Chapter Twelve Back Where We Started
Chapter Twelve
Back Where We Started
Owen’s body still aches as he comes to the following morning, his eyes heavy with exhaustion from a night spent restlessly
wrestling with the sheets. First, he’d been too hot and had thrown the comforter over onto Kevin. Then he’d been too cold
and had to steal the sheets back.
At least Kevin was too drunk to notice.
Sprinkle in the worst headache he’s had in a while and the dryness in his mouth from the edible, and Owen’s concocted quite
the mess of a morning for himself.
But all of that pales in comparison to how Jacob has made him feel.
It was going to happen; they were going to do it. They almost made a huge mistake. Because they shouldn’t be kissing. “What
the hell is wrong with me?” Owen asks no one.
And he wanted it too. He wanted Jacob to kiss him.
“Fuck, dude . . .” Owen rakes a hand through his hair.
“You okay?” Kevin grumbles, eyes still closed, face half buried in his pillow as he rolls over to face Owen.
“Yeah.”
“Good.” Kevin’s voice is gravelly and hard, filled with exhaustion. “Then please stop talking.”
“Sorry.” Owen swallows, throwing back the comforter and reaching for his cane. If he’s going to stew in his feelings, the
last thing he wants to do is sit here. He’s not sure exactly where he’s going as he brushes his teeth and gets dressed. He
just knows that he can’t sit around doing nothing. It’s too early for most of the entertainment offerings, and Owen would
rather not spend even more money shopping. Even after he eases his edible hangover with a greasy breakfast at the buffet, he still has no clue how to
occupy his mind long enough to stop thinking about Jacob.
“I’ve got a weird question,” Owen says to the waiter as he comes by to collect Owen’s last plate. “How do people spend time
on a cruise?”
“Oh . . .” The waiter is clearly caught off guard. Why wouldn’t he be? “Uh . . . I mean, most people don’t worry about it.
You’re on vacation, right?”
“Right.” Owen thinks for a moment, wondering how to actually ask what he’s asking. “But if I wanted to do something? Like do a thing, ya know?”
The poor waiter still seems lost, and then Owen remembers that he probably isn’t getting paid enough to put up with passenger
nonsense. Then the waiter says, “Lots of people do classes, I guess? I don’t know, dude, I just work in the buffet.”
Owen actually doesn’t hate that idea. “Sorry . . . Thanks.”
The waiter nods his head and quickly makes his escape. And Owen pulls his phone out.
He could join a pottery class, or a yoga group on the lido deck that’s starting in half an hour. Then he sees the last call for a baking class that begins in ten minutes, and the choice is clear.
Navigating his way to one of the classrooms near the rear of the ship, Owen steps into a large room dotted with individual
workstations. There are long counters throughout, each with their own sink, small oven, and stand mixer, as well as an assortment
of dry and wet ingredients. More cabinet space lines the far wall, along with two large refrigerators, cooling racks, and
extra mixers. It almost feels like Owen’s stepped onto the set of The Great British Bake Off for a moment.
“Hello, hello, hello, everyone!” A woman walks through the door just as Owen is looping a teal apron over his head, speaking
in a strong London accent. “How are we all doing this morning?”
“Great, Mel!” an older woman at the workstation next to Owen’s says, eyeing her husband. “Harold and I went to that jazz show
you suggested.”
“Did you have a good time?” the woman—apparently Mel—asks her.
“Oh, it was phenomenal. That Harry Whitfield is something special.”
There’s more small talk between Mel and a few of the other passengers as the workstations begin to fill up, and Owen is quick
to realize something: everyone here knows everyone else already, and for a moment, he feels out of place.
Then Mel sets her sights on Owen.
“You’re a new face!” she says, voice chipper.
“Yeah, I, uh . . . I hope that’s okay,” Owen says as he leans against his cane.
“More than all right!” Mel reassures him. Then she motions to Owen’s cane. “Do you need a stool or anything? We do a lot of standing here.”
“That’d be great, actually, thank you.” Owen nods, taking the seat when it’s offered to him.
“All-righty, now that everyone’s settled, I thought that we’d continue our pastry series,” Mel starts to say as she takes
her spot behind the workstation at the front of the room. “Today we’ll be doing one of my favorites, blueberry scones!”
Without hesitation, Owen grabs the bag of flour, the paper crinkling as he tears into it. It’s only when he’s scooping the
two cups he knows he’ll need into the bowl that he realizes no one else is doing the same.
In fact, all of his classmates are staring at him, Mel included.
“Sorry,” Owen says sheepishly, setting the measuring cup down.
