by Roan Parrish
“My aunts always made our bread.”
“Is that who you grew up with?”
Corbin nodded and his eyes got that dreamy cast. “Bake on Saturday,” he said, as if he was repeating part of a poem. Then his eyes refocused. “But it wasn’t usually Saturday, I don’t think.”
“Did you bake with them?” Alex waved Corbin over and handed him the eggs and sugar to add to the mixer, where the yeast and water had dissolved.
“No.” Corbin dumped in the sugar and watched as the water wetted it, like a lake eating into an island. Then he picked up an egg and stared at it.
After he’d looked at it for a minute, Corbin deftly cracked it against the lip of the bowl and added it to the mixer, then the others. When Alex closed the distance between them to flick the mixer on, he could feel the heat of Corbin’s body next to his; the air between them felt supercharged. Corbin was watching the mixer the way he’d watched the rain, as if hypnotized.
But when Alex’s shoulder pressed into his, Corbin jumped back a step, pulling his shoulders in, eyes gone wide.
Alex had a bad feeling in the pit of his stomach. He gritted his teeth at the thought that someone had hurt Corbin.
“Sorry.” Alex and Corbin said it at the same time.
Alex shook his head. “Do you want to add the salt and flour?”
In they went, and the mixer began to turn again.
“I used to do this all by hand,” Alex said. “In cooking school we had to learn all the techniques. Honestly, though, I love the mixer.”
Corbin hummed in reply, but his whole attention was on the bowl. Alex’s was on Corbin’s face. His brows drew together with concentration, and his lashes threw shadows on his cheeks. He’d tucked his hair behind his ear so he could see. His ears were small and delicate, with a slight point at the top, and they stuck out a little, which Alex found adorable. He was also startled by how familiar they were. In high school, when Corbin’s hair had been shaved, those ears had made people call him fairy.
Corbin pointed at the bowl and turned wide, excited eyes on Alex. The dough had finally come together.
Alex grinned. “Yeah, there’s the moment when things are separate, and the moment when they’re one thing, and you have to watch the whole time to see that instant when one becomes the other.”
Corbin’s smile was dangerous. It was slow and warm as fresh-baked bread, and then you saw teeth. A little crooked, charmingly overlapping in the front. The best smile Alex had ever seen. He was nervous what he might do to elicit another smile like that.
He could hardly tear his eyes away to swap in the dough hook. “Now the butter. One chunk at a time until it’s incorporated.”
Corbin did as he was told, watching intently.
“Hey, Corbin?”
“Hmm.”
“What do you draw? I know, everything, but will you tell me about it?”
No answer as the butter turned the dough glossy, glossier. Alex scraped down the sides of the mixer and they watched as it came together. He turned off the mixer and covered the bowl, set it aside.
“I could show you,” Corbin said softly.
“Please.”
The notebook had a plain black cover and a flexible spine, and Corbin cracked it open, pages splayed out on the table. His fingertips hovered over the paper like he was feeling as much as seeing. Or maybe hiding. With a deep breath, he nudged the book slightly toward Alex.
“I started drawing them ages ago,” he said. “They were just there one day. And I . . .” Corbin bit his thumbnail and blinked. Alex smiled as warmly as he could, wanting so much to hear.
Corbin flipped a few pages back. “I would draw stories for us. Adventures. Like we were hanging out. Because they were my friends, and I could take them with me like this. People at school didn’t want to be my friends.”
The sketchbook pages looked like a graphic novel. Alex recognized Corbin right away. He’d exaggerated everything about himself—the waves of his hair more tangled, his dreamy eyes glassy, his angles sharp enough to cut—and somehow it captured him perfectly, as if exaggeration exposed a truth of him that realism never could.
Also on the page was a woman who looked like a female version of Corbin, with her pointed elbows, feather-black hair, and matching oversized canvas jacket. But where Corbin’s eyes were dreamy, hers were shrewd, and where Corbin was slender, her angles were packed with coiled muscle. She looked like she could take on anyone.
