by Roan Parrish
When Alex smiled at him easily, Corbin felt it in his gut like a bolt of lightning.
Then Alex braided the fig and honey, and draped both with towels to rise again. He told Corbin all about challah and the different styles of braids, and about Shabbat.
When the loaves were in the oven, Alex turned to him. “I don’t remember that much about you in high school.” His voice was deliberately neutral. “But I remember—”
“What a freak I was,” Corbin murmured.
Alex’s gaze was sharp. “No. I was going to say how brave you were.”
“What, why.”
Alex’s shame was a sour streak that wrinkled Corbin’s nose. “Because you were all alone, and small, but you still didn’t deny who you were. I was on the damn football team and the track team. I had friends who would’ve had my back. And I still didn’t own who I was.”
Corbin’s heart pounded at the unfamiliar characterization. “But you knew.”
“Yeah. I always knew. Maybe I even wished that someone would ask me directly. Because I doubt I would’ve been able to lie about it to someone’s face. But no one ever did.”
“Sometimes knowing it yourself is enough.”
“Sometimes,” Alex allowed. “But this was just me being scared and self-conscious. It was me valuing the wrong things. I try very hard not to do that anymore.” His jaw was set and Corbin could see the truth of it. Could see the fierceness with which Alex always did what he thought was right.
It had never occurred to Corbin to deny that he was gay. But it hadn’t been out of a sense of righteousness. The other kids at school had called him a lot of things—some true, some not—but there had been no utility in commenting on them. They hadn’t cared about the truth of him. He’d been a stand-in, a convenient spot in the universe to direct the feelings they hadn’t wanted to hold inside themselves. What good would it do a spot in the universe to say if those feelings were true or false.
But Alex had looked at him and seen something different. Alex had been seeing his own failings in contrast, but he’d seen bravery nonetheless. It warmed Corbin to imagine that decades-old regard shining on him like a stray ray of sunlight through the small windows in their high school hallways.
The timer dinged and the smell of the challah made Corbin’s stomach growl. Alex was describing a sundried tomato bread he’d had in Italy, as he let the challah cool a bit, then he cut them both slices.
Corbin’s mind was still on the way Alex’s arms had felt around him, when he looked up to find Alex making a face.
“Yikes,” Alex said, snorting. “That doesn’t work at all.” He pinched off a piece and tasted it again. “I should’ve cleansed myself or something after that conversation with Mac. My grandmother always said don’t bake while you’re angry or sad because your bitterness will flavor the bread. You should bake with love if you’re baking for people you love, and they’ll taste the sweetness.” He winked and it blasted through Corbin like a shot.
Corbin blinked, the world shifting into slow motion, tumblers falling into place. Alex was rewriting his recipe aloud—sundried tomato pesto, with thyme instead of basil, running in a ribbon through the challah—but Corbin’s mind was racing.
Your bitterness will flavor the bread.
Negative feeling transferred into the food, communicated through its creation. If it was possible to channel bitterness and anger into the challah, was it possible to rid yourself of them that way, too? To bake them out of yourself? A purgation in flour and salt?
If it were possible . . . could Corbin do it? Bake the curse out of himself, one loaf at a time?
The thought ricocheted around his head, fizzed at the back of his throat, and settled in his nose, smelling of pine and snow—smelling of the kind of wildness that made things happen, and leaving him lightheaded with a surge of something that felt frighteningly like hope.
Corbin awoke from the twist of a dream, gasping. He pushed himself up on trembling arms to reattach to the real. It was dark. Cold air gusted through the open window. He could smell himself in the warm tangle of bedding—his woodsy sleeping scent, and the salt-sharp tang of desire.
He let himself collapse back onto the mattress, arms outflung as bits of the dream came back. Vignettes of Alex and him that would never happen in the waking world.
Alex’s arms tightening around his shoulders in a hug that relaxed into simply holding each other. Alex’s nose buried in his hair. Alex’s fingers skimming his spine. A playful shoulder bump that turned to Alex’s arm sliding around his waist to tug him close. He and Alex touching at thigh, hip, shoulder, leaning into one another like they had magnets polarized beneath their skin.
