Before I could drop my phone in the air fryer, a triple knock on the back door, both familiar and forgotten, made me jump.
‘Twice in one decade?’ I said, throwing the door open to find Dev on my doorstep. ‘I am honoured.’
‘I come bearing bacon,’ he replied, presenting me with a plastic package of the bargain supermarket variety. ‘The stuff Mum gave you is from that new butcher in the village, great for sandwiches, terrible for pigs in blankets. You’ll never get the sausages to cook without burning the bacon first.’
‘Like that, you mean?’
I gestured over at my first attempt like a 1970s gameshow hostess.
‘Fuck me, Gwen, what did those sausages ever do to you?’ Dev set his bacon on the counter, took off his grey coat, unbuttoned his cuffs and rolled up his sleeves. ‘Not to overstep my bounds but do you need some help?’
I opened my mouth to say a well-rehearsed ‘No’, but something stopped me.
I did need help.
‘It’s Christmas, you’re supposed to be with your family.’ Family, fiancée, same difference. ‘I know it looks bad but really, it’s all under control,’ I said through gritted teeth. What was wrong with me? Even when someone offered, even when I really needed it, I still couldn’t quite manage to simply say, ‘Yes, I do need your help, thank you very much, might you know how one is supposed cook a parsnip?’
He picked up a packet of gingernuts. ‘What are these for?’
I bit my bottom lip, my shoulders rising slowly up to my ears.
‘The gingerbread and walnut stuffing?’
‘No.’ Dev opened the biscuit cupboard, a part of our kitchen he used to be very familiar with, and put them away. ‘We’re not even going into why not, just no. Right, I’m going to go out on a limb and say you don’t cook that often?’
‘How dare you?’ I gasped, planting my hands on my apron’s photoshopped Chippendale abs. ‘For all you know, I could be a Michelin star chef.’
He picked up the Yorkshire pudding batter and turned the bowl upside down. The batter did not budge.
‘Fine, you got me, this is my first go at Christmas lunch,’ I said, collapsing onto a stool and dropping my head onto the counter. ‘I don’t know what happened, I did everything I was told, I followed Nigella’s cooking plan and—’
‘Wait, you tried to Nigella your Christmas dinner first time out the gate?’ Dev sucked the air in through his teeth as he did a lap around the kitchen, picking things up and putting them down. ‘Schoolboy error, Gwen, schoolboy error. When you’re starting out you want your Delias, your Nadiyas, maybe an early Jamie, but you set yourself up trying to go the full Lawson on your first time. I’m sorry but I’m going to have to take over.’
‘You’re staging a coup on my Christmas dinner?’ I replied, secretly delighted.
‘You’ve given me no other option,’ he said with a grave nod. ‘I’m a doctor, I took an oath to do no harm and leaving you alone in this kitchen seems like one of the most harmful things I could possibly do as a human, let alone a medical professional.’
As he busied himself around the kitchen, lifting lids of pots and giving various pans a shake, I gnawed on the nail of my right thumb. It was impossible to overstate the size of my teenage crush on Dev. If they could find a way to harness the power of a teenage girl’s obsession, the global energy crisis would be over in a single heartbeat. I did it all, wrote down every possible combination of our names to see which looked best, worked out our astrological compatibility, nearly set fire to the house trying to cast a love spell using a Body Shop Dewberry essential oil burner, I thought about him constantly. And now here he was, all grown up and in my kitchen asthough no time had passed at all. I felt my pulse quicken the same way it did when we were still sixteen and just home from school with Dev scouring our cupboards for a mini Mars Bar. Naturally, his mum didn’t believe in keeping sweets in the house.
‘Right. OG pigs in blankets aside, this is all salvageable,’ Dev proclaimed on completing his initial investigation. ‘Challenging, but salvageable. We should be able to sort it in an hour or so.’
The sheer relief of it all. I dabbed myself down with a tinsel-trimmed tea cosy and forced myself to stop thinking about the tiny shrine I’d made to him in the bottom of my wardrobe. Every piece of evidence of our shared existence carefully archived in a Dolcis shoebox: bus tickets, photobooth strips, cinema stubs and a pair of his pants that blew off his washing line and into our garden and no I didn’t feel good about keeping them but common sense doesn’t really register with a fifteen-year-old girl in love.
‘Tell me what to do and I’ll do it,’ I told him, blushing at the memory of the stolen boxers. ‘Clearly I don’t know my arse from my elbow in the kitchen but I take direction extremely well.’
Dev chuckled as he pulled a parsnip out of a sticky bowl and gave it a very thorough inspection. ‘You must’ve changed a lot since we were kids. Rinse those off, dry them with kitchen towel then lay them out on a single sheet on that baking tray.’
‘I’ve changed a lot, it’s wild what time will do to a person,’ I replied, examining the parsnip. ‘Not that I’m questioning your methods, but thesearesupposed to be honey-glazed.’
‘Glazed not drowned. If you put them in like that, the sugar in the honey will burn before the parsnips are even warmed through.’ He gave me a look that suggested we would not be entering into a debate on the subject and I felt a distinct tingle in parts of my body that had not tingled in some time. ‘I thought you said you take direction well?’
‘Might have overplayed that part,’ I mumbled as I gathered up the parsnips and terminated the tingling. It was pointless, he was engaged. Plus, he probably still remembered the time he came over to play video games with Manny and I ran into the room screaming and crying because I was convinced I’d lost a tampon inside me. It really was impossible to believe he hadn’t fallen head over heels in love with me right there and then.
‘Thank you,’ I said with a small grateful smile. ‘For offering to help.’
‘Don’t mention it,’ Dev replied as he sliced open the packet of supermarket bacon like a pro. ‘And for what it’s worth, doesn’t seem like you’ve changed all that much as far as I can see.’
I looked up to see the two of us reflected in the kitchen window and felt time slipping away. I was still a good foot shorter than him, my hair was still out of control and I still couldn’t keep my eyes off him. Maybe I hadn’t changed all that much.