He owned a large townhouse he’d gotten from a foreclosure which meant his mortgage was disgustingly affordable compared to what he’d been paying in rent, and if his sales remained steady the way they were now, he’d be able to save enough money to renovate and expand a bit.
And maybe, just maybe, revisit the idea of his own shop again once he was ready to take that risk.
He didn’t want to get too ahead of himself though. He’d invested in a smaller industrial mixer, which Taylor was currently heaving into the little nook where a kitchen table was supposed to go, and his brother, Linden, was fixing the last of the brackets onto his fairly decent DIY baking counter.
Peyton was pretending to help while lying on the couch pressing an ice pack to his stoma site, which was starting to ache again. He reminded himself it had only been two months since having part of his insides now on the outside, and it was normal to not feel, well,normal.
“You need meds?” Linden’s voice interrupted his melancholy pain spiral, and he glanced over at his brother. Like Linden, Peyton had been adopted by their kind but WASPy parents, and every now and again he still felt a bit weird when he thought of the tall, strawberry-blond, freckly white dude as his brother.
Linden had always fit in with the family where Peyton had looked like some sad TV orphan: super skinny and brown-skinned. He’d described himself growing up as vaguely Asian since all he had to go by were his eyes and nose. He’d brought up the idea of a DNA swab once, which had sent his mother into a hysterical melt-down about how her love should be enough for him, and shechosehim, so he didn’t need to know about his birth family.
He never bothered to explain to her the weird pain he felt not knowing where the hell he came from, or if there were other people out there who looked like him. She wouldn’t let herself believe that he could want to know and still love her just the same.
Luckily, his brother had understood and bought them each matching kits for Peyton’s twenty-second birthday. Linden’s came out exactly as everyone expected—mostly Scottish with a few drops of Swedish and French.
Peyton nearly choked on his own tongue when half of his came out Japanese, and the second half was split down the middle between Scottish and Ashkenazi.
“Shit,” was all Linden had said as they stared at their laptops. “Maybe we’re related, like, for real.”
Peyton very much doubted it considering they didn’t register as any sort of relation on the site, but it didn’t really matter. He couldn’t find anyone closely related to him at all—just a bunch of random fourth cousins spread across the globe.
Either way, it was nice knowing, even if it didn’t answer a single damn question he had about himself.
He didn’t think about it all the time, though. Especially not lately. For the moment, he was hyper-fixated on getting his house together so he could get himself and his now-online bakery up and running. His savings was starting to dwindle, and it was the very last year he was allowed to get any sort of medical procedure on his dad’s insurance. That magic number twenty-five was coming up and even though the man was a GP, he didn’t have sway with the blood sucking insurance vampires reading to pounce on Peyton’s chronic illness.
Frankly, he needed to get rich so he could stay alive.
Peyton blinked back to reality when his brother dropped into a crouch and pressed the inside of his wrist to Peyton’s forehead. He quickly batted him away with a scowl. “What the hell?”
“You’ve been out of it all morning,” Linden said, frowning.
Peyton sighed, then eyed the water in Linden’s hand before snatching it out of his grip and taking a long drink. “I’m not running a fever. I just slept like crap, and the whole bakery set up is stressing me out. Ineedthis to go well.”
He knew he didn’t need to remind his brother how shitty it had gotten after his brick-and-mortar shop had closed. Linden hadn’t been around for it much—something his brother had daily panic attacks about after deciding that his lack of involvement caused Peyton’s surgery. No amount of trying to convince the man that Crohn’s didn’t work that way helped.
Peyton had been kind of close-lipped about his diagnosis, anyway. The earliest symptoms had started out in his late teens as chronic stomach aches which his parents said was just anxiety. That morphed into bloating and pain after his twentieth birthday, then weird outbreaks of cold sores first in his mouth—then moving to his eyes of all places.
It was when the bleeding started that Peyton started to really panic.
Test after test, probe after probe making his asshole feel the same way it did after the one weekend he went to a festival when he was nineteen, finally gave him answers. Answers led to medication and steroids and weight gain and misery.
That led to stress which in turn started the cycle all over again, and the next thing he knew, he was crying in his brother’s arms trying to take his first steps after having his entire insides moved around, and a hole carved in his stomach.
Peyton tried to be patient with his brother too, because Linden had a bad habit of assuming responsibility for everything—something he blamed their parents for. But he didn’t have the spoons to hold his brother’s hand over this. Not anymore. He was barely surviving on his own.
With a sigh, Linden turned, flopping over next to his brother. “We’ve got your back.” He left the ‘this time’ unsaid. And it wasn’t like Peyton had expected his best friend and brother to drop everything else they had going on to pull his ass out of the fire or anything, but he had felt a bit like an island before everything had come crashing down.
He was grateful for their help now though, especially since half the shit that needed to get done he still couldn’t do.
He sipped more water, then surreptitiously touched his bag, breathing out a sigh of relief when it felt mostly empty. Linden had been there for a few of his spill-over accidents and handled it all with the grace, seeing as he was a highly trained EMT who had done a lot worse.
But it was still vaguely humiliating.
“We should do Thai tonight,” Taylor said, walking into the living room and dropping onto Peyton’s right. He kicked his foot up onto the coffee table, then promptly pulled Peyton’s shirt up and poked at his stomach like he was searching for swelling.
“Dude. Do you mind?”
“I’m just checking on you. You’re the only one in this room without medical training, so when you say you’re fine, I can’t trust you,” Taylor said with a sniff.