Baking With Boys |✔

51. Spumoni

The day of the finals arrived like an unforeseen windstorm. There was no pitter-patter of rain, or no forming of the clouds to indicate its arrival. In the blink of an eye, the two nights passed and we woke up to the sound of insistent knocking on our hotel door. Being so used to such panic-driving and frightening pattern of knocking, I mumbled in my sleep and kicked Brandon to tell him to open the door.

Befuddled with the late night of planning yesterday, it took me a few insistent kicks to make him budge from his spot. He sat up, confused, and switched the table lamp on. Light flooded the room, and I covered my face with the blankets.

"Who is it?" Brandon called out, his voice sore and deep at the wee hours of the morning.

I tried to go back to sleep but Brandon was making too much noise, first with finding his bathroom slippers, then finding his shirt, then yawning a few times before he actually shuffled to the impatient person on the other side of the door. There wasn't any need for me to see anything to be able to deduce what he did. He was a walking commentator, talking to himself and cursing about lost slippers and hidden shirts.

Not feeling guilty for making him do the work, I shifted deeper into the blanket and sought more of that sweet and warm sleep I had woken up from. Tried as I might to do so, my thoughts kept drifting back to the last time Sarah had visited us two, and how Brandon had played a cruel joke on me. Suffice to say, he was still receiving his punishment by becoming my handmaid of sorts.

Honestly, though. What a girl was to think when amidst his confession of liking me and right before kissing me, he mentioned a wedding?

I know I had freaked out, flashed my eyes open in an instant, only to see him bending down to kiss me. The kiss had lasted mere two seconds when I had pulled him off me, my heart beating out of my chest, head spinning, and body burning up hotter than a furnace, and fumbled out the question, "What did you just say?"

I don't think he expected such a violent reaction from me. Or maybe he did. I couldn't be sure behind his veil of an overly smug face and satisfied expression.

Brandon had simply tilted his head and ruffled the paper in his right hand. "Wedding. We'll be making a wedding cake."

Kicking my legs out in frustration and delving deeper into the blanket, I tried to remove the image of the most embarrassing moment ever out of my head. I couldn't believe I had actually thought that Brandon was proposing to me. Why I had that wild idea? I have no clue. And the face that Brandon made when he realized what I had thought he had said.

Stop thinking! I kicked the blankets away and pouted again. After the initial laugh he had, my embarrassment had transformed into anger and it's sufficient to say that Brandon has been suffering its wrath ever since.

"Tyler," Brandon called out, wheeling a trolley in and reading a card he held in his other end. The trolley bumped with the side table, rattling the utensils, making Brandon look up from whatever he was reading. "They're serving us breakfast."

"In bed? We don't have to go to the buffet?"

He passed on the card. "Special service for finalists. The camera crew will be here in five, you might wanna dress up a bit."

"What?" I shouted, flying out of the bed and into the bathroom. As I did the chores of cleaning myself up, I talked to Brandon. "Why are they coming though?"

"They will film us the entire day."

"Are you sure?"

"Yup, says so on the card."

I opened the bathroom door, letting my hair loose from the rubber band and letting them frame my face. "This is not a trick, is it?"

"You think Alard is doing this?"