Chapter 5 #2
He did it carefully, inside the small space Dave hadn't given up, so that turning brought them face to face with nothing between them but flour and an inch of warm air, and he looked up at Dave — the glasses, the flat-on-one-side hair, the dark eyes doing that bright, terrified, wide-open thing — and Dave watched him arrive at the edge of something and stand there.
"Dave," Albert said. "Can I—"
And stopped. And Dave understood, with the particular clarity he brought to the things that mattered, that this was the hard part for Albert — not the wanting, the wanting was easy, Albert wanted everything all the time on everyone's behalf — but the saying.
The claiming. Putting his own name on the front of a sentence and letting it stand there in the open with nothing to protect it.
Dave didn't finish it for him. He'd learned that too, from the same teacher. You didn't rush it.
"Can I—" Albert breathed, and his hands came up and settled light against Dave's chest, flour and all, "—kiss you. I want to kiss you. That's the — that's the thing I want, I checked, it's not for anybody else, it's just mine. I want it."
"Yeah," Dave said. "You can."
And then, because the man had finally asked, Dave chose — deliberately, the way he did everything that counted, no motion wasted — and closed the last inch himself.
***
The kiss was careful for about a second and a half.
Dave had meant it to be gentle, had meant to give the guy something soft to have said yes to, and Albert kissed him back like a man who'd been holding a want at arm's length so long his arms had given out, and the careful thing turned, fast, into something with heat under it, Albert's fingers curling into the front of Dave's shirt, Dave's hand coming up to the back of Albert's neck into that thick springing hair, and the bench knife clattered somewhere and neither of them looked.
Albert made the sound again, the rye sound, low in his throat, and it went through Dave like a current finding ground.
He got Albert backed against the bench, or Albert pulled him there, the sequence wasn't clear and didn't matter, and there was flour getting into everything and the taste of the dark shop coffee still on Albert's mouth and the warm live weight of him arching up, and Dave — who had spent two years being so careful, so solitary, so structurally incapable of needing one single thing — needed this, plainly and completely, and let himself, for once, not do the math on what it would cost.
His hand found the hem of the thin gray shirt and stopped there, at the warm skin of Albert's back, and went no further — some old careful part of him holding even now, wanting to earn the rest of it slow — and Albert shivered under even that much and said his name once, wrecked, and Dave had to stop and just breathe for a second with his forehead against Albert's.
"Okay," Albert gasped, against his mouth, laughing and not laughing, "okay, this is — the tension thing, I get it now, this is a very effective teaching meth—" and Dave kissed him again to shut him up, which worked, which he filed away as useful information.
They came up for air with Albert's back against the bench and Dave's forearms bracketing him and both of them breathing like they'd run somewhere.
Albert's glasses were fogged and shoved crooked.
His mouth was flushed. He looked up at Dave with his whole unguarded face, no wattage in it anywhere, just the plain astonished want of a man who'd asked for something and gotten it, and Dave felt the thing he'd nailed the door shut over come all the way up in his chest and stand there in the light.
"Don't," Dave said, rough, "start planning."
"I'm not planning."
"You're planning. I can hear you planning."
"I'm doing a little planning." Albert's hand was flat over Dave's heart, and he had to feel it going, and Dave let him. "You have flour in your — everywhere. We got flour everywhere. Mabel's going to know the second she walks in, she's going to take one look at this bench—"
"Mabel already knows. Mabel's known since before we did."
That got the laugh, the real one, and Albert dropped his forehead against Dave's collarbone and laughed into his shirt, and Dave felt the laugh go through his own chest like it belonged to him, which was a new and faintly alarming piece of plumbing.
He put his hand flat between Albert's shoulder blades and left it there, and Albert stilled under it and breathed.
And Dave stood in the middle of his own shop at one in the morning holding a warm astonished person against him, and thought, with the flat administrative clarity that had never once steered him wrong: this is going to cost me something.
And then, for the first time in his adult life, chose not to add up in advance exactly what.
***
It should have ended there. It nearly did.
Albert stayed another hour. They shaped the rest of the loaves, badly and then less badly, Albert bent over the bench with his tongue between his teeth in concentration, getting one nearly right and crowing about it like he'd won a prize, getting distracted, getting kissed, losing the thread of the next one entirely and starting over.
It was the least efficient shaping session in the shop's history and Dave wouldn't have traded it for a clean one.
He kept catching himself watching those hands learn the motion — the same hands that drew his, that drew the corners, that had come up flour-and-all against his chest — and having to look back down at his own work before he did something reckless like say a feeling out loud.
They got the six of them into their bannetons and covered and set on the rack to do the slow overnight thing Dave had just described — build the tension and leave it be — and it was somewhere in the quiet after that, Albert leaning against the bench with a coffee he'd finally accepted, watching Dave clean, that Dave felt the weather shift in him again.
"Hey," Albert said. "I have to tell you something. Actually tell you. Not the bread thing, I keep chickening — a real thing, and I need to say it before I lose my nerve, because you should hear it from me and not—"
"Okay." Dave set down the cloth. He wasn't afraid; that was almost funny, given everything; he'd have said, if asked, that there was nothing this bright anxious man could tell him at one in the morning that would land as anything but survivable. "Say it."
And Albert opened his mouth, and Dave watched him look around the shop — the crock, the rack, the ugly beloved tile, the corner drawn in a sketchbook by a man who'd loved it before he was ever paid to erase it — and Dave watched whatever it was rise all the way up in him and get, at the last possible second, folded back down and put away, the same move as the night of the rye, the exact same mercy that wasn't mercy.
"—that I haven't been this happy in a really long time," Albert said. "That's the thing. That's all."
And Dave, who read everything, who missed nothing, who had built an entire second life on the accurate pricing of what things would cost — believed him, because he wanted to, which is the one place even careful men go blind.
"Go home," Dave said, gently. "Sleep. Come back at 6:15."
"Yeah." Albert pulled his hoodie on, hair springing everywhere, mouth still flushed, the whole lit-up wreck of him. "Yeah. Okay. 6:15." At the door he turned back, and for a second the heaviness was there again, plain on him, and then he smiled through it, and it almost held. "Night, Dave."
The bolt clacked behind him. Dave stood in the warm shop with flour on his shirt and six loaves rising slow on the rack and a mouth that still felt kissed, and did not know that a clock had started, and would not have believed, that night, how little time was left on it.