Sex & Sourdough (29 page)

“I’ll stay. How long are you going to be stuck in here?”

“I’m not really sure. The recovery from the last surgery is only supposed to be a week, but since I didn’t really have anywhere to go, I figured I’d be stuck here for longer.”

“A week? After heart surgery?”

“Yeah. There’s no incision to heal. But it’ll be another month before I can do anything really strenuous, and even then, hiking….” Kevin shut his eyes and buried his nose in Anders’s hair. “I’ve been told I need to find a new hobby.”

Kevin felt Anders dig his fingers into his shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” Anders whispered.

“Me too.” Kevin nuzzled closer, relieved. His doctors might not understand just how much they were asking Kevin to give up, but Anders did. Anders was the only person in the world he’d let get close, and he was the only person in the world who could understand just what Kevin was losing.

“So.” Anders leaned up and smiled at him, “A couple more days and I can drag you home?”

“Home?”

“Home to Jacksonville,” Anders said, suddenly looking nervous, uncertain. “I brought my car, so I could drive you back to California if you would prefer to go there.”

“Home” had never been anywhere but the bakery in Bishop, and when Kevin had walked away from that, “home” had been wherever he could recreate the smell of fresh-baked sourdough. Since Anders had left, even the smell of baking bread and the rhythm of kneading dough in his hands wasn’t enough to recapture that feeling. Bishop wouldn’t be “home” any more than the Appalachia Trail was, if Anders wasn’t there to share it with him. On the other hand, if he followed Anders, he’d be nothing but a burden, and he knew it. He didn’t want Anders putting him up in Florida because he felt obligated to take care of him.

“I don’t want to go back to Bishop.” Kevin held Anders tight against him. “I know I should, but I just can’t. Not yet. I don’t know what I’d do in Florida, though.”

“Me,” Anders said simply.

“Other than you.”

“Is that so tricky? You’d live. Bake, work, go to school, watch me make a fool of myself trying to surf, become addicted to daytime television if you want—just live.”

“Live… with you?”

“If it freaks you out, you can stay with me until you’re healed and then figure out what to do next.”

“It freaks me out,” Kevin admitted. “A lot. I want to, but…. If I panic and say something stupid….” He shook his head, desperate to deny what he knew would happen. He would fuck it up, just like he had with his own family. But until he fucked it up, it could be fantastic. Would it be worth the pain when it finally ended?

“You think I can’t tell when you’re moody? You think I don’t know how to fix it? All it’ll really take is sex and sourdough,” Anders said simply.

“Hmm?”

“Every time you get depressed, either sex or sourdough snaps you out of it. I suppose we could combine them, but that’d get messy.”

It couldn’t possibly be that easy. But Anders was right. Every time he got depressed on the trail, sourdough was usually all it took to get him centered and confident again. And sex with Anders had definitely put him in a better mood.

“Your solution to any problems we’ll have living together is sex and sourdough? It’s not going to be that easy.”

Anders was quiet for a moment, and then Kevin’s stomach rumbled beneath Anders’s hands. “I know it won’t solve everything, but I can’t think of any instance when it wouldn’t do the trick. This doesn’t have to be weird, Kevin. It can be as simple or as complicated as we want to make it. I’m pretty sure, no matter how complicated it gets, we can figure it out.”

Kevin laughed as a mixture of relief and warmth slammed into him and knocked down the walls he’d built to close himself off from the world. Their relationship had been weird from the start, a convoluted clash of desire, uncertainty, and timid overtures of real emotion. The strange mess of their relationship had wormed its way inside him and begun to grow before he even realized it, rooting itself so deep Kevin had felt dead without it. How could such a complicated mess have such a simple solution?

“Sex and sourdough….” Kevin repeated the phrase, grinning. “I love you.”

Anders’s breath tickled his collarbone. “I love you too.”

