Chapter 11
FREYA
I spend a good five minutes choosing my meal – I go for fish and chips in the end – because it’s way better deliberating over a pub menu than it is having my head full of Jake.
For a moment there, I borderline liked him.
And then he turned back into the total shit that he is, telling me that my books cause horrific divorces.
But then he looked as though he was actually, possibly, slightly taking on board my points.
And then he was marginally nicer than his usual self when I asked about Dan and Lizzie, before making it very clear that he didn’t want to talk to me during the break.
Thank heavens there’ll be other people there on the team-building weekend.
I do the ‘during the date’ video that Sonja asked for, describing what we’ve been doing so far, and then go back upstairs.
Redrawing our pictures onto the embroidery canvas is slightly boring. I don’t love art, and we’ve already drawn each other once. I am, though, looking forward to seeing what Jake does with my nostrils.
We all (including Jake and me) work in more or less silence until Petra thinks we should all have finished.
‘Great work, Jake,’ she says enthusiastically – so enthusiastically that either she is besotted with him or it is not great – as she walks around looking at everyone’s work.
She finishes looking and then claps. ‘Time for the mini reveal before the big one later on when the embroidery is finished. Show your partners!’
‘You first,’ Jake says.
Mine’s fine. It does pretty much look like a real person.
It doesn’t look like Jake, but it’s slightly more like him than my first one was.
I’m not amazing at art, although I did enjoy it at school, but it’s actually really easy to look like you’ve attempted to sketch Jake without having made that much effort, because he’s so classically ruggedly handsome that you just have to aim for a very classically good-looking man with dark hair and you will look like you’ve tried to draw him.
‘Not bad.’ He looks down at his own and then up again, and his lips twitch, which makes me worry that I’m very rudely going to want to laugh again. ‘Are you ready?’
I nod. I. Must. Not. Laugh. He’s often annoying, sometimes incredibly so, but no-one should ever be laughed at for a slight lack of artistic ability.
He turns it round, and I almost gasp out loud. It’s… well, way more like a… well… I don’t know what. Not really an animal. Maybe an alien. Or a first-draft Picasso maybe. At best.
I fight an emerging snigger, and when I’m sure that I’m going to be polite and definitely not laugh, I say, ‘The nostrils are a great size.’
Jake looks me right in the eye and laughs out loud.
I fight some more, and manage again not to laugh. I do have to look down at my lap, though, and hold my lips clamped really tightly together.
‘Well done,’ he murmurs across the table. ‘Excellent no-laughing.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, with still not even a tremor of laughter in my voice. I am good.
‘Time to begin the embroidery,’ Petra says. She’s an incredibly enthusiastic woman, which is of course great, because we are here to learn, and no-one likes an unenthusiastic teacher.
We both waste valuable embroidering time trying over and over again to thread our needles, so we both have absolutely no idea what we’re supposed to be doing stitch-wise when we do eventually have them threaded, and Petra has to come over to give us an individual lesson on how to do cross-stitching.
‘I find this quite often with couples,’ she says. ‘The drawing each other’s faces is so intense when you’re with someone you love that you’re so wrapped up in each other for the rest of the evening you keep missing things.’
‘Not a couple,’ Jake says very firmly. ‘Just two single people who are all thumbs when it comes to needle-threading.’
‘Really.’ Petra stands back and looks at us both. ‘Well… there you go. I must be wrong. I sensed a lot of passion between you. Tension.’
‘Ha,’ I say. ‘No. We’re just…’ We aren’t friends. ‘Colleagues.’
Petra looks at us in turn again and then says, ‘Interesting. Do keep me updated.’ She looks again. ‘I feel as though I recognise you both. Are you famous?’
‘Nope.’ Jake shakes his head.
I shake mine too. Then I worry that she’ll see us on the show and feel misled.
‘It’s just that we ended up on TV together on Wake Up Britain, and, long story short, ended up doing a series of… evenings out… together,’ I say. ‘This is one of those.’
‘Oh. Maybe that explains everything.’ She peers very intently at Jake and then me, and then says, ‘I’d still like an update on how everything pans out between you.’
‘We can give you that update right now,’ Jake tells her. ‘We’re just temporary colleagues, as Freya said, and then we probably won’t see each other again.’
Petra frowns.
‘He’s right. But not in a bad way,’ I lie. ‘Just… we’re both busy people, you know.’
