Page 28 of The Wedding Cake
“I...” she began.
“Don't even think about saying it’s not what it looks like.” Tim filled in the gaps for her, eyes scanning the disgraceful scene laid out between them.
“You really wouldn't buy it if I explained that I just wanted to imagine how greatsexwould be on our wedding night?” She whispered the S-word as if she’d morphed into a nun. “Hence all the accessories and um, well, roleplay... with… um… myself?”
"Give me some credit. Since when did roleplay extend to using Chanel Allure Homme?" Tim sniffed at the air, recognising the fragrance he’d been lambasted with at the airport perfume concession. It was so pungent he almost choked.
“Imagining how great your husband is going to smell, when you finally get down and dirty after a day mollycoddling the wedding guests, is always going to help turn you on.” Piper crooned after several beats.
Mollycoddlingothers? Tim wasn’t sure the concept existed in Piper’s world.
“Oh, all right,” she snapped. “It’s no use trying to pretend this is anything other than it is.” Piper held her hands up in surrender and the towel she'd draped around herself dropped to the floor. She stooped to mummify herself in it again. “You were my project, Tim. That’s how it started. That’s how I intended for it to stay. Don’t get me wrong, I’m as physically attracted to you now as I was back then, I just wish you had a wind-up key in your back so I could make you more dynamic. I out-pace you at everything. I’m so weary of it!”
Piper made it sound like she’d put in an overtime shift at his dad’s factory. Tim couldn’t speak. Evidently his thoroughly active life as a spring-jumping fitness instructor – and part-time hospital porter – rendered him a couch potato.
“I-I didn’t mean to take things so far, and I should never have let you move in with me, or accepted your proposal, but you were good for me.” Piper pursed her lips and fluttered her eyelashes. “You tamed my wild ways…for a bit. But then the ambition thing took over. You looked great on my arm. The Influencer and the Fitness Instructor.” She gazed out at the horizon through the balcony’s floor-to-ceiling glass doors. Christ. The way the woman said it made their union sound like the title of one of those Ladybird pocket books that had been handed to Tim as a child. “There’s something so Hollywood about us. That’s why it doesn’t really matter what goes on behind closed doors. As long as we give everyone thatillusionof togetherness. We could both live separate lives in separate houses if we wanted to. You could only ever get me so far in the career stakes, you see. Noah’s super-connected. Not just here but all over the world. Plus I’ve developed feelings for him. But there’s no chance of him marrying me. I don’t have the elite family connections. So I’ll give him up if you want me to. You only have to say the word.” Piper went quiet. Tim felt like a fly trapped in a sticky spider’s web. “But then we could also be smart about this, babe, couldn’t we?” she finally added, twisting her long rope of dark hair. “You must have watched the filmIndecent Proposal?”
“You what?” Did she honestly just spout that uncoordinated lot out? Tim felt like he was in a seriously warped nightmare. Any minute now his alarm would wake him up. He’d jump out of bed (and back in time) to eighteen months ago, and the day he should have been on a boys’ holiday to Mallorca with his friends (when he would kindly ask the cabin crew to ask the pilot to divert to Malaga so he could walk into Freya’s cakery) instead of meeting Piper at his gym class.
“I have indeed seen the movie,” he answered, with a heavy bump back down to earth and his actual life circumstances. “But clearly I’m the only one who’s watched it to the end.” Tim furrowed his brow. “Spoiler alert: Demi goes back to Woody and decides the money wasn’t worth it!”
“But we can make our own choices, can’t we?” Piper put a manicured finger in the air as if she’d had a Eureka moment. “Do it a little differently. At least for a while, until there’s more money in the bank. I could keep seeing Noah. Milk the opportunity for all its worth.”
“Please!” Tim covered his ears at Piper’s turn of phrase.
“And we could still go through with the wedding,” she continued, still in her clouds of deception. “You could forgive me. Have a little fling of your own if it makes you feel better. Settle the score. Or not. All of this has happened before we’ve said our vows, after all. I mean, who doesn’t have one last little night of freedom before they settle down?”
