Sex & Sourdough (21 page)

He looked up to see Joel’s bright smile. “Hey, baby. I’ve been looking everywhere for you today. Your mom called me and told me you made it home okay. Did you finally get your phone charged?”

Anders began to shut down his laptop. He hadn’t seen Joel since he got home. But when he saw the stack of faded yellow notes left on his door, he knew it was only a matter of time.

“Or did it actually die out there?”

“I’m sorry, what are you talking about?”

“Your phone. I must have left you a thousand messages over the past few months. Did you finally listen to them?”

“No. I listened to the first couple, and then I just deleted them. Then I blocked your number. Then I changed my phone number. We broke up. What do you want? I’m busy. And what do you mean, my mom called you?”

“Anders, baby, we did not break up. I understand that you’re still upset about that spat in Georgia, I do. But I think it’s time we put it behind us. You know this whole grad-school thing was all so I could be here, so we could be together. I know it was shitty of me to leave you stranded, but it all worked out fine. You made it farther than I ever imagined! I was almost in New Hampshire when your mom called.”

Anders rubbed his eyes. He thought about calling Joel on the blatant attempt at manipulation, but he didn’t see the point. There had never been a point, even when they were together, because it always just made Joel angry.

After the week of classes he had endured, Anders already felt like screaming. He’d spent the entire week wondering how the hell the academic world had ever maintained the sense of self-importance that seemed to infect the campus. A year ago, he had been caught up in the atmosphere along with everyone else. He’d been convinced the research, ideas, work, and discussions that took place on campus were everything. It had been the center of his world. During the past three months, he had realized the real world was a much larger place than the University of North Florida campus.

Since it was Friday, he could finally unwind and leave the monotony behind.

He didn’t want to make a big deal about Joel any more than he wanted to spend an hour analyzing the statutory elements of assault and battery. He wanted to eat a sandwich made with real sourdough. He wanted to smell the forest around him—that delicate mixture of berries, flowers, pine, and the musk of fallen leaves.

“Are you even going to answer me?”

Anders took a deep breath. He definitely wasn’t going to lose his temper with Joel, especially not in public. After the past twelve weeks, Joel just wasn’t worth the effort anymore. The only thing that had ever made being with Joel worthwhile was that it was one of the few things Anders had any choice in. It was one of the only things that made Anders feel like his life was his own.

“Go home, Joel.”

“That’s all you have to say? After everything I’ve done for you, you’re just going to brush it all aside?”

“You’ve never done anything for me, Joel. I’m honestly not sure if you’ve ever done a single thing for another person without analyzing how it’ll benefit you first.”

Joel sat back and stared at him for a moment, chewing on his lower lip in a way that Anders had once thought of as adorable. Now it just looked calculating. “Is it so bad, to make decisions that benefit both people in a relationship?”

“No,” Anders said, sighing. “I agree, to have a relationship you need to have mutual consideration. But we’ve never had mutual consideration, Joel, just manipulation.”

“How dare you?” Joel sneered at him. “I offered you everything—my body, my heart, my life—and you throw it back in my face like it was all some kind of game? I was even going to forgive you for cheating on me all summer, you know.”

“Cheating?” For a moment, Anders felt his heart racing. He hadn’t mentioned Kevin to anybody. Joel had come to look for him in Damascus, but Anders was confident they had left him behind there in Virginia. Joel was most likely falling back on old habits, making random accusations just to make Anders feel guilty. He couldn’t actually know about Kevin.

When the screen on his laptop turned black, Anders closed the lid and shoved his computer back into his bag. “You need to stop this.” He cleaned up the wrapper from his first sandwich, slung his backpack over his shoulder, and pushed away from the table. He would take his second sandwich back to the law school and eat it there. Or maybe he’d go home to his apartment. He’d only be skipping one class if he left now.

“I was an idiot for letting you stay out there alone, I get it, but it does not mean we’re over!”

“We’re done, Joel. We were fucked up from the start, but I didn’t realize just how bad things had gotten until I got away from you. I… I almost lost myself, when we were together. And, looking back at it, I think that was what you wanted all along. This has always been a game to you, and I knew it from the start. I just didn’t have to face the reality of it until you pulled this shit in public.”

