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When he can’t sleep, Felix goes walking.
He gets to know a lot of his new neighborhood this way, and none of his neighbors. His sleep gets worse, and he learns more streets and what they look like with next to no-one on them. He passes under buzzing street lamps and squints at dimmed storefronts—the dry cleaners, the optometrist, a butcher’s shop that he thinks maybe he’ll check out in the daytime but never does.
It’s quiet enough at this hour that he can hear a crosswalk beeping far off and the dry scape of trash caught up in a dust devil skittering past his feet. He dips his chin into his muffler. The lights at the intersection change colors for no cars. Felix is, above all things, tired. If that was all it took to sleep, he wouldn’t be out at just past 4 A.M., trying to shove some of the emptiness of his surroundings into his uncooperative brain.
His feet take him through a short alley, a path that runs behind the probably-charming small businesses housed in an old-seeming brick building. In the middle of the block, a door, propped open and unattended, spills a thin rectangle of yellow light over the ground and the chain link fence beyond.
Felix slows. There’s music playing on the other side of the door that he can’t quite make it out. He keeps his footsteps quiet.
At a glance, what he sees through the doorway is this: a man and a large quantity of dough. His red hair is tied back with a bandana. He’s got some sort of tool to wrangle the dough with, scraping in the sides and cutting it into segments. The motion looks intuitive, practiced. The muscles of his forearms stand out. Not exactly athletic, but shaped by daily work.
This is what Felix can glean without stopping. Part of him does want to stop, which surprises him. He thinks about it off and on for the rest of his walk. The man clearly in his element, alone in a warmly-lit space, humming along to what, when Felix had gotten closer, he could tell was something old—a crooning voice over smooth instrumental, the one phrase he recalls trailing after him like smoke: tell it like it is.
+
Felix walks that same route three times that week. It’s not every night, but the times he doesn’t are the result of a conscious choice not to, and a faint sense of his own ridiculousness for deliberating at all.
It’s the same man every time. He’s always alone, and the door’s always propped open. Depending on when Felix comes by, he can sometimes smell baking bread for half a block in either direction. Once, the man glanced up just in time to make fleeting eye contact with Felix, swiping his flour-dusted forearm over his brow. Felix, caught out, nodded. A split second had been long enough to make out the freckles on the man’s face.
That was two days ago. The fourth time Felix takes the alley detour (it is not a detour, he thinks, just a path, suitable as any other), he finds it occupied for the first time.
The man from the bakery—Felix has concluded it’s a bakery—is sitting on a crate outside the door, smoking. He raises the hand with the cigarette in greeting when he sees Felix.
“It’s you,” he says, stubbing the thing out, maybe as some form of politeness. “The guy, from the,” he gestures expansively, “here.”
Felix stops. He pulls out a cigarette of his own, which makes the man smile a little, his eyes creasing at the corners.
“Not the most secure set-up. Leaving the back door open all the time,” Felix says, exhaling smoke, but away from the man’s face—look, he’s polite.
“It gets hot like you wouldn’t believe.” The man leans against the brick wall at his back. “It’s a credit to your character that you haven’t robbed us, then, in spite of how easy it would be.”
Felix taps the ash from his cigarette. He eyes the man’s arms along with a brief sweep of the rest of him. His thick chest, and thighs, and the convex of his stomach that presses through his white t-shirt.
“I didn’t say easy,” Felix says.
The man smiles again. It’s a frustrating kind of smile. The kind someone uses in place of something else. It’s hard to name what, but Felix feels something about it, all the same.
“No, I guess you didn’t,” the man says, his voice smooth and pitched in a way that makes something stir low in Felix’s stomach. “I’m Sylvain, by the way.”
“Felix.”
“Are you always up this late, Felix?”
Felix pulls hard on his cigarette. “Sometimes.”
Sylvain doesn’t look displeased about the non-answer. On the contrary. His mouth quirks. He claps his hands on his knees and stands. Felix’s gaze travels with him; he ends up having to look up.
“I should get back to it,” he says. “Wait here a sec?”
Felix shifts. “What for.”
Sylvain huffs a laugh, halfway to the door. “Not fond of surprises, are you?”
Sylvain’s back in under a minute with something wrapped in parchment paper. “Here,” he says. “So you know what the end result looks like.”