D
ESPITE
HOW
badly Anders wanted to get Kevin home, it took a full week before they made it back to Florida. The doctors at the Albany Memorial Hospital weren’t eager to release him when he would be traveling and going to a new city, where he’d have to find a new series of doctors before he could even schedule his four week follow-up. Kevin wasn’t eager to leave, either, when Chex Mix was still missing. Anders was surprised when he was asked to give a statement about Joel, but he told the police everything and passed along Joel’s address and phone number in Florida. Since the Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office hadn’t been able to find Joel, Anders didn’t know how the Massachusetts State Police intended to get in touch with him, but they wanted his contact information anyway.

With each additional day that volunteers combed the forest and campgrounds near Pittsfield, the odds of finding him alive dropped. At this point, they were just hoping to recover his body.

The worst part of Kevin’s recovery passed in the hospital, walking along the long hallways, clinging to the support rail with each step. His doctor assured him that getting back to regular activity would be a gradual process, and if he pushed things too far, his body would let him know. The first time he tried to climb up three steps to a rest-area bathroom, he had ended up doubled over in pain. Two hours later, the faded yellow bruises near the catheter sites on his legs had bloomed into new, massive bruises all over again.

Anders called his father from the next rest stop, while Kevin raided the vending machine. He had called his dad a couple of times, so the news that he was bringing Kevin home wasn’t new, and when he explained that Kevin still couldn’t manage stairs, his father agreed to let them use the old single-story guesthouse behind their family’s home. It wasn’t much, hardly more than a cabin, but it was better than camping, and it would save Kevin having to climb to Anders’s third-floor apartment.

They made it home early Monday afternoon, while both of his parents were out, and Anders was grateful for that. After two straight days on the road, they both needed a chance to rest. Anders left Kevin relaxing on a porch swing while he emptied their packs and set their gear on the porch to air out. He draped their sleeping bags over the porch rail and then joined Kevin. Anders slumped against him, even though he knew Kevin was probably more exhausted than he was.

“Thanks for taking care of that,” Kevin whispered. “Thank you for all of this. This is amazing.” He gestured out at the Intracoastal Waterway.

Anders gazed out over the dark-brown water of the St. Johns River, watching as it slowly made its way north to spill out into Nassau Sound and then to the Atlantic Ocean. The late-morning sun reflected off the water like glass. The way the white three-story colonial home sat against the water, with its manicured hedges, perfect lawns, pond fountains, and gardens in the picture, was beautiful. “It’s okay.”

“It’s like something out of a magazine. I can’t believe you grew up here.”

“It’s all fake,” Anders insisted. His parents had invested a lot of money to make sure of their home’s perfection. “Funny you should mention magazines, though. On the coffee table in the parlor, my mom keeps two old garden magazines that did photo spreads of the house. She’s in the pictures, kneeling in the flowerbeds and holding a trowel, as if she actually knows what it’s for. It’s all fake, and it costs a fortune to keep it looking this way.”

“I guess, growing up in a place like this, it’s easy to get used to it.”

Anders rubbed Kevin’s knee and watched a sailboat gliding over the water. “It’s not that it’s not pretty—I know it is. It’s just that it’s so fake, and they put so much effort into keeping everything that’s real out.”

Kevin leaned through the porch handrail and rubbed the petal of a yellow rose. “Feels real to me.”

“Not that kind of fake.”

“There’s a kind of fake that means something other than ‘not real’?”

Anders gently poked Kevin in the ribs, where he knew Kevin was ticklish. “Not natural, I mean. This land is all sand, so every few years they have to bring in trucks of topsoil, and they have to fertilize the soil four times a year, because the nutrients just leach into the sand. And they have to drench everything in bug spray. At least once a month, the gardener’s out here with bug spray….”

“If this is how they like it….”

“It’s just nicer without it,” Anders insisted.

“Without bug spray?”

Anders nodded.

“I don’t know. I saw one of those cockroaches….”

“Palmetto bugs,” Anders corrected him without thinking about it. “We call them palmetto bugs.”