“So you’re throwing a fit because we had a fight in public? God, you’re so worried about your precious fucking Blankenship reputation it makes me sick. What do you care if the world finds out you’re gay? We love each other, Anders. You’re going to have to admit it, sooner or later.”

“My reputation?” Anders said, laughing. “I’ve been out since I was sixteen, Joel. My family knows I’m gay. I don’t care who else knows. What I’m talking about is how you have to make everything dramatic, how you turn everything into a crisis, even if it’s just me not being where you expected me to be at some random point in the day. You make me feel guilty, accuse me of cheating on you, threaten to end things, make me feel like I’m not even worth your time and I should be counting my blessings, and then you let me make it up to you in the most degrading ways you can think of.” He picked up his second sandwich. “I guess I should be grateful you were never more creative.”

“You’ve changed, Anders. What the hell happened to you?”

Anders knew that people around them were staring. He didn’t want to do this, and so he wasn’t going to. He held up his plastic-wrapped sandwich with a bright smile. “Honestly? I tried sourdough.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Bread. Sourdough bread. It really is addictive. There was other stuff too. I climbed down cliffs, touched waterfalls. I got to pet wild ponies. I walked more than fifteen hundred miles. I got a lot of free food and a grand total of twenty-three different trail names. But mostly… sourdough.” He held up his sandwich again and walked away with a smile and a nod.

Anders heard Joel’s indignant muttering following him for a few steps, but three and half months of walking twelve hours a day had gotten him into the best shape of his life. He wasn’t plodding and slow anymore. He naturally fell into a quick, efficient stride that left Joel jogging beside him.

Halfway across the commons, Joel was panting. “Would you just wait a minute? I said I was willing to forgive you. What else do I have to do to prove I love you?”

“I don’t want you to prove it to me. We’re not together anymore. No more phone calls. No more voice mails. Leave my family alone. We’re done. I’ve got to go, Joel.” Anders waved and took off jogging.

When Joel’s curses were finally out of earshot, Anders glanced back over his shoulder, feeling free and happy for the first time since he’d last kissed Kevin. He sat down in the dirt at the base of a pecan tree and tore open the wrapper of his second sandwich with a laugh. He ate quickly and loved every bite. So far he hadn’t found any mental tricks to convince his stomach that he didn’t need an obscene amount of calories.

His next class was hell. Anders couldn’t believe how caught up his classmates got in each case, in each class discussion. Wednesday, they’d argued as if the statute of limitations was somehow a matter of life and death, today they spent hours trying to pin down the definition of a single word, and they focused so much on their classes that it seemed as though the world outside of the law school ceased to exist. For the first time in his life, he found himself staring out the tiny lecture hall windows and daydreaming about being outside rather than paying attention. He paid attention long enough to note that the professor had called on someone else to explain the last case, then used the law school’s Wi-Fi to poke around on the Internet. He found himself looking up guides and maps of the northern half of the Appalachian Trail. He found forums filled with people who had hiked the trail and who were still obsessed with it. He read each post and message as if the words of strangers were his only lifeline in a sea of deluded self-importance. He clung to their posts, feeling like they were the only thing left to keep him grounded in reality.

When he finally got home to his apartment off Hodges Boulevard, he was exhausted. As he shoved his key into the deadbolt, he was confused when the key turned easily. He tried the knob and eased the door open, cursing. He set his backpack down inside the door and looked around his one-bedroom apartment, more confused than ever. The lights in his kitchen and over his breakfast bar were on, and he always turned them off on his way out of the house. He hadn’t been all that eager to leave for class in the morning, but he hadn’t been that spaced out.

Anders stepped into his kitchen and saw a gift basket and a coffeepot. He made it through his undergraduate degree with a little four-cup coffeepot and he had never seen any point in replacing it. But there on his counter, where the little white coffeepot with its four years of stains had sat, was a new gigantic chrome coffeepot. In front of it sat a plastic-wrapped basket filled with tiny foil packets of imported coffee. There was no card or note, but Anders knew it was from Joel. Anders had mentioned how much he loved coffee once, years ago, and Joel had used coffee gift cards the way a straight man might use roses ever since.