There was a tall black woman with short curly pink hair, dressed all in black and drawn only in profile. She had a hand resting on the head of shaggy gray dog—no, a wolf. The wolf’s expression wasn’t fierce, though, but docile and curious.
There was a small impish girl with pale skin and platinum hair, who seemed always to be in motion. She was plucking at one person’s sleeve, or sneaking up on another. Her smile was sly.
Last was a large man with light brown skin and dark brown hair. He wore painter pants and a navy and white striped T-shirt, which made him seem to Alex like some kind of French sailor he’d seen in an old movie. The man was muscular and striking, and something about the detail in his renderings whispered to Alex that he was different from the others.
“Does it just sit there.”
“What?” Alex glanced up from the sketchbook. “Oh. Yeah, it should rest for another hour, hour and a half. Guess it wasn’t the most interesting thing I could’ve let you make.”
Corbin cocked his head in confusion, and Alex remembered how absorbed he’d been. Strike that.
“Do you want to make something else while it’s resting? What do you like? If I have the ingredients for it here, we can make it.”
Corbin nodded. “Let me think.” Then he went back to studying his sketchbook, and Alex smiled at the idea that he was going to actually stand there and think about it.
“Do they have names?”
“Of course. But I can’t tell you.”
“Oh. Why not?”
“Because names give you power over things. And only I get to have power over them.”
Heat flushed through Alex at the intensity in Corbin’s voice. He imagined what it would feel like to have Corbin writhing beneath him, calling his name. He thought that maybe the power of names went both ways.
He turned a few pages of the sketchbook, and saw a garden, then a house. It was a turn-of-the-century house, like those on the old west side of town. The roof slumped, the eaves sagged, and the windows gaped like broken teeth.
But the trees around the house were myriad lush greens and the wide back porch was inviting. One window glowed lighter than the others, and Alex imagined it was Corbin’s bedroom.
“Is that your house?”
“It’s my aunts’ house.”
“Do you live with them?”
“No. Not anymore. They’re gone.”
“I’m sorry. But you live here?”
“Yes. The Catsle.”
“Castle?”
“No. Catsle. Aunt Hilda liked cats.”
Alex flipped another page, then another. Corbin seemed to draw in real time, because the figures on the pages began wearing scarves and sweaters; the leaves on the trees around the Catsle began to change. Alex’s fingers closed around the corner of the page and lifted it slowly, still taking in every detail on the page before him, and in the time it took him to turn it, Corbin moved.
He grabbed the sketchbook, closed it, and pulled it to his chest, crossing his arms around it.
“Um, cookies,” he said. “A thing I like.” His expression was a little panicked, but Alex thought he saw a slight flush to his cheeks. What the hell was on the next page?
“Okay, cookies it is.”
Corbin slid the sketchbook back in his bag, pausing for a moment as if he was saying goodbye.
Alex pulled ingredients from around the kitchen. He remembered Corbin’s face when he’d brought out cinnamon toast and smiled. “I bet you’d like snickerdoodles.”
“Is that real.” Corbin looked like a bir
d puzzled by why he couldn’t fly through a windowpane.
“Yes.” Alex grinned. “They’re basically the cookie version of cinnamon toast.”
Corbin’s eyes got wide, then dreamy. “Mmm.”
Alex had certainly used baking as seduction before. There was an intense sensuality to working with food. Moving around each other in the kitchen, touching and smelling the ingredients, tasting the food—it often led to touching, smelling, and tasting each other.
He could imagine how it might go. A hand on Corbin’s shoulder as he leaned in to look at the mixture. The press of his chest against Corbin’s back as he demonstrated how large to make the cookies. The feel of Corbin’s tongue on his fingers as he fed him a bit of dough. The give of Corbin’s lips when he replaced the dough with his mouth. They’d kiss until they were panting, then he’d spread Corbin out on the table and make a feast of him.
The cookies could burn for all he cared.
Alex shook his head and pinched the inside of his wrist to get his mind back together. It was clear that wasn’t going to happen here, no matter how much he might want it to.
