16: “Do you think I have rabies?”

Someone was eating Ramsay’s bread. Obviously it was one of his two roommates because no one else who ever came to the apartment would do that. He’d even asked Gemma about it to make sure.

“I’m sorry, are you accusing me of eating your bread while you’re not looking?” She asked him in return. “Like, do you think I wait for you to go to the washroom and then shove whole pieces of your bread into my mouth like an anaconda unhinging its jaw to devour whole animals?”

“So it’s not you then,” Ramsay concluded without bothering to answer. He assumed they were rhetorical questions anyway. Gemma raised an eyebrow at her.

“No,” she confirmed flatly. “It’s not me.”

That left Oscar and Spencer. He was fairly certain it wasn’t Oscar either and he was sure of this for two reasons; the first was that Oscar had never done this before and Ramsay had been living with him for a couple of years now and the second was that Oscar would’ve just told him if he was eating his bread. Oscar didn’t bother hiding anything. He ate Ramsay’s food all the time, but he did it openly like a man so that Ramsay would know. That, at least, was how Oscar explained it to Ramsay when he broached the subject over lunch at work one day.

“Does stealing bread make you a man?” Miles asked dubiously, frowning at Oscar while he chewed on the sandwich he’d brought for lunch.

“Just ask Hugh Jackman in that movie about French peasants,” Oscar replied, nodding. Miles’ frown deepened.

“Are you perhaps referring to Les Miserables?” He checked.

“Well, if you fucking know, why bother asking?” Oscar retorted.

“You know it’s a book, right?” Miles asked.

“Yeah, I know it’s a book,” Oscar rolled his eyes. “I’m not an uncultured swine. I’ve read it.”

“You’ve read Les Mis?” Ramsay cut in skeptically. He’d never seen Oscar read once in the entire time he’d known him.

“I don’t appreciate the tone of surprise, but yes, I have,” Oscar answered. “I majored in English at university, like an idiot, so I’ve read all kinds of horribly long, boring novels from 18th and 19th century Europe. I’ve also read Middlemarch, Withering Heights, and Anna Karenina. I wouldn’t recommend any of them.”

“Noted,” Miles nodded.

“It must be Spencer then,” Ramsay concluded.

“Uh, obviously,” Oscar returned as though it was perfectly evident and Ramsay was stupid for ever thinking otherwise. “Who else would be doing it? I told you he was out to get us.”

Ramsay frowned at him.

“I think eating my bread and being ‘out to get us’ are probably two different things,” he pointed out.

“Yeah, until you don’t have any fucking bread,” Oscar countered. Ramsay conceded the point purely because he was tired of carrying on the conversation and he could see where it was headed; quickly out of hand.

Ramsay cornered Spencer in the kitchen later that night to ask him about his missing bread. Spencer seemed skittish even before Ramsay opened his mouth so he didn’t expect the conversation to go very well. On the other hand, since Spencer was already so nervous, there was a strong chance he would just admit to it immediately and a short conversation was what Ramsay aimed for basically at all times.

“Are you eating my bread?” Ramsay asked bluntly. Spencer glanced down at the apple in his hand, which he’d already taken a bite out of. Then he looked back up at Ramsay, even more uncertain than he’d been before the start of the conversation.

“Uh, no?” He replied unsurely. Ramsay fought the urge to roll his eyes.

“Not right now,” he corrected. “I can see that that’s an apple. I just meant in general.”

“In general am I eating your bread?” Spencer repeated. “Like, metaphysically?”

Ramsay fought the urge to smack him.

“No, I mean have you eaten my bread in the past,” he clarified. “Have you been stealing my bread?”

“Oh, like Aladdin,” Spencer nodded. “Um, no.”

He still didn’t look certain, like he wasn’t sure if he’d eaten Ramsay’s bread or not. It didn’t seem like something someone wouldn’t know. If Ramsay had eaten someone else’s pear, for instance, he would remember doing it. Unless Spencer was sleep-eating Ramsay’s bread, in which case he was as creepy as Oscar made him out to be. In any case, Ramsay didn’t leave the conversation very confident or reassured. To be frank, he assumed Spencer was lying to him and was in fact stealing his bread because his bread was still going missing and it wasn’t anybody else.

And then, a couple days later, Spencer approached Ramsay in the living room looking much more confident than the last time they’d spoken.

“I’m definitely not stealing your bread,” he announced to Ramsay, who raised his eyebrows at him in bemusement.

“Okay…,” Ramsay replied. “Didn’t we already determine this?”

Spencer nodded.

“Yeah, yeah,” he said. “I just had to…uh, check something.”

Ramsay was even less assured than he’d been before.

“He’s definitely taking my bread,” he told Miles and Oscar at lunch the following day. “But now he’s lied to me twice. The second time it was like he was lying to me about it just for good measure, just to make himself look guiltier.”

“I told you he was evil,” Oscar returned triumphantly. Miles raised an eyebrow at him.

“Again, it’s just bread,” he pointed out wryly.

“Yeah, well, you can say that because no one’s stealing your bread,” Ramsay turned on him. Miles held up his hands in defence.

“Don’t bite my head off,” he protested. “Christ. I’m sorry about your bread and your French peasant roommate.”

Ramsay didn’t think he was being sincere.

Two days later, Ramsay left his bedroom earlier than usual in the morning and headed to the kitchen to make coffee. He was going back to the gym, having taken quite a bit of time off after his break-up with Courtney. Now, though, he was with Gemma and things in his life had taken a drastic turn for the better, missing bread aside. Frank had agreed to meet him before his own shift at work and help Ramsay get back into things, which meant that Ramsay wasn’t going to be able to use his arms for the next two days. Frank was intense at the gym. Ramsay supposed that was why Frank had visible abs, though. More power to him. Ramsay liked carbs far too much to ever achieve that, but it was nice for other people to have their dreams realized.

When Ramsay stepped into the kitchen, the first thing he saw was a piece of his bread lying on the kitchen floor. The second thing he saw was a raccoon. It stared at him in shock, frozen in place, a piece of bread between its tiny, humanoid paws. Ramsay stared back at it in equal surprise. Then the raccoon took the bread and bolted, disappearing behind one of the chairs in the living room so Ramsay had no idea where it had gone or how it had gotten in.

“Do you think I have rabies?” Ramsay asked Oscar and Miles at work later that morning. He’d still gone to the gym with Frank as planned and the soreness had already began to set into his muscles. He was having trouble lifting his coffee cup to his lips. He was going to have to wait for it to cool and then drink it with a straw like a crazy person. Oscar gaped at him openly.

“Did you continue to eat the bread?” Miles asked Ramsay, eyebrows raised.

“Well, I didn’t know I was sharing it was a raccoon, did I?” Ramsay returned defensively.

“Oh my God, go to the hospital!” Miles cried. “You’ve been eating raccoon bread! You’re going to get rabies for sure!”

Ramsay grumbled, but he began packing up his things and went to talk to their manager about being able to leave early. He refrained from telling their boss exactly why he needed to go home, only stating that he wasn’t feeling very well. The massive shot he had to get in his butt was pain enough without having to go through the public humiliation as well.