‘Yeah, no, I actually see something between you,’ she says. ‘Anyway. Time to sew.’
We all kind of hover there, as you do at the end of a slightly off conversation, and then Jake breaks the awkward silence.
‘I’m really sorry to ask.’ He presents Petra with a gleaming smile. ‘But could you possibly just give me a quick recap on how to do that stitch again?’
‘Of course.’ Petra’s return smile is suddenly so flirty I’m surprised she hasn’t written her number on his arm.
Which makes sense actually; what she was saying before about there being some kind of tension between us was kind of weirding me out a little, but I now realise that she must just have been trying to establish whether there was anything between us before making a move on Jake.
If he finds true love with her, I’d be quite happy, actually.
I’d have lost the challenge, but I’d rather go on a love therapy weekend by myself than the team-building one with him.
Jake does not show a natural talent with a needle, so Petra is forced to keep coming over to help him. I say forced; she seems more than happy to spend lots of very tactile time with him.
I find it slightly annoying, actually. I mean, it’s hardly professional, is it?
At the beginning of the second break, we’re all asked whether we’d rather eat at tables on the other side of the room, or continue to embroider through the break. Jake and I both elect to sew while we eat; having snuck glances at some of the others’ canvases, we know we’re way behind everyone else.
‘I think it was because it took us so long to thread our needles.’ I realise that I’ve been staring so hard at my canvas, trying to get my stitches right, that my vision’s gone slightly blurry.
‘Yeah.’ Jake’s staring at his own canvas. ‘How is everyone else so good at that? And also why is it not hurting anyone else’s fingers?’
‘You aren’t supposed to keep poking yourself.’ I look more closely at his hands. ‘Have you smeared blood on your canvas?’
‘Might have done. But not to worry. I’m going to sew over it.’
‘Delightful.’
He nods very seriously. ‘It doesn’t matter if you mess up, it’s how you recover that counts. Always sew over your blood.’
‘You’re so right. Why didn’t Petra tell us that?’
Our freakishly civilised and friendly little exchange is terminated by the arrival of our food, and then we’re both busy juggling cutlery and needles until our embroidery companions retake their seats, and then everyone continues in near-silence, because this is, frankly, a ridiculously challenging task to be completed in the time available (or, indeed, at all).
When we finish, Petra does her clapping thing and then says, ‘Okay, so it’s time for the big reveal.’
‘Would you like to go first?’ Jake says.
‘Love to.’ I turn mine towards him and his eyes widen.
‘Wow,’ he says. ‘You have a genuine talent there. I mean, it slightly looks like me and it fully looks like a person. It’s… amazing. I’m genuinely impressed. It’s as though you – the prolific author – are naturally creative.’
‘Why thank you.’ I’m a little stunned by Jake being nice. Maybe he’s just doing it to impress Petra. ‘Now yours?’ Petra leant over him a lot while he was doing it; maybe she helped and it’s actually going to be very good.
‘Here we go.’ He moves it from side to side in a building-suspense fashion, and then suddenly turns it round.
And then we both just laugh.
When we eventually wipe our eyes, I say nothing. There are in fact no words for how bad it is. If you had to guess the age of the person who did it, you’d probably say five or six.
I lean forward. I’ve just noticed something. ‘Did you spill some of your curry on it? As well as the blood.’ I indicate the browny splatters to the top left of it.
‘Yep.’
‘No time to sew over it?’
‘Yeah, there’s only so much genius I can produce in one evening.’
‘It is genius,’ I say.
‘I know.’ Jake turns the canvas back towards him and shakes his head. ‘Three hours of my life gone doing this.’
Petra claps. ‘Well done everyone. I’m proud of all of you, every single one of you.
’ She looks long and meaningfully at Jake, and I catch sight of his right foot doing a little backwards and forwards circle, and wonder whether it’s due to slight sexual attraction or discomfort over the (what I would call) OTT flirting.
‘Now. It is of course your choice as to what you do with your finished embroideries, but one suggestion is to make a present to each other of them. A lovely memento of this evening. Or you can keep them, as a lovely embroidered memento portrait of each other.’
We look at each other for a long moment, during which I think no thank you very much, I do not want a memento of Jake. He clearly thinks the same thing, because we suddenly, as one, shoot our arms out and exchange them.
Which, frankly, doesn’t make any difference because it’s still a memento, just one of his work rather than my work. To be fair, his work has actually given me a lot of pleasure. You don’t cry with laughter every day.