After the dinner rush, we were cut to a skeleton crew, which was usually Carter on the line, me on everything else, and one of the drivers on delivery. Carter got significantly nicer when he didn’t have an audience to impress, and on occasion, even possessed an intelligent thought.
And he wasn’t hard to look at. His baby fat had melted away over the years, and now he was toned and muscular from a regimented schedule of lifting weights and snorting protein powder. Well, he actually blended it into smoothies, but he was definitely an addict. The details of his workout rituals bored me endlessly, but I’d once made the mistake of complaining about my size, so Carter took it upon himself to be my personal trainer. According to him, I needed to cut out carbs and sugar and bulk up on protein in order to increase my “muscle visibility.”
Did human blood count?
My hunger was, at times, a throbbing ache that went nerve deep. It made me edgy, and it heightened my sense of smell. We were at PJ’s one night. It had been raining, which meant we were busier than usual, and the air conditioner was on the fritz, so it was just a swampy cloud of body odor and cheese with Carter’s scent the strongest among them. After the rush, when staff was being cut, I offered to go home because I needed to inhale a blood bag pronto, but Shayla had a finals study group, and Darien wanted to spend time with her college boyfriend before he had to go back to school.
So, I stayed. Carter was droning on about some party he went to and asking why I never came out. Our social circles only overlapped when one of my friends made the mistake of dating a jock.
“I prefer intimate gatherings,” I told him. I bit into a pepperoncino in an attempt to fry my nasal cavity so I wouldn’t have to smell him.
“Circle jerks?” he asked with a salty grin.
“Exactly,” I deadpanned. Carter thought I was living some sextastic lifestyle when it was actually the opposite. I was going to have to seduce a priest before long.
“You on Grindr?” he asked.
I shot him a look. “Why would you care?”
He shrugged and went back to pounding a slab of dough against the counter in a steady rhythm. His back was to me, so I could watch him work without him noticing. Was it my imagination or was he really putting his ass into it?
“Hey, do you still have those cat funerals?” he asked over his shoulder, then chuckled. “That shit was crazy.”
I glared at his back. Whenever I’d hosted a social event as a kid, Papa made me invite everyone in the class. The truth was that I still held cat funerals, but they were private affairs, with just me and my cats.
“My cats don’t die anymore,” I told him. Technically only one of my cats was immortal, though I’d tried unsuccessfully to replicate it with the others.
Carter turned around to stare at me quizzically. I reminded myself to blink. I didn’t want to accidentally seduce him.
“You know your uncle came to school once and threatened me?”
“That must have been my dad.”
“No, it wasn’t your dad. Or your other dad. It was that big, pro-wrestling-looking dude. The same guy who was at your birthday party sniping us with Nerf guns.”
I remembered cutting Carter’s knuckles with my teeth, then licking the wounds—one of the few times I’d had access to fresh human blood—but I’d somehow forgotten your role in it. I glanced at Carter and wondered if he was thinking about it too, a strangely intimate thing for kids to do.
“What did he say?” I asked.
“He threatened to kill my dog.”
“What?” I smiled. It was somehow so on-brand for you. Mild-mannered Henri, until something set you off, and then you were a lunatic.
“You think that’s funny?” Carter said. “He scared the shit out of me. Whenever I let Rocky out after that, I brought my bat with me.”
I laughed. “A bat wouldn’t have helped much.”
“Yeah, no shit. That guy would have destroyed me.”
I leaned back against the counter, sucked the juice from the pepper, and tongued the seeds while thinking about how protective you could be. Missing you. Missing us.
“What’s he bench?” Carter asked.
I laughed. “Does it even matter?”
“Um, yeah.”
“I don’t know. What do you bench?” I knew already. The weight of everything was relative to how much Carter could bench press—ten boxes of cheese, 100 bags of dough…
