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 was wearing a white apron stained with flour up to the elbows, faded jeans clinging to his legs, and his head 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 had been hotter than the bakehouse itself.

—Fuck, get a grip —he muttered to himself, and slammed the dough down 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 gathered no matter how often he swept 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 sometimes he allowed himself to talk out loud, sing, say stupid shit.

Lalo was forty-six, broad-backed from carrying sacks, arms forged by years of kneading and by Sunday football games with the guys from Quique’s bar. He kept his beard neatly trimmed, blond with dark streaks, and his hair was still thick despite the gray. He knew he was attractive, but knowing it did him no good while he was alone in a bakery at dawn with a hard cock that had not gone down since he lifted the shutter.

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

The bulge in his jeans was obvious, the fabric stretched tight by a cock that had been demanding action for hours. It had been like that all day yesterday, when Marga, a dark-haired neighbor who always came in for a loaf of country bread, had bent down to pick up the coins she’d dropped and he had stood there staring at her neckline, those two big tits bouncing inside her bra like a little kid. It had been like that too when Tobías, from the fourth floor, the one with the tattoos, the one in the gray tracksuit that outlined with indecent precision the package swinging with every step, had shown up. Tobías had asked for two croissants and smiled at him in a way Lalo couldn’t quite decipher. Or maybe he could. Or maybe he made it up. Or maybe not.

—Tobías, fuck —he said out loud, and laughed to himself at how absurd the moment was.

For weeks he had noticed his head 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 nape, the way the short hair trailed down toward his back. It was thinking, while showering, about what a man’s hand would feel like squeezing his shoulders, or a man’s mouth sucking him off without any fuss. It was waking up at three in the morning with the image of tattooed arms wrapping around him from behind and a hard cock driving between his ass cheeks. Things he had not expected to be thinking about at forty-six.

—The divorce must have driven 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 betrayed the hours he spent in the municipal pool. When Carmela had gone to Albacete with her parents, the kid 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 had told him with that new calm Lalo still couldn’t quite read as adult. They lived together upstairs, in the flat with the balconies facing the square. Each in his own room, with his own schedules, his own respectful silences.

Adrián was a good kid. He studied Civil Engineering badly, 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 drifted into strange places —and sometimes it did— he forced himself to push away any thought that mixed the boy up with the new fantasies that ambushed him. “Not there, never,” he would tell himself, and go back to focusing on the dough, on the oven, on Tobías, on Marga, on anyone who was not his own son sleeping two floors above.

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

***

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

—You’re not going to do it —he said out loud, as he unbuttoned his trousers.

He laughed at himself. He pulled down the zipper with his left hand, not having washed all the flour off yet, and took his cock out carefully. It had been hard as stone for quite a while and throbbed against his palm with a pulse that seemed to have a life of its own. It was the sort of cock that did not go unnoticed: thick, straight, the pink head peeking out from the skin of the retracted foreskin, already beaded with a fat drop of precum that stretched into a shining thread when he moved his hand away. He had looked at it in the mirror dozens of times, without pride and without shame, simply the way you look at a tool when you know it well. He weighed it in his hand, rocked it, squeezed his heavy balls with the other hand and felt that electric stab rising from his lower belly to his chest.

—God, what a mess you are —he murmured.

He sat on the wooden stool next to the oven, the one he used to check invoices, and settled in with his legs spread wide, his trousers lowered to mid-thigh, his balls hanging heavy over the seat. His undershirt clung to his chest from the heat of the bakehouse. He spat into his palm, a thick gob that fell straight onto the head of his cock, and started moving slowly, almost lovingly, coating the whole thing with saliva mixed with the own liquid that kept leaking from him. His hand went up and down with a wet smack that echoed in the silence of the bakehouse. He was trying to stretch it out beyond the miserable two minutes he had been lasting lately. The divorced-man wank, he thought: quick, efficient, unimaginative, just enough to sleep.

But tonight he wanted more.

He closed his eyes. Looked for an image. Marga appeared, bending down, the neckline, her hair falling over her face. Good. That worked. He imagined her on her knees right there in the bakehouse, blouse bursting open, her big tits hanging free, sucking his cock with that lipstick mouth she made when she came to ask for bread. His hand moved faster, more determined, squeezing hard under the head, yanking from him that wild tingle. He imagined grabbing her hair, forcing her face down against his groin, fucking her mouth until mascara tears ran down her cheeks. But after a few seconds, without asking permission, Marga faded and Tobías took her place. Tobías without a shirt, with those tattoos that ran down his left side from neck to hip, spiraling lower until they disappeared beneath the waistband of his tracksuit. Tobías looking at him from across the counter with a small, tilted smile, the kind that says, “You and me both know.”

—Fuck —Lalo whispered, and quickened the pace.

The fantasy unfolded on its own. Tobías walking into the bakehouse through the back door, leaning on the frame, seeing him like that, cock out and dripping, not even surprised. “Keep going, man. Keep jerking it, I want to see.” Tobías crossing the kitchen in four steps. Tobías kneeling between his legs with tattooed forearms resting on Lalo’s thighs, his short beard brushing the inside of his thighs. The idea hit him with a new, almost violent force. He had never imagined something like this in such detail before. He had never wanted so badly for an image to be real.

He imagined him lowering his head and swallowing his whole cock in one go, all the way to the root, nose pressed against the blond pubic hair, Lalo’s balls knocking against his chin. He imagined him sucking with the voracity of a starving man, with no delicacy, head pumping up and down in a brutal rhythm, cheeks hollowed from suction, a string of spit sliding from the corner of his mouth and dripping onto his balls. He imagined him pulling the cock out of his mouth in one sharp motion, spitting on it, looking him in the eye and saying, “You like how I suck you off, baker?”

