Best friends forever, Gio thinks - until Gio's lifelong crush on Declan is exposed, leaving her humiliated, and Gio realises she needs to cut him loose to get over him once and for all.
Enter Theo, Gio's neighbour ... She's never met anyone like him before. He doesn't talk much, but he's kind, he's sexy, he's generous and he's often awake in the middle of the night, like Gio. Theo has a sweet tooth and a mysterious history and Gio can't seem to stay away.
Thanks to the power of sleepless nights and chocolate cake, Gio thinks she's finally over Declan, but then his whole world turns upside down. Gio knows she can't desert Declan in his time of need, but how can she explain a lifetime of love to Theo?
Letting go of the past isn't so easy when your heart is breaking.
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Best friends becoming something more is a good story. I’ve
certainly always been a big fan.
It’s a classic combination, after all: a
solid bedrock of affection and respect suddenly shot through with the lava of
red-hot passion. You see it in food all the time: creamy, comforting chocolate
awakened by fiery chilli; a soft, delicate roux set aflame by Worcestershire
sauce and a sprinkling of white pepper. It just worked. Or, at least, it did with other
people.
The evening I realised ‘best friend’ to ‘passionate lover’
wasn’t going to be as natural a progression as all my recipe books had
suggested, I stood at the island bench of my Great Aunt Agnes’ kitchen. A tray
of perfect, velvety dollops of choux pastry and my two squabbling best friends
were before me.
There wasn’t much about this scene that differed from any of the
past hundred Wednesday nights, but there was a slight tightness in my chest
that told me that this one was special. This was our last Wednesday as high
schoolers, our last Wednesday before actual adulthood set in.
My friends, however, didn’t seem to appreciate the significance.
‘I swear to God, Dec, call me shallow one more time.’ Zoë’s
smooth, jet-black bob quivered with agitation and Declan, lanky and
bright-eyed, held up the bible he’d been flipping through in mock surrender.
‘I’m not calling you shallow,’ he objected with a laugh that
suggested that’s exactly what he was doing. ‘I’m just pointing out that on
this, the eve of our graduation, we’ve all decided to pursue careers represented
by the cardinal sins.’
‘Training to be a beautician does not make me prideful.’
Zoë, the spitting image of how Snow White would’ve looked had she had anger
management issues, rose immediately and predictably to Dec’s bait. ‘Or stupid
or vain or whatever the hell you’re suggesting I am.’
‘And I wouldn’t say training to be a pastry chef necessarily
means I condone gluttony,’ I said as I dipped my finger into a glass of water
and began carefully dabbing down the tops of my pastry blobs so they wouldn’t
catch in the oven.
‘There’s no need to deny it, we’re all friends here,’ Dec said
cheerfully, sending a tiny wink my way as Zoë let out a constricted noise of
outrage. ‘And I’m not saying I’m exempt. I mean, I have an excessive
love of, and desire for, earthly possessions. Greed, yeah?’
There was a ‘tsch’ noise and we looked up to see Great Aunt
Agnes – Aggie to all who knew and loved her – emerging from the bathroom in a
waft of her distinctively spicy perfume.
‘What is this talk of sins?’ she asked in heavily accented
English, putting her hands on her hips with a flourish that made her gold
bracelets chime. ‘You are not sinners. You are my brains, beauty and,’ she
searched for a way to describe me and then raised her rather severe eyebrows
and finished, ‘baker.’
This sort of affirmation was nothing we hadn’t heard from her
before, but we still smirked at each other in that mixture of embarrassment and
pride we felt every time she so easily validated each of us.
‘But this?’ She marched over and pulled her bible from Dec’s
grasp before waggling it in his face. ‘Not a prop.’
Dec grinned back at her, unrepentant. ‘I thought you’d be
pleased I was expanding my religious education.’
‘Aw.’ She reached out and gave his chin an affectionate little
wiggle then lightly slapped him on the cheek. ‘Respect and grace,’ she reminded
him, a common refrain of hers that Zoë and I mouthed behind her back.
Her gospel saved, Aggie moved away to start rummaging through
her cavernous wardrobe on the other side of her studio flat and the rest of us
returned to the matter at hand.
‘Of course, there’s another way to look at it.’ Zoë shifted
forward on her stool and poked Dec in the chest with a perfectly polished nail.
‘Some would say that my aim is to make people feel beautiful on the outside,
and Gio’s is to do the same on the inside. Frankly, we’re going to bring good
to the world. You’re the only bad guy here, Brains.’
