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The setting sun casts the shopfront of the Sugar Moon Bakery in deep orange, the mismatch of wooden tables and metal-laced chairs and stools sending long shadows over the floor as Dorian finishes checking over the espresso machine, burnished brown and gleaming in the early evening light.
“Good job today,” he says to it, giving it a pat as he wipes over the last baked-on dregs of milk. The machine is long since turned off, but it hums gently at his words, and Dorian smiles. He’s enjoyed using this machine the whole time he’s been working here, and the way it responds to him, it seems to have as much heart as its namesake. The first coffee of the morning always seems to come out better if he gives it a little attention each night, and it really seems to like praise from him.
Giving Heart one last pat, Dorian straightens up and takes one last lap of the cafe. Passing the honeycomb shelf with Orym’s collection of foreign cake-related ornaments, a tug on his hair stops him in his tracks; and he has to pause a moment to detangle the pothos plant where it’s wrapped itself curiously around his braid, the vine steadfastly ignoring the little flyaway clouds loosening themselves from his hair and prodding it away. The other plants are calmer—or, at least, have less inquisitive leaves than this one that Fearne gifted Orym from her grandmother’s floristry not that long ago—and some of them rustle softly as he moves by them, checking the soil even though he knows Orym will be heading around with his watering can like clockwork the next morning. The little shelves of second-hand novels and brightly coloured recipe books liven up the space, lessening the sparseness of the emptied shelves behind the counter, as does the glass-fronted display of mismatched chinaware.
Dorian pauses in front of the chinaware cabinet, as he always does. The pieces within are masterfully shaped, and so very beautiful—floral motifs, delicate star charts, one plate that has the finest cross-hatching of flower-laced rapiers—and he thinks, not for the first time, how thrilling it would be to release them from their gilded cage and crown them with Orym’s delightful pastries. It seems strange to him that Orym—practical, functional Orym, who finds a good use for everything that comes through his kitchen—would take the trouble to find such a beautiful variety of this chinaware and never use it.
But the thought gets startled away as his phone buzzes in his back pocket, and Dorian scrambles to pull it out and turn the timer off. And with one last check to make sure he hasn’t locked the front door by mistake, he turns tail and heads back into the kitchen.
While the cafe is forlorn in the encroaching darkness, the heart of the bakery is warm and welcoming as Dorian pulls the door to, sweeps his hair up into his favourite hairnet and knots the bunny-print scarf keeping it secure. The sweet, nutty tang of blooming yeast rings heady throughout the kitchen, even with the dough only on its first rise, and it comforts him like the warm weight of a guitar beneath his hands, familiarity and safety and something beautiful just waiting for someone—for him—to bring it to life.
Across the far bench, his ingredients and utensils are untouched: the butter and sugar and cinnamon in one neat row, the tins stacked for ease of space. But he spots a note taped to one of the ovens, and changes course from the proving drawer to go and look it over. The paper is sage-green, a little butter-stained, and the angular print is as neat as ever as Dorian plucks it off the door.
Don’t use One Way - still on the fritz from this morning. Going to sort someone to come and take a look. Loonch and Rabbit are okay, just remember that Loonch runs a little hot, so preheat it 10 degrees less than your recipe says and it should work out. I’m in the office, holler if you need me. Thanks for the coffee. Much appreciated.
– Orym
Dorian frowns as he re-tapes the note to the oven door and preheats Rabbit—the smallest and most reliable of their three ovens—before heading back to his ingredient stock. One Way’s been having more and more issues of late. At first it was just an occasional fluctuation of temperature, but now it’s turning out burnt bakes almost every morning. The inner light died a short while ago, and the casing around it is stuck too badly to replace it; and Orym’s been shooting worried glances at the wiring when he thinks Dorian isn’t looking. Though it isn’t Dorian’s place to say anything, he has a sinking feeling that sooner or later, the oven is going to live up to its name in the worst kind of way.
But Orym can handle it. Orym’s more capable than anyone Dorian’s ever known.
Focus, Storm, he tells himself, shaking himself from his thoughts. Cinnamon rolls. Let’s get this bread.
The dough is pillowy when he pulls it from the proving drawer, puffed up and just a little sticky when he tests it with his knuckle. Satisfied—and more than a little relieved that the rise actually worked this time—Dorian takes up the cup of flour he’d set aside and dumps it on top, sprinkles in the baking powder and salt, and starts to pull the whole thing together into some kind of… well, it always ends up as dough again when Orym does it.
Dorian’s always been surprised by how much flour goes into making just one loaf of bread or one batch of rolls, and it surprises him too how long it can take for everything to cohere into something that resembles a dough, something that bakes into tender chewiness and not a dense rock trying to pass itself off as bread. But as he works his dough, scraping round the sides of the bowl, he can’t help but think that it still looks really dry.
Orym’s always cautioned him against adding extra water to bread dough unless he’s truly desperate, and Dorian wracks his brain trying to think what he could have done wrong. Because he didn’t do anything wrong. He weighed out all the milk and butter, the yeast definitely became activated, he waited to put the salt in so it wouldn’t inhibit the rise, and therefore there shouldn’t be any reason why there’s still so much flour in the bowl—
So much flour.
So much flour, and it all went in at once, but that wasn’t right— hold on, Orym had said last time, hold on—
“Hold on a second, Dorian, just—”
In the time it took for him to freeze in place and stare around, Orym had already crossed the kitchen, pulled down the central set of bench steps, and climbed up level to Dorian, one hand light against the bowl with the second measure of flour for the buns.
“Take out a quarter-cup measure of the flour before you start,” said Orym, guiding the bowl back towards the bench. “Go on, just take it out and dump it on the bench there.”
Dorian hesitated—but at Orym’s insistent nod, he did so, and started to pull the dough together again. “Like this?”
“Just like that,” Orym said, leaning his hip against the bench and looking intently at the bowl as Dorian kept working the mixture. “You don’t need nearly as much flour as you’d think, believe me. Easier to start with less and add more in.”
Dorian stared at the mess of dough stuck to the bench and under his fingernails, and tried to imagine it looking like one of the perfectly browned, perfectly fragrant loaves Orym pulled from the oven every Yulisen.
“Are you absolutely sure?”
“You want it to feel that way. It’ll get less sticky the more you knead it, I promise. If we put too much flour in from the start and keep adding more, the bread’s just going to get really tough. No one wants that.”
“Fuck,” Dorian whispers, staring at the half-formed dough in the bowl. “Shit, fuck—”
It’s definitely too late to start a new batch by this point. Too late, too many ingredients, and he just had to mess this up on his own with no one there to stop him making a stupid, stupid mistake. He whips his head back to glance at the door leading to the hallway and the office—but there’s no Orym in the doorway, none of his usual prescience when Dorian’s in trouble with his baking. Just the clack of a keyboard, and the soft hum radiating from the oven.
The call for help gets stuck in his throat.
He’s never been on his own like this before.
