Sex & Sourdough (9 page)

“My treat. I saw the flier in the nightstand and I couldn’t resist,” Anders admitted. He didn’t look at Kevin when he spoke, but kept his eyes fixed on the television.

“My God, thank you,” Kevin said through another mouthful.

“No problem. I wasn’t sure what you’d like for toppings, so I just got my favorites.”

Kevin glanced at Anders while he chewed. Anders was looking everywhere but at Kevin. He had definitely realized what Kevin was doing in the shower. “It’s delicious,” Kevin said. “I haven’t had pizza in so long….”

“I know, it is good,” Anders said. “But you want to hear something crazy? After three pieces, all I could think about was that it would be better with a sourdough crust.”

Kevin smiled around his bite of pizza. “Everything is better with sourdough.” After he finished his first piece of pizza, he grabbed his own boxer shorts and his clean tank top and then went into the bathroom to get dressed.

Kevin grabbed another two pieces of pizza when he came out, thought about sitting down on the same bed as Anders, and sat down on the second bed instead. “Thanks for getting laundry started.”

Anders was fiddling with his phone while he ate, but he cast a quick sideways glance at him. Kevin dropped his gaze when he saw a slight blush color Anders’s cheeks. The blush looked amazing on him. Kevin ate his pizza and forced himself to stare at the TV. A movie about a bunch of men surviving a plane crash only to be picked off one by one by a pack of wolves was playing.

After a few tense minutes, Anders cursed and held the phone up to his ear. Kevin could hear the monotone words as Anders’s phone announced that he had forty-seven unheard messages and that his mailbox was full.

“Is your family trying to get a hold of you?”

Anders shook his head. “My ex.” Kevin watched Anders delete voice mail after voice mail, not bothering to listen to more than the first few syllables of each message.

Kevin didn’t say anything. Anders hadn’t sounded certain when he told Kevin that he and his ex were finished, and from the frantic, placating, and then enraged tone of each voice mail, it sounded like Anders’s ex wasn’t quite sure where they stood either.

Anders’s shoulders tensed and he shifted to his knees, holding the phone close. “That fucker….” He hit the delete button hard. “It’s weird enough that he doesn’t seem to get that we’re over, but he went to my dad! My parents think I’m out here starving to death and that my boyfriend’s worried about me….” Anders practically spat the words.

“Give them a call,” Kevin suggested. “Let them know you’re all right.”

“Yeah….” Anders went to the window and called his parents. Kevin tried to focus on the horror movie on TV, to give Anders some privacy. He ate another two pieces of pizza and then relaxed, watching Anders pace back and forth out of the corner of his eye.

“I don’t even know why I bothered charging the damn thing…,” Anders announced, returning to his bed. He turned the phone off, then dropped back onto the bed and stretched.

“Parents reassured?”

“No. Well, yes. I told them I was fine, and that I wasn’t going to be home until the end of August, but I don’t think it helped. I don’t know what the hell Joel’s doing, but he’s got my father convinced that he and I are still together and that I’m insane, that I’m cutting myself off from my family and trying to hurt myself.”

“Wow,” Kevin muttered. “That’s….”

“Crazy?”

“A little nuts,” Kevin agreed. He didn’t want to admit that he had essentially done just that when he started hiking. He’d run into a few other hikers who had used long-distance hikes as a form of temporary suicide too, escaping from the world when they didn’t have the resolve to just kill themselves.

At least Anders had been definite this time when he said that he and his ex weren’t together. Kevin had spent the past two weeks trying to coax a straight answer out of Anders on that question.

Kevin sat up and glanced across at Anders, watching the way his shirt rode up slightly, how his hands settled on his bare abdomen. He stared, transfixed by the mere proximity of Anders’s fingers to the waistband of his boxers. He needed to get over this fixation. He didn’t want to go back to hiking alone, because hiking with Anders was fun, but he couldn’t handle the tangled mess of emotions he’d be trapped in if he couldn’t keep his hands to himself. His own issues were bad enough, but Anders was just coming out of what sounded like a nasty relationship. No matter how cute he was, no matter how much Kevin wanted to enjoy his body as well as his company, Anders wasn’t up for any kind of relationship at the moment.

