by Roan Parrish
“Hi,” Alex said. “Hello. Good morning. Welcome to And Son. I just opened.”
The man cocked his head in the other direction and nodded. “Coffee,” he said quietly. His tone said it was a request even though his voice didn’t go up at the end to intone the question.
“Of course.” Get a grip, Alex. “Light, medium, or dark roast?”
He shrugged one shoulder. “Dark.” His voice was low and soft, and there was something so familiar about him all of a sudden that Alex narrowed his eyes against the jolt of déjà vu. But that’s how it was coming back to Ann Arbor. Always the sense of familiarity paired with that jarring discontinuity.
Under Alex’s scrutiny, the man dropped his chin a little and glared.
“Coming right up,” Alex said. “Can I get you anything to eat?”
The man shook his head, but the glare was gone, and as he handed over his money, it was replaced by a faraway look that made Alex feel like he wasn’t seen any longer. He brushed the man’s palm with his fingertips as he took the bills, and their eyes locked for a moment. Then the man jerked away.
He didn’t put anything in his coffee, just cradled the mug as he made his way to the corner table and folded himself onto the bench, knees sharp through faded denim. He slid a black notebook out of his tattered canvas bag and immediately bent so close over it that the ends of his hair brushed the paper.
He seemed completely absorbed in whatever was in the book, and after a while Alex went back to the kitchen, leaving the front of house to Mira and Sean.
When Alex brought baguettes out to the counter at lunchtime, the man was still there. He was still hunched over his book, but now he was drawing, his lines fluid, quick, and studied.
“Do you know that guy?” Alex asked Mira.
“Corbin Wale,” she said softly. “He’s come in for years, according to Helen—er, your mom. Since before I started working here. Sometimes he’s here every day for two weeks, sometimes once a week, sometimes he doesn’t show for a month. He always sits and draws. Helen always let him.” She bit her lip. “Is it okay? Or do you want me to . . .”
“No, it’s fine. I was just curious. Thanks.” Mira looked relieved.
Alex sliced a piece of warm baguette in half, spread one side liberally with salted butter, and scooped plum jam into a ramekin. He put it all on a plate and carried it over to the table in the corner. Corbin didn’t look up. He didn’t seem to notice Alex at all.
“Corbin?” he said softly.
Corbin jerked, his elbow nearly knocking the empty coffee cup off the table. The eyes that met Alex’s were wide and wild.
“Sorry,” Alex said. He kept his voice soft and smiled. “I thought maybe you might like a snack.” He set the plate down on the table and took a step back, since Corbin seemed threatened by his looming.
“I didn’t . . . I didn’t order that.” Corbin blinked quickly as if he was coming out of a dream, confused about what was real and what wasn’t.
“No, I just thought you might like it.” At the gaping mouth and fluttering eyelashes, he added, “Since I just reopened, I wanted to welcome customers. You used to come in when this was my mom’s place, right?”
“Your mom. Helen is your mom.”
“Yep. She asked me to take the place over. It’s been a lot of work for her lately. She gets tired.”
“Tired,” Corbin echoed, and his shoulders slumped a bit, like the word had taken up residence in his body.
“I’m Alex. It is Corbin, right? That’s what Mira said.” He nodded at his employee and she smiled.
Corbin gave a stuttering nod. His eyes tracked from the food on the table to Alex’s face. “You don’t want me to leave.” Alex realized that he said all his questions like statements.
“No. I’m glad you’re here.” It was a pat answer—one any new business owner would give a customer—but Alex felt the truth of it down to his toes. “Please make yourself at home.”
Alex tried to get a glimpse of what Corbin was working on, but the notebook was covered by Corbin’s arms, intentionally or not. All that was visible were some spiky black lines and an indigo curve arcing from under Corbin’s fine-boned wrist.
“Well, I’ll leave you to it,” Alex said, and turned back to the kitchen. As he got out the flour and butter to make pie crust, he realized what he felt was a vague sense of disappointment. Disappointment that he hadn’t seen the contents of the notebook. Disappointment that Corbin hadn’t asked him to sit down and join him. Disappointment that Corbin had seemed to draw closer into himself with every inch toward him that Alex moved.
