Sex & Sourdough (30 page)

“I know what you’re getting at, but I’m not worried. If he was going to fuck me over….” Kevin shrugged. “Eh, honestly, what do I care? He’s really hung up on Jennifer, so I doubt he will. I trust him. He even promised he would still audit anyone I picked to replace him. Maybe in a couple years, maybe after she’s had a chance to go to school, I’ll find someone else.”

Anders gaped at him and then looked down at the bread. “She doesn’t want to go to school, you know. She likes working in the bakery. She also turns beet red when she talks about Max. Apparently he spends his lunch breaks in the bakery with her, helping out.”

Kevin took a deep breath and then took another bite of food.

“Just out of curiosity,” Anders went on, “do you know what kind of money should be coming in, if you’re holding a one-third interest in a nationally marketed brand?”

Kevin looked to the side and shrugged. “Does it matter? I told you, I don’t need much money.”

“Have you even checked the balance?”

“Not for about a year,” he admitted.

Anders stared at Kevin and shook his head. “Okay.”

Kevin flashed him a relieved smile and went back to his sandwich. When he’d finished the entire thing, he stared at the label again.

“But I feel stupid,” Anders admitted. “Do you have any idea how much money I spent buying everything I saw with the word ‘sourdough’ on the label when I got back? And none of it was perfect. I need to start shopping at Publix now.”

“Just make your own.”

“Can’t. I tried to make a sourdough starter and it didn’t work. Course, I stopped feeding it after a day because I decided to go find you instead.”

“That’ll do it. I’d offer you some of mine, but it got thrown out along with the rest of my food bag. I can make another one, but it’ll be at least a week before it would be good for much of anything. Unless we buy some pineapple juice.”

“Pineapple juice?”

“The bacteria and other little critters go through a few different life cycles where the sourdough starter isn’t really sourdough starter, but just filled with nasty stuff. Each cycle makes the solution a bit more acidic, until the pH drops enough for yeast to grow. The yeast will kill any bacteria except the ones that produce the acidity they need, so it stays stable. You can cheat, to make a sourdough starter faster, by adding more acid. So, pineapple juice….”

“When you can manage a full flight of stairs without hurting, my kitchen is all yours. You’ve got to show me how to make that roasted garlic bread.”

“Anything you want.”

“Anything?” Anders asked.

Kevin just flashed that cocky grin that always left Anders trembling.

Anders heard car engines before he had a chance to think of anything else to say. It was probably for the best, since he couldn’t think of making a mess without thinking about all of the different ways he could get Kevin naked in his kitchen. He was thrilled Kevin had come home with him, but since they had spent the past week in a hospital room or in a car, Anders hadn’t managed to get Kevin naked once. He wanted to touch Kevin so bad his palms ached. But it had only been a week and a half since Kevin’s surgery, and it had only been during the last day that Kevin had been able to walk without limping, so Anders had to keep his hands to himself.

“That’s probably my folks.” He nodded toward the front of the house. He hurried out to the parlor window and saw not only his parents, but three other cars as well. He recognized Michael’s and Cole’s cars immediately, but he’d never seen the third car before.

When his father stopped in the driveway, Anders cursed. His brother Aaron, still in his Navy khaki uniform, climbed out of the backseat and straightened his back. Aaron, unlike Michael, had none of their father’s good-natured attitude. He was a career Navy officer, he lived for his job, and he was more rigidly absolute than any man Anders had ever known. And Cole was here too. Anders wasn’t sure which of his brothers made him the most uncomfortable: Aaron, with his confrontational attitude, or Cole with his snide remarks and muttered insults. The only thing he was sure about was that he didn’t want to force Kevin to be around either of them right now.

“Well, fuck a duck…,” Anders drawled. He wished he’d had a bit more warning that his entire family was coming to Sunday supper. Kevin was still sore. Neither of them had had a chance to take a shower. And Cole and Aaron together were more than even Anders could stand for an entire evening. He rushed back to the kitchen, straightened everything he had moved, and tugged Kevin away from the counter. “We have to go. Come on, out the back.”

“Are we not supposed to be here?” Kevin laughed.

“We are, but it’s getting late. Everybody on the fucking planet is starting to show up for Sunday supper, which means dinner is on the way. We haven’t even gotten to shower yet.”