“It’s not real,” Corbin whispered in the dark. “It won’t ever be real, so stop it.” The dampness on his lashes was quickly absorbed by his hair and the pillow, and he pulled the covers back around him. He inhaled and an ocean of loneliness opened in his gut. Finnian, I need you, he thought, but then changed his mind. It wasn’t Finnian he needed. Wasn’t Finnian he dreamt about, his sleeping mind admitting what his waking thoughts refused.
That he wanted Alex. He wanted Alex with a fierce desperation that made him shudder in the night.
Eyes squeezed tightly shut, jaw set against the things that could never be, Corbin fell asleep and dreamt of nothing.
The moon cast shadows like arrows on the sidewalk as Corbin let himself into the bakery at midnight. He got out yeast, flour, eggs, oil, and salt, measuring as Alex had.
As he kneaded the dough, he summoned everything he felt about the curse. He thought of the first time his aunts had told him of it. The Wales are cursed in love. Long before it could be a disappointment, it was simply a fact. This is how things are, and this is how they can never be.
He thought of the first time it had truly meant something. The afternoon the angle of Denny Dermott’s chin and the laughing curve of his eyelashes had sent heat fluttering through Corbin’s chest. He’d been fourteen, and on the walk home from school, he’d imagined kissing that chin, licking those eyelashes. Then, with a sinking sensation, he’d realized what would happen after. Not with Denny, perhaps. Or the next boy, or the next. But eventually.
As flakes of early snow stung his heated cheeks, he’d realized in a rush that wanting to kiss a boy’s chin meant that eventually there might be a boy he’d love. Eventually there might be a boy whose chin he wanted to kiss forever. As the factual how things are turned to the personal how they can never be, something opened up inside Corbin that had gaped ever since.
The promise of loneliness wasn’t the same as loneliness itself. Corbin knew, because it was the promise of loneliness that descended that day. It was loneliness itself that he’d felt over the last few years. Loneliness that ached with the throb of a thousand hearts. Loneliness that turned certain parts of himself to stone to stop that throbbing ache because it was easier to cut some things off than to feel the pain of them.
Corbin watched as the dough inflated with everything he wished he could throw away. Once it had risen, he rolled it into six strands. Braids can trap ill wishes and keep them away. He braided slowly, sending the curse into the braid.
Then he set the oven as high as it would go, and burnt the ill-wish bread to carbon.
At work later, he touched Alex’s bare arm with his fingertips, raising the hairs on his own arm with the contact. For the next hour, he watched closely, waiting to see some sign that anything had rubbed off, the taint in him transferring to Alex. When nothing seemed to change, he breathed deeply.
Maybe, if he did it again and again—leached the curse out of himself and burnt it, one loaf at a time—he could be free. Maybe, just maybe, he wouldn’t have to be alone forever.
In the bath that night, Corbin closed his eyes and waited to disappear.
Finnian, he murmured, and lay motionless until the air changed.
Finnian didn’t touch him; Finnian told him how to touch himself. That was the way Corbin liked it. That was the way it had
always been—Finnian using him as an instrument of his own pleasure. Finnian liked to watch, and Corbin liked the way being worth watching made him feel momentarily beautiful.
When it was Finnian, it wasn’t fantasy, wasn’t masturbation. It was sex with someone he knew and trusted calling all the shots. Pushing him in different directions but always keeping him safe.
When he opened his eyes, Finnian was perched on the edge of the tub, languidly trailing his long fingers in the bathwater and making Corbin shiver at the thought of what those fingers would describe.
Touch your stomach lightly, under the water. Feel how slick your skin is.
Corbin shuddered at his own touch. His skin was often so sensitive that a caress of his stomach or his thigh could have him achingly hard. Sometimes brushing the inside of his biceps or under his arms made him quake with awakened desire. Once, Finnian had made him come by scratching the creases where thighs met groin, little fingers of electricity zinging everywhere.
