The Remaking of Corbin Wale

by Roan Parrish

Alex had a problem. Alex had a problem and it was spelled C-O-R-B-I-N W-A-L-E. The problem was that every morning Alex worked with bated breath, finding excuses to come out of the kitchen to see if Corbin was there. The problem was that when Corbin was there, Alex’s eyes seemed magnetized to him—to the cant of his head on his graceful neck. To the way his thin, nail-bitten fingers wielded a pen like a scalpel, ruthless and exacting. To the hair that often obscured his face. To the eyes that either stared resolutely down, completely absorbed by his work, or fixed, dreamily, on something up and to the right that Alex didn’t think he was seeing at all.

It was the difference between strawberry jam and a perfect, sun-ripe strawberry. Other people he’d desired had been jam. He’d seen them, liked them, saw potential in them, thought of what he might do with them, how they’d combine. Corbin was a strawberry. If you had any sense at all, you took it as it was and you never questioned it. You didn’t add sugar and you didn’t add heat. You didn’t put it in a sandwich or use it in a cake. You didn’t do anything to it because it was already as absolutely, perfectly a strawberry as it would ever be. You recognized it, and were grateful for it. And, if you were lucky, you savored it. That was what Alex was doing. Alex was savoring.

Corbin’s smile was dangerous. It was slow and warm as fresh-baked bread, and then you saw teeth. A little crooked, charmingly overlapping in the front. The best smile Alex had ever seen. He was nervous what he might do to elicit another smile like that.

“Because names give you power over things. And only I get to have power over them.”

“I wasn’t anything in high school.” “And now?” Alex asked softly. “Now. Now I’m only me. I’ll always be only me.”

Alex Barrow had streaked into Corbin’s life like a shooting star through a dark sky. Things that had long dwelt in shadow were illuminated. Things that had been buried deep could no longer be ignored.

Better not to want things. Better to focus on what he had instead of what he never would.

“Fear,” she’d said, “is natural. But anger is the weak mind’s attempt at inoculation against fear. Don’t pay any attention to them. They have small minds and they’ll have small lives.”

When people at school teased him, he went away in his head where Jasmine would calm him down, or Carbon would curse them out. Where Lex would jolly him into good humor, or Wolf would run him ragged in the woods. Or, best of all, Finnian would kiss him sweetly until he forgot that anything else existed.

Corbin, you see, was a Wale. And the Wales were cursed. Anyone who loved them, and whom they truly loved, died within a year.

No one had made their way inside the walls of his attention, or his home, or his dreams. No one had begun working their way into the fantasies where only Finnian had dwelt for over a decade. No one until Alex Barrow.

In Alex’s arms, time was measured in breaths and distance in the wrinkles of the clothing between them. Though he was held firmly, his breath felt deeper, like his lungs could expand up to his throat and down to his stomach, filling him with all the air he’d need to stay there forever. In Alex’s arms, nothing else could touch him.

He saw the monsters that love and longing could make, and they all had human faces.

My grandmother always said don’t bake while you’re angry or sad because your bitterness will flavor the bread. You should bake with love if you’re baking for people you love, and they’ll taste the sweetness.” He winked and it blasted through Corbin like a shot.

The promise of loneliness wasn’t the same as loneliness itself. Corbin knew, because it was the promise of loneliness that descended that day. It was loneliness itself that he’d felt over the last few years. Loneliness that ached with the throb of a thousand hearts. Loneliness that turned certain parts of himself to stone to stop that throbbing ache because it was easier to cut some things off than to feel the pain of them.

When they stepped out of the car, Corbin saw the moon hanging heavy and nearly full in the sky, a thin cover of cloud turning the light milky and delicate. Then, as Alex walked toward the house, the cloud was blown away, moonlight falling on Alex like a consecration. He glowed with it, illumined against the dark angles of the house. It took Corbin’s breath away.

His aunts had had a name for people like Alex. Kedge. The mooring that kept things from drifting off, kept them anchored to the here and now.

“Well. I think for me I would tell because I would feel comfortable around them after a while, as if I could be myself and they would like me for it. I would think of them first when I wanted to tell someone things that happened. If I were doing something or seeing something amazing and they weren’t there, I would know that it would be better with their presence. I’d want to know everything about them. Even the bad stuff. And I would stand behind them, support them, feel proud that they had chosen me to spend their time with, to trust.”

“There’s something about him that just . . . it calls out to me. I’ve never felt that about anyone before. It’s like a place inside him is screaming my name, and I just want to answer it with everything.”

That kiss . . . that kiss had remade him. Dragged him to the blackest sky and the brightest stars and exploded him into something he had never known.

He didn’t want any of them. He didn’t want pieces or shades or lines on the page. He wanted flesh and blood and bone and sweat.

Because love doesn’t live in kisses and flowers and first dates. It lives in your mind, in your heart. The problem is that I already love you.”

He realized that Alex was absolutely right. Love didn’t live in kisses and first dates, but in your mind and heart. In the way a person could come to dwell there, uninvited, without ever touching you. In the way you thought about them and dreamed about them and wished about them, curse be damned—because though you could choose not to act on the feelings, the heart knows no logic but its own.

“I don’t really believe there’s one destined soul mate for each person,” he went on. “But I do think that with numbers like those, it’s likely that no matter what you believe or who you are, there’s someone out there—probably a lot of someones—who could see you clearly. Who could understand you, and care about you. Who could love you.”

Corbin’s dreams were up among the stars—pinpricks of light and swooping galaxies—and then they were in the dirt—seedlings shooting up in bloom, hair-delicate tangles of roots creeping down into the earth. Corbin’s dreams were air and earth, a balance he rarely dreamed in.

“You were so gorgeous,” he murmured. “And your mind. It’s beautiful.” Alex brushed his hair back. “You remake the world a hundred times a day.”

“Are we almost done,” Corbin asked. They needed to burn off some of the tension between them or they’d ruin everything in the kitchen. “I’ll never be done with you,” Alex said, looking almost shocked at his own words.

Corbin’s fantasies of a man fucking him had so often been oceans and planets and stars. As Alex pressed inside of him it was earth. The hot honesty of ground and flesh and rock.

The remaking of Corbin Wale was a constant overturning, like the ocean tides.

The remaking of Alex Barrow had been far less tempestuous. It had been a deepening, an underscoring. He had sunk into his love for Corbin with the inevitability of gravity. At unexpected moments, he would see Corbin and be caught breathless at the insistence of his need. When Corbin reached for him, he felt that need like magnets finding their way close enough to snap together.