Felix unwraps it; it’s a bagel, crusted with sesame seeds, still warm. He eyes Sylvain dubiously. Kindness is never without some sort of motive, and there aren’t many Felix puts any stock in.
Sylvain reads the suspicion off his face. He laughs like it’s the easiest thing in the world for him. “It’s okay if you don’t want it,” he says.
Felix folds the paper back around it and tucks it in his coat pocket. “First one’s free, huh?”
“Something like that,” Sylvain says, smiling still.
+
Okay, so Felix makes a routine of it. A few times a week. Maybe most days; maybe every day. Whatever. Sometimes Sylvain is out in the alley and sometimes he isn’t. But he always says hi if he sees Felix, and if he’s not in the middle of something, he’ll take a minute to come to the door and foist a paper bag off on him.
At the end of a month, Felix has sampled bagels, scones, croissants, and more baked goods he doesn’t know the names of.
“It’s good luck, setting aside some of the batch as offering,” Sylvain says, leaning against the doorframe, a linen towel slung over one shoulder.
“Sure, to the gods,” Felix says. “Not me.”
“I’ve always been more interested in the practical than the symbolic,” Sylvain says.
Felix eyes him. “And your profit margin?”
“See, now if I cared about that I’d have stuck to a different line of work,” Sylvain says, and something about his inflection strikes Felix as off. Too light, too practiced. Felix squints at him.
Sylvain smiles, subjected to Felix’s scrutiny. He always does. Felix can’t tell if Sylvain’s smile is actually getting warmer or if he’s just learning to read it.
“You know,” Sylvain says. “If you ever wanted, you could watch from up close. I mean, if you’re up anyway.”
“I’m always up,” Felix says automatically.
“Yeah.” Sylvain’s smile twists. “Should I be concerned about that?”
“No.”
“And if I am anyway?”
“Keep it to yourself.”
“Can do, boss.” Sylvain stretches, a signal that their time is up. It always surprises Felix. How fast it goes. “Anyway, just thought I’d offer. You seem, uh. Interested. In the process.”
“Do I,” Felix says dryly.
“Well,” Sylvain says, slowly, “you’re always looking in on me.”
Felix feels suddenly the exact distance between them. His face goes warm. He forgets all the little he knows about how to have a conversation in one mortifying instant.
“Thanks,” he comes up with. “For the offer.”
Sylvain nods. “No pressure. Ham and gruyère croissant alright with you?”
“You don’t have to do that,” Felix says, a variation on an exchange they’ve had a dozen times before.
“And if I want to?” Sylvain asks, breaking pattern. “Should I keep that to myself, too?”
Felix considers, with the full warmth of Sylvain’s gaze on him. He looks Sylvain in the eye, square and deliberate. “No,” he says. “Not if you don’t want to.”
+
On a good week, Felix can count on three to four hours of rest a day. It’s not enough, but he’s functional. No one asks him to be more than functional, these days. He blinks at the ceiling, freshly awake at 11am, and thinks about the word optimal. Fuzzed by sleep and the lack of it, he thinks about machinery, cool and silver, and oiled gears, and then his phone rings.
He squints at the screen. The family lawyer, again. Felix’s signature’s never been more valuable in his life. He listens, and then bites out: send the forms by mail. The lawyer says come down in person. Felix swallows an expletive. No one’s trying to be an asshole, here, except him, if he chooses to make trouble. Fine. He’ll be there this afternoon.
He brews the strongest, darkest coffee his $12 drip coffee maker can handle, and idles while it gurgles and hisses, thinking how he’s had his breakfast taken care of for weeks now, and whether he’s grown reliant on it. None today, though; Sylvain only had sweets ready the night before, and while everything he makes is good, Felix can’t change his whole palette for—some guy.
He dumps coffee into his empty stomach, which sours almost instantly. He’s gone soft, he thinks with some scorn. A month or so of eating breakfast and now his body acts like it’s some requirement.
He drinks a second cup out of some potentially misplaced spite. His neighborhood looks different in the daylight. He zips his jacket to the throat and draws the hood over his head. Watery sunlight cards through the spindly, too-uniform trees on his street. Rain later, maybe.
He still hasn’t figured out the transit system near his house. This is for lack of trying. The law office is only a mile or two, though, which is basically nothing, but once he’s on the street it seems longer.