‘Well, nothing new there, then.’ The corners of Dec’s mouth
quirked self-deprecatingly.
Afraid that my eyes were about to start flashing neon heart
signs at him like in a cartoon, I looked for something to say other than: I
know you’re one of my best friends, but I’m mad about you, please let me have
your babies.
‘Check out my choux!’ is what I landed on and, as distractions
went, it was a pretty effective one. Dec and Zoë immediately stopped narrowing
their eyes at each other and, appearing vaguely puzzled, lifted themselves to
look over the counter and down at my feet instead.
When I realised why, I let out a little snort. ‘Not shoe.’ I
laughed. ‘Choux!’ And I gestured at the tray in front of me.
They exchanged a look.
‘Not shoe shoe?’ Zoë repeated.
‘Choux,’ I said again, trying to enunciate the difference. ‘Choux.’
‘You’re aware that you’re just standing there repeating the word
“shoe”, yeah?’ Dec said and I rolled my eyes.
‘C-h-o-u-x,’ I spelt out.
‘Choux pastry.’ I indicated the blobs on the tray again and they both
obediently switched their attention to them. I could tell by their
expressions, however, that they didn’t get it. They didn’t appreciate how
sheeny the dough had become once I’d added the eggs or how evenly I’d piped the
buns out, and they certainly didn’t appreciate the perfect golden puffs they were
destined to turn into.
‘Just say, “They look lovely, dear”,’ I advised.
‘They look lovely, dear,’ they intoned obediently.
Tying a brightly patterned scarf around her throat, Aggie
re-emerged from her Aladdin’s cave of a closet and headed back to the kitchen
area.
‘Are you ready, minha querida?’ she asked and Zoë nodded,
hopping off the bar stool, expertly shimmying her tight black skirt back to its
proper length and then wrinkling her nose.
‘Sinner or not,’ she said dryly as she snatched up her purse,
‘as God is my witness, once I have enough money to quit waitressing I am going
to burn this skirt. It doesn’t matter how many times I wash it, it always
smells like garlic.’
‘So that’s what that smell is,’ Dec deadpanned, ducking
as she thwacked her purse into his head in response.
‘Text me later,’ I called as she headed for the front door and
she waved a hand over her shoulder in reply.
That was Zoë: always with somewhere else to be, always hitting
someone round the back of the head as she went.
Aggie paused only to blow extravagant kisses at Dec and me,
which we returned with gusto, before she, too, bustled out of her flat.
‘And then there were two.’ Dec stretched out his long legs,
hooking his feet into the footrest of Zoë’s abandoned stool and grinning lazily
at me across the counter.
Oh god, I loved him, I loved him, I loved him . . .
‘So you’ll be the first to try my chocolate-topped caramel
custard profiteroles!’ My exclamation was much too high-pitched, but in my defence, it was getting harder and harder to act
normally around Dec now my mid-level crush of the past two years had exploded
into full-on infatuation.
‘Works for me.’
It was difficult to tell whether he was just being kind by not
mentioning my obvious partiality to him, or whether Dec was actually so dense
that he hadn’t noticed. His even response then left me none the wiser.
There followed a companionable half-hour or so where I pottered
about finishing off my baking and Dec did whatever it was that boys do on their
phones every waking hour of their lives. I revelled in the cosy domesticity of
it all and tried not to feel too guilty about how much I enjoyed this time
every Wednesday when Zoë left for work, dropping Aggie off at her ‘stitch and
bitch’ group on the way, and reduced our usual foursome down to a twosome.
Not that various permutations of us didn’t end up congregating
at Aggie’s flat on other days of the week. Dec and Zoë had the sort of home
lives that people spoke about in sad whispers, and my parents worked gruelling
shift-work hours and had always relied on Aggie to provide before- and
after-school care for me when I was younger, a routine I’d never really grown
out of as I adored Aggie and sought any excuse to see her. So it was here,
where the door was always open and the kettle was always on, that we all ended
up more often than not.
‘Do you think it’ll to work out?’
I spent just about every cent of the money I earned as a
check-out chick on baking ingredients and recipe books and kept an extensive
stash of both at Aggie’s studio. When Dec suddenly spoke, I’d been
concentrating on melting chocolate to the right temperature for tempering.
‘My profiteroles?’ I asked blankly.
He shook his head. ‘I’m kind of thinking bigger than your
profiteroles.’
I was about to make some smart remark about how it wasn’t the
size of the profiteroles that mattered, but how they tasted, but stopped as I
saw him start to spin his phone back and forth nervously.
