All Of My Silences Will Be Your Words [English Vers. - FINISHED]

Chapter Thirteen

The journey home was... Strange. Maybe because Felix had stopped talking ? We ate our cotton candy in total silence on the way home. Too total for my taste, if you must know. It was the kind of heavy silence that nobody wants and where nobody suddenly feels at home.

Fortunately, we soon reached the house, and I felt as much relief on Felix's part as on mine. When we opened the door, we were greeted by the smell of cooking food, and Felix's parents. Mrs. Lee came towards us with her usual big smile and a large salad bowl in her hands.

- Hi, you two ! You're just in time, we needed help setting the table and finishing dinner ! She exclaimed cheerfully.

I smiled at her and nodded, while Felix did the same, a little less cheerfully than usual... Which his mother noticed. She raised an eyebrow in his direction, and I left them both to return to the kitchen. If there was one thing I didn't want to talk about with anyone, it was what had happened earlier. Just thinking about it made my cheeks and ears turn pink. I had to get my mind off it, and fast! I couldn't keep thinking about it and getting in my head when I didn't even know where I stood with Felix. Were we going to talk about it again ? Or just pretend it never happened ? And if we did, how would we broach the subject ? What could I say ? How do you...

- Well, you're just in time, Sae-Jin ! Mister Lee exclaimed as he saw me enter the kitchen.

I looked up at him, suddenly brought back to reality.

- Can you help me, please ? Mr Lee said.

He held up his flour-laden hands, looking a little embarrassed. In front of him, on the worktop also full of flour, was half-spread what I understood to be cake batter. I approached him, wondering how I could help him, since I'd never cooked before in my life. It didn't take long for Mr Lee to explain the situation to me, with a hint of desperation in his tone of voice.

- Lina wanted to try out a new recipe for dessert, and I offered to do it myself as a surprise... I just hadn't thought that the recipe in question would be, well, slightly more complicated than expected.

With his dejected face and the explosion of flour around him, my smile returned to tickle my lips.

- Need I point out that Lina hasn't been in the kitchen for half an hour and if she comes back now she'll kill me for the flour ? He added with a serious look on his face.

I started to laugh, but my compassionate side called me to order : I grabbed the sheet where the famous dessert was printed, and thought as best I could of a way to rectify the cake so that it would be at least edible for tonight.

In the end, even if a great chef would have been horrified by our amateur work, I thought we'd done pretty well. After half an hour, we could already see a semblance of a cake, and after an hour of baking and finishing to hide the biggest disasters (or finishing for decoration, as Monsieur Lee used to say), we had a dessert for tonight's dinner. In the meantime, Rachael and Olivia had returned from the funfair, and had immediately gone for a shower (as luck would have it, Olivia still had plenty of snow on her, and Madame Lee suspected they'd been playing with the kids at the park near our house).

After all that, I simply had time for a quick shower of my own before joining the Lee family downstairs for dinner, and wondered where Felix had gone, whom I hadn't seen since our return from the funfair. Taking care of dessert with Monsieur Lee, then helping Madame Lee set the table with Olivia and Rachael had made me forget the afternoon, except that once I was alone, standing in front of my wardrobe trying to decide what to wear tonight, Felix came back to titillate my thoughts. Our kiss, his smiles, the softness of his lips, his laughter...

I simply couldn't think of anything else or pretend it hadn't happened. Was he in the same state as me ?

After showering and replaying all the possible and unimaginable questions, I reached the stairs leading to the dining room in a dog's mood.