The route he takes doesn’t have to pass by Sylvain’s. But it’s not as if it’s out of the way. And he’s not stopping. It just occurs to him that he hasn’t seen it by daylight. Not since before he knew it was Sylvain’s.
He sticks to the other side of the street. Glances through window. There’re bodies in the shop—good. Sylvain needs to make a living somehow, and Felix isn’t helping, letting Sylvain ply him with free product. But the crowd means he doesn’t see a flash of red hair. Which is also fine. He already sees Sylvain by nights. And he wasn’t going to stop anyway, so what does it matter? What would he have gotten out of just a look?
He shoves his hands in his pockets and picks up the pace. There are too many people out in the daytime. Where the hell are they all going? He’s stopped at a crosswalk, “respecting” “traffic laws”, when someone among those many people starts yelling. It’s noisy in the daytime, too. Felix has one foot off the curb when the yelling becomes his name.
He turns. Sylvain jogs up to him, breathing a little heavy, a bundle of parchment paper under one arm like a football.
“Hey,” Sylvain says, smiling, still catching his breath. He straightens, tossing his hair out of his eyes.
Sylvain looks different in daylight, too. The sunlight brings out the freckles in his face and arms. “What are you doing.”
“I, uh.” Sylvain puts a hand behind his head, rubbing at his neck. “Well, I saw you, y’know, through the window, and I remembered our conversation.”
People push around them to get to the crosswalk. Felix steps off to the side, eyeing Sylvain with incredulity. “What conversation?”
Sylvain holds his parcel up and offers it out. “Sourdough. With calabrian chili. You said you thought it sounded good.”
“That’s—“ Felix says, and gets stuck. “You ran.”
Sylvain’s face colors a little, pink high on his cheeks and his mouth slightly abashed. Felix feels his face do something vaguely reciprocal and tries to clamp down on the absurdity of the situation.
“I can’t take that,” Felix says.
“Oh,” Sylvain says.
“I mean—“ Jesus Christ. Communication is pain. “I can’t take it right now. I’m on my way to my lawyer’s office.”
“Oh,” Sylvain says again, visibly recalibrating. Somehow this makes it worse. “Is everything alright?
“It’s fine. It’s my family’s lawyer.”
“I see,” Sylvain says, but his brow doesn’t smooth out.
“My dad’s dead,” Felix blurts out.
One flub after another. Sylvain’s face does something fast and complicated: surprise to thoughtfulness to tactful compassion. He looks sincere, and focused.
“I’m so sorry, Felix,” he says, and Felix thinks about pitching himself into the street.
“It wasn’t recent. Or— It was six months ago, but there’s still—paperwork.”
Sylvain nods. “And you don’t want to take a loaf of bread to deal with that. Very fair.”
Felix’s body almost sags in relief. Leave it to Sylvain not to belabor this point, of every meaningless conversational thread they’ve unraveled together the last month. He feels chafed a little, still, by the disclosure of information, but the best balm for that is people not heaping pity on him. Sylvain, though— Sylvain looks mostly the same, even if his eyes have gone a little soft, creased around the corners.
“I can come by for it tonight,” Felix says, then realizes he’s invited himself. Like their meetings are a sure thing, constant, counted-on. By both sides.
Sylvain smiles, small, one side of his mouth lifting more than the other. The other thing about daytime—Felix’s never seen Sylvain’s eyes in the light before. They’re brown, rich and warm, and the full attention of Sylvain’s gaze is something Felix can almost feel, bodily, like laying himself down on a rock that’s sat in the sun awhile.
“Tonight,” Sylvain agrees. “I’ll set it aside for you.”
+
Felix can’t be late or early, given that they’ve never once decided on a time. He turns up just a little past four. Maybe that’s early, for them. Sylvain’s in the alley, leant against the wall. Felix feels sharp with exhaustion, a little displaced after the day he’s had. The current running through him jumps to see Sylvain: the curve his body makes, his outline in the light, the movement of his head, turning Felix’s way.
“Felix. Hey,” Sylvain says, smiling into Felix’s name. A dimple forms on one side of his face. “How’d it go?”
“Fine,” Felix says. It’s more than he’d offer most anyone. “The lawyer was. Fine.”
“Is that so?”
