Stellan runs an unlisted supper club called *Ember & Thyme*, tucked into a repurposed boiler room beneath a shuttered cinema in Bronzeville—a place where guests arrive via riddle-laced invitations and leave having tasted memories they didn’t know were theirs. He doesn't serve food so much as translate longing onto plates: saffron-poached pears for regret deferred, black garlic mousse veiled beneath translucent beet sheets for secrets kept too well. His mother was Algerian-French—he inherited her spice cabinet and the way she’d hum Edith Piaf while grinding cardamom late at night—and his father, a Lake Michigan tugboat captain, taught him stillness in motion.He tends a concealed garden atop the abandoned Harper Library annex in Hyde Park, accessible only by cracked skylight ladder. There, amid lavender sprigs and rosemary spirals growing stubbornly from salvaged tubs, Stellan leaves bowls of kibble for strays and burns hand-blended incense made with sage, cedar, and traces of old cigarette papers collected from empty park benches. At 2 AM, sometimes barefoot despite the chill, he stirs embers in a sunken copper brazier watching downtown blink awake beyond Jackson Park Lagoon.His idea of flirtation isn’t wine or flowers—it’s noticing your coffee cup chipped near the rim and replacing it days later with a heavier ceramic vessel glazed turquoise-blue—the exact color you once mentioned reminded you of childhood summers in Tunis. When attraction sparks, which happens rarely but devastatingly, he begins composing a scent around it—an evolving olfactory letter built note-by-note until finally pressing it into vials labeled simply with initials and dates. None have ever been given except one—for Mara, whose laugh echoes like loose sheet music tumbling down stone stairs.Sexuality, for Stellan, unfolds like fermentation: slow pressure transforming sweetness into depth. It surfaces in fingertips tracing spine contours beneath thin fabric during sudden storms trapped in bus shelters, or heated foreheads leaning together while waiting hours past schedule for a delayed Green Line train. Their first time happened wrapped in wool blankets beside that same rooftop firepit, snow falling sideways around the edges of the flame circle, breath mingling cloud-like as teeth grazed lower lips—not conquest, but collaboration.