(Vegetables) Chapter Seven: Here He Comes, A Knight With Shining Wine Bottles

Morwen, Rosa and Felindre were making carrot and orange cupcake numbers 48 to 72 when the doorbell rang. Rosa went to open it.

It was Richard, laden down with shopping bags, and with a bunch of flowers tucked under one arm.

“Am I glad to see you,” said Rosa in relief. “Mor could do with a hug about now.”

She appraised the flowers carefully.

“Tulips. Much better than carnations, but you can still do better.”

Richard gave a half shrug with the shoulder that didn’t have the bunch of flowers wedged under it. A small smile crept over his face.

Rosa took one of the shopping bags from him.

“Mor!” she yelled. “It’s for you!”

Morwen came out of the kitchen looking cross, with flour all over her hands and down the front of her dress.

“The mixer’s just packed it in, and we’ve run out of sugar again! I thought you bought three kilos?”

She stopped dead when she saw Richard.

“I thought you were going away for work,” she said.

“I am,” he said. “But I didn’t want to go without seeing you tonight. And I bet I can fix that mixer for you.”

Rosa, meanwhile had been rummaging through the shopping bags.

“Flour, sugar, cocoa powder, marge, eggs, chocolate sprinkles, icing sugar! You wonderful man! And I bought three bags of sugar – they’re on the counter.”

“I know you have the chickens,” explained Richard, “but I thought I’d bring some eggs along anyway, just in case.

Rosa let go of the bag, and it thumped onto the ground. Richard and Morwen both winced.

“Eggs!” they both called out.

Morwen turned to Rosa “You mean the three five hundred gram bags that we’ve already used up that were on the counter?”

“Oh,” said Rosa. Then to cover she gave Richard a big hug and whispered in his ear.

“Give her the tulips, you dummy!”

She adroitly relieved him of the second shopping bag and looked in there too.

“Wooohoooo!!! WINE!! Fel! Get the bottle opener and glasses!”

Rosa took off back to the kitchen, clutching the wine to her, baking ingredients lying unattended on the floor.

Morwen and Richard looked at each other. Slowly, hesitantly, they both smiled.

Richard awkwardly held out the flowers to her. She took them, and carefully put them down on top of the cake ingredients bag.

Then she stepped into his arms and kissed and hugged him.

“My knight in shining armour,” she said. “Come to save me from the evils of broken mixers, the irritation of housemates who don’t know the difference between five hundred grams and a kilo, and the perils of carrot and orange fairy cakes. Bringing wine too.”

They were about to kiss again, when Felindre’s voice yelled from the kitchen:

“Stop smooching – we’ve got another sixty odd cupcakes to make and ice before tomorrow morning!”

Richard muttered under his breath:

“They’re fine ones to talk...”

“Come on,” said Morwen. “Let’s get baking.”

Exhausted but happy (and slightly drunk) all four fell into various beds at an ungodly hour that morning, with one hundred and fifty beautifully iced fairy cakes on trays covered in cling film lined up on the kitchen table, and a food processor that looked like the bastard offspring of an industrial cement mixer and a drill, but mixed the most perfectly smooth cake batter in less than a minute²¹.

Richard had tried to head back to his own house at half four, but Morwen was having none of it.

They all were happily and very deeply asleep when Morwen’s bedroom door opened. A chicken²² peeked into the room, clucked quietly and contentedly, and then left.

Richard’s phone woke him and Morwen up a mere few hours later. After a whispered conversation, he pulled himself out of bed.

“Sorry, love,” he said. “Server crash. I’ll call in the morning.”

It took Morwen until the morning to realise that he’d called her “love”.

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²² You don’t want to know what weird and wonderful things Richard had used for parts. And glue. Lots of glue.
²² Gingernut, or possibly Bourbon. It was dark.