Devil's Food Cake [✓]

12 | dumpling soup

While waiting for Jonny come back downstairs to our table, I leaned back in my chair, allowing my mind to drift. He'd gone to get a second helping from the buffet. Although I couldn't imagine how he'd managed to still have any room; his plate was stacked with different items.

Remarkably, he'd managed to fit a little of each of the dishes, which each smelled amazing.

They consisted of dim sum, rice, spring rolls, pork dishes, chicken rolls, rice noodles and many other savoury delights.

I kind of regretted limiting myself to the dumpling soup, even though it was delicious and steaming hot. Jonny, ever the gentleman, had been nice enough to share some of his dishes with me. From the few mouthfuls I'd indulged in, the buffet was indeed a great choice.

During the meal, we'd talked about work, school and a new TV series that was about zombie vampires currently airing. It was a dystopian show set in a highly commercialised version of America, where the population were divided up into two groups: The Zombies and The Vamps.

Without much success, Jonny tried persuading me to believe his theory about one of the lead characters; he thought that the whole dystopian world was a figment of bounty hunter Florian Darkwood's crazed mind.

However, I wasn't so sure.

I had a theory that Darkwood's half-zombie girlfriend Jocelyn was his long-lost sister, which Jonny promptly declared was absurd, but he didn't put it pass the producers to create something so messed up going by the previous storylines.

I forgot that we were on a date, feeling comfortable around him now that I'd got used to the situation.

Jonny was good company, but, of course, that came as no surprise. We'd been good friends with each other for six months, so I knew a lot of things about him, just like he did with me.

However, that didn't mean I didn't learn a few new things too. Mostly anecdotes about his family.

His parents were both Scots. Until he was five he'd been raised in Edinburgh, then his family had moved to Kent as a result of his father's IT consulting work. His mother worked as a primary school teacher.

Jonny didn't have a Scottish accent because he'd lost it, but he could do wonderful impressions of his parents and surly older brother Kevin, who was currently taking a weekend break to Prague with his wife Helena.

In one such anecdote, The Pollacks had been invited to in the highlands for a wedding and Jonny had sent me into spasms of laughter when he'd explained how a stubborn Kevin had delegated himself as driver of the expedition, which had resulted in them getting lost and having to stay in a sheep farmer's humble abode.

Helena had complained of hearing strange noises downstairs, so to halt her complaints, Kevin had gone out into the corridor in his boxers to investigate. When he'd got down to the kitchen, baseball bat in hand, he was confronted by the site of the farmer's wife chopping up a huge pig. The poor animal was leering at him.

The farmer's wife gazed at him with a blank, eerie expression, and he hurried upstairs and locked his room door. It had been a weird sight for him.

Despite his brother's unwillingness to admit it at the time, he'd been terrified.

The next morning Jonny had found out from the farmer that his wife was a sleep walker, which explained her actions during the witching hour.

All in all, I was having a good time that evening and I was glad that I'd accepted his offer.

A Chinese New Year poster stuck on the wall beside our table, so I took the opportunity to see which events caught my eye. There was a photo of a red dragon at a street festival with people lining the streets and it reminded me of the festival I'd gone to earlier in the year with a Korean friend.