This isn't weird.

Secret Ingredient

Watching the last of the blood spatter on his skin disappear down the shower drain went a long way toward calming Ben's nerves. When he came back downstairs in a set of fresh pajamas, he started toward the kitchen, but as he turned the corner, he caught a brief glimpse of his hosts engaged in some light necking against the refrigerator, and opted not to interrupt. Instead, he sat on the living room sofa, hugging George to his chest until Walt found him.

"Didn't hear ya come down the stairs! Ready to eat?"

"Sure," Ben said. He gave the cat one last scritch behind the ears before he eased him out of his lap and followed Walt back to the dining room, where a plate of spaghetti was already waiting for him on the table. He didn't have much in the way of an appetite, but the simple domesticity of sitting down to a home cooked meal made his heart feel immediately lighter.

"What do you want to drink?" Hoyt asked him. "Beer? Tea?"

The idea of a beer was a little too appealing. Ben shook his head. "It's okay, I can get myself a cup of water—"

"Keep your ass in the chair, city boy. We don't make our guests serve themselves here," Hoyt called from the kitchen. Ben heard the clinking of ice against glass, and a moment later, a Dallas Cowboys tumbler was collecting condensation on the table in front of him.

"Do you need anything else?" Walt asked. "Is that enough sauce? There's more sauce—"

"No, no, come sit down," Ben replied. "This is amazing. You're like the overbearing gay dads I never knew I wanted."

"We have talked about adoptin'," Hoyt said.

Walt looked at Hoyt and gasped. "Ooh! Yeah, can we keep'em?"

"I'm pretty sure I'm a few years older than the both of you," Ben said.

"Shucks," Walt replied. "I was really lookin' forward to teachin' you how to play catch."

A piece of garlic bread abruptly bounced off of Ben's forehead and onto the table. He looked up, bewildered, to see Hoyt grinning. "See, honey? You can still teach 'em to catch."

Picking up the glutenous projectile, Ben took a bite, and was surprised to realize that he was hungry, after all. He devoured it in two large bites, swigged a gulp of water to expedite the chewing process, and reached for his fork with a new sense of purpose.

"Maybe we could forge a new birth certificate," Walt suggested brightly.

"Ooh, can I be thirteen again?" Ben asked, twirling pasta around his fork. "I want a cowboy themed bar mitzvah this time."

"We're already planning his bar mitzvah?" Walt said. "Good lord, they grow up so fast."

Hoyt reached over and squeezed Walt's hand. "Our little boy's becomin' a man."

"Oh my god, this is good," Ben said through a mouthful of spaghetti. "This tastes exactly like Millie's recipe."

"That is Millie's recipe!" Walt replied, pleased. "She taught me to make it, way back when."

A mental image of a teenage Millie flitting about her family's little kitchen flashed through Ben's mind, so vivid it almost felt like a memory. He'd watched her set her mind to perfecting a recipe countless times, making the same dish over and over for weeks, taking notes after each iteration until she distilled all of her trial and error at last into the One True Recipe. The realization that she had perfected this recipe at such a young age ascribed an exhilarating sense of intimacy to the many times she had shared it with him. No matter how hard she tried to divorce herself of her roots, still, this silly little spaghetti recipe had followed her from one life to the next, a secret tether between her past and present self. "I've tried a hundred times to make this and I never get it to taste right," Ben said. "What the fuck is her secret?"