That night, in my apartment, we celebrated.
I had baked a cake. This requires context. I do not bake cakes. I am a bread man. Bread is honest. Bread is chemistry. Bread follows rules. Cakes are anarchists. Cakes require precision with sugar and fat ratios that I find chaotic, and the decorative component, the frosting, the layers, the aesthetic expectations, violates my fundamental belief that food should be judged by taste rather than appearance.
But Luca loved chocolate cake with buttercream frosting. He had mentioned this exactly once, three weeks ago, in a conversation about childhood birthdays, and I had committed it to memory the way I committed all information about Luca Moretti: immediately and permanently.
The cake was lopsided. The frosting was thick in some places and nearly absent in others. The layers, which were supposed to be level, had achieved a tilt that defied both the spirit and the letter of basic baking physics. It was, by any objective standard, a structural failure.
Luca looked at it like it was the Sistine Chapel.
"You made me a cake."
"It's not good."
"You made me a cake."
"The layers are uneven. The crumb is too dense. The frosting situation should be investigated by federal authorities."
"Wes Chen. You made me a chocolate cake with buttercream frosting because I mentioned it once three weeks ago and you remembered."
"I remember everything you say. This is not special. This is data retention."
He took a fingerful of frosting off the side and put it in his mouth and the sound he made was obscene. There was no other word for it. The sound was a full-body vocalization that started in his throat and traveled through his chest and landed somewhere south of his belt, and the effect on me was immediate and total.
"The frosting is perfect," he said. "Shut up about the structural deficiencies and bring this cake to bed."
"We are not eating cake in bed."
"We are absolutely eating cake in bed. Today was the best day of my life and I am celebrating with cake in bed. These are not suggestions."
"Celebrations happen at tables. Like civilized adults."
"Civilized adults don't kiss their boyfriends in front of twenty-five hockey players and then bake lopsided cakes. We are past civilized. Bring the cake."
I brought the cake.
The bed was not designed for two men and a cake. The logistics were immediately problematic. Frosting migrated to the sheets within thirty seconds. Crumbs established a permanent colony on the pillows. Luca ate with his fingers because I had forgotten forks, and the sight of his fingers covered in chocolate buttercream was doing things to my brain that had nothing to do with baking.
He licked frosting off his thumb and looked at me and the look was not about cake.
"Come here," he said.
I went there. He put his chocolate-covered fingers on my jaw and pulled me into a kiss that tasted like buttercream and celebration and the particular sweetness of a man who had been patient for months and was done being patient. His tongue waschocolate-warm and his hands left frosting on my neck and I did not care because his mouth was doing something that made the cake irrelevant.
My shirt came off. His came off. We were skin to skin and the frosting was everywhere now, on his collarbone and my chest and in places that frosting had no architectural reason to be, and I was laughing. Laughing. Because sex with Luca Moretti was not the solemn, athletic transaction I had experienced with previous partners. It was messy and ridiculous and full of sounds that I had not known I was capable of making.
"There's frosting on your ear," he said.
"There's frosting on your stomach."
"So do something about it."
I licked the frosting off his stomach. The sound he made in response was better than the first frosting sound, which I had not thought possible. His back arched off the mattress and his hands found my hair and I continued south, my mouth tracing the line from his navel to the waistband of his jeans with a deliberation that I was learning was the key to his undoing. Luca responded to patience the way I responded to directness. Slowly and then all at once.
His jeans came off. My jeans came off. We were naked and frosting-streaked and his hands were on me and mine were on him and the feedback loop that we had built over weeks of learning each other's bodies was running at full efficiency, each touch calibrated to the other's response, each sound a signal that was immediately received and acted upon.
"I want to try something," I said.
"Anything."