Something shifts in the air, and his chest grows tight as he stares at the bowl and the bench. A chill brushes past his cheek, and crawls down his spine.
In the bowl, the flour stirs up and settles of its own accord. A moment passes. Then it sifts itself through again and lifts, a tiny cloud that exhausts itself and collapses over the side of the bowl, dusting flour and scraggly dough over the bench. All around him, close to him, the air starts to become wind, swirling and circulating in swells that already feel like a chill draft whistling through the cracks in the windows of his apartment.
The panic grows twofold, and Dorian grips the bench tight, heedless of the dough stuck to his fingers and the flour getting swept up in the gusts threatening to form a gale through the kitchen.
The air is strong around him. It only makes the tightness in his chest more apparent; the tightness where there’s no air at all.
It wasn’t all that long ago that they had a busy day when One Way had burnt everything they had put in it, and the bread hadn’t risen right, and Dorian had been trying to salvage a pastry he hadn’t added enough water to, one little frustration after another leading into anxiety into trying to fix something where he couldn’t figure what had gone wrong in the first place—and his vision had tunnelled into the bench, the pastry, his own incompetence, and there simply wasn’t enough room for him to remember to breathe.
Caught in his panic, he hadn’t realised what was going on. That his hair had ripped free of his hairnet and was swirling above his head—that the small bags of bench flour and salt had tipped and spilled with the force of the wind—that he was the epicentre of a tornado building with fury through the bakery kitchen—
Hadn’t been aware of any of it until a tiny, wiry body tackled him to the floor, and his breath came back in a collision of hard stone and the echoes of a knife clattering to the ground, hands gripping his apron so tight it hurt, and Orym’s weight above him, hazel eyes wide and dark with something unspeakable.
Dorian shuts his eyes tight against the mess, grips the bench tighter, and blocks out the wind gusting through his ears. It’s so cold. No warmth, none of the smells of yeast and wood and flour that are so familiar to him now. Just cold, that awful, senseless void where he feels off-balance, like his senses aren’t all working in tandem.
“Tell me what’s wrong, and we’ll fix it.”
It isn’t some great evil flourishing over the land. It isn’t the end of the world. It’s just too much flour. It might have all ended up in the dough anyway. It isn’t lost. He can still knead it, Dorian tells himself. Just for five minutes. Just to see. And if it’s a total disaster, the bin gets a snack and Rabbit gets the night off.
“But you have to tell me. And you have to breathe.”
The gusts grow softer against his skin, and as they settle, the low hum of the preheating oven thrums through the air again. As he listens, and attunes to the rhythm of the fan inside, the tightness in his chest unfurls little by little. And the nutty yeast and sweet sugar mix with the richness of butter and flour and wash over his senses as the breath finally returns to him.
The air is finally still when he dares to look at the dough again. Not ruined. Not yet.
It takes a couple of minutes to clear up the mess on the bench, gathering the scrappy bits of flour and dough onto a bench scraper and tipping them back into the bowl, and Dorian takes his time over washing his hands and getting the dough out from under his fingernails. It may be a fool’s errand, cleaning up when he’s about to plunge his hands back into the same mess, but it feels better coming from a clean slate.
Then, with one last very deep breath, Dorian takes the bowl of dough, tips it out onto the workbench and starts to knead.
Kneading has a rhythm to it: fold-push-turn, fold-push-turn, fold-push-turn-push-turn-push-turn. The dough is sticky and scraggly as he keeps working the flour in, but slowly, surely, it starts to cohere beneath his fingers. As he sinks into the rhythm of it, the mound of dough softening and stretching as he works it over the bench, it feels like getting into the depths of a tune, strumming and plucking and coaxing the music from somewhere deep in his guitar so it swells through the room—and all the while, that steady beat guides his hands, guides the dough, that four-count that never leaves his head helping him knead in perfect timing.
The panic buzzing and prickling in his brain eases away, working itself into the heft of every push and pull, the tension and strength in his arms tempering the tension everywhere else. He reaches five minutes, and the dough isn’t too tough and dry after all. So he keeps going, keeps the rhythm steady, and trusts in his hands alone to help it cohere fully into a smooth dough, soft and pliant under his hands. Just like how Orym makes it.
The next bit is easy; the dough rolls out with no resistance under the long Zemnian rolling pin, although Dorian still takes up the fabric measuring tape to check the length and width even when he thinks the rectangle is big enough. The butter goes on next, soft and smooth; and then the sugar and cinnamon, forked together and sprinkled on top. From there, Dorian knows Orym would go straight into rolling and cutting, keeping the rolls small and tightly spaced in their tin; all the better to spiral high when they bake, crusting over with sugar, just on the tender edge of coming out scorched.
But Dorian’s lasting memory of cinnamon rolls is from the weeks leading up to many a Winter’s Crest of his childhood, times where his aunt would come and stay and make buns that unmolded from the pan with a molten caramel-sticky underside, toasted walnuts harmonising with sweet sugar and warm-speckled cinnamon. They were Cyrus’s favourite at that time of year, and Aunt Lydian always managed to sneak an extra one onto Cyrus’s plate when their parents weren’t looking. It’s still so clear in his mind: the scent rising from the oven that promised a gooey mess of sugar over fingers and mouths, reaching out to take a bun early and snatching his hand back when they were still scorching to the touch, the giggles as he and Cyrus revelled in getting to play with their food for once, tearing the rolls apart and racing to catch the dripping syrup before it hit the table.
So he beats together brown sugar with butter and maple syrup and spreads the mixture into the base of the baking tin, scattering chopped toasted walnuts over top ready for the dough scrolls to sit neatly on top. It isn’t quite the way it’s done throughout Tal’Dorei, never the way Orym has started to serve them in the bakery in the last couple of weeks to brighten up a gloomy Whelsen morning, but it’s the way Dorian knows best.
The nagging doubt that it’s not going to work still presses at him, and he’s just a little bit scared that it’s not going to be as good as he remembers. But it’s his. It might not turn out the same, but it smells good. It looks good. That has to count for something—right?
“The bread definitely knows if you don’t think it’s going to work,” Orym had said, taking a hold of the dough after Dorian asked him to check it and giving it another few firm kneads on the bench. “Just have some faith it’s going to turn out okay. And besides…”
He gave Dorian a wry grin. “Worst that can happen is it’s so bad, Pâté V gets to enjoy it instead.”
“It’s going to work,” Dorian says firmly to himself as he takes one final look before pinching up the edge of the dough and starting to roll. “It’s going to taste good.”
And even just saying it out loud, the low hum of the oven seems to take on a new tone in the air; almost like it agrees with him.
When the dough is rolled, sliced, and back in the proofing drawer, Dorian starts his clear-up, putting the dough-sticky utensils in the sink for a good soak and wiping the bench over well. And then as he’s washing his hands, it strikes him that he hasn’t seen Orym at all since starting the close. And the clack of the keyboard in the other room has fallen silent.
