Work Text:
Never mind the ‘first snow’ the other day, thinks Jo as she surveys the kitchen, it may as well be snowing in here.
There is flour on almost every available countertop, and the kitchen window is wide open, letting cold air in and a suspicious smell of burning out. She catches sight of Kate’s guilty face as she rounds the corner into the kitchen, the mop from the upstairs cupboard in her hand.
“Shit! Jo! You scared the living daylights out of me.” Kate yelps, and then she frowns. “It’s early, you’re not supposed to be home from work yet.”
Jo walks towards her, taking the mop out of her hands and doing her best to lean forward to kiss her without covering herself in the flour that Kate seems to have dipped herself in from head to toe. “I think you will find, my love, that I am in fact half an hour late.” She grins. “I see you’ve been keeping busy.”
Kate huffs at her. “I wanted to make gingerbread stars, like you made last Christmas.”
“Oh Kate.” Jo smiles softly at her.
“But as it turns out, we don’t even have any ginger or the right kind of sugar, and then the bag of flour fucking exploded everywhere.”
“It just exploded, did it?” Jo raises an eyebrow.
Kate looks at the floor. “Well. I tipped it over on one counter, moved it to the other where I thought it would be safe, tipped it over again, and then dropped it on the way back to the cupboard and it broke.”
Jo squawks with laughter.
Kate is less than impressed. “Hey! Flour’s fucking slippy.”
Jo presses another kiss to her cheek. “All the more reason to get this cleared up.”
“That’s what I was going to do when you came barging through the door and interrupted.” Kate gripes.
“With a bucket and a mop?” Jo questions. And then, as Kate’s eyes gleam, “And don’t you dare start singing.”
“Spoil sport.”
“Maybe I am, but it’ll be a horrible mess if you try to clean flour away with water. Let me go change into something that isn’t a suit, and then I’ll help you sweep all this up.”
“Thank you.” Kate looks a little bit like a lost puppy. “I just wanted to make you something nice, you know?”
Jo turns from where she’s picking her way through the flour to the kitchen door. “I do, and I adore you for the thought. We’ll get this cleared up, and when we do our shop this evening we’ll pick up ginger and brown sugar and have another go.”
“Okay boss.” Kate throws her a smile and starts clattering around in the cupboard below the sink for the dustpan and brush before Jo has a sudden thought.
“Kate?”
“Yes?”
“If you didn’t get any further with biscuit making than tipping flour everywhere, why can I smell burning?”
Kate’s face turns red.
“Well, I…”