Beneath the water, he slid his hand over his chest to circle his nipples. When Finnian told him to pinch them, he closed his eyes. Put your other hand between your legs and touch your inner thighs. Slowly. Corbin stoked the sensitive skin of his thigh and felt his cock harden against his stomach. He switched hands, pinching his nipples and sliding his palm along his other thigh. He imagined what it would be like for the hand to belong to a lover, for the touch to be unfamiliar.
The hand would be larger than his, rougher, and would rasp his delicate flesh until he trembled and pressed into it. He flexed his hips under the water, every nerve ending lit up at the thought.
Get out of the tub and dry off, but don’t touch your erection. Go lie on the bed and light the candle. Then get the lube and wait for me.
Corbin sloshed water on the floor as he got out, but ignored it, roughly toweling himself off. Water dripped from his hair and ran down his spine like the lick of a tongue. The candle he lit filled the room with a subtle, warm scent. Amber and willow and musk. It was so tied to memories of pleasure that just the smell of it threw Corbin deeper into an erotic haze.
Lube in hand, he lay on the bed and waited.
I love to look at you. You’re so beautiful, Corbin. You would do anything I asked you to, wouldn’t you?
“Yes,” Corbin gasped. “What do you want me to do?” His voice was rough and he squirmed against the duvet.
Finnian whispered in his ear and Corbin obeyed. He took out the vibrator with the wicked curve that hit his prostate. He slicked it with lube and lay back, teasing his hole with the tip. Finnian liked to tease.
Slick your fingers and open yourself up just a little. Just so I can see.
Corbin’s touch was electric, and he slowly worked two fingertips around his rim and then inside himself, breathing deeply at the penetration and the feel of his own body on his fingertips.
His mind spiraled out as it always did when he took his time with this. He imagined his fingers grew into tree roots, long enough to slide all the way inside him, so deep they were buried in his gut, his heart, his lungs, the back of his throat. He imagined drawing a line of fiery pleasure from his ass to his throat, with strokes that opened his whole body. The openness he so often felt made real. His entire body penetrated, stuffed, all the empty places filled.
The image made him quake with lust, and he was hard and hot and throbbing. He moaned and Finnian’s eyes heated.
Slide the vibrator inside, slowly, until the tip touches your prostate.
Corbin’s eyes fluttered closed again as the toy breached him. His hips rolled up, the wet tip of his dick sliding against his stomach in a snap of pleasure.
Is it in place? Is it touching you just right?
Corbin flexed the toy and gasped, nodded.
Good. Hold it inside and take your hands away.
Corbin clenched around the toy and grabbed at his thighs. He scratched red lines in the pale flesh as his hips rocked, the tip of the toy crackling pleasure at the base of his spine.
Turn it on now, on low.
When the humming vibrations hit his prostate, Corbin’s hips jerked upward and he cried out. Eyes closed to blackness, the warm scent of amber and musk making his head swim, he felt every sensation concentrate on that single spot inside his body. Every nerve ending routed there, stimulated with vibration, and Corbin gasped.
Touch yourself. Anywhere but your cock.
Corbin’s concentration broke, easing things off a little. He ran his palm flat along his stomach, smearing drips of his arousal into his skin. He pinched his nipples, zinging pleasure to his gut. He slid a hand around his throat, felt his hard swallow.
He squeezed just enough to make himself writhe on the bed at the thought that it was all connected: blood and bone and come and spit and breath.
Turn it up a click and pulse it inside yourself. Do not touch your dick.
Corbin’s breath came fast as the vibration increased. He rocked the vibrator, pulsing it against his prostate, lightheaded with jolts of pleasure that were turning his bones to liquid fire. He felt like he might drown in the sensation. The scratches on his thighs burned as he ran his fingernails the other way, and he knew he’d feel them the next day. Knew his jeans would rasp against the scratches and he’d remember this moment.
The pleasure, the pain, everything in between, it all tethered him inside his body, kept him in the world.
His hips had begun to move rhythmically, his entire body pulsing toward completion.
Turn it up the rest of the way. Fuck yourself. I want to watch you fall apart.