Orym couldn’t have left—the only ways out are the door at the back of the kitchen and the front entrance to the shopfront. And Orym wouldn’t have left. He stays much later than Dorian every night, getting all the bread dough mixed and kneaded for overnight rising, topping up the stocks of creme patisserie and jams and curds, and taking inventory and doing a million and one other things by himself besides. He’s waved Dorian off every time he’s offered to stay and help with what seems like an insurmountable amount of work.
“I’ve been doing this by myself for a long time. I’ve got a system. And it isn’t like I have a long walk home.”
And Orym’s startling prescience is sometimes just as much circumstantial as it is his senses honed to the finest filigree—simply put, he’s normally in the kitchen alongside Dorian at this time.
The flutter of worry surprises Dorian even as it presses through his throat. Orym is so very capable. He must be fine. There isn’t any reason why he shouldn’t be.
But his concern wins out in the end.
Tucked in at the end of the short hallway that houses the storage cupboards and bathrooms is the office: a small, narrow room perpendicular to the side of the hall, but which fits seamlessly into the building despite Dorian’s absolute conviction that it ought to be jutting far out to the side, and probably crashing into the next building for good measure. His brother is an architect. He’d like to think he knows a thing or two about building design.
But for all its impossibility, the office is there like it existed before the building did; a small room that feels even smaller for the sheer number of recipe books squashed together on the shelves and piled high on the floor. There are elegant, embossed tomes mixed with battered volumes on pie and tavern desserts, and interlaced between are dozens upon dozens of sheaves and leaves of hand-notated parchment.
And buried between it all, hunched over the desk at the far end of the room, is Orym.
Unlike the central benches in the kitchen, the desk here doesn’t have a lever, or a turn-wheel, or anything else to adjust the height; it’s made for someone Dorian’s size, with a large wooden chair on a base of swivelling wheels to match. Maybe it’s the sheer volume of papers scattered around the desk, or the overlarge cardigan swamping his form, or maybe it’s just that he’s hunched over in a way so unlike his usual quiet grace and command, but Orym looks small where he sits cross-legged and huddled in this chair three sizes too big for him. His half-moon reading glasses rest up on his forehead as he pinches the bridge of his nose, and with his eyes closed tight and his mouth pressed in one tense line, it looks like the full weight of Exandria is pressing down upon him.
Dorian hovers in the doorway, the butterflies in his stomach heightened by the strange, low hum that infuses this room, a counterpoint to a melody that sometimes brushes over the tip of his tongue. This strange, perpendicular room, crowded with books on books even when he’s sure it couldn’t fit any more, windowless but never musty, flowers carved and stained in elegant stems through the grain of the wooden shelves. He always feels some strange trepidation coming in here, the kind that rises up when he holds his breath for too long underwater, or runs and leaps and the winds themselves seem to carry him further and lighter than anyone else.
But he can’t leave it alone. Not with Orym looking like this. So he braves the hum that snakes electric over his skin, and keeps his footsteps soft as he steps into the room.
Or, he tries to, until his foot catches on a loose sheet of parchment and he skids, yelps, and catches himself on the wall as a whole stack of books tumbles loose and crashes to the floor.
“What in Melora’s—”
The chair jolts into the desk with a bang as Orym turns to the door, wide-eyed.
“Oh!” His gaze settles on Dorian, and he clutches his chest, sinking back into the chair. “Oh. Sorry, Dorian. Didn’t hear you come in.”
Dorian stares at the ground, the tidal wave of books and parchment sending another pile sliding down as he watches, a third again sent tumbling through the force of Orym’s chair, and his neck grows hot as the books thud and fumble to the ground.
“Orym, I’m—” His breath isn’t coming right, and he doesn’t know what to say. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry, I didn’t mean to mess this all up—”
The air around him grows cool, and a few sheets of parchment rustle and flutter gently upon the floor.
“I’m so sorry—”
“Whoa, whoa, Dorian—”
A firm pressure settles on his arm, and Dorian looks down to see the chair empty, and Orym standing in front of him, brow scrunched under his reading glasses, holding Dorian’s wrist tight.
“Dorian, it’s okay, I don’t even know what half of those are, it’s fine.” He squeezes Dorian’s wrist gently. “It’s fine.” Another squeeze. A breath; and Dorian breathes too. “You just startled me, that’s all. Are you okay? Are you hurt at all?”
“No! No, no, no, I’m fine!”
“Okay. That’s good,” Orym says, with a smile that’s all softness in his eyes and relief settling through his shoulders as he lets go of Dorian’s wrist. “Believe me, it’s not your fault. I should’ve tidied this place up ages ago, I can’t believe I haven’t sent one of these flying before.”
“I sincerely doubt that,” Dorian says, at last managing a smile. Orym is so dextrous and light on his feet that he can balance a hot biscuit tray level in each hand while scaling the stepladder to the cooling racks and evade every crack in the flagstone floors on the way—and yet, for all the way he defies gravity with six-foot vertical leaps and his balletic feats of balance, Orym is grounded and tethered in a way that seems like he would never be caught off his feet unawares. Just standing here with Orym, so solid and unwavering, Dorian feels a little more connected to the ground himself. The lingering pressure from his hand still feels warm and settling. “I’ve seen you doing arabesques on the ladders before.”
“I fell off one of them once.”
“Once. How long have you been here?”
“Long enough.”
“Let me tidy this up, at least,” says Dorian, as he kneels and starts to pull the loose sheaves of parchment into a hasty pile. Orym moves to the other side of the chair and begins to do the same with the books; checking over the spines, smoothing off the covers, cracking them open with a soft, contented look in his eye. He even slides his glasses back down and starts flicking through one of the tomes.
Looking back to his own pile, Dorian starts to re-sort the pages by handwriting. A couple of the recipes are penned in Orym’s small, fine hand, and a number have variations on what he recognises as Mom Handwriting, pretty and loopy and very legible. And then there’s one script that comes up again and again: a large, rounded cursive that scrawls like the writer’s mind was racing ahead of their hand to get words onto the page. The recipe titles make him smile as he sorts them together: rose apple pie, jumbleberry tart, lemon meringue pie, lemon magic pudding, Berry Surprise (Lurleen’s recipe) (this is a pie).
So many of Orym’s favourites, all bundled together. How strange that he didn’t even know they were there.
And then Orym’s voice breaks through the quiet.
“How did this get down here?”
In Orym’s hands is a gigantic book, bold gingham the backdrop to a title embossed opalescent in the low light. Dorian sets his pile of recipes aside and edges closer, mindful of the mess still crowding up the floor.
“What is it?” he asks, leaning in closer.
“Oh! Maybe you haven’t seen this yet—here, feel free to take a look.”
Orym extends the book towards him, and Dorian bites back a yelp of surprise as the sheer weight of it lands in his arms. It has to be seven hundred pages long at least, bigger than any recipe book Dorian’s ever seen—bigger than anything outside the weighty tomes he had slogged through back in law school. The hardcover is beautifully textured, rough like real gingham under his fingers, and the book has the most enticing pie gracing the front cover, pastry gleaming in the low light and looking so crisp that he could well believe it would flake off on his fingers if he rubbed hard enough.
