What He Kneaded in the Oven at Four in the Morning

It was four in the morning and the oven at «Aroma de Levadura» roared like a hungry beast. Lalo wore the white apron stained with flour up to his elbows, worn jeans clinging to his legs, and his mind was anywhere but on the dough in his hands. It had been three weeks since he had signed the divorce papers with Carmela and, since then, he’d been hotter than the bakery itself.

—Fuck, get a grip —he muttered to himself, and slapped the dough against the marble harder than necessary.

The Lavapiés neighborhood was asleep. The bakery had been his since his father retired, twelve years ago now, and he knew every tile, every scratch on the worktable, every corner where flour built up despite sweeping twice a day. At that hour, with no customers, with Adrián asleep upstairs, with no one coming in for loaves or muffins, the place was a private temple where he sometimes allowed himself to talk to himself, sing, say filthy things out loud.

Lalo was forty-six years old, with a broad back from hauling sacks, arms forged by kneading and by Sunday soccer games with the guys from Quique’s bar. He kept his beard trimmed with care, blond with dark streaks, and his hair still thick despite the gray. He knew he was attractive, but that knowledge was useless when he was alone in a bakery at dawn with an erection that still hadn’t gone down since he’d raised the shutter.

—This is ridiculous —he muttered, and looked down.

The bulge in his jeans was obvious. It had been all day the day before, when Marga, a dark-haired neighbor who always came in for a crusty loaf, had bent down to pick up the coins she’d dropped and he had stared at her cleavage like a kid. It had been there too when Tobías had shown up, from apartment four, the one with the tattoos, the one in the gray tracksuit that left nothing to the imagination. Tobías had asked for two croissants and smiled at him in a way Lalo couldn’t decipher. Or maybe he could. Or maybe he invented it. Or maybe he didn’t.

—Tobías, fuck —he said out loud, and laughed at the sheer absurdity of it.

For weeks he’d noticed that his mind wasn’t working the way it used to. It wasn’t just desire for women, which had always been there, plentiful, orderly, predictable. It was something else. It was noticing Tobías’s neck. It was thinking, while he showered, about what it would be like to have a man’s hand squeezing his shoulders. It was waking at three in the morning with the image of tattooed arms wrapping around him from behind. Things he hadn’t expected to be considering at forty-six.

—Must be the divorce making me crazy —he told himself, and left the dough to rest under a clean cloth.

***

Adrián, his son, was twenty-one and had a body that gave away the hours he spent at the public sports center pool. When Carmela had gone off to Albacete with her parents, the boy had decided to stay in Madrid. “My life is here, Dad, I’m not going to a city where I don’t know anyone,” he’d said with that new calm Lalo still hadn’t fully recognized as adult. They lived together on the floor above, the one with the balconies facing the square. Each with his own room, his own schedule, his own respectful silences.

Adrián was a good kid. He studied Civil Engineering with difficulty, went out with his friends on Fridays, slept until two on Saturdays. And that was it. Lalo couldn’t ask for more. When his mind wandered into strange territory —and sometimes it did— he forced himself to push away any thought that mixed the boy with the new fantasies that ambushed him. “Not there, ever,” he told himself, and went back to focusing on the dough, on the oven, on Tobías, on Marga, on anyone but his own son sleeping two floors above him.

That dawn, however, it was hard to push everything else away too.

***

He leaned against the worktable, covered the dough with a cloth, and stared at the ceiling. The extractor hummed. The oven read two hundred and twenty degrees. Half an hour remained before he had to put in the first batch of buns. Plenty of time to do something stupid.

—You’re not going to do it —he said out loud, while undoing the button on his pants.

He laughed at himself. He lowered the zipper with his left hand, not having fully washed off the flour, and pulled out his cock carefully. It had been hard for a good while and throbbed in his palm with a pulse that seemed to have a life of its own. It was the kind of cock that didn’t go unnoticed: thick, straight, with the pink head peeking out from the skin of the retracted foreskin. He had looked at it in the mirror dozens of times, with neither pride nor shame, simply the way you look at a tool when you know it well.

—Damn, what a mess you are —he muttered.

He sat on the wooden stool beside the oven, the one he used to check invoices, and settled in with his legs apart. His undershirt clung to his chest from the heat of the bakery. He began to move slowly, almost tenderly, trying to stretch it out beyond the miserable two minutes he’d been lasting lately. The divorced guy’s wank, he thought: quick, efficient, unimaginative, just enough to sleep.

But tonight he wanted more.

He closed his eyes. Searched for an image. Marga appeared, bending down, cleavage, hair falling over her face. Good. That worked. His hand moved up and down more firmly. But after a few seconds, without asking permission, Marga vanished and Tobías appeared in her place. Tobías without a shirt, with those tattoos running down his left side from neck to hip. Tobías looking at him from across the counter with a small, crooked smile that said, “you and I both know it.”

