salvia. [h.s. AU]

Chapter Six

Maria Eduarda

"You have to give me your recipe!" Martha moaned out after eating her fifth cookie in a roll. "I'll never want to eat those poor excuses for a cookie that I've been baking."

"Don't be ridiculous, I'm sure your recipe is amazing." I rolled my eyes playfully, reaching for a cookie myself, actually the first one I eat today.

We're in the service's room, during lunch break. I spent the whole morning cleaning the third floor, where there's a private gym, another bathroom and what I believe to be Mr. Styles's studio - it's where I'm heading to after lunch. I haven't seen anyone in the house besides Martha, Jerome and Catherine, and honestly it feels kinda weird to be cleaning and working on a house none of the owners are.

I mean, I saw Mr. Styles this morning when I arrived, and one of the guest rooms was locked when I tried to go there to organize everything so I guess there's someone there, and Mrs. Styles was super nice wishing me a good day before she left this morning - it was barely 8. I have no idea where she went, but it's none of my business anyway.

After our little interaction this morning, I didn't see him again, and for some reason I'm feeling a bit antsy about it. I can't explain why, but I felt something different while I was talking to him. It's something about his eyes, maybe his energy, I don't know, but it made my stomach clench with an overwhelming and unexpected sense of sadness. When I arrived and saw him on the same spot he was last night, I honestly thought he had spent the whole night there, smoking his cigarettes with a gloomy look on his eyes. It's something about him, maybe the way he held himself last night while his friends were here and he simply laid there looking to the sky while smoking, free completely absent of everything happening around him.

The moment I saw him this morning, I felt an urge to make something, anything, that could make him smile, which doesn't even make sense considering I barely know the guy - who, by the way, happens to be my boss and the very person for whom I should act like I was invisible. I can't really explain the blind impulse that took over me, all I know is that I recognized in him some of my own melancholy, and felt it in my core the need to make it go away.

And the only thing that could ever make it go away, at least for me, it's cooking. But even though I'm OK with being the weird girl - I know I'm socially awkward and people who don't know me tend to find me a bit peculiar - I felt it would be too awkward to suggest he should try to cook something at 6 in the morning.  So I thought of the closest thing to cooking that might soothe his soul a bit, and ended up swallowing my nervousness about new people trying my food and offered him the cookies I've baked during the night while I couldn't sleep.

I've made so many, Dani made me pack most part of it and bring it here to share with my co-worker, because, and here I'm quoting her, we would both explode if I kept baking the way I do. I really thought getting a job would help my anxiety to subside, at least enough so I could have a decent night of sleep for a change, but apparently, it isn't enough.