And, looking at the title, for good reason.
“A Pie-Based Culture?”
“Straight from the woman who brought pie into my life,” Orym says with a grin, tapping the cover, where the book credits the compilation and editing to one Ruby Lee Beckfort. “If she ever visits, anything she wants is on the house.”
“That name sounds familiar. Why do I know that name?”
“Maybe you saw the book tour? It was pretty well-publicised, they had a whole promotional event for it in Byroden, and Ruby’s hard to miss once she gets talking—”
But Dorian tunes him out, attention caught by the subtitle: Militia, Mining, and Merriment in the Mornset: A Complete and Unabridged History of—
“Byroden? Wait, the place that Opal’s from? She’s never mentioned this to me!”
“Opal—she’s the one with the Fantasy Grams, isn’t she?”
“It’s Fanstagram, but yes. Wait, but this is a history book.”
“In a very technical sense. It makes more sense if you read it, but the complete history of Byroden had to be produced as a recipe book because everything there is tied to food. It’s amazing. And the recipes…” Orym shakes his head. “You need to taste it to understand. Everyone in town contributed something, and all their grandmothers’ recipes, the family recipes, the food they make for festivals— everything is in there.”
“Everything?” Dorian eases the book open and starts to page through the very nice cardstock. “Sweet or savoury?”
“Both,” Orym says emphatically. “But the sweet things… Dorian, they’re to die for. There’s this beautiful berry pie in there—first pie I ever had. There are bear claws—”
“I thought bear claws were from northern Tal’Dorei?”
“They are. But the person who invented them is from Byroden originally—she’s actually one of the mayor’s closest friends.” Orym looks off into the middle distance, the same focused, excited look on his face as when the first batches of cakes and pastries are baking for the day. “You know, if you wanted, you could always make a trip of it up to Whitestone to try bear claws straight from the source. If you’re really lucky, you’ll even meet the bear.”
Dorian nearly drops the book.
“The—the bear? Wait, do they have actual bear meat in them?”
Orym laughs. “No bear. Just almond paste and cinnamon. Sometimes custard and cinnamon.”
Dorian clutches his chest and forces himself to breathe, in and out and in and out, keeping the gentle strains of rising dough and fine-cut paper present around him.
“There is really a bear, though. Did you ever have a trinket bear growing up?”
Dorian clears his throat. “Don’t recall.”
Orym gives him a knowing look. “Same bear.”
Swallowing back the heat rising up his neck, Dorian heaves the book open to the index and tracks down bear claws; which, as it turns out, are covered over a full ten-page spread complete with recipes, an account of the relationship Byroden’s bakeries have forged with one up in Whitestone named The Slayer’s Cake, and an in-depth history on trinket bears. There is too an actual bear pictured in the book: an enormous grizzly bear with two dark-haired half-elves cooing over him and a large pink bow nestled in his headfur, not unlike the trinket bear Dorian had slept with every night as a child. The real bear is a bit less cute and smiley and a bit more hairy and resigned-looking.
Not wanting to chance Orym making further suggestions about actually meeting this very real Trinket, Dorian continues skimming through the book. It seems as though almost every other recipe is a pie of some kind, and he marvels at the variety and skill and artistry, all on display so vividly that he can almost smell the savoury crust through the paper, can almost hear the crunch of crisp pastry as he flips the page. Orym can work wonders with pastry and builds the most beautiful decorations into his pie lids when he has the time—and no wonder, if these are the people he learned it from.
“Look at this one, Orym! It’s shaped like a fish!”
Orym glances over, and then he leans in conspiratorially.
“It’s really salty,” he says, keeping his voice low even though they’re the only two people in the building. “Ruby once told me that this guy wouldn’t let it be published unless they put in the recipe exactly as written, but I’ve made it before and you can take out so much of the salt. So much. And I don’t say that lightly.”
The seriousness in his tone is just a little bit frightening, and Dorian nods fervently, and skips ahead a few pages. This section—evidently one of many dedicated to the various pies of the town—seems to be themed around old family recipes, the ones passed down unchanging over generations. Even just skimming over the captions and essays preceding the recipes, the love and pride for these little pieces of family and history ring out abundant from the pages.
It feels strange, in a way, to see so much heart expressed without hesitation on the page. To see something so personal as family brought forth for the whole world to see.
“I always thought family recipes were meant to be family secrets,” he says with a soft laugh.
“Depends whose family you’re talking about,” Orym says, giving the book a thoughtful look. “I’m pretty sure a few of these are tweaked a little, but you keep the best version for you and yours, right?”
“I suppose so.” Dorian thumbs through a few more pages on sustainable gem mining and peach jam, and pushes down the thought that he doesn’t really have family recipes he can share with anyone else. He just has Aunt Lydian’s cinnamon buns—and even then, Dorian isn’t sure he’s got everything right about them.
And it aches inside him, that windswept feeling of wanting to know that feeling too—to have the confidence to share himself so freely with the world.
“It’s a beautiful book,” he says after skimming through a few more sections, lifting it up between his hands. It’s very heavy. “I could do weights with this.”
Orym chuckles. “You’d need to if you start making all the pies in here. Work it off so you can eat more, that’s my strategy.”
“I’d like to give this a proper read sometime. It’s fascinating.”
“Take it home with you,” Orym says. “I’m sure I’ve got another copy somewhere in here. Oh, and you have to try the Berry Surprise. Best pie you’ll ever eat. And, uh—”
Orym leans in again, and his voice lowers like the salty-fish-shaped-pie author is listening in. “It isn’t in the book, but use rum in it, not port. That’s the surprise. It’ll change your life.”
“Do you mean it?”
“Junior Tempest Blade’s honour,” Orym says, with a motion like drawing a sword and holding it proud to his chest. “I’ve been told I can pass on the surprise to people who can change other people’s lives with pie, and I’ve only told two other people that secret. One of them is my mom.”
Dorian grins at that, because of course Orym would make a point of telling his mom and no one else—and as he eases the book back to the index, he bites down his the doubts that rise, unbidden, about how he doesn’t think he’ll ever be able to make pastry, let alone pie.
But the thought goes as quickly as it came as he finds his place at the berry entry, and his eyebrows shoot up as he looks at the full page of recipes listed before him.
“There’s a lot of berry pies in here.”
“Search it up under Lurleen, she’s the one who wrote that recipe.” Orym looks back at the pile of books he’s reassembled into a neat stack, and his brow creases. “It’s so strange that this was on the floor, I’ve always kept it up on the shelf. I don’t know how half these books ended up down here.”
“Are they books you don’t like?”