And when he brought two pies out later that afternoon, disappointment to find the table in the corner empty, with no sign of Corbin having been there at all.
Alex had a problem.
Alex had a problem and it was spelled C-O-R-B-I-N W-A-L-E.
The problem was that every morning Alex worked with bated breath, finding excuses to come out of the kitchen to see if Corbin was there. The problem was that when Corbin was there, Alex’s eyes seemed magnetized to him—to the cant of his head on his graceful neck. To the way his thin, nail-bitten fingers wielded a pen like a scalpel, ruthless and exacting. To the hair that often obscured his face. To the eyes that either stared resolutely down, completely absorbed by his work, or fixed, dreamily, on something up and to the right that Alex didn’t think he was seeing at all.
Alex would wait, hoping that some loud noise or sudden shift in the air would catch Corbin’s attention. Snap him out of absorption or dream, and bring him back to a place where Alex could reach him.
It wasn’t that Alex didn’t try. Sometimes he even succeeded, for a little while.
The next time Corbin came in, Alex asked what he was drawing. Corbin looked up, startled, as if he hadn’t realized his notebook was visible to anyone but himself. He looked at the page and then back at Alex, dark eyes framed in inky lashes.
“Everything,” he said, and a shiver ran up Alex’s spine.
A few days later, Corbin seemed out of sorts. Alex was working the cash register and when he asked Corbin how his day was going, Corbin muttered, “You can’t talk to me today. Please.”
“All right,” Alex said. “I’m sorry.”
Corbin’s brows drew together, a line between them. “No, no.”
Alex handed over his coffee without another word, and Corbin’s hand trembled as he took it. He pushed crumpled-up bills onto the counter and slunk to his table in the corner, tangle of hair hiding his face completely. Alex watched as Corbin stared into space, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth in a manner that absolutely did not send a shock of tender desire through him.
Alex watched Corbin. His cup emptied, though Alex never saw him sip it, and rather than becoming absorbed in his notebook, he pulled his jacket tightly around himself and left as suddenly as he’d come.
He didn’t come back for three days.
“Hey,” Alex said when Corbin next came in. “I realized why you looked familiar. I think we went to high school together.”
It had struck Alex as he was lying in his childhood bedroom one night, exhausted and wanting nothing but to fall into a dreamless sleep.
He’d closed his eyes on the day and instead of the grown-up Corbin, he saw a boy. Painfully skinny, with a messily shaved head like he’d run an electric razor over it himself. He had huge dark eyes and long lashes and his clothes were brown and green and gray, the colors of the forest, as if to announce the place he was camouflaged to fit in.
The boy had been a freshman when Alex was a senior, and he’d never known his name. It was a big school. Alex likely wouldn’t have remembered him at all, except that a month or two into the school year, someone had spray painted FOREST FAGGOT FREAK on a bank of lockers outside the auditorium. The boy standing in front of the locker that was clearly the epicenter was this pretty, skinny boy, staring at the words like they had no meaning.
After that, the rumors about him had reached even the senior class.
That he was gay. That he didn’t deny it, and responded to neither taunts nor camaraderie. That he lived in the forest and animals followed him to school. That he spoke to them, but not to anyone else. That something was wrong with him.
Even then, Alex might not have remembered him. Might have grouped him in the category that his seventeen-year-old brain had marked Braver Than Me, because it felt easier not to tell anyone that he, too, desired boys instead of girls. Because it felt like he had something to lose.
But then the boy—Corbin—had disappeared.
The rumors flew. He’d gone feral in the woods. He’d been having an affair with a rich businessman and fled the country with him. He’d killed himself. Someone at school had found out he was actually a vampire and he’d had to leave town.
But here was Corbin in front of him—clearly not dead, likely not a vampire, as it was a sunny day, and not feral . . . not completely, anyway.
“Do you remember me?” Alex asked.
