Alex had a problem.
Alex had a problem and it was spelled C-O-R-B-I-N W-A-L-E.
The problem was that every morning Alex worked with bated breath, finding excuses to come out of the kitchen to see if Corbin was there. The problem was that when Corbin was there, Alex’s eyes seemed magnetized to him—to the cant of his head on his graceful neck. To the way his thin, nail-bitten fingers wielded a pen like a scalpel, ruthless and exacting. To the hair that often obscured his face. To the eyes that either stared resolutely down, completely absorbed by his work, or fixed, dreamily, on something up and to the right that Alex didn’t think he was seeing at all.
Alex would wait, hoping that some loud noise or sudden shift in the air would catch Corbin’s attention. Snap him out of absorption or dream, and bring him back to a place where Alex could reach him.
It wasn’t that Alex didn’t try. Sometimes he even succeeded, for a little while.
The next time Corbin came in, Alex asked what he was drawing. Corbin looked up, startled, as if he hadn’t realized his notebook was visible to anyone but himself. He looked at the page and then back at Alex, dark eyes framed in inky lashes.
“Everything,” he said, and a shiver ran up Alex’s spine.
A few days later, Corbin seemed out of sorts. Alex was working the cash register and when he asked Corbin how his day was going, Corbin muttered, “You can’t talk to me today. Please.”
“All right,” Alex said. “I’m sorry.”
Corbin’s brows drew together, a line between them. “No, no.”
Alex handed over his coffee without another word, and Corbin’s hand trembled as he took it. He pushed crumpled-up bills onto the counter and slunk to his table in the corner, tangle of hair hiding his face completely. Alex watched as Corbin stared into space, worrying his bottom lip between his teeth in a manner that absolutely did not send a shock of tender desire through him.
Alex watched Corbin. His cup emptied, though Alex never saw him sip it, and rather than becoming absorbed in his notebook, he pulled his jacket tightly around himself and left as suddenly as he’d come.
He didn’t come back for three days.
“Hey,” Alex said when Corbin next came in. “I realized why you looked familiar. I think we went to high school together.”
It had struck Alex as he was lying in his childhood bedroom one night, exhausted and wanting nothing but to fall into a dreamless sleep.
He’d closed his eyes on the day and instead of the grown-up Corbin, he saw a boy. Painfully skinny, with a messily shaved head like he’d run an electric razor over it himself. He had huge dark eyes and long lashes and his clothes were brown and green and gray, the colors of the forest, as if to announce the place he was camouflaged to fit in.
The boy had been a freshman when Alex was a senior, and he’d never known his name. It was a big school. Alex likely wouldn’t have remembered him at all, except that a month or two into the school year, someone had spray painted FOREST FAGGOT FREAK on a bank of lockers outside the auditorium. The boy standing in front of the locker that was clearly the epicenter was this pretty, skinny boy, staring at the words like they had no meaning.
After that, the rumors about him had reached even the senior class. That he was gay. That he didn’t deny it, and responded to neither taunts nor camaraderie. That he lived in the forest and animals followed him to school. That he spoke to them, but not to anyone else. That something was wrong with him.
Even then, Alex might not have remembered him. Might have grouped him in the category that his seventeen-year-old brain had marked Braver Than Me, because it felt easier not to tell anyone that he, too, desired boys instead of girls. Because it felt like he had something to lose.
But then the boy—Corbin—had disappeared.
The rumors flew. He’d gone feral in the woods. He’d been having an affair with a rich businessman and fled the country with him. He’d killed himself. Someone at school had found out he was actually a vampire and he’d had to leave town.
But here was Corbin in front of him—clearly not dead, likely not a vampire, as it was a sunny day, and not feral . . . not completely, anyway.
“Do you remember me?” Alex asked.
Corbin bit his lip and nodded.
“Oh, did my mom tell you?” It seemed likely that his mother had asked every customer who looked about his age if they’d gone to high school with her son.
Corbin shook his head. “I recognized you. You were a football player.”
He supposed that had been the most notable thing about him to a stranger in high school, but for some reason it still made his stomach feel a little hollow to hear it.
Coffee in hand, Corbin nodded at him and went to sit down. While Alex worked, he scoured his mind for other scraps of memory about Corbin from high school. He found only one.
Alex had gotten to school late one morning and had to park at the farthest edge of the lot. He’d cut around the back of the school to the science wing, and had seen someone coming out of the tree line. A skinny boy, all large eyes, and hands and feet too big for his body. A dog had been trailing behind him. At the edge of the woods, he’d paused and spoken to the dog. Then he’d scratched its head, knelt, and thrown his arms around its neck. The boy had hugged the dog like it was his only friend in the world, then snapped his fingers, and the dog had bounded back into the forest. Alex thought it must have been the last time he’d seen him until Corbin had shown up at And Son.
At lunchtime, Alex cut a thick slice of the oatmeal bread he’d baked that morning and toasted it. He spread the hot toast with butter and sprinkled it with cinnamon and sugar. Corbin was bent over his notebook, drawing as usual, but this time when Alex approached, he pushed his hair out of his face and looked up. His eyes were huge.
“I brought you a snack.”
He laid the plate on the table and hovered for a moment.
“That . . .” Corbin pointed at the toast suspiciously. “That’s my favorite.”
“Yeah?” Warmth flushed through Alex. Preparing food was always a pleasure, but this—preparing something for someone he liked and having them desire it—was the thrill of satisfaction. “I’m glad.”
He couldn’t help himself. He stayed in the hope that Corbin would eat it in front of him. When the man raised the toast to his full lips and took a bite, cinnamon and sugar spilling onto the plate like snow, something hot and possessive ripped through Alex.
Sugar stuck to Corbin’s lips, and Alex wanted to bend over him and lick it from his mouth. Corbin’s jaw clenched as he chewed, and Alex imagined Corbin on his knees before him, jaw moving for another reason entirely.
Corbin’s throat worked as he swallowed, and Alex fisted his hands in front of him and turned quickly away.
“Okay, enjoy,” he called over his shoulder, voice scraped raw with arousal and confusion.
He’d never responded to someone the way he responded to Corbin. He’d had lovers, he’d had good sex, he’d seen men across a room or over a pool table and felt attraction, lust.
With Timo, he’d felt desire, affection, love—or so he’d thought.
But Corbin had awoken something in him that felt like all of these, and none of them.
It was the difference between strawberry jam and a perfect, sun-ripe strawberry. Other people he’d desired had been jam. He’d seen them, liked them, saw potential in them, thought of what he might do with them, how they’d combine.
Corbin was a strawberry. If you had any sense at all, you took it as it was and you never questioned it. You didn’t add sugar and you didn’t add heat. You didn’t put it in a sandwich or use it in a cake. You didn’t do anything to it because it was already as absolutely, perfectly a strawberry as it would ever be. You recognized it, and were grateful for it.
And, if you were lucky, you savored it.
That was what Alex was doing.
Alex was savoring.