“Quite the opposite. All of these are usually on display.” Orym runs his hand over the top book on the stack, a volume on artisan bread, and a shadow crosses his face. “It’s been a while since I’ve had time to look through them, though. A lot’s happened in the last couple of years. I’ve had to sort through a lot of stuff, and then with the people I’ve had coming in to help out here…”
There’s something heavy in his voice as he sighs, and pulls off his reading glasses to rub the bridge of his nose. “I guess some of them might have looked things up and not known where to put the books back. Here, just leave those papers on the desk, I’ll sort through them later.”
The air feels fragile between them—some great chasm that Dorian isn’t sure he could cross without sending Orym falling down it too. He isn’t sure if Orym would want him to broach that gap.
So instead, he closes A Pie-Based Culture with gentle hands, and places it with reverence upon the desk before crouching back down and taking one stack of wayward recipe books in his arms as Orym hefts up the other. The pile of six books weighs less all together than the complete history of Byroden. But as he helps Orym tidy away the books and loose recipes, rehousing a number of the books up high and a couple on lower, more intricately carved shelves, he can’t help but glance back to that one pile, in that one fast-scrawling hand.
“Is everything alright?”
Dorian jumps, and almost drops the books he’s holding.
“Huh?”
Over by the desk, Orym’s staring up at him, massaging the base of his neck with one hand. Even through the lines of exhaustion drawn on his face, his gaze is disarming.
“Out there,” Orym says, nodding towards the kitchen. “With your baking, I meant. When you came in here—sorry, I should have asked, did you need help with something?”
“Oh!” Dorian slots the last two books into place and shakes his head, and his hands, and then twists his hands in his apron before he lets the anxious thrumming go too far and do something he doesn’t intend, like knock another pile of books over. “No, everything’s fine—it’s all gone in for the second proof, everything’s totally fine. I—”
The worry he felt seeing the shadow of exhaustion lingering over Orym is bigger than he can put into words, and he thumbs over the embroidered rabbit on his apron pocket as he thinks of what to say, the stitches smooth and soothing to the touch.
“I wanted to check on you,” he says at last. “I hadn’t seen you in a while, and—”
He stops his hand in the fabric and stops talking.
It sounds childish to say that he’s become used to Orym lingering in the kitchen while he bakes after hours; that he almost expects his presence to remind him to turn up the speed on the mixer, or to use a lighter hand while piping, or to spring up the retractable steps to the bench and take a taste, and suggest a pinch of salt or a dash of vanilla. And having Orym in the kitchen means practice-piping silly designs onto parchment paper together, and humoured smiles and sincere thanks when Dorian can gather sieves and sprinkles and spare sugar thermometers from the highest storage shelves without even going on tiptoe, and a small, gentle fistbump on his hip every time he’s waiting to pull something from the oven, watching anxiously for it to rise, trusting in his judgement on the timing. And it isn’t like Dorian needs him there. He shouldn’t. Not by now.
Not if he wants Orym to think he can do it on his own.
Not if he wants to prove that he’s good enough.
“I hadn’t seen you in a while, that’s all. You’re normally out doing food prep by now.”
Orym sighs and nudges a fist against the edge of the desk, close to the mountains of folders and papers and, buried somewhere in between, Orym’s ancient laptop.
“Lost track of time. I’ve been doing the accounts. Pain in the ass, but someone has to.”
Dorian grimaces. “Boring?”
“Hard.” Orym sighs, and tugs the edges of his oversized cardigan, pulling it tighter around himself. “Finance was never my strong suit and… I mean, I can do it. I have to. It just starts looking like number soup after a while.”
“Is there anything I can do to help?” Dorian’s already running through the accountants his family knows—there’s the one who does the finances for their whole family, and the second one they have to verify everything the first one does, but they have various contacts they work with and Cyrus knows a few through his architecture firm, and Dorian knows some of his cohort went into contract law, and if he can pass Orym on to one of them—
“I don’t know if you’ve got time, but—any chance you could make me another coffee? I’ve been trying to get my brain going, but…” Orym gestures to the collection of empty cups on the far side of the desk. “It’s just not kicking in like it should, you know?”
Dorian’s brain freezes. He remembers Orym asking for coffee around two-thirty that afternoon; and again, a little after four, and again with an extra double shot of espresso at quarter past five. Which he thought was weird. Orym goes to bed early —like, before ten-thirty every night early . He doesn’t drink coffee in the afternoons, if he drinks it in a day at all.
Out in the kitchen, a neat little beep-beep! beep-beep! sounds out from the timer, and Dorian jumps.
“Sorry—have to roll—rolls—” he stammers out, shoving the remaining books in his arms haphazardly onto the shelves. “Have to rescue the rolls—”
And as he turns tail with ears burning, he desperately hopes it isn’t showing on his face that he’s been making Orym’s coffee decaf all afternoon.
With the rolls out of the proving drawer and the heat in his face dissipated enough that he’s sure they’re closer to indigo than magenta, Dorian crouches down beside Rabbit, checking the temperature gauge inside. He keeps his gaze averted as soft footsteps enter the kitchen; and then the tell-tale creak of steps being pulled down sounds out, and an appreciative hum comes from Orym a moment later.
“The rise looks great. What’s that—?” Dorian turns to see Orym wafting his hand above the baking pan, staring out the window with his brow furrowed the way it gets when he’s focusing intently on completing an icing job or scoring an intricate pattern into a sourdough loaf. “Is that maple in there?”
“Yeah. For the uh… topping. Glaze. I don’t know what it’s called, it’s just—that’s the way my aunt always made cinnamon rolls, and—I mean, it might be a bit much—”
“No, it smells good. It’s different. I don’t think I’ve ever had cinnamon rolls with maple in them before.” Dorian catches the edge of a soft smile before Orym takes up the tin and descends the steps backwards, pausing at the bottom to flick the catches on the hinges and wrench the steps back into place under the bench. It takes a lot more force to send them up than it did to pull them down.
“You could leave that,” Dorian says, but Orym shakes his head.
“It’s a trip hazard, and it’s easier if I just take care of it right away.”
“Those things are stable, right?” Dorian asks as he takes the pan and slides it into the oven, setting the magnetic timer.
“Definitely. We had them checked out when we wanted to get them installed, and they’re perfectly safe. Hinges are as stiff as the day they arrived, though. Nothing seems to work on them.”
“You haven’t thought about getting them replaced?”
Orym is quiet for a beat too long, and Dorian’s brain chants bacon lips, bacon lips at him in a decidedly unhelpful way.
“There’s always something else that needs doing,” Orym says at last, just a fraction too level and too light-hearted for the way he doesn’t meet Dorian’s eyes. “It’s just me that has to worry about it, anyway, it’s fine. Really. Say, you don’t mind if I bring my work in here for a bit, do you?”
“Not at all! Do you want me to lower one of the benches?”
“Nah, I’ll grab a stool from the cafe.”
Dorian’s stacking his dishes ready to be washed when Orym returns, carrying a stool taller than himself, which he situates and springs onto with a deftness Dorian can only dream of achieving. He opens up his laptop, but proceeds to ignore it in favour of the copy of A Pie-Based Culture laid out reverently beside it.