“No. It was shit.” Felix meets his eye. “You should’ve let me lie.”
“Oh?” A certain sparkle in Sylvain’s eye. “Why’s that?”
“Reciprocity.”
“You think I’m a liar?”
Felix shrugs. The air should be hostile but it’s not. “I think you’re a bit full of shit. Same difference.”
“I like you,” Sylvain says, and Felix feels all of himself snap to attention with almost comic abruptness, his vision in sudden technicolor. “How’s that?”
“Marginally less full of shit than some things I’ve heard you say,” Felix says, staring hard at Sylvain. Not past or through him, but stopped by him, as solid as the wall Sylvain’s put his back to. “Possibly.”
“I get it, if it’s too soon,” Sylvain says, already backing off.
“Invite me in,” Felix says.
Sylvain blinks. “Yeah,” he says, voice almost casual. “Sure thing.”
Felix’s never been inside the kitchen proper. It’s a little smaller than he imagined. Then Sylvain ties on his apron and bandana, and turns some music on low, and Felix realizes it’s Sylvain making the room feel smaller, and not in an uncomfortable way. He doesn’t encroach, just shapes the space around him.
“You can sit there.” Sylvain gestures to a stack of industrial-sized sacks of flour. “It’s surprisingly comfortable.”
“Sounds like a health code violation,” Felix says, but he takes a seat. Sylvain’s not wrong.
“Listen, I run a tight ship,” Sylvain says, pulling out sheet pans and covered bowls and lining everything up on the counter in a way that even Felix knows is deeply idiosyncratic.
He lets Sylvain chatter a bit about his process and what’s on the menu, and his part-timers, both 5-foot-nothing girls who don’t let him get away with anything, and then, some minutes later, with his hands covered in flour, Sylvain says, “Oh right, the bread.”
Sylvain brings over the loaf he hustled down the street with what feels like weeks ago, in the scheme of Felix’s day. Felix picks at the twine holding it closed and the paper beneath, then tears off a hunk with his hands. Sylvain laughs, and Felix looks up.
“What?”
“Nothing,” Sylvain says. “That’s just exactly how I’d expect you to deal with it, I guess. I have about a dozen knives but why bother. Hey, I mean it,” he says, to Felix’s suspicious squint.
“I’m sure,” Felix says, and hands Sylvain a hunk of bread, which only makes Sylvain look happier. It’s a nice look, on him. It’s different than it is on other people. More surprised, and more guarded. And richer for it, somehow.
“You like it?”
Felix swallows. “I do.” It’s peppery, savory bread. What’s not to like.
“I never get to actually see you try anything. It’s nice.”
Felix feels his nose wrinkle vaguely. “Is this your pitch for getting me to visit your shop during business hours? It’s not a very good one.”
“You’d be welcome,” Sylvain says. “I don’t know if I made that clear. I guess I just assumed I had. I mean, you’ve been here. You, uh. You’d pretty much be welcome anywhere.”
“You don’t even know me.” It’s at once pertinent and the best defense Felix can muster.
His share of the bread eaten, Sylvain brushes his hands together to knock free any crumbs. “Do you know me much better?”
Yes, Felix wants to say, but this, he realizes, is not factual. Meaning he must’ve just. Felt it, instead. “I know some things. Go do your job, and tell me more.”
Sylvain stops, and looks at Felix, and smiles. Felix gets the fleeting impression Sylvain wants to touch him. He’s waiting for it, charged with the static electricity of anticipation, when Sylvain just says, “On it, boss.”
Felix watches him in profile as he shapes a batch of croissants. The set of his shoulders, at ease, but perhaps even more than. A bit like resignation. The posture of remembering, maybe.
“Well,” Sylvain says, with an exhale like he’s just set down something heavy. “I uh, didn’t plan this whole bakery thing, really.”
“You plan?” Felix interjects dryly.
A smile twitches over Sylvain’s mouth, but he doesn’t look over. Felix just gets to watch it, Sylvain’s chin tipped to his chest.
“Not well,” Sylvain says.
The story, as Felix hears it, but not necessarily as it is told, is this: Sylvain’s dad is an asshole, and possibly he’s the patriarch of what is a family of mostly assholes. Sylvain bucked his demands, which amounted to the entire map of Sylvain’s future, written in a hand not his own.
