Page 40 of A Winter Kiss on Rochester Mews
And that was that. Except, Tom didn’t come home that night. Mattie listened out for the slow, scrapey turn of his key in the lock, but all was silent until she fell into a fitful doze at gone two in the morning.
He didn’t come home the next night either, or the one after that, which was fine. Mattie was done poking her nose into Tom’s business. If he wanted to stay out all night, shagging his way around London and the Home Counties, being a Casanova, inveigling his way into women’s beds and hearts with his shameless flirting and trickery, then that was absolutely his business.
It wasn’t anything to do with Mattie, which was exactly how she liked it.
As the damp drizzly days gave way to frost-bitten, freezing days, a skin-scouring crispness that Mattie always associated with Christmas clung to the air, and both Happy Ever After and the tearooms were busy from the moment that Verity and Mattie respectively flipped their door signs from ‘closed’ to ‘open’.
Mattie liked to think, especially given recent Tom-related events, that the tearooms would be busy even if they weren’t attached to a successful romantic fiction bookshop. They had their own loyal customer base and thanks to glowing write-ups inTime Out, theEvening Standardand countless food blogs, and the fact that their cakes were extremely Instagrammable (Cuthbert had painstakingly taught himself to stencil designs with chocolate powder on their cappuccinos), they were a viable business in their own right.
Still, it didn’t hurt that the TV news segment on Nina’s Mistletoe Booth had captured the imagination of every romantic in London, and that was in addition to the increased numbers of book buyers as Christmas crept ever closer. Then it was Mattie’s own turn in the TV spotlight. Clearly, lovers of pork encased in pastry outnumbered even hopeless romantics, so the daily lunchtime queue for pig-in-blanket rolls stretched now around the mews and out into Rochester Street.
Mattie was happy to be busy. She was even happier when Little Sophie and Sam broke up early from their fancy academy school for the Christmas holidays and Sophie was available to serve in the tearooms full time so that Mattie could stay in the kitchen. Not just because she was still keeping a low profile but because she needed to spend most of the day prepping, mixing, baking and cooling. It was against all sorts of food-safety regulations but she was even using the oven in the flat upstairs. It felt as if all her waking hours were punctuated by the beeping of one of three different timers to let her know that she had something to take out of an oven.
But when she wasn’t being beeped at, then she had her own unhappy thoughts for company. Posy, Nina and Verity were cordially polite when their paths crossed, which wasn’t that often, as they no longer came into the tearooms for a coffee or tea each morning. Even worse than getting their coffee and tea from a rival establishment, Mattie had seen them making their own coffee and tea in the sliver of space in the back office which could laughably be described as a kitchen. It was like a knife to the heart that they’d rather drink instant coffee and substandard, non-organic tea than Mattie’s own bespoke blends. And as for coming in for their lunch, which they all used to do? No. Not any more.
Although Mattie had briefly tortured herself with visions of the four of them, all sitting around in the Italian café eating paninis and bitching about her, the truth was a lot more tragic than that. Rather than partaking of Mattie’s delicious lunchtime savouries, Verity and Posy were bringing lunch from home. Tired-looking leftovers; floppy pasta from the night before. Ready meals cooked in the microwave that had languished unused in the back office and stank out the shop. Once Mattie had popped through to the office with some invoices for Verity and had caught her eating the most depressing sandwich in the world: some droopy ham and a bit of wilted lettuce between two slices of stale-looking white bread.
Mattie was also spending a considerable amount of time tormenting herself about Tom, who apparently was kipping on the sofa at a friend’s house. Tom had mentioned the sofa surfing to Nina who’d told Sam, who told Sophie, who discussed it with Cuthbert as they wondered aloud at how rumpled Tom was looking lately.
Mattie hadn’t noticed Tom’s rumpledom, because she was avoiding Tom at all costs. But when she overheard Sophie and Cuthbert talking about Tom’s bad back from sleeping on an ancient sofa and how cross Posy was with him because he said that he couldn’t be expected to hump boxes of books about for the foreseeable future, Mattie decided that enough was enough.
Though she’d had a valid point about Tom’s cavalier coffee consumption (‘Oh my God, let it go,’ Sophie had groaned when Mattie had brought the subject up yet again), she shouldn’t have outed Tom as a closet Casanova and expert in romantic fiction, so she had to make things right. She wasn’t brave enough to face Tom (and anyway, he did a swift about turn any time Mattie was near) and though they’d shared a living space, they’d never shared mobile numbers so she had no option but to message him on his Happy Ever After email address:
From: [email protected]
Tom,
I feel absolutely wretched about EVERYTHING. I’m sorry that I reacted so badly (though it was incredibly thoughtless of you to bring your breakfast panini from the Italian café into the tearooms every day but whatever, I’m over it) and I am so sorry, quite sick with shame, that I told Posy and Verity about your thesis. And that I called you a Lothario. Although I did see you in action at the Banter Boys’ bonfire party and you were coming across as quite Lothario-ish – just saying.
Anyway, it’s silly for you to be sleeping on a sofa in zone four, when you have a perfectly comfortable bed upstairs and a ten-second commute. Please come back to the flat and things can go back to how they were before. I’ll stay out of your way. Honestly, I’m quite happy to sit in my room and only come out when you tell me I can.
Again, I really am sorry.
Mattie
All day Mattie was on tenterhooks, staring at her phone and listening out for the ping that told her she had new mail, and not listening out for the beep that told her she had something that needed to come out of the oven. She even burned a batch of sponges.
Finally, as Mattie was staring disconsolately at the back of a customer who’d ordered two of her mince pies and had decimated both of them between his fingers and was now eating them crumb by crumb, the phone in her apron pocket pinged:
From: [email protected]
This whole living arrangement thing will only work if we agree not to talk to each other.
Regards,
Tom
It was harsh. Almost as harsh as the look on Tom’s face when he caught sight of Mattie an hour later as she was directing a tearoom customer to the Regency shelves in the bookshop. He looked at her in the exact same way he’d look if he’d trodden in something disgusting and it was all Mattie’s fault.
Filled with regret, Mattie messaged back:
From: [email protected]