“Menu prep?” Dorian calls, donning his rubber gloves and squirting dish soap into the sink.
“Something like that. It’s been a while since I switched things up with the pastries, and it’s a good time of year to bring pies back in. Where better to get inspiration than this?”
“Do you just want an excuse to eat pie?”
“I never need an excuse to eat pie,” Orym says, and Dorian can almost hear the mischievous twinkle in his eye. “You know what, I should teach you how to make the Berry Surprise sometime soon. It’s always a favourite round here.”
Dorian lingers over scrubbing out the mixing bowl he’d been using, and blames the heat of the dishwashing water on the uncomfortable flush rising through the back of his neck.
“I… I don’t know about that,” Dorian says, keeping his voice as light as he can, like it’s not a big deal. It’s not a big deal. Only…
“I mean… you saw what happened last time I tried to do pastry. Didn’t go so well.”
“Yeah,” Orym says softly, “but that wasn’t with me. We’ll work through it like we did with bread dough. One step at a time.”
“You make it sound so easy.”
“It is easy, trust me. Just takes a bit of practice.”
Dorian glances over his shoulder just to make sure Orym can see exactly how high he’s arched his eyebrow in response, and Orym laughs in that soft way he has with just the barest curve of his mouth, where his eyes are sparkling with mirth.
But through the laughter, Orym reaches up to rub at the space right at the crease of his neck and shoulder again, fingers digging hard into the muscle, and something passes over his face that Dorian doesn’t like the look of.
“Are you okay?” he blurts out before he can stop himself. “Sorry—your shoulder—is it injured, did something happen—?”
Orym freezes in place, and a litany of fuck-shit-fuck-fuck-fuck-why-did-you-say-that-useless-bacon-lips rushes through Dorian’s head as he clamps his lips together to stop himself running his mouth off any further.
But then Orym’s face softens, and he shakes his head with a rueful smile.
“No, it’s alright. Just tense. It sometimes gets knotted up in there when there’s a lot going on, that’s all.”
Dorian turns back to the sink, willing down the flush already building through his neck and ears. But he turns Orym’s quiet admission over in his mind, over and over, as he thinks about how much Orym does, every day, every week in this place. Dorian’s been here for two and a half months and it still sometimes feels like Orym could run this place single-handed—perhaps just with less coffee on offer. It’s frightening, sometimes, to see how capable Orym is; the way he switches so seamlessly at the drop of a hat between every pastry that needs his attention, how light he is of foot running in and out of the shopfront and up and down the steps to the benches and the ladders to the ovens, the way his calm never, ever seems to fade. The way it seems like Dorian could leave tomorrow and Orym would just pick up after him without missing a beat.
And he thinks about Orym, closed off with the weight of the world pressing down on him, and wonders.
“You know,” Dorian says slowly, “I was wondering, earlier—are the accounts that bad?”
“No! They’re fine. I think. It’s just—”
Orym heaves out a gusty sigh, and Dorian glances back to see him staring down at the bench. That exhaustion from before weighs over him like a shroud.
“I never thought this was something I would have to do myself,” Orym says, rubbing at his forehead. “I’m not that smart, I don’t really know about keeping a business running. I’m doing what I can, but… I’m a baker. I bake. And I keep thinking about how the humidity’s changing, and we’re going to have to adjust things with the breadmaking until winter settles in, and what temperature we need to keep the kitchen at if we’re making pies as well and keeping the pastry cold—but none of that matters if I don’t get all these things done so that we can just keep running. And I just don’t have time to figure it all out.”
Behind his hand, Orym draws a long, stuttering breath. Dorian slips off his rubber gloves and approaches the opposite side of the bench parallel to Orym’s.
“That’s a lot to go to sleep on,” he says softly.
Orym shakes his head.
“If only. Haven’t slept much this week. Figured tonight I might as well make some use of the time.”
“You’re staying up?”
“Just to get all the prep done once I’ve got through… all this. That’s what the coffee’s for, at any rate. Fourth one’s the charm, right?”
Dorian is absolutely certain his ears must be magenta by now with the heat rising past his neck.
“It’s fine, Dorian,” Orym says, pressing the heel of his palm against his eyes for just another moment before drawing his shoulders straight and pulling himself upright. “Really. I have to keep this place running. It’s all I can do.”
Something echoes wrong in the weight behind Orym’s words, like he’s said them a hundred times before; like no matter what happens, he’ll have to say them a hundred times again.
But in the moment before he can think of what to say, Orym reaches up to rub at his shoulder again, and Dorian doesn’t miss the wince as he presses against the muscle.
“Are you sure your shoulder’s alright?”
“It’s fine. I just can’t—” Orym grits his teeth. “Can’t get the knot out. I’ll take a L-Restor in a bit. It’ll come right. It always does.”
And here’s the thing—Dorian’s seen this before. His mom gets tight shoulders too, working long hours, and sometimes she needs L-Restor too, or a cup of chamomile tea—but sometimes it needs something more, and it takes someone else gently working the tension out before she finds any relief. She’s been taking Dorian to the massage parlour with her since he was fourteen. He’s learned a few things along the way.
And he doesn’t have the lavender-scented oil or a comfortable couch, or anything much to help at all. But Orym looks so uncomfortable, and it stings to see him that way; Orym, who dedicates his life to this bakery, who fronts up with a smile and a free sample for every wayward child who comes rushing in, who mixes and kneads and slings trays around day in and day out like it costs him nothing.
But nothing in life comes without a cost.
“Dorian? What is it?”
“It’s nothing, really,” Dorian says, averting his eyes towards the fine scratches in the metal bench, counting the rows of the cooling racks from bottom to top. “I just wondered—you might not even want it—would it help at all if I tried to loosen the muscle up?”
Orym stares at him, unreadable and silent.
“I know it sounds silly, but I know what I’m doing, I’ve learned how to give massages properly, but—sorry, forget I said anything—”
“No!” Dorian looks up reflexively at the sharpness of the sound—but far from seeming weirded out, or even angry at the suggestion, Orym looks merely surprised. “No, that actually sounds—I’ll give it a go, if you’re happy to.”
Dorian relaxes his grip on the bench. He hadn’t even realised he’d been clutching it so tightly. “Really?”
“It can’t hurt to try,” Orym says, closing his laptop and placing it aside. “Do you need me to—you know, do anything?”
Dorian assesses as he comes around to the same side of the bench as Orym. The stool looks stable enough for Orym to rest comfortably on, and the bench is a good height for him to lean his weight into if he needs—but if Dorian’s going to be able to work his hands over Orym’s shoulders properly…
“You should probably take your cardigan off,” he says finally. “And just… relax, if you can.”
“Let me know if you need me to move at all,” Orym says, shrugging the cardigan off his shoulders. It’s many sizes too large on him, and it looks bigger still as Orym lets it drape down his back and rests his hands together in his lap. It looks homemade, soft wool in a deep blue-grey and spun in patterns Dorian’s come to recognise as Zephran; patterns that weave throughout the trailing plants that make their home in the cafe, patterns embroidered neatly on the stacks of tea towels and oven mitts scattered through the kitchen, patterns whittled with care into the shelves of this very kitchen. It looks at home on Orym despite the size, and despite the colour, so different from the soft olives and greens and fawn he normally favours.