‘Bigger how?’ I asked. Seeing that the chocolate had reached
forty-five degrees, I removed it from the double boiler to stir in the
remaining room-temperature chocolate.
‘You know, our sins.’ He raised his hazel eyes to mine and I
belatedly realised how much his mood had shifted since Zoë and Aggie had left.
‘Do you think they’ll work out? Cos we’ve all sat here and talked about what
we’re going to do with our lives for years. What the hell do we do if it turns
out that the Beauty’s allergic to nail polish, or the Baker’s actually crap at
baking, or the Brain’s not smart enough for uni?’
No-one was a bigger champion of Zoë and me than Dec, so I knew
it wasn’t our abilities he was questioning.
The three of us lived in an outer suburb called Jarli that was
known primarily for its large sign that proclaimed: ‘Welcome to Jarli’ and
which some joker had graffiti-ed ‘Good fucking luck!’ across. Our luck lay in
Aggie, who’d immigrated to Australia from Brazil with my maternal grandparents
and, from day one, had been determined to make a success of herself. At an
early age, Zoë, Dec and I had each become disciples of Aggie’s zeal for
self-improvement, encouraged by her to read and study and work towards a better
set of cards than our respective parents had been dealt.
Which wasn’t to say that some of the ingrained ‘you’ll never amount
to anything’ Jarli way of thinking didn’t sometimes get the better of us. Dec
most of all.
‘Okay,’ I said slowly, reinserting the thermometer into the
chocolate as I stirred it. ‘Except Zoë’s been wearing polish since she could
hold a brush, I’m a freaking excellent baker, if I do say so myself, and
you killed it in your exams.’
‘I guess.’ Dec pocketed his phone and drummed his fingers on the
counter. ‘It’s just that I want to be good at what’s coming, you know? I need
to be good at it.’
His voice was fierce, but there was something small in it as
well, and I got it. There weren’t exactly a surplus of successful role models
in his family and he’d been talking about being nothing like them ever since
the first day of primary school. Knowing the fear and anxiety that lay behind
his words, I thought carefully about my reply.
‘I guess, in the very unlikely event that you did turn
out to be a massive failure at uni, you’d still have a fair bit going for you.’
Deciding that his need for reassurance outweighed my desire for
super shiny chocolate, I set aside the mixture and moved around the bench to
perch on the stool facing him.
‘I mean, you are smart, like annoyingly smart, and nothing short
of some sort of brain trauma’s going to change that. And you’d still be a laugh
and a handsome bugger.’ He cracked a smile at this, which gave me the
confidence to add, ‘And you’d have me. And Zoë and Aggie, obviously, you’d
still have all of us.’
I’d looked down into my lap as I’d said this last bit and had to
force myself to peek up at him to see what he thought of my mushiness. I was
pleased to see that the taut line between his eyebrows had relaxed and he was
looking at me with a small smile. I felt my breath catch in my throat as he
shifted forward on his stool, reaching out to gently tuck a curl behind my ear.
It was a completely futile gesture, of course, as it sprang straight back out,
but it made me melt all the same.
‘You’re something else, Gio. I don’t know what I’d do without
you,’ he said, leaning in close and lowering his voice.
Dozens of responses came to mind, most of them along the lines
of you’ll never have to find out, but in the end, I just did what I’d
wanted to do for so long now. I closed the minuscule gap between us and pressed
my lips to his.
It felt so right, exactly what I’d been hoping for, and I let
the moment consume me, cataloguing every last detail and storing it away with
the intention of savouring it for the rest of my life.
Yes, I memorised our first kiss and, boy, did I live to regret
it.
4 Stars
This the first read for me by this author and I can now say, I fan and looking forward for more! Cake at Midnight is the perfect blend about best friends, heartbreak and finding new love.
Gio, Zoe and Declan have been best friends forever. But as they grew older, their lives changed and they tried hard to grow apart. Gio always had a crush on Declan, but he "friend-zones" all the time and she ends up being his go-to friend, when no one else is around. That's when Gio is crushed and decides she needs to move on.
In come Gio's mysterious next door neighbor, Theo. The more time she spends with Theo and less time with her friendship with Declan, Gio starts to move on. She learns things about herself with her new relationship.
Don't worry, this isn't a love triangle, but more of a growing up between friends and just staying at that. This book will take your the ups and down on friendship and love. A fabulous read that is heartwarming and little bit angsty!
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