Corbin bit his lip and nodded.
“Oh, did my mom tell you?” It seemed likely that his mother had asked every customer who looked about his age if they’d gone to high school with her son.
Corbin shook his head. “I recognized you. You were a football player.”
He supposed that had been the most notable thing about him to a stranger in high school, but for some reason it still made his stomach feel a little hollow to hear it.
Coffee in hand, Corbin nodded at him and went to sit down. While Alex worked, he scoured his mind for other scraps of memory about Corbin from high school. He found only one.
Alex had gotten to school late one morning and had to park at the farthest edge of the lot. He’d cut around the back of the school to the science wing, and had seen someone coming out of the tree line. A skinny boy, all large eyes, and hands and feet too big for his body. A dog had been trailing behind him. At the edge of the woods, he’d paused and spoken to the dog. Then he’d scratched its head, knelt, and thrown his arms around its neck. The boy had hugged the dog like it was his only friend in the world, then snapped his fingers, and the dog had bounded back into the forest. Alex thought it must have been the last time he’d seen him until Corbin had shown up at And Son.
At lunchtime, Alex cut a thick slice of the oatmeal bread he’d baked that morning and toasted it. He spread the hot toast with butter and sprinkled it with cinnamon and sugar. Corbin was bent over his notebook, drawing as usual, but this time when Alex approached, he pushed his hair out of his face and looked up. His eyes were huge.
“I brought you a snack.”
He laid the plate on the table and hovered for a moment.
“That . . .” Corbin pointed at the toast suspiciously. “That’s my favorite.”
“Yeah?” Warmth flushed through Alex. Preparing food was always a pleasure, but this—preparing something for someone he liked and having them desire it—was the thrill of satisfaction. “I’m glad.”
He couldn’t help himself. He stayed in the hope that Corbin would eat it in front of him. When the man raised the toast to his full lips and took a bite, cinnamon and sugar spilling onto the plate like snow, something hot and possessive ripped through Alex.
Sugar stuck to Corbin’s lips, and Alex wanted to bend over him and lick it from his mouth. Corbin’s jaw clenched as he chewed, and Alex imagined Corbin on his knees before him, jaw moving for another reason entirely.
Corbin’s throat worked as he swallowed, and Alex fisted his hands in front of him and turned quickly away.
“Okay, enjoy,” he called over his shoulder, voice scraped raw with arousal and confusion.
He’d never responded to someone the way he responded to Corbin. He’d had lovers, he’d had good sex, he’d seen men across a room or over a pool table and felt attraction, lust.
With Timo, he’d felt desire, affection, love—or so he’d thought.
But Corbin had awoken something in him that felt like all of these, and none of them.
It was the difference between strawberry jam and a perfect, sun-ripe strawberry. Other people he’d desired had been jam. He’d seen them, liked them, saw potential in them, thought of what he might do with them, how they’d combine.
Corbin was a strawberry. If you had any sense at all, you took it as it was and you never questioned it. You didn’t add sugar and you didn’t add heat. You didn’t put it in a sandwich or use it in a cake. You didn’t do anything to it because it was already as absolutely, perfectly a strawberry as it would ever be. You recognized it, and were grateful for it.
And, if you were lucky, you savored it.
That was what Alex was doing.
Alex was savoring.
The first Tuesday in November, it stormed. It began at noon with a clap of thunder and a silence just long enough for the patrons of And Son to freeze in anticipation, and then turn to each other and smile their relief that it was only thunder and no rain.
And then the rain came down.
Outside was black; rain hit the pavement and the roof like it was throwing itself down from the sky. The wind snatched it out of the air and lashed the windows with it. Umbrellas were torn from hands and plastic trash cans blew down the sidewalk like tumbleweeds. It only took thirty seconds for everything outside to be drenched.
Thirty minutes after that, it was still coming down, and the shop had emptied, customers running for their cars or trudging out, resigned to a soaking.
Except for one.
Corbin Wale sat in his corner and watched the rain.
He sat there for hours.
