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“You don’t have to do this.”

“I know.” The bowl scrapes as he stirs. Thick batter folds over itself, glossy and pale. “I just figured birthdays should have cake.”

Renny would have laughed at that. He would have eaten two pieces standing at the counter, no napkin and chocolate covering his lips. He would have gotten icing on his thumb and licked it off while winking at me, because Renny never met a small gesture he couldn’t turn into a performance.

“He liked yellow cake,” I say.

Clint keeps stirring, slower now. “With chocolate icing?”

“Only way to eat it.”

“Good. Because that’s what the store had.”

Clint points the spatula at me. “Don’t make it emotional. I’m only doing this because from what I’ve gathered, the man had terrible judgment but decent dessert taste.”

I nod, smiling before I can get sentimental. “True.”

He pours the batter into the pan.

“You can talk about him,” he says. “If you want.”

I look at the batter settling into the corners of the pan, then at Clint’s flour-marked stomach and careful hands.

“I don’t know where to start.”

He shrugs. “Start before everything got ruined.”

The oven beeps while Clint slides the pan inside, and suddenly Renny is leaning against the doorway of a bar in Louisville like he’s been waiting there all night for me, even though we had never met.

“I met him when I was twenty-three,” I say.

Clint closes the oven and turns around.

“How’d that happen?”

“I was at a bar I had no business being in, wearing a shirt I had bought because I thought gay men dressed better than I did.”

“Did they?”

“Yeah.”

Clint smiles.

“I wasn’t out yet. Not really. My mother knew in the way mothers know and then pretend they don’t. My father was gone by then, so I’m not sure where he’d have stood on the issue.”

Clint leans back against the counter. “The pyramid finally worked?”

I laugh, which helps. “No. He was just… gone.”

“Your childhood keeps getting darker.”

“It was dark in waves.”

He laughs softly, and the sound makes the memory easier to hold.

“Renny saw me standing by myself for too long. I thought I looked mysterious, but I’m sure I looked terrified.”

“What did he do?”