—Fuck, fuck, fuck —he said through clenched teeth, his hand flying up and down with an obscene slosh.

The bakehouse had become a sauna. Sweat ran down his beard, stung his eyes. With his free hand he hauled his shirt up to his chest, exposing the blond hair that rose from his navel to his nipples, thick and soaked. He pinched one nipple, twisted it between two fingers until a jolt shot straight to his balls. He let out a low, rough groan he didn’t even recognize as his own. He brought his hand to his balls, kneaded them, spread his legs wider still and touched, with the pad of his middle finger, that sensitive spot just behind the scrotum, pressing in circles, feeling his prostate demand attention from inside.

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. Not his hand. His hand kept going, traitorous, stubborn, refusing to obey, sliding from the base to the head, squeezing, wringing from him a guilty stab of pleasure that made him even worse. 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 muttered.

For an instant he imagined —he couldn’t help it, it was a tenth of a second, a flash— that his son came down the stairs and found him like that. The image snapped away on its own, repulsed, and Lalo clenched his teeth in anger at himself. “Not there, asshole. Not there, never.” But his heart was pounding at two hundred, and the guilt of having thought what he’d thought, even for an instant, paradoxically sped everything else up.

He went back to Tobías. He clung to Tobías like a buoy. Tobías sucking him off without hurry, looking up from below with those green eyes of his, the tip of his tongue tracing circles around the head, teasing the frenulum until it trembled. Tobías lifting his shirt and showing him the full tattoos, those hard gym-built pecs, those dark nipples Lalo was dying to suck. Tobías standing up, turning around, slowly lowering his tracksuit until he showed a round, white ass, those two tight cheeks parting as he bent over, and for the first time in his life Lalo saw a man’s ass like that, offered up, and wanted to bite it, spit on it, bury his tongue in the hole.

And then Tobías mounting him. Tobías lowering that tight opening over his cock, taking him in slowly, clenching his teeth, letting out a deep pant as he was forced open. The imagined feel of that hot flesh closing around his shaft put him right on the edge. Tobías riding him, hands planted on his chest, going up and down, the boy’s own cock bouncing against his belly, hard, thick, wanting in turn.

Tobías telling him, in that gravelly voice he used when he asked for croissants, something filthy: “Fuck me, baker. Fuck me like it’s the last thing you ever do. Tear my ass open with that bread-kneading cock.”

—Yes, yes, yes —he gasped.

He felt the release rise from below, slow, electric, unlike the quick wanks of recent weeks. It started in his balls, taut and hard against his body, shot up through his prostate, traveled the channel and exploded in his head. He bit his lip so he wouldn’t shout, 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, heavy, white ropes onto the flour scattered on the floor, the first shot leapt high enough to stripe his chest in a hot line above the shirt, the second splattered his thigh, the third and fourth burst between his fingers and slid down over his balls to his trousers. His thighs trembled, his whole belly contracted like a fist, his head fell back. He let out a low, contained, almost animal grunt, and kept stroking slowly, squeezing out the last thick drops gathering at the tip, smearing his hypersensitive head with his own sticky semen until a nearly painful stab of pleasure forced him to let go.

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 stayed sitting on the stool, his cock still half hard and sticky against his thigh, semen cooling on his skin, breathing through his nose as if he had just run a hundred-meter sprint. He wiped himself with an old rag, made a long pass over his cock, over his balls, over his belly covered in white streaks that were already starting to dry, threw fresh flour over the stain on the floor, pulled up his zipper and washed his hands in the sink with industrial soap until the skin burned. His face burned too, but for a different reason.

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

It was not the first wank of his life with a man in his head. It was the first, though, in which the fantasy of a man had come on its own, without asking permission, and pushed everything else aside. And it was also the first in which he had imagined spreading his own legs, letting another guy fuck him. That was new. That called for thought.

He put the buns in the oven. Set the timer. Went upstairs to take 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 having not slept properly.

—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 natural than he had expected.

—Yeah, son. A tricky dough. Sometimes you have to fight with it.

—Okay, Dad. Save me a little bun when they come out, yeah?

—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 the cock he could make out under the gray tracksuit. Thought about tomorrow, when Tobías would come back for croissants. Thought about what he would say if he asked him, just once, to stay a minute after paying, to come into the bakehouse, to slide the back door shut with the bolt.

—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. Under the hot spray, his cock went hard again, and this time he didn’t even bother resisting: he braced himself against the tiles and started stroking it slowly once more, imagining Tobías behind him, his beard pricking his neck, a hard, thick cock rubbing between his wet ass cheeks, tattooed hands gripping his hips. He came a second time in twenty minutes, a shorter, whiter rope that the water carried down the drain, and stayed there, panting against the wall, knowing there was no going back.

***

The bakery opened at seven sharp. Doña Rosario, the first regular customer as always, had her checked handbag and a rosary in her hand. She ordered two napolitanas and a loaf. Lalo handed them over with a cordiality that seemed freshly baked, and the woman left muttering 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 queue, not in tracksuit this time, wearing a dark wool sweater that hugged his shoulders and tight jeans that outlined his thighs and that bulge Lalo now, yes now, dared to look at for a full two seconds. He smiled at him from afar, with that small, tilted smile, exactly the same one Lalo had imagined hours before while he came on the flour in the bakehouse.

—Two croissants, Lalo —said Tobías when he reached the counter, just like every day.

—Coming right up, Tobías.

And when he handed him the paper bag and Tobías’s fingers brushed his for one second too long, with the tip of his thumb deliberately stroking the back of Lalo’s hand, Lalo finally understood that the divorce had not been the end of anything.

It had been the beginning.