The weather app on Alex’s phone said the downpour would result in flash flooding and continue all night. It was only four, but it seemed unlikely they’d get any more customers that afternoon, so he told his employees to clean up and go home.
As they cleaned out the display and zeroed out the cash register, Corbin watched the rain.
As they mopped the floor and wiped the tables, Corbin watched the rain.
As Mira, Sean, and Sarah left—wind blowing a spray of rainwater and wet leaves onto the freshly cleaned floor—and Alex locked the door behind them, Corbin watched the rain.
And Son glowed like a lighthouse in the rain-swept dark, and Alex approached him slowly. He lifted the chair across from Corbin and moved it back far enough that he could sit down.
Corbin’s eyes were fixed on the rain as if he saw something in it he couldn’t miss a moment of. Suddenly Alex wanted so badly to see what Corbin saw that the desire hit him like a physical pain.
He wanted to rest his hand on Corbin’s and feel his skin, lace their fingers together and sit close as the rain whipped around them. He wanted to lift Corbin’s hand to his lips and press a kiss to his knuckles. He thought Corbin would smell like ink and paper, coffee, and whatever the smell of Corbin was, just Corbin, beneath all the rest.
He wanted to push the man’s hair back and cup his cheek. Trace the lines of his face with the pad of one finger, feather over dark brows and ruffle ink-black lashes.
He wanted to press his thumb into the dip in Corbin’s lush lower lip, feel the flesh give like a ripe peach, push his fingers inside and feel the sharp edges of teeth and the rasp of tongue.
He wanted, wanted, wanted, like he had never wanted before.
But more than any of that, he wanted Corbin to talk to him. He wanted to be included in the cocoon of him, invited into Corbin’s world.
In the glow of the bakery, with the hum of the coffee machine and the buzz of chatter stripped away, the only sounds were rain and wind outside.
Suddenly, Corbin’s gaze snapped to him, though he’d been sitting there for at least a minute. Alex’s breath caught. Corbin looked right at him, as present and clear as anyone.
“Did you know there’s a phenomenon called phantom rain, where it’s so hot that the raindrops evaporate before they hit the ground,” Corbin said.
It was so unexpectedly . . . ordinary that Alex almost laughed. “No, I didn’t.”
“Ev
eryone’s gone.” Corbin looked around like he’d just noticed.
“Yeah. I don’t think anyone else’ll be in when it’s coming down like this.”
“I should leave so you can go home.”
Corbin began gathering up his notebook and pens, and Alex grasped around for a way to make the moment last.
“Do you want to help me make something?” Alex asked. “If you have time.”
Corbin cocked his head, dark eyes curious. “In the kitchen.” He said kitchen like it was an improbability.
Alex nodded and watched indecision flicker over his face, then curiosity, then Corbin dropped his chin so Alex couldn’t see his face at all, and Alex’s stomach lurched.
He reminded himself that he didn’t know anything about Corbin, that they weren’t friends yet, no matter how much he might wish they were.
Gareth had told him more than once that he exerted influence over people even when he didn’t mean to. When Alex had asked him to explain, Gareth had shrugged and said that he couldn’t explain why it was true. Just that when Alex had a plan, the plan came into being, and other people got caught up in it, from where to get dinner to where to go on vacation.
“You don’t have to,” he offered now.
But Corbin said, “Okay,” and gathered up his things, slung the canvas bag over his shoulder, and stood up.
When Alex stood, he was just a few inches taller than Corbin, and closer to him than he’d ever been before. He shoved his hands in his pockets to keep from steering Corbin into the kitchen with a hand on the small of his back.
“What are we making,” Corbin asked, dropping his bag beside the steel prep table.
“We’re going to make brioche for tomorrow. It’s better if you let the dough sit overnight.” At Corbin’s narrowed eyes, he added, “It’s a rich buttery bread. I think it’ll be nice for tomorrow. The day after bad weather, people like comforting things.”
“Bread is comforting,” Corbin said.
Alex couldn’t tell if he was asking or agreeing, so he said, “I think it is.”