Rumors from high school aside, he had no idea if Corbin was attracted to men. And even if he were, the few times Alex had touched him by accident—the brush of their hands as Corbin paid for his coffee, the press of shoulders as they stood—Corbin had jerked away like he’d been burned.
Besides, Alex didn’t simply want to sleep with Corbin. He wanted Corbin to come back. To keep coming back. He wanted Corbin to ruffle aside his barriers, hold out a hand to Alex, and let him in.
So he talked about cookies. He talked about culinary school. He found out that Corbin grew vegetables and herbs in the garden behind his house, but cooked mostly simple things and sometimes forgot entirely. He learned that Corbin loved spices—cinnamon, ginger, nutmeg, all the warm flavors of autumn and winter—but didn’t care for chocolate. He learned that Corbin had a lot of dogs.
“They hang around the yard and like to walk with me, but they’re not exactly mine,” Corbin explained. “Only one comes inside with me. Stick.”
“The dog’s name is Stick?”
“It’s not really her name, just what I call her. Because she really likes when I throw sticks.”
Alex smiled. Names give you power over things.
This dough they mixed by hand, and Alex felt a familiar calm settle over him.
“What’s cream of tartar.”
“It’s an acid that’s used as a leavener. When it’s combined with baking soda, they produce carbon dioxide gas, which is the same thing that yeast in bread produces. It’ll make the cookies soft.”
“What else.” Okay, not bored by minutiae, then.
“Well, it stabilizes egg whites when you whip them because it strengthens the bubbles so they don’t deflate as fast. Um, you can add it to simple syrup and it’ll magically stop it from crystallizing.”
“Magically.” Corbin’s eyes narrowed, his gaze suddenly sharp.
“Well, no. Chemically. When the sugar is dissolved, the acid prevents it from re-bonding and forming crystals.”
Corbin was watching him, dreamy again, and Alex found himself swallowed up in his dark eyes.
“It, uh. It’s the residue left on the barrels after wine is fermented.”
“Wow.” Corbin smiled that slow smile again and Alex blundered over to turn on the oven before he did anything ill-advised.
“Okay, now we roll them into balls and coat them in cinnamon and sugar.”
Corbin leaned in to sniff at the cinnamon and sugar mixture and immediately whipped away and sneezed five times in quick succession. He shook his head between sneezes like a cat, and Alex tried not to laugh. Then he got lost in the shift of muscle in Corbin’s lithe forearms as he rolled his cookies in cinnamon and sugar.
After a few minutes, the smell of the baking snickerdoodles filled the kitchen.
“Smells like a rainy morning,” Corbin said.
“Is that when you make cinnamon toast?”
One nod, and a faraway look.
“Did your aunts used to make it when you were little?”
“Yes. Aunt Jade made it on rainy mornings and when I couldn’t sleep.”
“How did you end up living with them?”
“I always lived with them. Since I was a baby.”
“Your parents weren’t around?”
Corbin shook his head. “No. When I was really young, my mom came by sometimes, when she was passing through town. She’d stay for a cup of coffee. My aunts said she drifted. Then she didn’t come any more. My father died before I was born.”
Thunder cracked loudly outside, and the kitchen went black.
“Oh no,” Corbin murmured, and Alex instinctively moved toward the sound of him stumbling into something.
“Are you scared of the dark?” Alex reached for what he thought was Corbin’s shoulder, but his hand landed in Corbin’s hair instead. The strands curved around his fingers like feathers.
“No.” Corbin stepped just out of reach.
They stood in silence for a minute as their eyes adjusted, shapes resolving into familiar objects.
“Be careful of the oven,” Alex said. He maneuvered around Corbin, who clearly didn’t want to be touched, and opened the oven door, sliding the trays of snickerdoodles onto the counter. “We should let them cool for a few minutes. The way the cream of tartar keeps them soft also means they fall apart if you try and take them off the tray right away.”
Alex could feel Corbin draw closer. His skin felt like it had been turned into a Corbin-seeking instrument, attuned to the other man’s presence. Alex kept talking and Corbin drew closer. He talked about cookies. He talked about cinnamon. He talked about how opening this bakery was a dream he’d had for a long time, but hadn’t believed he’d ever make a reality.