“Did you say dinner is on the way?”

“Their housekeeper prefers to cook in her own kitchen, because my mom gets a little psychotic about anyone messing up her house.”

Anders tugged him down the steps and back to the guesthouse. Kevin tried to keep up, but he was limping by the time they made it through the guesthouse door.

“Oh, fuck! I’m sorry! Are you okay?” Anders asked.

“I’m fine,” Kevin managed through gritted teeth. “How much time do we have to get cleaned up?”

“About an hour, maybe less.”

Kevin caught him in his arms, leaned close, and kissed the tip of his nose. “Fine. Bad timing, I get it. But I reserve the right to get you dirty again tonight.”

Anders groaned. He shut his eyes and thought about contract law to keep himself from getting hard. “As dirty as you want,” Anders promised. “After we survive dinner.”

A
FTER
THEY
had showered, shaved, and gotten dressed in the cleanest clothes they had left, Anders didn’t actually want to leave the guesthouse. He’d warned Kevin about Aaron and Cole in the shower, but somehow he had a feeling Kevin didn’t appreciate just how miserable dinner was going to be.

“Hey.” Kevin caught his chin and kissed him softly. “You’ve hiked over fifteen hundred miles. You’ve crossed a quarter of the country on foot. You’ve climbed mountains. This is just dinner.”

Anders couldn’t help but grimace. “Dinner with Aaron and Cole.”

“It’ll be okay.”

“It won’t be okay. Just promise me something?”

“Hmm?”

“Whatever they say, whatever they do, please don’t take it personally.”

“I don’t take most things personally, so relax.” Kevin set his fingertips on Anders’s waist and guided him toward the door.

“And don’t mention Chex Mix disappearing. My parents spent the entire summer listening to Joel tell them how much danger I was in, and the last thing I want to do is make them think he might have been right.”

Kevin nodded. “No panicking your folks.”

With a hopeful smile, Anders led the way back to the house. The parlor and study both opened up to the main foyer, and Anders saw his parents and a man he wasn’t expecting sitting on an old Victorian sofa in the parlor, chatting with Anders’s oldest brother. He scanned the parlor, looking for Aaron and Cole, but there was no sign of either of them, thankfully.

The moment his mom noticed them, she stood up and came to greet them with open arms, like a perfect hostess. All of the warmth in her greeting was just an act, so she could look like a loving mother in front of her guest, and possibly in front of Kevin.

“Anders, dear, I was wondering when we’d see you. When I saw your car out front, I went back to the guesthouse to welcome you home, but you were sound asleep. I thought we’d surprise you with a nice dinner. You remember Reverend Bowman, don’t you?”

Anders gaped at her. At least now he knew who had draped them both with a blanket while they slept, but the idea of his mother tucking them in was unsettling. Even when he was a little boy, she typically paid someone else to tuck him in. “Sorry, Mother. We drove through the night, figured we should get a bit of rest before supper.” Anders nodded to the man. “Reverend.”

Reverend Lawrence Bowman wasn’t much older than Anders, and that still freaked him out. He had replaced the old minister at the Southern Baptist church where his mother had insisted he spend every single Sunday morning of his childhood, and Anders had never been able to get used to the idea of a minister who didn’t have gray hair. He always felt like it should be a prerequisite for the job—just like how law professors handed down advice about which color suit evoked different feelings in a jury, theological college professors should hand out tiny bottles of gray hair dye. He’d only been to a few of the man’s sermons, and they were all up to par, but Anders still thought he was odd.

“Reverend,” Barbara said, “you must remember our youngest son, Anders….” Anders saw her gaze flick toward Kevin for a moment, and then she faltered. “And this is Anders’s gentleman friend, Mr.?”

“Winters,” Anders filled in on cue. “Mother, Dad, Reverend, this is Kevin Winters.”

“Ah, Kevin Winters,” Anders’s mother said, smiling, “of California. Kevin, this is our family’s minister, Lawrence Bowman.”

Kevin had no choice but to shake the man’s hand. “Reverend Bowman.”

“Larry is fine.” The man smiled. “Barb was telling me this afternoon how all of her kids were going to be home for dinner for the first time in ages. I haven’t had a chance to catch up with them all in too long, so I took her up on her invitation to stay.”