“So what was life like, growing up in Bishop?” Anders asked.

Kevin shook his head and squeezed his eyes shut, trying to focus. “Bishop? Nothing special. It’s just a typical small town.”

“Is your whole family from there?”

“What’s left of it, yeah,” Kevin said, grateful for the distraction. “Just my mom and my sister Jennifer. She’s turning twenty this month.”

“Are you two close?”

“As close as siblings can be, I guess. Meaning we spent the first fifteen years of our lives trying to kill each other. Of course, she’s accident-prone, so every time I even touched her, she got hurt.”

“You’re the big brother,” Anders said, snickering. “You’re supposed to be the responsible one.”

“That just means I’m supposed to take the blame for everything,” Kevin insisted. “When she was three, we were still in the same bedroom, and she broke her arm jumping off my top bunk. I had tried everything short of throwing her off to keep her from climbing up there to begin with, and somehow it was my fault that she wouldn’t stay down…. Never mind that she jumped, she didn’t fall.”

“That’s the way it’s supposed to go. Trust me. I’m the youngest of four boys. Big brothers are supposed to be tolerant, protective, kind, patient, and take the blame for everything. It’s what they exist for.”

“Four? You’ve got three brothers?”

“Yes. But we’re not close. They were all a lot older than me. Michael is the oldest—he’s going to be thirty-nine in April—Cole is thirty-four, and Aaron is thirty. I’m pretty sure they thought I was some kind of new toy when they were younger, and by the time I was old enough to do all of the normal brother stuff, they were all out of the house. When I was seven, Cole was graduating from high school and going on to college. Aaron went to Annapolis when I started middle school.”

“Must have been lonely….” Kevin might complain about Jennifer, but they had been both best friends and best enemies growing up. He missed her so much the grief nearly choked him when he thought about never seeing her again.

“No. It was cool. I got to learn from their mistakes, after all.”

“But you didn’t get to share them,” Kevin said. “The only time I ever got caught sneaking back into the house after a party, it was because Jennifer came to the party and I dragged her home. She was a loud drunk, all giggly and clumsy. It was funny.”

“But you said she’s just turning twenty….”

“Exactly!” Kevin reached across the gap between the beds for another slice of pizza. Between the two of them, the first pizza had vanished already. “The last thing you want to see at a party is your fourteen-year-old sister, drunk and hitting on your friends!”

Anders laughed and the last tension and unease in his eyes faded. It had been a long time since Kevin had actually gotten to know anyone, much less been able to talk to someone as easily as he could talk with Anders. He didn’t want to fuck that up. He was just going to have to keep his thoughts on hiking, or brace himself for a lot of pain if he had to resort to cold showers.

“I never ran into my brothers socially,” Anders said. “Thank God. I’m going to be stuck with Michael, though. He’s a junior partner at my father’s firm. My father’s already got my office picked out.”

“Firm? You said he does real estate law?”

“Contracts and commercial transactions, although he makes most of his money with commercial and residential developments.” Anders stretched out on the bed, reaching his arms over his head until his T-shirt rode up over his navel. Kevin licked his lips and stared at the slight dip of Anders’s hipbones. “Dullest shit on the planet,” Anders went on. “All Michael does is write contracts—all day, every day. You’d think being a lawyer would be exciting, but it’s all paperwork and golf.”

“Are you anti-golf?”

“I hate golf.” Anders shut his eyes and burrowed into the pillow. “But it’s Florida. You’ve got to play golf. Every apartment complex and subdivision has its own golf course.”

“At least they look nice….”

“Whatever. I’ll stick to trees. What about you?” Anders cracked his eyes open and looked across at him. “What do you do, in real life?”

“Same thing I do now. I make sourdough.”

“You bake? For a living?”

“You don’t think my bread is good enough to sell?”