It looks familiar, even though he’s never seen Orym wear it before, like he’s seen it somewhere in the cafe, or out in the collection of blankets and rugs they keep stored for using in the garden. There must be a matching blanket out there, Dorian reasons to himself. That’s all it is.
He lays his hands gently on Orym, at first. Orym’s shoulders are fine-cut and tightly muscled beneath his fingers, and Dorian probes around for a minute, making himself familiar with the planes of Orym’s shoulder blades, the elegant seam of his spine. It’s hard to second-guess how deep and strong to place the pressure on someone he’s never touched like this before. It isn’t even that Orym is small, because Dorian has seen time and time again how strong he is, and how much he can bear all on his own. He holds himself with a grace and a lightness that seems as innate a part of him as his freckled skin and level voice—but even under this light touch, some of that poise falls away, and Dorian can see the exhaustion pulling at his body as he sinks forward just a little, and draws the folds of the cardigan in closer.
But the only way he’ll know for certain is if he tries.
Settling his hands over Orym’s shoulders, Dorian starts to rub his thumbs in large, firm circles right at the base of his neck. He finds a knot almost immediately, buried deep in his trapezius, but keeps his motions steady. If there’s one crucial thing he’s learned from all the massages he’s had over the years, it’s that the muscles need to be warm and loose before you can start working any knots or pressure points out—dig into them cold, and it really hurts.
So he keeps up his circular motions, and moves his palm down to ease over the muscle, coaxing it loose with every gentle push and soft circle until he feels Orym start to relax under his hands, the tension held high and tight in his shoulder blades and across his upper back starting to melt away. He moves a little way down Orym’s spine, rubbing slow, easy circles all the way; and when at last Orym’s breathing has slowed down, he keeps one hand steady on Orym’s shoulder as he reaches back up to the knot and presses in hard.
Orym lets out an honest-to-Melora squeak.
Dorian snatches his hands away, heart hammering in his chest.
“Orym? Did I hurt you?”
Orym is quick to shake his head, and his voice is steady when he speaks a moment later.
“You can keep going.”
Dorian has to force himself to take a breath, and then four more. And then he lays his hands back down, and keeps going.
The next knot is higher up, right at the base of Orym’s neck where he had been rubbing. Dorian takes some time over this one, using both thumbs to ease it out a little at a time until he feels Orym slump just fractionally under his hands. As Dorian works over the knots, right shoulder blade first and then left, Orym’s breathing gets heavier and heavier; and when it comes loud and shaky through his mouth, Dorian eases off, moving his hands back to their slow, easy circles down his low back, and then back up to his shoulders as the air around him settles and his breathing evens out.
Beneath Orym’s shirt, the edges of his tattoo peek out, clear and sharp even in the low light. The clouds coalesce right over Orym’s bicep—ever-visible with the way his shirts are always tailored to remove the right sleeve—but separate out as they cover his shoulder and descend his collarbone. As Dorian fingers gently work back over his trapezius, they nudge the shirt askew just a fraction, and Dorian catches a glimpse of the last of the clouds, breaking away into tiny blossoms and falling leaves.
The nutty, heady scent of yeast and brown sugar fills the room, gentle and warm as it wraps around the hum of the oven, and it melts away every last vestige of tension in Orym’s body as Dorian takes his circles to the small of his back and rocks his knuckles rhythmic down his spine. His breath comes slower and slower.
“Is this any better?” Dorian asks after some time, taking care to keep his voice low.
“That’s really good,” Orym says, voice huskier than Dorian’s ever heard it. He sways a little under Dorian’s touch. “If you need to stop, though—how long do your rolls have to go?”
“They’re a little way off, still.” Dorian moves back up to Orym’s shoulders and rubs over them slow and gentle as he thinks how to phrase the thing he really wants to say. “Do you want to try one, when they’re out of the oven?”
“I won’t say no if you’re offering. They smell amazing.”
“Here’s hoping they taste alright, then.”
Orym sighs, his shoulders slack under Dorian’s hands. “Honestly, they might be just what I need. I could do with some sugar. Might keep me awake if the caffeine doesn’t work.”
Dorian wills down the heat from his neck and slows his hands further.
“Orym… do you think that maybe you should get some sleep instead? No offence intended, but you look two seconds away from passing out on the bench.”
“I wish I could, but the accounts… I don’t have time during the week, I need to get them done before I turn the whole thing into a bonfire and commit tax fraud.”
“You just… you look exhausted, Orym. It feels like you never leave this place.”
“I promised Wi—I promised I’d keep this place going. And I have. And I will.” Orym folds his hands together, rubbing the crease of his thumb like he so often rubs his beautiful tattoo. “I want people to know that this place is staying put. Places like this, it’s hard to deal with change. I wouldn’t know what to do with myself anyway, if I weren’t doing this all day. I love it, I do, truly. It’s just… it’s only that… Dorian, have you ever felt like the world needs to expect that you’re okay? That they can’t have any idea you’re just treading water with a kraken wrapped around your heels?”
Dorian’s throat closes off. Every day for the first twenty-seven years of my life.
Every day still.
“I just… I need to keep this place going. But I’m in over my head. It feels like I’m in over my head every day and one day I’m going to wake up and this place will be underwater. Do you know what I’m saying?”
“Do you have to do it all by yourself? What’s this town for? What’s this community for? Orym, what am I for if not to help you here? Can’t—can’t I do anything?”
“Dorian, you practically run the front by yourself, you set up the Fantasy Grams—”
“Fanstagram.”
“—and you do all the work on that, I can’t ask you to do more. I can manage it on my own. This is the bit I’m good at.”
“But you’re doing all this and running the business? Orym, I can help. I want to help.”
“Dorian—”
“Orym, I like it here. I really like working here, and I just want to help however I can. I don’t want to see you work yourself so much you get hurt—I know you said your shoulder’s okay, but what if you do something you can’t fix? You can’t do this all on your own. You shouldn’t have to.”
Orym lets out a long, shaky breath. He doesn’t say anything.
The timer goes off, and Dorian lifts his hands away too quickly. He’s really done it this time. His stupid, stupid bacon lips which just don’t know when to stop.
He crouches to open the oven door, and hears the faintest fraction of a sound from Orym. But it cuts off immediately as the door opens, and he dismisses it; it’ll just be the oven fan. He pulls out the cinnamon rolls—burnished and beautifully risen—and slides them onto the cooling rack; and then, when the oven door is closed again, Orym speaks.
“Dorian—”
“I’m sorry—”
“You’re right.”
Dorian turns so fast he almost knocks over the cooling rack.