“I went from dropping out of the economics major,” Sylvain says, “only to end up in business classes at the community college a few years later. Specifically for small business owners, but, you know. What circuitous paths we travel.”
“Those are different circumstances completely,” Felix says, pointed. You didn’t end up in the same place, Felix means to say. He has a sense that Sylvain’s skull is at once thick and selective.
The interim sounds challenging. The space between being disowned and knowing what to do from there. Felix reads it in the winding sentences, and the jokes, designed to steer away from anything too heavy. That’s fine. The laughter’s bullshit, but. Felix isn’t entitled to everything.
Sylvain talks about the early years, which weren’t so many years ago at this point, and the disasters, and breaking even for the first time—“like making it to shore after miles of open ocean, and, like, sure you’re vomiting water but still, dry land’s pretty fucking nice”. Somewhere in the details of Sylvain’s employees’ love lives, Felix realizes he can’t tell how they’ve gotten onto the subject, particularly without Felix rejecting it, and he’s aware then that he’s falling asleep where he sits.
He could not. He has the willpower. But it’s comfortable, the mix of the sound of pans and the creaking of the floor, and the low, old-school crooning in the background, all tied together by Sylvain’s easy voice telling Felix about a life that Felix can hardly imagine, but that he thinks suits Sylvain just fine.
Felix lets himself drift. It’s been a long time since it was easy.
I like you. He thinks of it, now, the thought wading toward him in his half-sleep. He thinks of how Sylvain looked when he said it. Who ever said something so simply? Just handed it off. Same as a loaf of bread. But Felix wakes in small starts, and when he does, he drifts off again watching Sylvain work the dough, tucking the edges under, nestling them in rows and stashing them away to rise. He won’t bake these until tomorrow, Sylvain says, still talking softly. The yeast is living, and it needs time. Bread, Felix thinks, maybe dumbly, is no simple thing. And then he’s not aware of thinking anything at all, only the warmth of the room, and the other person in it.
+
Felix wakes to his name, and pale daylight pressing into the kitchen.
“What?”
“It’s uh, morning. Officially,” Sylvain says.
“Oh.” Felix’s brain fumbles around a bit. “Okay. I’ll go.”
“You don’t have to,” Sylvain says. “I mean, we might have some explaining to do, if Lysithea finds a strange man napping in the kitchen, but I think you’d get along, once that was sorted out.”
“I’m not strange,” Felix says. His eyes are heavy still. His mouth is dry. He looks up at Sylvain, who is out of his apron, and wearing a hoodie. Sylvain looks amused, and tired. “How long did you let me sleep?”
“You were in and out, I think. But it’s only been a couple hours.”
“Hm.” Felix says, scrubbing at his face, trying to get himself back to functional. It feels like his sleep was deep. The feeling is unfamiliar.
“I, uh,” Sylvain says, and Felix squints up at him.
“What?”
“Well, it’s raining,” Sylvain says, and Felix can hear, now that Sylvain mentions it, the patter of drops beyond the cracked door, and the greater blanket of white noise beyond that.
“What about it?”
Sylvain scratches the side of his nose. “Well, I live upstairs. And I thought, if you wanted to wait for the rain to die down. Or uh, even if you wanted to sleep more…”
“Are you propositioning me?”
“I’m not. I’m really not! But I don’t know how to make it sound like—not that.” Sylvain sounds a little helpless, and he laughs, a huff of self-effacing noise. “I just think you really need the sleep.”
Felix stares at him for a long moment. “Yeah,” he says. “Sure.”
+
“You can take the bed,” Sylvain says, “if you want.”
Felix’s impression of Sylvain’s apartment is: very clean. And tiny, and books. A little bit shabby, maybe, but not for lack of care. There is, Felix thinks with an odd feeling, an almost ridiculous amount of care. In the potted plants and the actually-folded throw blankets and the kitchen table with the thin book beneath it to steady the leg.
“I might catch a nap on the couch,” Sylvain continues, when Felix just stands there, looking around.
“You can have the bed,” Felix says.
“Oh. Are you sure? The couch is great but the bed’s—“
“I’ll also take the bed,” Felix says.
Sylvain blinks at him. “If you’re sure,” he says.
“Mm-hm.” Felix has not fully rejoined the world. He hopes not to be made to, for the next few hours at least.