Anders grinned at him. “Kev, I think your bread is amazing. It’s as close to orgasmic as food can get without being pizza. I’m just surprised, that’s all.”

“Orgasmic?” Kevin blushed. “I make orgasmic bread?”

“Yes, you do.”

“Well…. That’s… I don’t think I can put that on our bulletin board, but it’s tempting.”

“Bulletin board?”

“In front of our bakery.” Kevin smiled as he said the word
bakery
aloud. “We don’t really advertise, except by word of mouth, but my dad always put up prices and stuff on a bulletin board out front. Jen and I had fun coming up with slogans to put on the board, new names for recipes. I love that place,” he whispered. “It’s more my home than the house we lived in. The first thing I remember in life is my dad setting me on the counter while he kneaded dough for cinnamon rolls. I was obsessed with eating the raw bread dough. Apparently they couldn’t get me to leave it alone. So one day when I was four, he made a sourdough starter, thinking that it might be one dough I wouldn’t attack. That turned into the recipe for our Rock Creek Sourdough. Most popular bread we made. But I loved the sourdough starter so much I used it for everything—pancakes, the french bread, the cinnamon rolls, even croissants. Anything you can make with flour, my dad and I tried to make with sourdough. We spent the rest of the time hiking.”

“Sounds like he’s a great dad.”

“He was,” Kevin said quietly. “He was the best.”

“Oh, I’m sorry.”

Kevin shrugged and took a deep breath. “I’m not,” he said at last.

“Hmm?”

“I’m not sorry. He got sick when I was sixteen. Well, no, he
told us
he was sick when I was sixteen. I suspect he was sick for a long time before that. For five years I watched him get worse and worse. He spent the last year in a nursing home, too weak to get out of bed. By the end, his hands were always so swollen he couldn’t move his fingers, even to hold a pen. His throat ended up inflamed and he couldn’t talk. He was my size when he was healthy, and over the years he shrunk down until he looked like a skeleton. When he finally died, I was glad he was gone.” Kevin looked back at Anders, expecting to see the same shock and horror he had seen every other time he’d dared admit that out loud. “That’s horrible, isn’t it?”

“No,” Anders said seriously. “It doesn’t sound horrible. It sounds hard. Especially as a teenager. I still have that image in my head of my parents being invincible, you know? I’ve never imagined what I would do if I lost them….”

Kevin finished the crust of his last piece of pizza and wiped his hands clean. He tossed his napkin into the trash and stretched back on the bed himself. “Hopefully you won’t find out for a long time.”

“I am sorry,” Anders said again.

Kevin watched Anders put the second pizza in the minifridge. When Anders crawled under the covers of the other bed, Kevin reached toward the nightstand and turned off the lamp. He buried himself in the blankets and rolled over to block out the glow of the television. A moment later, the television clicked off. Kevin heard Anders set the remote down on the nightstand.

“What killed him?” Anders whispered in the darkness.

Kevin squeezed his eyes shut tight. “The same thing that’s going to kill me. Lupus.”

T
HE
RAIN
tapping on the metal roof of the shelter sounded like gunfire, right over their heads. The Fontana Dam Shelter had more than enough sleeping platforms for everyone, and it was nice not to be sleeping in the rain again. It also had a large common room with a fireplace, and someone had gotten a blaze started despite the wet wood. They’d even had warm showers.

Up until their stay in Franklin, North Carolina, four days before, Kevin had been dead set against sleeping in shelters unless the ground was soaked. Their first night back on the trail, Kevin had set up his small tent close to a crowded shelter and they had both stayed near the fire pit, chatting with other hikers until Anders was so tired his eyes itched. Two days out of Franklin, they’d stayed in a gigantic hostel at the Nantahala Outdoor Center, then another crowded shelter the next night, even though it didn’t seem likely to rain. Anders had enjoyed the quiet evenings in front of the fire with other hikers. The next night, once the rain began, he’d been glad he wasn’t caught in it, but Anders couldn’t figure out why Kevin had changed his mind. There were just as many chipmunks in North Carolina as there had been in Georgia, after all.