“You’re right. And I haven’t been fair to you. I know this is too big to run on my own. I’ve been trying my best, for a while, but it works better with two. Always has. If you’re willing—”
He looks up and meets Dorian’s gaze head-on.
“If you’re offering—it’s going to be a lot more work.”
“I did five years of law school. It’s not the same, but I know about hard work.”
“Starting tonight?”
Dorian has never been able to back down from a challenge.
“Tonight sounds perfect. Let me finish things up with the rolls and we can get started.”
“How long do they need?”
“Just a few minutes in the tin so I don’t burn myself on boiling sugar.”
The shelves on the window-side wall house all the display boards, and Dorian eases out one with a soft teal grip for unmolding the cinnamon rolls. It still takes him a second to steel himself to do this bit—it always feels like something is going to go horribly wrong—but Orym’s trick of counting down works its usual magic. It only takes a firm one-two-three! to flip the pan, and a beat for gravity to finish the task, and Dorian feels it when the rolls loosen from the bottom of the pan and settle satisfyingly on the board. Nothing sticks to the pan when he pulls it away.
“They look amazing, Dorian.”
There are already two plates laid out on the bench when Dorian brings the board over, inlaid with a delicate cross-woven pattern of forget-me-nots, and a bread knife and two cake forks besides.
“Wasn’t sure what you’d want to eat these with, so I figured some of everything.”
“I don’t know about how you do it in Zephrah, but in my home, cinnamon rolls were finger food. Exclusively.”
“They were in my home too.”
Orym holds his roll aloft.
“To the things we can control.”
“To the good part of the job,” Dorian responds, holding up his own roll in kind. He taps them together, a gentle cheers, and Orym laughs.
“I’ll eat to that.”
The sweet-sticky maple and cinnamon warm his body, the spicy, buttery buns like a warm hearth on a dark winter morning with the winds howling and the rain spiralling horizontal around the house he grew up in. The roll itself is a little chewier than he thinks it should be. There was too much flour, after all. But it’s—
It’s his, and it’s good.
Savouring the taste as it lingers on his tongue, Dorian glances to Orym, whose mouth is full and whose eyes are very wide. The only other time he’s seen Orym look like that was several weeks ago, right after Dorian had started working at Sugar Moon Bakery, when the woman Dorian now knows as Orym’s ma brought in a pie that one of their neighbours had baked, and Orym had been walking on air for the whole rest of the afternoon.
Orym finishes his mouthful, and turns to Dorian with those same eyes wide and intent.
“If you’re okay with it, and don’t feel any obligation, I would love to put that on rotation for autumn.”
Dorian almost drops his own roll.
“You’re not serious.”
“I’m completely serious. Those were something else.”
“I mean…” Dorian flounders, for once lost for words. “It’s not my recipe, even, it’s my aunt’s…”
“Please, feel free to ask her. We’d credit her for the recipe if she’d be happy to let us use it. Trust me, Dorian. It’s a job and a half to balance out the flavours that are best at different times of the year and these ones are perfect. You did good here. Really good.”
“I put too much flour in. They’re meant to be fluffier than that.”
“Easy enough to fix next time. I couldn’t really tell. You did a good job of kneading.”
“Do you think so?”
“Oh, yes. There’s no way you couldn’t have.”
And try as he might, there’s no way Dorian can hide the thrill that runs up his spine at the praise. Praise from Orym, who’s the best baker Dorian has ever known.
“Anyway,” Orym says, hopping off the stool, “have a think about it. No rush. I really should find some L-Restor before we get going with the prep—will you be okay here if I run up to my apartment real quick?”
“Sure! I should text Opal and Dariax anyway, they need to know I’ll be back late.”
“If it’s going to be an issue, we can take a couple of days to sort something out—”
“It’s not an issue, Orym, I promise. There will be an issue if I find you passed out on the floor from exhaustion. I just need to make sure Opal doesn’t put the chain and the deadbolt on the door before I get back.”
For everything Dorian loves about the bakery, its internet connection is, sadly, not one of its selling points. The only place with reasonable wifi is the office, given that’s where Orym does the paperwork, and normally Dorian resigns himself to using his data and not being able to check Fanstagram on his breaks. But since Dariax always forgets to top up his phone plan, and Opal has one of the plans with copious amounts of data but no actual calls or texts, Dorian isn’t left with many other options.
And it’s not like he’s not allowed to come in here.
Dorian pockets his phone once he’s sent his messages—via both SendStone and Fanstagram just in case Opal has grudges with one or the other presently—and takes a glance over the office. The miscellany of recipes is still piled on the desk, untouched. And Dorian’s curiosity is clawing at his insides. It feels like something he doesn’t want to know—or maybe it’s just the fear that Orym will catch him in the act.
But it’s not like he’s doing anything wrong. It’s just a pile of recipes with no particular purpose.
Dorian keeps his footsteps quiet nonetheless as he picks his way through the books still piled on the floor and takes up the sheaf of parchment again. He rifles through the pages feather-light, and carefully lays down the top of the pile face-down when he finds what he was looking for.
The same hand that penned lemon meringue pie and triple citrus cake and a dozen other recipes which are all Orym’s favourites is the one that wrote out Berry Surprise (Lurleen’s recipe) (this is a pie). The ingredients, plain as day, list rum (a generous splash) (always the Darktow varietals).
And the method extends out far beyond what a normal recipe should. It makes Dorian’s breath catch in his throat. A gentle, summery breeze flickers through the papers.
On an impulse, he takes all the recipes in that looping, racing hand out of the pile. It’s the work of moments to find enough sheets of parchment from the floor to bulk it out to the same size it was before. With luck, this might have been the least pressing thing on Orym’s mind this evening.
Because Dorian doesn’t know a lot about what the bakery was like before he moved to Zephrah, but there are things he’s found hard to miss. The kitchen, that could move between his height and Orym’s from the first day he set foot in there. The office, designed for one person so much taller than Orym. The over-large cardigan in Zephran patterns. How Orym speaks of we all the time.
How it seems to have been just Orym keeping the bakery alive for so long.
How Orym says this place has always worked best with two.
And as Dorian sequesters the recipes in a different, darker corner, somewhere Orym surely won’t look when sorting out this room must be last on his list of things to do, he wonders again who this person was, this person who still lingers in the air of this place as ever-present as the yeast and sugar and vanilla do. He wonders what this person was doing with these recipes.
He wonders if Orym knew.
The click of the front door shakes him from his reverie, and Dorian hastens back into the kitchen. Atop a hasty pile in one corner, amidst recipe books gathering dust, the page entitled Berry Surprise (Lurleen’s recipe) (this is a pie) remains.
Best enjoyed on a picnic out over Tempest’s Rise, under the magnolia tree. Bring lemonade (more lemon, less sugar), and bring ice cream. Make a show of keeping it cold even in the heat of the afternoon. Pie tastes best accompanied by the delight he takes in your magic. Kiss him senseless. Make him a flower crown. Hold him close as the sun sets over the mountains.
You’ll know you’ve made it right when he can taste your love in every bite.