Vanilla

Fifty Five

A/N: I'm so so sorry I took so long to write this chapter! /.\ do forgive me eep. If you're following me on Instagram, you might sort of know what I have been going through the past two weeks, which, albeit a seemingly short time, have been perhaps the most eventful two weeks of my whole entire life.

I often think about how writing requires an objective mind void of distractions; recently it's been of the latter because of a certain someone, and I don't quite know how to handle it since, well, it's really been ten years since I've last talked to him! It's the same guy I wrote about in my final author's note in Baked Love ^^

How strange the world works. I feel as though someone is writing my story. How strange, how very, very strange.

Enjoy the chapter.

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[Vanilla]

Somewhere along the way, days have become much shorter than nights and here I was, emerging from the conference room having bid Chef Marseille and the team a brief farewell before entertaining thoughts of retiring to Cinnamon instead of my apartment. Meditations of Leroy waiting in the latter with a simmering pot of chicken soup and the image of it steaming in a bowl—glistening clear broth, onions, carrots and all—was enough to imbue a sense of purpose in my feet despite the cold.

I was midway down the steps of Anton plaza, headed towards the front gate when the buzz of a text caught my attention. Leroy had returned to Cayenne and appeared to have been, indeed, in the process of testing out an old creation of his which was what we established as a decent way of figuring out the extent of his condition.

It was in receiving this text that I recalled the list of ingredients Chef Marseille had entrusted me with, meant for the bonus round that was to be held in less than twelve hours. I responded to Leroy's text before making a U-turn and going back up the stairs into Roth hall, informing him that I was to be giving the ingredients in the storage room a quick check. He'd given a quick show of disappointment in the form of an :( which I'd found myself laughing at.

Pulling out the list and attaching it to a handy clipboard I preferred to bring around, I made my way down to the basement of the building where the storage and freezer rooms were, apart from the wine cellar. They weren't very hard to identify and the food safety foundation course taken by every first-year student helped in that we had been showed around and taught exactly how food should be stored in a proper manner.

The logistic checklist had in one of the columns, checkboxes for valid expiry dates beside the name of each ingredient and while there were a mere forty or fifty items in total, I could tell that I was going to take some time.

"Hey, you're kinda late."

I'd scanned my student ID by the entrance to the cellar just as Chef Marseille had reminded me to and rounded the corner to see a small group of three other assistants with checklists in their hands. "Oh, um. My apologies. I was... well. I have no excuses. Should we get started then?"

One of them snorted. "Too busy partaking in cancel culture?" I'd paused, stunned into confusion.

"Um. Sorry. I don't seem to quite under—"