Page 28 of This Thing With Charlie

I baked because it was in my blood, family or not. I owed it to Graham, even though he would pat me on the back and tell me I owed him nothing at all. He kept talking about retiring and that in itself filled my chest with dread. I could take over the bakery, he said laughing as my face would twist with unease. I knew that. Or he could sell up, and we could both move on. The choice was mine.

It was a choice I had refused to make. Instead, I was now struggling, trying to figure out what on Earth I had become. For Daniel, it was easy because he was just what he was. He was mine, truly, madly and deeply. I adored him, more than I knew how to put words to, even when he charged around the house and shouted at me. He was also a brilliant kind doctor and played with me on Chistleworth’s five-a-side football team despite never having kicked a ball before I made him come with me to practice. I still made him do things he didn’t really want to. I still forced him to use that deprived body of his for good. Good things. Like football matches for charity and wild monkey sex at night.

It was almost a year since Dr Daniel Gilbert had walked into my life, wearing muddy joggers and trailing a bike through the lobby of that hotel where I used to work. Almost a year since I had first seen him and my heart had made a little jolt in my chest.

Dr Daniel Gilbert. He’d been a vision of dark curls and stubbly chin and legs for days and a firm little arse. He was also like sunshine on a rainy day, like light in the darkness, and fluffy meringues on my lemon-posset cups. I’d made one hundred of the darn things this morning for a wedding in town because Daniel was not only the love of my life and the man who’d finally taught me how to put down roots, but he was also the savvy co-owner of Charlie’s Catering, where I provided mouth-watering desserts and fine patisseries for high-end occasions in town.

It had started with Mrs Hallet’s daughter’s wedding, as a favour, and then the guy from the football club needed a christening buffet sorted out, and once we’d catered that big gay wedding bash this summer things had gone completely nuts.

It was nuts, I knew that. I couldn’t keep doing everything, and to be honest, I got it now. I was overstretched, overworked and overtired as I bumbled down the stairs from my office.

I had an office. The thought still made me snicker, but it made sense since our bedroom was in the loft and the huge open space downstairs was our living area and kitchen and game room and chill-out space with the huge bi-fold doors that opened up into the pool of mud that was still our unfinished garden.

So yeah, it had made sense to do something with those two bedrooms that sat unwanted and unloved on the first floor. We didn’t want lodgers or kids or whatever, so we took a room each and made it ours. Daniel’s was decorated with vintage posters of medical journals and his old computer and a TV hooked up to his beloved PlayStation One. Mine was full of my books and scraps of paper and stuff everywhere that had been mine since forever. I’d cried a little the first time I looked through it all. Graham had brought over boxes of toys I used to cherish; things he’d saved when I didn’t even know those things were mine to keep. I had somehow overlooked all those things he’d done for my family during that year when our lives had so irrevocably fallen apart.

I now had my dad’s favourite paintings on the walls, and his collection of football cards neatly displayed in a frame. I had an old unopened bottle of his favourite whiskey on my desk, and my mum’s recipe books were stacked on a shelf that I remembered from my childhood kitchen. Graham had even saved Mum’s mixing bowls and the grey plastic spoons I remembered so clearly being held in her hands. I didn’t know how he realised what to save when he cleared out what had been our home or if my mum had told him what things to keep. But those boxes he presented to me were all the little things from my childhood that I had somehow thought were simply gone. Every time I looked at them, it made my brain explode in that overwhelming sense of gratitude for a man who had sacrificed his whole life to save mine.

I’d turned into a mute, weird child when my mum passed away. And then my dad died a few weeks later as I held his hand in a hospice bed. I shouldn’t have been there, but Graham had taken me and my brother to see him, the way he had done every day. He’d waited outside as I had sat there with my brother, hoping that my dad would wake up and make us laugh. He never woke up. Instead, his body had struggled through every breath, his muscles at one point squeezing my hand. He fell into the big sleep with us both holding his body, my brother sobbing quietly as I felt more bewildered than I knew how to cope with. We had both lost our parents within mere weeks and, instead, found ourselves living in a new strange house where we didn’t belong.

