Cinnamon sugar and bread dough rising in the early morning sun. He was stuck in rumination; each familiar scent transporting him back there, to that house, watching the man bake. He had been let go from his job and, with the combination of his generous severance and years of frugal living, he did not need to work for sometime. It was his close friend’s idea to take some time off. “You don’t need a job right now anyways,” she said. “You might as well enjoy it.”
So, he found himself here: pulling apart the sticky bits of a fresh-baked cinnamon bun, sipping coffee, reading, and watching the Wednesday-morning commuters ready themselves for work. Afterwards, jittery and nostalgic, he would walk through the city streets and snap photos of buildings gleaming with light or fresh blooms of flowers bursting through concrete. When he got tired and craved the familiarity of his apartment he would return to the cradled comfort of his bed.
But lately, he found his mind kept drifting back to the man: an ex he had been out of contact with for years. He did not understand why. Nothing in particular had changed about his life. The two of them hadn’t even come into contact in almost a decade. Sure, he kept an eye on the man, silently tracking him across the digital world. And, from what he had gathered the man had grown considerably, both in physical size and mental capacity. Perhaps it was the cinnamon buns. Or the extra time he now could dedicate to reading. Whatever it was, he felt this rumination like an irritating itch, positioned just far enough on the body that hands could not scratch.
Here is what he knew about the man: he worked at a software company as a marketing manager for an HR productivity dashboard and lived on the west coast with his partner and two small dogs the color of coffee and cream. The two of them bought a house, which he found strange. He knew the man had found some recent literary success, first as a short story writer, and then as a breakthrough novelist, but he could not imagine that either of them paid well enough.
To be honest, he never read a completed bit of his ex’s writing. When they were together he had tried often but found the prose meandering and a touch overwritten. He liked a different sort of fiction than what the man wrote about and, incapable of providing praise or feedback on the man’s stories, he pretended to have never read them. In his reading, the central issue with the writing was the man struggled with purpose. Sure, he had things to say, but often he thought too little about what he wanted to say. Instead, he obscured things in vague or incomplete metaphors, obscuring the ultimate meaning of the sentence or hamstringing the plot in favor of style.
He couldn’t imagine much had changed. The man struggled with letting his guard down or surrendering to a moment. One summer, when the two of them were still in their early twenties, the man had lived in an apartment complex with a saltwater pool. That summer had been warmer than usual and so the two of them passed the long days swimming alone. The complex was a labyrinthian sort of thing, with all of his units opening up into the central courtyard that housed the pool. Anyone could see them, but it never occurred to either of them to act any differently.
In the water the man was playful: diving under and splashing, practicing dunking or wrestling and attempting to drag him under. They would swim like this for an hour or so, then, dry off and walk back to the man’s apartment to have sex and fall asleep. At the time the man had a light blue duvet the color of fairground cotton candy and, much to his embarrassment, showed water and sweat and cum too easily. But, in those moments the man never seemed to care. He was unwound. Limp. Unguarded.
He felt inspired to read the man’s work and it didn’t take long to find it. It was on a central table at the nearby bookstore highlighting new works by queer authors. The cover was bright pink with bubbled font and littered with pastiche cut-outs of vintage gay porn models meant to mimic the style and form of Greek statue. The novel was titled The Lives of Ordinary Men I Have Loved and featured a blurb by an up-and-coming online critic that described it as “powerful, if not a little boring.”