Mel smiles, though, and moves on with the instructions, explaining a bit about her own recipe as she works through the first
few steps. When everyone else goes to open their own bags of flour, Owen picks up where he left off, ignoring Mel’s steps
as he adds the dry ingredients together, mixing them before he adds the sugar. Scones are second nature to Owen; they were
his mother’s favorite growing up. Owen’s too, and the very first thing she ever taught him how to bake.
There was once a sting he associated with making them, especially after college, when baking became this thing Owen relied
on just to get himself out of bed. Because it was something to do, and something that he knew he could do well, no matter
how badly his parents made him feel about himself.
The sugar helped too.
“A woman needs to know how to bake,” Owen’s mother had told him when he was much, much younger, before Owen knew what being transgender looked like, back when he just thought that he was wrong for how he felt about his body when he looked in the mirror.
Despite her misogynistic reasons for wanting to teach Owen how to bake, it was fun—hovering next to his mother, watching her and how she moved so naturally in the kitchen, replicating her ritual for him.
And for however long the recipe would take to bake, Owen got to have a somewhat normal relationship with her. She wouldn’t
make comments about his body, or his hair, or his grades, or how he slouched, how he needed a haircut, when he used a word
incorrectly.
It got to be just the two of them.
Owen’s mother would gossip about her coworkers and the other moms in the neighborhood. She never really cared that much about
what Owen had to say, but that didn’t matter to him. It was the closest he really ever got to her paying attention to him.
Owen pours the buttermilk into a measuring cup, adding a bit more than Mel suggests so that they won’t come out too dry before
he walks over to the back of the room, grabbing a fresh lemon from the pile of fruit stacked in a bowl.
“This recipe doesn’t call for lemon,” Mel says, leaning against the counter opposite Owen as he takes a seat on his stool.
“Oh, uh . . .” Owen’s eyes dart around, suddenly nervous. “Sorry, I just . . . uh . . . I always put lemon zest in the wet
ingredients.”
“Hmm . . .” Mel seems to think for a moment. Owen does his best to read her face, wondering if she’s angry or annoyed that
Owen would dare come into her class and change her recipe. “I noticed that you added more buttermilk too.”
“Right.” Owen nods, suddenly feeling like he’s a contestant on MasterChef and he’s being grilled by Gordon Ramsay. “I think you don’t have enough, I’m worried that the scones will be too dry.”
“That’s because these are meant to pair with tea, so they’re supposed to be a bit drier,” she explains.
“Yeah, I just . . . guess I’m used to doing things my way.”
Mel lets out a laugh, and Owen feels his stomach unclench, grateful that what he said was taken as a joke. Even if he didn’t
exactly mean it that way. “I take it you bake often?”
“Yeah,” Owen says. “I do.”
“You’re Owen?” Mel asks, before she explains, “Yours was the only new name on the class registry.”
“That’s me.”
“You move around the kitchen like a natural.”
“Thanks . . . Chef?” he says, unsure if he needs to add the honorific. They do it on TV.
Mel’s giggle tells him that he shouldn’t. “I could tell when you used the cheese grater for the butter; usually we just have
our students slice the butter with a knife or break it up with their hands.”
“I like the consistency better,” he tells her. “And it makes for a nice flake on the finished bake.”
“Good eye. I usually make them that way too, but too many passengers were shredding their fingertips apart on the grater,
so the cruise line told me I had to change the steps.” Mel giggles again, her eyes drawn to the younger couple on Owen’s other
side.
One of the women turns the mixer on to the highest setting right away, causing a cloud of flour, salt, and baking powder to
burst in front of her and her girlfriend’s faces.
“I’ll be back to check on you in a second,” Mel says, waving at Owen before she glides over to help.
Watching his own mixture to make sure it’s not overworked, Owen scrapes the dough that climbs its way onto the sides of the bowl so that he gets everything, only stopping when the older couple next to him seems to also have trouble with their own mixer.
“You lock it like this,” Owen explains, twisting the bowl so it won’t keep spinning out of control like it has been. “And
then pull this lever. You don’t want it to go for too long, or else they’ll come out stodgy. Once all the ingredients are
incorporated, give it about twenty more seconds.”
“Oh, isn’t he so nice, Harold? Thank you so much!” Owen can tell it’s taking everything in the older woman not to reach up
and pinch his cheeks.
Then she goes for it anyway.
“Don’t bother the boy, Ethel,” Harold tells his wife. “Let him get back to his own scones.”
“It’s no problem,” he tells them both, biting back his desire to pull away. “Really.”