“Your mom gave you the coffee shop to open a bakery,” Corbin said, in his strange intonation.
“She signed the coffee shop over to me, but she didn’t tell me what to do with it. I don’t think she cared, really, as long as it got me to stay in town, and she got to spend more time with her boyfriend.”
“She must care about it. It’s what she and your father built together.”
“She told you that?”
“Everyone knows that,” Corbin dismissed, but Alex wondered what else he knew.
“You’ve been coming here a long time, huh?”
“For a while.”
“Why? It wasn’t a very good coffee shop.”
“Your mom was kind to me. She let me sit and didn’t bother me. She didn’t let other people bother me. I don’t care about the coffee.”
“Why do they bother you?”
Alex’s eyes had adjusted to the dark enough that he saw Corbin’s chin drop, saw him glance up through his hair and bite his lip. Saw his eyes flutter shut as he said, “Because. I’m a freak. I mess up everything I touch and people know it. They always have.”
Alex’s mouth crowded with denials, reassurances, and threats, but Corbin had spoken in a way that rendered them all useless. What came out of his mouth instead was, “I don’t think you’re a freak. I think you’re great.” And he handed Corbin a cookie.
Corbin held the cookie for a moment, let it rest in his palm like he was weighing it against the truth of Alex’s words. Then he took a bite and the smell of cinnamon grew stronger.
“This is the most delicious cookie I’ve ever had,” Corbin said, and smiled slightly in the dark.
A few days after the storm, Alex was putting fresh croissants in the display case when a man burst through the door enthusiastically.
“Alexander Barrow! I’m Mac—Barry MacKenzie, but everyone calls me Mac. Good to meet you.”
He stuck out a hand and Alex shook it, though he had specific opinions about people who said that everyone called them anything.
Mac was forty-five or so, burly, and a bit on the short side. He was dressed in Michigan gear from head to toe.
“It�
�s Alex. And nice to meet you, too. Can I get you something?”
“Oh, no, no, thanks. I brought you everything you’ll need.” He brandished a shiny blue U of M folder full of papers at Alex. “I’m the chairman of the Small Business Owners’ Guild, but I’m sure your mom’s told you all about it.”
“Nope,” Alex said, and Mac’s face fell.
“Well,” he said, recovering quickly, “no problem. All the info’s in the folder. I own the Maize Cave.”
Alex nodded. That made the Michigan apparel slightly more understandable, if no less ill-advised.
“Basically the SBOG works to keep all the business owners in town connected. This year, my initiative is to implement monthly theme days where all the biz owners will do something in their shops to reflect the theme. It works great on social media, so we figure it’ll generate some buzz. Especially with the younger patrons, eh?” He squeezed Alex’s shoulder, and Alex wanted to shake his hand off.
As Mac continued to monologue, Alex felt all the energy drain from him. This was one side of business ownership he didn’t relish.
“Listen, thanks for the information, but I’ve got bread rising in the kitchen and I need to go check on it.” He held out his hand.
A burst of laughter from one of the tables made them both turn. Mac’s expression immediately soured, and he sneered. But it wasn’t at the girls who’d laughed. It was at Corbin, ensconced in his customary place in the corner.
As if he felt eyes on him, Corbin looked up, and when he saw Mac, he froze. His pen dropped to the table. His wide eyes darted from Mac, who was still glaring, to Alex. Alex smiled at him the way he always did, but Corbin just blinked and gathered his pens and his notebook, shoving everything into his bag. Then he made his way to the door before Alex could say anything.
Mac shook his head as the door swung shut.
“Guess your mother asked you to let him loiter here.”
“No. My mother doesn’t make the decisions about who comes into my place of business. Besides, he’s not loitering. He’s a paying customer. A welcome customer.”
Mac raised his palms as if to say Alex was overreacting, but he shook his head. “All right, but you be careful with that one. He’s not the sort you want associated with your business, is all I’m saying.”