I didn’t understand why Graham had done it. Why he had struggled so hard to take us in, but he’d fought for us and talked us down, even when we shouted at him and called him names. We’d blamed him for our mother’s illness and hurt him with childish comebacks when he told us he had nothing left but us. He’d sat down and talked to us like grownups, and told us that we just had to deal with the fact that we now lived in this house that would be our home. That yes, we were orphans, but instead, we had him and that he would love us and look after us and give us the world.

He had as well. He pushed my brother to study and me to study harder. He’d pushed and pulled when we needed it, and always told us it didn’t matter if we failed miserably or won all the awards. Whatever we did, he always reminded us that, however hard we tried or how awful things would become, as long as we held our heads high, things would be fine.

He taught us to handle money, and how to invest in stocks and shares, which, in a way, was how Daniel and I now had a proper roof over our heads. Daniel’s finances had been a mess and a half, I bought half the mortgage off him, barely making a dent in the inheritance I hadn’t known what to do with.

I held my head up high and bought myself half a house, and Daniel had cried on the last day of the building works when the scaffolding came down and the lights by the new front door shone brightly over the street below. I had put down roots, and so had he. We’d done this thing together, down to the scribbles in the once-wet concrete that would one day become our patio and our messy handprints in the hallway floor that had a date and a heart next to where Daniel and I had scribbled our names. We had roots, and they were growing right here.

There were things I’d never realised. Things like that Graham had paid for my degree with his own money and left my parents’ funds untouched. He’d laughed when I yelled at him for that one, waving old bank statements in his face.

“Charles, don’t be ridiculous,” he’d replied as he once-again explained how he owed his life to me and my brother, because had we not been there for him to care for, he would probably have jumped off a bridge somewhere and joined my parents in an early grave. Hehadalways said that, but I had never really listened. We’d saved his sanity in a time where all was lost, and he had saved us right back, bringing us up to what we were now. My brother was a successful vet and his wife, an army captain. Me? I had degrees up to my ears and a life I hadn’t known what to do with.

Yet now, I had roots. I had those little things that used to matter to me, the things that held all my childhood memories, things I thought had been forever lost, were once again part of my home. And I had new things too. I had a home, and I had a partner, and I had a crazy life that I still struggled to control.

My life. I still didn’t know what to do with it most of the time, but things were taking shape and that was all due to the man who was now on his knees, trying to mop up a mess of broken eggs on our kitchen floor.

“Dropped the little fuckers,” he muttered as I burst out laughing and sat myself down on the stool by the kitchen sink.

“What did you do that for?” I said sternly, as he threw the box of broken eggs in the bin.

“Tried to do too many things at once.” He sighed as he came over and washed his hands in the sink, stopping only to plant a kiss on my head. “I was just putting the shopping away, and then I was thinking of dinner and texting...”

“Daniel, my Daniel,” I said as I stood up putting my arms around him, letting my body wrap around his back. “Daniel, Daniel. Daniel.”

“I still love the way you say my name,” he said into my cheek, trying to steal himself another kiss.

“I still love the way you break all the eggs so I’ll have nothing to make breakfast with in the morning.”

“You can always nip down to the bakery and grab some more.”

“You can always nip back to the shops and grab some more.”

“Brat.” He smiled into my cheek as his lips planted another kiss on my skin.

He said he was still amazed at how gay he had become. I smacked his bum and told him he was never gay to start with. We’d made our peace with what we were, and somehow, things had been great. Better than great. Things had been bloody fantastic because I couldn’t have done the things I’d done if Daniel had not been there holding my hand.

“Do you need me to look at your paper again?” he asked quietly, turning around in my arms.

“I’ll give it a break for a bit. Need to clear my head.”

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