—Fuck —Lalo whispered, and quickened the pace.

The fantasy unfolded on its own. Tobías coming into the bakery through the back door, leaning in the frame, seeing him like this, cock out, not surprised. Tobías crossing the kitchen in four steps. Tobías kneeling between his legs with his tattooed forearms resting on Lalo’s thighs. The idea struck him with a new force, almost violent. Never before had he imagined something like that in such detail. Never before had he wanted an image to be real so badly.

—Fuck, fuck, fuck —he muttered through clenched teeth, his hand flying.

The bakery had turned into a sauna. Sweat ran down his beard, stung his eyes. With his free hand he lifted his shirt up to his chest, revealing the blond hair climbing from his navel. He pinched one nipple. A low, rough groan escaped him, one he didn’t even recognize as his own.

He had never done this before. He had never thought this before.

***

And then he heard a creak in the ceiling.

His body froze from the waist up. His hand did not. The hand kept going, traitorous, stubborn, refusing to obey. The creak came again. Footsteps. Someone was walking around upstairs. Adrián, probably, getting up for water or the bathroom, as he sometimes did.

—Shit —he whispered.

For a moment he imagined —he couldn’t help it, it lasted a tenth of a second, a flash— that his son came down the stairs and found him like this. The image cut off on its own, repudiated, and Lalo clenched his teeth in anger at himself. “Not there, asshole. Not there, ever.” But his heart was hammering at two hundred, and the guilt of having thought what he’d thought, even for an instant, paradoxically made everything else speed up.

He went back to Tobías. He clung to Tobías like a buoy. Tobías sucking him off without hurry, looking up at him with those green eyes he had. Tobías lifting his shirt and showing him all the tattoos. Tobías saying, in that deep voice he used when he ordered croissants, something dirty Lalo couldn’t quite form even in the fantasy.

—Yes, yes, yes —he panted.

He felt the release rise from below, slow, electric, different from the quick wanks of the past few weeks. He bit his lip to keep from shouting, because above him was his son and below him was the bakery that would open to the neighborhood in five hours. He came in thick spurts over the flour scattered on the floor, over his pants themselves, over his hand. His thighs trembled. His head tipped back. He let out a dull, restrained, almost animal groan.

When he opened his eyes again, the oven was still roaring, the extractor still humming, and upstairs there was no sound at all.

***

It took him five minutes to move. He wiped himself with an old rag, threw fresh flour over the stain on the floor, pulled up the zipper, and washed his hands in the sink with industrial soap until his skin burned. His face burned too, but for another reason.

—All right, Lalo —he said out loud, talking to himself the way he sometimes did in the back room—. All right. You liked that. You really liked that.

It wasn’t the first wank in his life with a man in his head. It was the first, however, in which the fantasy of a man had come on its own, without being invited, and had pushed everything else aside. That was new. That demanded some thinking.

He put the buns in the oven. Set the timer. Went upstairs for a quick shower before opening.

Adrián was in the kitchen, in his underwear, pouring himself a glass of milk. His brown hair was tousled and his eyes were small with not having slept enough.

—Dad, were you working? I heard weird noises —he said, without malice, his voice thick with sleep.

Lalo laughed, and the laugh came out more naturally than he’d expected.

—Yeah, son. A difficult dough. Sometimes you have to wrestle with it.

—Okay, Dad. Save me a little bun when they’re ready, okay?

—Done.

Adrián shuffled off to his room. Lalo stayed for a moment leaning on the counter, looking out the window as the sky began to turn a pale gray over the rooftops of Lavapiés. He thought about Tobías. Thought about tomorrow, when Tobías would come back for croissants. Thought about what he would say if he asked him, just once, to stay one minute after paying.

—Fuck —he said, and stepped into the shower with that small smile of someone who has just discovered, at forty-six, that life still has things to teach him.

***

The bakery opened at seven sharp. Doña Rosario, the first regular customer as always, carried her checkered bag and her rosary in her hand. She asked for two napolitanas and a loaf. Lalo handed them over with a cordiality that seemed freshly baked, and the woman left grumbling something about how cold it was that morning.

At nine-thirty, when the neighborhood was already in full swing and the line reached the door, Lalo looked up and saw him. Tobías was in the middle of the line, not in a tracksuit this time, wearing a dark wool sweater that defined his shoulders. He smiled at him from afar, with that small, crooked smile, exactly the same one Lalo had imagined hours earlier while coming on the flour in the bakery.

—Two croissants, Lalo —said Tobías when he reached the counter, as he did every day.

—Coming right up, Tobías.

And when he handed over the paper bag and Tobías’s fingers brushed his for a second longer than necessary, Lalo finally understood that the divorce had not been the end of anything.

It had been the beginning.