You could take the lid off maybe?”
“Knowing my luck, I’d break it. And then I’d have to go up to that Colin bloke and be, Mate, I broke your thing, I’m really sorry. And he’d be, Oh, this is awful, Jennifer will be upset. And I’ll be like, Mate, it’s not my fault. They should make them so they all work the same and they don’t.”
Rosaline blinked, caught off guard by the magnitude of this beverage-based catastrophising. “Okay. Alternative plan. I take the lid off.”
Stepping back, he put his hands in the air like he was being held at gunpoint. “Be my guest, love.”
It was at this juncture that Rosaline realised she couldn’t pour tea for a man who kept talking to her like, well, like pouring tea was one of a very limited set of things she was good for. “Sorry, I don’t mean to be weird about this, but . . . can you not call me love?”
He looked briefly surprised, then shrugged. “Yeah, all right. I don’t mean nothing by it.”
The part of Rosaline that, despite all her efforts, was still her father’s daughter itched to correct his grammar. Of course, Lauren would have argued that dialect was an important feature of identity, and the rules about double negatives were made up by a bunch of insecure pricks in the seventeenth century who thought English should either work like maths or Latin. But Rosaline had been raised to believe that there were rights and wrongs about this kind of thing, and you didn’t drop your g’s or your h’s or permit a glottal stop to replace a perfectly functional t.
“I’m sure it’s not personal,” she said instead. “But you wouldn’t call me that if I was a man.”
He seemed to be thinking about this. As far as Rosaline was concerned, it wasn’t a difficult concept, but at least he wasn’t shouting at her. “If you was a bloke, I’d probably call you mate.”
“You know”—she ended up sounding sharper than she meant to—“you could always use my name.”
“What’s your name then?” He offered her a slow smile. Not the sort of smile she would have expected from someone who looked like him or talked like him. Shy almost and oddly genuine. “I’m Harry, by the way. Not that you asked.”
“Oh. Sorry. Um, Rosaline.”
“You what?” he asked. “Rosaline?”
“Yes. Like in Romeo and Juliet.”
“Look, I know I didn’t do that well in school, but”—he eyed her nervously—“isn’t the girl in Romeo and Juliet called . . . Juliet?”
It had been ages since she’d had this conversation. And frankly, she could have done without it now. “Rosaline’s the woman Romeo is in love with at the beginning. Then he forgets about her when he sees Juliet.”
“Your mum and dad named you after a bird what gets dumped in a play?”
“She doesn’t get dumped. She’s sworn a vow of chastity, so Romeo never has a chance with her.”
“They named you after a nun in a play.”
This was sounding bad. She’d never really thought about it before. Most people accepted that it was a slightly obscure Shakespeare reference and moved on. “She’s not technically in the play. She’s only mentioned in a few scenes.”
“They named you after a nun in a play what isn’t even in the play?”
“It’s not that weird.” She was starting to worry it was, in fact, that weird. “I think they just liked the name.”
He winced. “Sorry, don’t get me wrong. It’s a very pretty name and you’re a very pretty girl. I don’t meet many Rosalines is all.”
And it had come so close to going well. “I don’t want to push my luck, but can you also ease up on the girl and the pretty? I’m here to bake and when you focus on my appearance, I find that a bit demeaning.”
Which she knew was the teennsiest-tiniest bit hypocritical, given how very aware of his appearance she was, but it wasn’t as if she’d greeted him with Hey sexy, like the arse. Although—gender dynamics being what they were—he might have been okay with that.
“Bloody hell.” He pulled a slightly horrified face. “Made a right mess of this, haven’t I?”
“It’s fine. It’s just we’re not in the pub and you’re not trying to pull me.” At least she hoped he wasn’t. At least she mostly hoped he wasn’t.
“I don’t think we go to the same sort of pubs, mate.”
In the brief but intensely awkward silence that followed, Rosaline thought it best to fix the entirety of her attention on making the tea dispenser dispense tea. She twisted something, pushed it, and—with a disproportionate sense of triumph—was rewarded with a hot stream of tea that flowed neatly into her cup.
Then kept flowing.
Then kept flowing.
Harry calmly pushed his own cup under the spout. “Nice one.
Now how do you stop it?”
“I . . . I thought the button would come up again by itself.” It was not coming up by itself. And tea was already beginning to spill into Harry’s saucer. Slapping a hand over the top of the dispenser, Rosaline tried Canute-like to turn back the tides of brown liquid she had inadvertently summoned. It went about as well for her as it had for him.
“Do you want to pass me another mug?” asked Harry.
Rosaline passed him another mug. They watched it fill slowly. “Do you want to pass me another . . . another mug?” asked Harry.
Rosaline passed him another another mug. “I think we should probably be looking for a more permanent solution.”
“It’s got to run out eventually. It’s not that big.”
They watched the tea creep steadily up the sides of the third mug like the world’s slowest and most civilised disaster movie. Unprompted, Rosaline retrieved a fourth mug from a rapidly dwindling pile.
With no comment beyond a faint mumble that might have been “Cheers,” Dave reached past them, grabbed the cup Rosaline had poured for herself, and a carton of UHT milk to go with it, and walked away.
Harry danced his fingers clear of the splash zone. “So any news on that permanent solution?”
“I’ve got an idea. We make a run for it and pretend it wasn’t us.” “I don’t think I’m going to make it.” He slid a fifth mug into place. “But you go. Save yourself. Tell my mum and dad I went down fighting.”
“I can’t leave you,” wailed Rosaline, not entirely sure if they were joking or not. “This is my fault.”
“What’s your fault?” Colin Thrimp popped up like a piece of underdone toast. Then he caught sight of the endless tea stream. “Oh my. How did this happen? Jennifer will be livid.”
Rosaline stared at him for a long moment. “I’m sorry. But they should make them all the same way and they don’t.”
When she’d applied for Bake Expectations, Rosaline had told herself it was a low-risk, high-reward plan. If it worked, she’d get a decent-ish cash prize and, if the experiences of former contestants were anything to go by, a bunch of career opportunities she couldn’t get any other way. And if it didn’t work, she’d just end up back where she’d started: owing money to her parents, worrying about Amelie’s future, and feeling like a failure. Except, normally, she felt like a failure in a vague, directionless, oh what might have been sort of way. And now she was giving a bunch of celebrities permission to make her feel like a failure for specific reasons repeatedly on national television.