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“You told me it was going to be easy!”
In Gerard’s defence, it was supposed to be easy. Heat the wax on the stove, add fragrance, put the wick into the container, pour the wax and wait for it to cool. Easy. A child could do it, though letting a child work with hot wax is probably not the best parenting choice. But Gerard and Frank are adults, surely they don’t need any supervision.
Gerard can almost see Ray rolling his eyes. It doesn’t matter that Ray is not around, preferring to spend this nice December evening with his girlfriend: he definitely has some sort of sixth sense when it comes to his bandmates, he probably sensed the mischief the moment Gerard came up with the idea of making candles and decided, as any rational adult would, to wait and see whether or not the kitchen survives the whole ordeal.
Frank takes a look at the instructions on the tablet screen for the fifteenth time over the past three minutes.
“Do you know what they call adults who can't follow simple five step instructions?” he asks.
“Idiots?”
“Yup,” Frank nods. “That's what we are. Idiots.”
“We could try again,” Gerard tries to argue. He is well aware of how weak and unconvincing this sounds, but hey, at least they haven’t destroyed the kitchen yet, they have at least one more attempt left.
And besides, the instructions didn’t say that the stickers they used to attach the wicks to the bottoms of the jars would come off if the wax temperature became too high. He probably should have figured it out on his own but maybe, if he tries hard enough, he can blame it on the people writing step-by-step guides on the Internet.
“Or,” Frank points out, “we could not try again.”
“Practice makes perfect and all that,” Gerard shrugs.
“I like our kitchen the way it is,” Frank argues. “Do you know how hard it was to pick the right tile colour for the backsplash?”
“It really wasn’t.”
“It was!” Frank protests and waves his arms to drive the point further.
“We went to pick it together, Frank, and you spent most of the time making the ugly carpets tier list.”
“That’s because they were ugly!” Frank scoffs. “And I don’t know about you, but I don’t wanna run around looking for new… everything because of some stupid candles.”
Gerard sighs. It’s useless to argue with Frank now: if he’s got his mind set on something he won’t give in. Most of the time Gerard likes this about him, but right now it feels almost unfair. Gerard just wanted to try something new. It also would have been easier to give out homemade candles as Christmas gifts to all those distant relatives he is going to see when they go to Gerard’s parents’ place for Christmas dinner.
“We’ll do it tomorrow,” Frank tries to reassure him. “Maybe call in Ray.”
“He’s never gonna let us do it ourselves,” Gerard grumbles.
“Okay, we’ll call Mikey, then.”
“Mikey’s gonna burn the house down.”
Frank rolls his eyes.
“Fine,” he grumbles. “We’ll figure it out tomorrow.” He rubs his cheek, deep in thought. “I think I wanna order pizza.”
Gerard takes another look at the kitchen. He isn’t sure he will have enough energy to cook anything after cleaning up the mess he made.
“Yeah,” he mutters. “Sounds good.”