Sylvain leads the way to the sole bedroom in the apartment, which is also small, and mostly bed. The head of it is situated against the only window in the room, but it’s a large window, taking up the greater part of the wall. The sunlight through it is timid and grey, hardly any presence at all next to the rain tapping steadily against the glass.
“S’nice,” Felix says, shrugging off his jacket. “Can I—?”
Sylvain says, “Yeah, sure,” though Felix thinks he can’t have known exactly what Felix meant.
Felix falls into the bed. On top of the covers. He waits a beat, then looks at Sylvain, who’s still just standing there. “Don’t pussy out now.”
This startles a laugh from Sylvain. He grabs a blanket and lays down beside Felix then pulls the blanket over the both of them. There’s a few inches of space between their bodies. It feels like less. Maybe because the whole bed, the whole apartment smells like Sylvain, and that does something to Felix. Gets in him, and around him, and not in a bad way. Not the way most things do.
Sylvain turns onto his side to face Felix. “I’m glad you’re here,” Sylvain says quietly, looking nervous about it.
“Sure,” Felix says, which is not what he means, exactly. What he means is when he touches the back of Sylvain’s hand. How he’s heard is in the way Sylvain’s face moves from surprise to smiling, small and bare and real.
+
It’s still raining when Felix wakes up, and Sylvain is gone, but the bed is warm and the apartment smells like coffee. Felix lays in bed for a while, listening to the rain, and the soft clinking and pattering of Sylvain in the room over.
Eventually, Sylvain pokes his head into the room to find Felix looking back at him.
“Hi,” he says. “Coffee?”
“Yes,” Felix says, and tacks on, “please.”
Sylvain looks like he knows Felix nearly forgot that second part. “I’ll bring it to you.”
Felix pulls himself to an upright position, looking for his hair tie and coming up empty. Sylvain returns and hands over a mug, and a plate with a bagel and an actual fucking ramekin of cream cheese, plus a dull, broad-bladed knife that Felix is pretty sure is made for this purpose. What the hell.
Felix goes coffee first, for the purpose of toughening up his stomach to an acceptable standard again. Over the rim of his mug, he catches Sylvain watching him.
“What.”
“Nothing. I’ve never seen your hair down before. It’s nice.”
Felix spreads the cream cheese over his bagel. Thinking, but not fully sure what yet.
“You don’t really seem like a crumbs in the bed kind of person,” is what Felix comes out with.
“I’m not,” Sylvain says. “But I can change the bedding.”
Felix looks at him, and then away. Maybe it’s a small gesture. But Felix has no idea, about the relative sizes of things. How many and how large are the exceptions Sylvain has already made for him?
Felix says, “I broke a mirror.”
Sylvain looks around. “Really?”
“At my last job. I punched a mirror in the bathroom. They tried to put me on leave but I just. Never went back.”
“I’m surprised they went with leave, and not the police.”
“White collar finance,” Felix says. Then, “They knew who my father was.”
“Ah.”
“And that he was dead,” Felix takes a bite of his bagel. Cheddar jalapeño. “They offered me free counseling.”
“And did you tell them to shove their executive grief expertise up their ass?”
Felix feels the smile on his own face. “More or less. I sold my dad’s house and moved here. It’s not even far, it’s just—“
“Somewhere else,” Sylvain finishes, when Felix doesn’t.
“Yeah,” Felix says, his gaze traveling to the window, specked with rain. “Basically.“
“When was that?”
“Two months ago,” Felix says. He thinks of his apartment, briefly. The cavernous, sterile feel of it, opposite in every way to the life inherent in Sylvain’s small, curated space. “Everything’s still in boxes.”
“Glad to know you’re settling in,” Sylvain says.
Felix sets down his bagel and eyes him. “I still haven’t decided if I like the neighborhood.”
“I see,” Sylvain says seriously. “Anything I can do to convince you?”
Felix says, “Try.”
Sylvain, cross-legged near the foot of the bed, leans forward and tucks Felix’s hair behind his ear. Felix meets his gaze. The both of them, looking, pressed quietly together, until Sylvain closes the last bit of distance. The kiss tastes mostly like coffee, but Felix can tell there’s something else, too. Something he might eventually come to know, distinct among all other things.