Page 46 of Triple Pucked
“Would my scones work as well?”
Cody looks thoughtful. “It’s not the cake itself. With Mike, it’s that this is the first thing that I baked for him, when we moved in here together. I cremated the cake. I was horrified. But Mike still faithfully sat there and ate every slice like it was delicious.” His smile becomes sadder. “Dad told me so many times that I was bad at everything I tried, even those things that I was goodat like surfing. But that moment with the burned cake was when I learned that Mike would tell me I wasgoodeven at something I wasn’t yet good at. So, he encouraged me to try again. I kept baking and cooking, until the voice in my head was Mike’s telling me that I could do it, rather than Dad’s telling me to give up because I was a loser.”
I ball the cloth in my hand. “Are you sure that you don’t want me to kill your dad?”
Cody shakes his head. “It’s complicated. I don’t need any more violence in my life. It’s why Mike is my rock. I didn’t think that it was possible to feel safe before I met him.”
I know how he feels. His sister offers the same to me.
I nod.
“Anyway,” Cody arches his brow, “I thought that theno killing therapywas going well?”
I shrug. “My therapist resigned.”
I don’t know why. Aren’t you meant to be honest in therapy?
Is there such a thing as too honest?
Cody gives me a long look. “Uh-huh. Well, you can always talk to me.”
Aren’t we talking now?
Cody slides his thumb through the cake’s icing, before sucking it with a sigh. “Food is love.”
This is why Cody is my friend.
He understands these simple things. He voices them in a way that I can’t.
Food was my way of loving my brother, when our biological parents were injecting themselves in squats and leaving us to starve.
Food was my way of making sure that Shay didn’t go hungry, when he couldn’t budget properly through college and kept missing meals.
Food is how I make sure that my lovers aren’t hungry and are taken care of.
I hum in agreement. “Would your sister like it if I made her heart shaped chocolates for Valentine’s Day? I often made them shaped as stars for Shay as his Christmas present.”
We didn’t have the money to pay for Christmas gifts growing up. But I was always good at crafts. Shay, on the other hand, tried his hardest, but his attempts usually turned out like novelty gifts.
He once made me a Santa out of pinecones, glitter, and googly eyes that could have been a star of the horror films that he loves.
It gave meThe Nightmare Before Christmasactual nightmares.
I didn’t care.
I still kept every single thing that he ever made me. They are at the bottom of the wardrobe in the bedroom that I shared with him in our parent’s house in Guildford.
I did find it hard to sleep, worrying that the pinecone Santa may creep out of the wardrobe in the middle of the night, clamber up onto my bed, and murder me.
Crafts are dangerous in Shay’s hands.
My brow furrows.
Should I warn D’Angelo about the mold of his own cock that Shay suggested to me excitedly as a future birthday present for D’Angelo?
Only, Shay tells me that some people like surprises. Even bad ones of what will inevitably be a malformed, nightmare cock.
I remember Shay dragging the bedding around me in our bedroom, when I’d been shaking and in tears, and explaining that Mom’s surprise party for us hadn’t been a punishment.
