Sweet by Alysia Constantine

Author:Alysia Constantine [Constantine, Alysia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, mobi
Tags: LGBT, Romance/Contemporary;Romance/Gay
ISBN: 9781941530627
Publisher: Interlude Press
Published: 2016-02-22T05:00:00+00:00

Ten

Teddy bought a chocolate croissant and a coffee from one of the fluorescent-and-Formica bakeries at Penn Station, protected them from crush and spill, balanced the package carefully under one arm while lugging his garment bag and pull-along suitcase, and bumped down the platform escalators and finally into a window seat near the front of the train. As it turned out, it hadn’t been worth the care: The croissant was leathery and bland; its chocolate was far too sweet; the coffee was watery. Nothing tasted the least bit loving or glorious or alive. It tasted like nothing at all.

By the time the train finally dug its way out from underneath the city and was clacking along the tracks above ground, past fences and power lines and gray morning sky, Teddy had given up on his breakfast and settled with his cheek pressed to the cool glass of the window.

When he finished college, his parents had sent him, as a graduation gift, on a month-long trip to Europe. He’d traveled alone and bought a student rail pass because the train was the most romantic way to go. He’d brought a notebook, a small manual camera and whatever clothing he could fit in a backpack, nothing more. He’d spent days at a time without saying a word, moving alone through the thin crowds, whistling under his breath as he climbed the cobblestoned hills of town after little town. He’d gestured and pointed sheepishly for shopkeepers whose language he didn’t understand; he’d learned to read warnings and suggestions in pictures and faces and road signs; he traveled without a guidebook, without GPS, without maps. At night, he had slept in hostels and in the sleeper cars of trains, on thin, under-padded beds, tucked into himself and dreaming while other travelers snored and breathed heavily around him in the dark. During the day, he’d slipped between the living throng in Budapest or Vienna or Prague like a flâneur, he thought proudly, and then like a spirit, and then like air, until the day came when he realized he’d finally slid into the being of nothing.

When Teddy returned to the States, Indiana seemed boisterous, offensive, full of invasions; everything around him was jangling and demanding and exhausting. The cool, humming quiet of his parents’ house, the stoic dinners around his family’s table, the days and evenings he spent alone, reading or writing or simply staring at the walls in his old bedroom, were a relief. It took a long time for him to speak above a whisper again.

Now, years later, he still felt like an apparition, lost from the cemetery he’d never found, wandering.

He typed a message to Jules on his phone, unsure it would go through once he sent it since his phone’s signal reception seemed, like all else near the train tracks, shaky and weak:

Above ground, finally. Arriving in DC around 9. You are probably baking right now, something real and delicious. Had the worst pain au chocolat of my life. It was a PAIN, oh, chocolate! You would have wept.

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