“They’re cockroaches.”

“No one wants to move to a state with six-inch cockroaches. They’re palmetto bugs.”

Kevin’s horrified expression was priceless. “Six inches?”

“Yes. My mom hates them.” He laughed. “They still get in, no matter how much she has the yard sprayed. They’re just a fact of life.”

“So you just give them a prettier name?”

“Exactly. I wish I could convince people to do that with the rest of the state. It’s amazing down here, once you get out past the golf courses and the landscaping, but no one wants to see it….” Anders leaned against Kevin’s chest, the exhaustion of two days on the road catching up with him. “When you’re feeling up to it, I want to show you.”

“Sounds perfect,” Kevin agreed. “I’ll probably be up for an easy walk tomorrow, if you want. Today, not so much. Not without a nap, anyway.”

“You and me both.” Anders yawned. As he closed his eyes, he felt Kevin wrap his arms around him. Anders wasn’t quite sure how he fell asleep. He had too many things to do to doze off, but when he opened his eyes again, the sun had moved across the sky and the air around them had become hot and humid. Someone had thrown a crocheted blanket over both of them. From the even rhythm of Kevin’s shallow breaths, Anders knew he was asleep too.

“Kev?” Anders nudged him gently. “Kevin?”

“Hmm?” Kevin blinked and smiled down at Anders.

“Come on. Lunch.” Anders wasn’t planning on subjecting Kevin to his family any more than necessary, but the guesthouse didn’t have a kitchen. Anders was surprised to find two loaves of sourdough bread on the counter, so he threw together a couple of sandwiches and grabbed them each a soda, thankful the house seemed to be empty.

Kevin ate with his eyes closed, and Anders took a moment to stare at him. He had kept his face clean-shaven, and Anders loved it. His square jaw was rigid and framed his soft chocolate eyes so perfectly Anders could hardly believe he was real.

When he took a bite of his sandwich, he realized why Kevin had focused in on the food. “This is good,” Anders muttered between bites. The bread was soft, with a crackling crust and a perfect hint of complex sour flavors. It had a perfect aroma, and an aftertaste like rich beer.

“It really is,” Kevin agreed. “Did your housekeeper make this?”

Anders shook his head. He jumped off the barstool and grabbed the half-loaf he’d shoved back into the bag. He scanned the barcode and then the label. It had been purchased in the local Publix, but the label was a white sticker showing a blue outline of towering mountains, with a tiny creek and waterfall in the foreground. The name “Rock Creek Sourdough” was incorporated into the design in stylized letters.

He passed it to Kevin without a word. “Huh. I never thought I’d see that all the way out here,” Kevin admitted.

“Your mom said they opened a wholesale bakery in Atlanta.” Anders laughed. “The way she talked about it, it sounded like it wasn’t doing so well, so I didn’t expect to see it down here, either.”

Kevin nodded. “We only stocked a few Safeways, last time I checked in with my attorney.”

“And that’s your bread?”

Kevin nodded again.

“For sale in Publix?”

Kevin shrugged. “I haven’t really talked to him in a couple of years. He wanted me to find somebody else to take over his job so he could ask my sister out. I’m afraid I’ve been having trouble finding anyone else I trust with my affairs.”

“Max, right?”

“You met him too?”

Anders shook his head quickly. “I didn’t get the chance. He can’t possibly date her if he also holds a general power of attorney for you, because you two each hold an equal share of the bakery. It would be a major conflict of interest.”

“That’s right.”

“How much older than Jennifer is he?”

“Eight years,” Kevin said. “I know it wasn’t a big deal twenty years ago, and there are a lot of old couples where there’s more than a ten-year age difference, but Jennifer is still a kid. She’s too young to be dating someone that much older than her.”

“You ever think about asking her opinion about that?”

“No.”

“So, this guy manages all of your affairs, including your share of the bakery, and your trust fund. Do you keep track of what he puts in and out of it?”