Joel had never left a gift in his apartment before. Anders didn’t remember when, or even if, he had given Joel a key.

Anders tensed. He moved through the rest of his apartment quietly, checking to see if Joel had messed with anything else—or worse, if he was still there. When he was positive his apartment was empty, Anders returned to the front door and set the deadbolt. He hesitated for a moment and then set the chain.

He went back to the kitchen, determined to find food, but he froze when he saw the gifts again. He knew that he should have been getting dinner started, he should be working through the hundreds of pages of reading he needed to finish for next week, but all he could do was stare at the new coffeepot on his counter. He wanted to throw the damn thing off his balcony. Instead, he unplugged it, wrapped the plug around the machine, and set the gift basket on top of it.

He was tempted to just call Joel and tell him to come pick the damn thing up, but that would mean handing Joel his new phone number. So, after making sure he locked the door, he carried the coffeepot back down the three flights of stairs to his Jetta, dropped it into the passenger seat, and drove to the duplex Joel rented off Atlantic Boulevard. Joel’s Jeep wasn’t parked outside, so Anders left the coffeepot and the gift basket by Joel’s front door.

When he finally got home, it was dark outside and he was starving again. He made some pasta, double-checked that the front door was locked and the chain was set, and then took his backpack into his room and tried to brief cases on his bed. He ended up back at the same Appalachian Trail forum, rereading the same posts he had read earlier that afternoon. He read the forum posts until nearly midnight, until he was so tired he couldn’t keep his eyelids from dropping, then shut down his laptop and fell asleep with the lights on.

Saturday, he managed to sit still long enough for breakfast, but then he had to move. He felt like the walls of his apartment were closing in around him, and even though he knew the door was bolted shut, he kept expecting Joel to walk in. When he left he made sure he set the deadbolt and then drove out to Jennings State Forest, just west of Jacksonville. He spent the entire day walking around the SUV and horse trails, moving until he felt sane again.

When he returned to his apartment, the door was unlocked again. Once again, there was a gift basket on his counter. The basket itself looked exactly like the one that had been stuffed with coffee packets yesterday, but this time it was filled with three long loaves of artisan sourdough bread. Anders groaned and rubbed his eyelids. He could smell the bread through the plastic and if it had come from
anyone
else, he’d have been attacking it.

Instead, he took a Coke out of the fridge, grabbed the backpack he had lived out of all summer, locked the door, and headed down to the parking lot again. He stopped at the main office and asked about getting his locks rekeyed. He wasn’t surprised when they told him it would be Monday morning before their overtaxed maintenance man would be able to get to it.

“I’ll stop back in to pick up the key Monday afternoon,” he told the woman at the desk.

“You know, Mr. Blankenship, if you’re not comfortable staying in your apartment, two of the furnished rentals on your floor are empty at the moment,” she said helpfully. Anders’s father had played a major role in developing the entire apartment community, and he owned a majority interest in the property management company that rented the units. His father had held on to the four one-bedroom apartments on the top floor of Anders’s building for his own use. Anders had been living in one since he started college, and his father had converted the other three to furnished business rentals—letting family and his partners use them as needed and renting them out as luxury vacation properties whenever they weren’t in use. Every time Anders saw the other apartments, he was amazed at how different the apartments looked with nice furniture instead of his cheap futon and coffee table. But they were right across the landing from his own apartment, and he didn’t want to be anywhere near his apartment at the moment.

“No, thanks,” Anders said, shaking his head. “I’m covered.”

“I’ll leave a note for the night manager in case you change your mind.”

He spent the night in the Jennings State Forest campground, where his tent and sleeping bag, saturated with Kevin’s scent, helped him let go of the lingering tension and anxiety he’d felt since he saw Joel’s gift. He refused to be afraid of Joel, but he didn’t think he’d be able to get to sleep in his bed, knowing he might wake up to find Joel trying to slip into bed with him.