His shoulders relaxed.
“I know better than to touch your baby,” Doyle said, peeling back the foil top on a container of corn syrup masquerading as maple syrup before drizzling it over his french toast.
“The watermelon isn’t my baby,” Larkin answered.“You’re not supposed to pick favorites.It was watered Wednesday morning, is all.”
Doyle gave him an indulgent smile.
After a minute, Larkin leaned forward and hissed, “Yes, it’s my baby.”
Doyle laughed.
The woman at the counter stood from her seat, knocked back the rest of her coffee, then walked to the door, passing behind Doyle.She wore the familiar blue uniform and standing eagle patch of a postal carrier, although Larkin thought she was a bit old to still be schlepping mail—late fifties, at least—but maybe she was looking to hit a certain service benchmark for retirement incentives.
The bell jangled overhead as she stepped out, and a waft of what smelled an awful lot like an original Djarum Black, despite flavored cigarettes having been banned since 2009, lingered in her wake.That distinct scent of spicy burning clove made Larkin think of the boy who’d sat in front of him in AP English.He’d gotten reprimanded for writing poetry about other boys and had had a voice like a shovel dragging over loose gravel.Larkin hadn’t thought of him in nineteen years.
Olfactory memory was funny like that.
Doyle must have noticed the smell too, because his nose wrinkled and he said, mostly to himself, “Smells like every music venue I snuck into as a kid.”
Larkin redirected his attention.“You snuck into music venues?”
Doyle glanced up.“Oh, yeah, all the time.Well—it wasn’t really sneaking, I guess.They let me in.”He took a bite of breakfast.“Punk venues in the ’90s weren’t big into carding.That, and I was already six feet by fourteen.”
“Had your voice dropped.”
Doyle thought for a minute.“Around sixteen, I think.But by then, I was six four.”He gave his chin a quick rub and added, “Couldn’t grow a beard until grad school, though.”
Larkin’s mouth tugged to one side.“If you sounded like this at sixteen, I doubt anyone noticed your patchy whiskers.”He sopped up runny yolk with more toast.“I’m sorry I can’t share in your musical interests.”
“That’s all right.”
“It’s not even because of associations,” Larkin continued.“Not really.Music overstimulates me.And your tastes are… very fast.”
“System of a Down.”
“And loud.”
“Bikini Kill.”
“Although I am intrigued by the concept of queercore.”
“Pansy Division,” Doyle laughed.“It’s not for everyone.Did you listen to music when you were younger?”
Larkin shrugged.“Showtunes.”
“That’s just a different kind of queercore.”
Larkin smiled at that.“I do listen to Marilyn Monroe when I’m alone.”
“I didn’t realize you liked her so much.”
Larkin set his fork aside.He rubbed his palms up and down his thighs a few times.His heart did an uncomfortable lurch before feeling as if it’d missed a beat, like a roller coaster stalled on the tracks just before the big drop.“Did you know she had a stutter.”
“I had no idea.”
“When Patrick—” Larkin stopped.He looked down at his lap, then toward the empty counter, then back to Doyle.He cleared his throat and tried again.“My TBI resulted in, among other things, a very bad stutter.Not only did I have to relearn how to walk and write prior to entering college, but all throughout I required continuous neurological rehabilitation.It’s why I talk like this: flat, no inflection, no emotional prosody.That innate articulation of emotion—I’ve never been able to fully regain it, not while having to be consciously aware of my breathing, projection, enunciation.It’s a sort of defense mechanism, I suppose.I’ve read that’s why Marilyn had such a distinct, breathy delivery.It was a tool to work around her stutter.I’m no biographer, I can’t say how true it might be, but… I’ve felt a sort of… kinship with her since learning of that.”
Larkin could never predict Doyle’s response in these moments of honest intimacy, and yet, he’d been coming full-circle to appreciating the same unknown that used to devastate and isolate him from the rest of the world.Because Doyle was so different from them—from a population who’d proven time and again they didn’t want to know, didn’t want to listen, because grass was always greener if you chose to believe the atrocities of man could never sink to such levels of depravity as beating a teenage boy to near death with a baseball bat because he’d sat on the dock that summer afternoon with his toes skimming the water’s surface and his lips touching Patrick’s own.