His groan was a broken thing clawing its way out of his throat. He turned up the vibration and his head snapped back as his body shook. He pushed the toy deep inside himself, and the thought was back. The image of pressing the thing all the way inside, dragging the shuddering pleasure up through the hollow of gut, the throb of heart, the gasp of lung, the clench of throat, the entirety of his body held captive to these sensations.
Only, for the first time, it wasn’t the toy or his own fingers he pictured turning to tree roots or to fire. It was a lover’s erection, and it speared through him, claiming him—all of him.
Corbin’s back seized as every muscle clenched in throbbing pleasure, his cock shooting untouched onto his stomach and chest, a hot brand of lust. His muscles clenched around the toy, hips jerking as every touch to his prostate sent another jolt through him.
“Please,” Corbin whimpered, shuddering as ecstasy turned to pain. His cock gave one last pulse, a bead of come welling from the tip, and Finnian let him go.
You can turn it off now, if you like.
Fucked too loose for coordination, Corbin pulled the toy out and dropped it on the bed, collapsing backward. The still vibrating toy nudged his balls and he jerked again, a ghost spasm of pleasure turning to shivers. When he finally got ahold of it and turned it off, he was shaking.
He mopped at his stomach and then pulled the duvet over him, relaxing into the warmth. The candle would burn all night, and if he woke, its smell would remind him how good his body could feel. How good he could feel, even alone.
Always alone.
With a last sigh, he closed his eyes, but as he drifted to sleep, he realized it hadn’t been an anonymous lover he’d pictured in the moment before his orgasm had ripped through him. It hadn’t even been Finnian.
It had been Alex Barrow inside him. Inside him so deep he could never hope to get away.
When Corbin saw Alex early the next morning, sleepy in the predawn light, he took in the muss of Alex’s soft hair, the line of his broad shoulders, the movement of his throat as he swallowed.
Corbin saw these things and he squeezed his thighs together, the rough seam in the denim rasping over the scratches on his thighs. Corbin caught a whiff of Alex’s scent and felt the press of his flesh against flesh, and he closed his eyes as his cock hardened in seconds. He closed his eyes and went elsewhere in his head, because he’d never been so close to coming from practically nothing in hi
s life.
When Alex squeezed his arm in greeting, Corbin bit his lip and tried to smile, and he decided he would bake and bake and bake the curse away every night if he had to. Because he wanted Alex fucking Barrow. He wanted him like he’d never wanted anything.
It was happening more and more often. Little touches at work, and Alex’s smell in his nose, and when he got home, instead of Finnian telling him what to do, it was Alex.
Alex who stripped him bare. Alex who ran greedy eyes over his naked form. Alex who had him touch himself everywhere, fuck himself with every toy he owned, scream his orgasms into the empty quiet of the house and the yard and the woods beyond.
It was Alex, Alex, Alex, inside his head and inside his body, until he was so full up with Alex, it was like his fantasy had come true.
It wasn’t just sex, either. Something about Alex called to him. He dreamt about him. He began imagining that Alex was sitting across from him at the kitchen table over dinner. Walking with him when he and Wolf tramped the honeycomb trails through the trees. More than that, he imagined Alex talking to him. He imagined talking to Alex.
Corbin had never talked to anyone—not really. His aunts had mostly talked at him when it was needed, preferring to talk to each other. Carbon, Lex, and Jasmine knew what he was thinking, so he never had to tell them. Finnian . . . Finnian wasn’t much for talking. Which left Wolf. He told Wolf things sometimes. They felt like confessions, but he thought perhaps Wolf knew already in the same way Carbon, Lex, and Jasmine did.
But Alex didn’t know, and Corbin thought that he might want to.
The afternoon before, as they’d cleaned up the kitchen, Corbin had been muttering to himself, and Alex asked “Will you tell me what you’re talking about?” Flustered, Corbin’s head had immediately emptied. He hadn’t even realized it had been audible, and had raised his brows questioningly at Alex. “I want to know,” Alex had murmured. “I want to know everything.”