“Oh,” Kevin said, obviously not sure how he was supposed to respond.

“So what brought you all the way out here from California?”

“Hiking. I hike long-distance trails. I’ve been hiking the Appalachian Trail this year, and Anders and I ended up hiking together.”

“The entire trail? I’ve read about that. It’s quite a feat, I’m sure.”

Kevin shrugged. “It has its ups and downs, but it’s worthwhile. The towns and people along the way are some of the friendliest you’ll ever meet, especially in the Southern states.”

“I can certainly believe that! We’re known for our hospitality down here. You’ll have to tell us all about it.”

Just like in those rare moments when people managed to engage Kevin in conversations at hiking shelters, Kevin’s natural gift for storytelling came to the forefront. Anders knew he wasn’t terribly comfortable with small talk, and he avoided big groups of people, but once he got into storytelling mode, he could hold a dozen people enchanted with tales of random acts of kindness and humanity that he had encountered on the trail. Soon, his parents and their pastor were listening with rapt attention as Kevin retold stories Anders had heard a few times already. They were so engrossed that his mother just nodded to his brothers when the three of them wandered in. Then Kevin began to tell a story Anders had only heard bits and pieces of himself—the story of how he had ended up in the hospital with three veritable strangers acting as his guardian angels.

“That’s amazing,” said Barbara, with the first genuine smile Anders had seen on her face in a long time. “And you don’t even know their real names?”

“I know one of them, but only because I happened to overhear it. That’s part of the appeal of long-distance hiking. It really is like stepping into another world. For a few months, you get to leave your past behind. I’m pretty sure I could find them again, though. Anders found me, after all.”

“How on earth did you manage that?” his dad asked him.

“One of the hikers who helped him get to the hospital called me. But even if Spider hadn’t called, I’d have read about it on the Internet within a few days. A lot of people love that trail. They write about their hikes, trail conditions, and gossip all the time. A story like Sourdough’s definitely would have been mentioned.”

Michael spoke up for the first time. “Sourdough?”

“My trail name was Sourdough,” Kevin explained.

Anders felt his brother’s glare, but he couldn’t tell if it was aimed at him or Kevin. “Sourdough?” Michael asked again.

“Like the bread.” Anders forced himself to smile. “It’s addictive.”

Cole’s snicker was openly cold, but he didn’t say anything.

“Where’s the family?” Anders asked Michael.

“They went to Tampa for the weekend, visiting Cheryl’s parents.”

“Oh, too bad.”

“Are you even going to introduce him?” Aaron asked, glancing meaningfully between Kevin and Michael and Cole.

“Yeah, yeah, I didn’t want to interrupt. Kevin, this is Michael, Cole, and Aaron. Michael might as well be my dad’s clone, Cole makes an obscene amount of money, and Aaron is a lieutenant commander onboard the
USS Gettysburg
.”

Kevin’s head perked up at that. “The
Gettysburg
? Is that a destroyer?”

“Guided-missile cruiser,” said Aaron.

“That sounds like a fun job,” Kevin said.

“Best job ever. I get to shoot big guns for living. We just got back from a six-month deployment hunting pirates off the coast of Africa.”

“That’s awesome.” Kevin grinned. “I would have loved to do something like that. Plus, getting to travel has to be cool. What parts of Africa did you get to see?”

Anders was surprised to see Aaron’s glare soften slightly. They talked about some of the ports Aaron’s ship had visited on his last deployment, from Spain to Dubai, while Kevin listened and nodded encouragingly. Anders grinned and almost let himself relax. Even though he wasn’t that comfortable with large groups, Kevin was charming one-on-one.

As nice as it was not to worry about Aaron, Anders could tell just from the expression on Cole’s face that he was angry. As Barbara herded them into the dining room, Anders was almost grateful his mother had invited their minister—Cole didn’t care about offending anyone in their family, but he might behave himself in front of company.

Anders felt Aaron’s eyes on him from across the table. “Aaron?”

“So what’s this I hear about you dropping out of school?” Aaron asked, blunt as always.

The chatter around them dimmed, and Anders’s entire family focused on him, waiting for his explanation.

“I don’t want to be a lawyer. I figure it’s better to save the hundred grand in tuition than to stick it out and be miserable for the rest of my life.”