Tim brought his fist to his chin and posed in contemplation. She couldn’t even offer him half a commitment. One minute all was apparently over with Noah. The next she was trying to prolong her affair. He eyed her through his side curtain of hair. It came in handy at times like this. A shield from life’s curveballs. But then he remembered he was a brand-new Tim. Physically and mentally, he knew what to do to bat those pesky curveballs away now.
“That would be most people, Piper. Yeah, funnily enough, most people who are about to get married, they generally love one another and are committed from the get-go,” he finally replied. “But this situation,” Tim pointed at the exhibits scattered across the bed and floor, “is something else! How did we even get here?”
“Oh, Tim. You are too trusting. That’s what I love about you.”
Tim said nothing. Let Piper think what she wanted.
“Okay, then,” she relented, as if she’d been silently turning everything over in her head, working out the pros versus the cons of all her future potential love stories. “Let’s start over. No more naughtiness.”Oh, was that all it was?“Just you and me. Forever. In harmony.”
Tentatively, Tim reached out his hand to shake Piper’s. He felt like the world’s weakest man. But what choice did he have? He might not buy a word of this laughable turning over a new leaf claim, but how could he let his family down? Especially when Brittany had flown in from the States that morning. The answer was, he couldn’t disappoint them.
But he could do something else.
FREYA
It took Freya a while to fathom who the text message was from, but then her heart skipped several beats. It was Tim. He must have changed phones since that day when she’d blocked him. She held her breath as she read his words.
Mortified by Piper’s behaviour on the phone with you y’day! I can only apologise. Sooooo embarrassed :-( Feel free to carry on with your suggestion for the cake. It’s no big deal XX
He had left her not one kiss, but two…
Why would he do that when they had agreed to forget everything? Was this a suggestion? An ember of hope that a miracle might change their tragic circumstances? It was pathetic and morally wrong to go back there. But Freya wasn’t Buddha. She was a human being full of flaws, faults, and fancy.
Before her head hit the pillow after yet another hectic day at the cakery, Freya deleted the text. She would – as Tim had instructed, and as she’d already decided – go ahead with cutting the cake straight down the middle. Fortunately, Ricky and Hannah were pulling out all the stops with the ludicrous swing. FOM was meeting the bitter bride halfway and that would have to do. Maybe this didn’t sound like the right attitude, coming from a high-end wedding cake baker, but it was all Freya had left to give. The season had wiped her out before it had got started, and by June she’d found herself turning her back on those precious self-care Mondays, coming to work instead, forgoing her salary so that Ricky still got his for the extra hours and responsibility. Between him and Hannah (and Nicola, Jimena, Alejandro and the part-time staff, of course) every other wedding had run like clockwork. If they’d just scaled down the bookings by twenty percent, and gotten more selective with their clientele, Freya estimated that they wouldn’t even have needed her there to oversee things. Between them, her team knew the business inside out. And that got her thinking.
But for now she had bigger fish (cakes) to fry (or bake). The first days of August were sweltering. A high of forty-five point six degrees centigrade saw the month in, and even with the luxury of aircon, everyone was struggling to keep their shit together. Merv was no exception. His visit shortly after the discovery of the double-booking had been what could only be described asvolcanic.
“Freya, darling,” he’d wafted through the downstairs shop door to the cakery like a bad smell on the humid breeze. “What’s all this nonsense about abandoning our precious green order book? I never thought you had this kind of rebellion in you.” Merv had stood there in the middle of the room, hand on the top of his cane, moving it this way and that as if it were a gear stick in a racing car and he was about to press his foot to the accelerator to mow her down. He pinned Freya with angry blue eyes.
Freya, caught off-guard, was too weary to reply. She’d been making last-minute adjustments to the basic product range on the ground floor. In all the years she’d been working in the wedding cake business, it never ceased to amaze her how much trade Marbella wedding parties and hen and stag celebrations would bring FOM’s way. They always needed to be stocked up with meringues, cupcakes, macarons and small layer cakes. Basically everything except cake pops. Oh, and cakes on swings. Whether that became a fad or not, as long as Freya was running FOM, she would never agree to her team making and installing another one of those. The business was a cakery, not a playground.
