sweetness in strangers // jasper and drew
Baking a cake should be an easy task. For all intents and purposes, it was an easy task. Jasper had, after all, gotten an A in his Cookery class, and that meant he could definitely make a cake. He could! What he couldn't do, though, was make a cake out of air. That waws difficult. With no sugar, no flour, no eggs and only a smidge of butter, Jasper sighed as he copied down the ingredieents, carefully curling his best, though clumsy, handwriting onto the scrap of paper-- the same scrap he clutched in his hand all the way down to the supermarket.
Eggs, those were easy to find. They were right up there on the sign, and anyway, there were just hundreds of cartons all stacked up. He picked his favourite-looking box (a purple-ish one, with cartoon chickens printed onto the side) and carried along his merry way. Butter, that was easy, too--it was in the fridges, which narrowed down the possibilities considerably and only offered him a couple of aisles so wander up and down.
Butter and eggs in the basket that hung balanced in the crook of his elbow, Jasper wandered around, looking for the next item on his list. Fifteen minutes later, and Jasper was just going down the aisles, picking up every packet he saw that could be sugar and considering it before he replaced it carefully back on the shelf, occasionally casting an almost offended look at the pack in question.
And so his shopping trip went. He picked things up, he put things down, he got distracted in the aisles for toys and video games, and spent a good twenty minutes looking through what CDs here were. Eventually, his mind flicked back to the fact he was supposed to be shopping, and he instead opted to ask the closest person for some degree of help-- even a vague gesture would probably send him in a better direction.
If it weren't for the fact that he was reading straight off of the paper when he asked, if it wasn't for the fact that he hadn't taken the time to realise what exactly he was looking for, if he wasn't just matching words to matching words, if he wasn't having one of those days, he maybe wouldn't have asked the man, with a hopeful expression glued onto his features;
''scuse me, mister? D'y'know where the... suh-gar is?'