He tells himself to focus on counting—the steady tick of a clock somewhere, the pulse in his ears—but the noise shatters the numbers.
He blinks and the dark doesn’t change.
His phone is in his pocket, and he can feel its weight like a disobedient thought.
His messages to Tom—plural now—sit unanswered above the read ones from a few days ago. A neat column of grey single ticks reaching into silence.Can we talk?I need to see you.I’m nearby.Please, Tom.
It’s like he’s been blocked.
Above him, that thudding noise continues. He presses his head back, as if the wood could absorb it. It doesn’t.
He closes his eyes.
Tries to think of something that will make him sleep, but he’s hard, solid.
The need is not dignified; it never is.
He unzips his jeans slowly, slides a hand in and works at the feeling with the same angry efficiency he applies to everything else he wants to get rid of.
When he climaxes, it’s like a black-out — brief, blank, almost kind. He just lies there, the warmth on his hand, over his T-shirt.
The thudding sound that was aching his brain has also stopped. Silence settles like snowfall.
He thinks about Tom not replying. He thinks about how people misunderstand patience for weakness. He thinks about how Tom always needed help making decisions, how he drifted unless someone gave him anchorage. It wasn’t cruelty to be that anchor. Everyone wants to be held in place. Everyone wants someone to tell them where they are.
He thinks about money, about numbers that do not obediently move in the right direction unless pushed. He thinks about the texts from people who do not sign their names, about the cheerful emails that are not cheerful.
Tom will see sense. He always does, eventually. He’s soft like that. Soft is not an insult. Soft is malleable. Soft can be shaped into something that holds.
Giving it time, the house around him shifts into that late quiet where sleep is a weight rather than a choice.
Eventually, when his shoulders begin to ache and his fingers tingle from being too still for too long, he rolls onto one side. He waits again, counting — twenty, thirty, fifty — not wanting to move too soon.
As the room stays silent, he slides out from under the bed frame in one controlled motion, palms flat, shoulders turning so he doesn’t knock the wooden leg that creaks. He remains crouched for a few heartbeats until he is sure the only sound is the low, steady breathing ahead.
He stands, Tom’s bed in front of him.
Tom lies turned slightly toward the window, mouth parted. There is another shape beyond him, a second weight in the bed. A man — unknown, uninvited, unannounced. The stranger’s hand is draped over Tom’s waist, proprietary in sleep.
Heat floods Daniel so fast he feels dizzy with it. His breath shortens, roughens.
Tom’s throat, Tom’s cheek, Tom’s chest rising. He remembers the map of that body in a way that feels like ownership.
His right hand is still lightly sticky, his drying semen not yet crisp. He wipes it slowly across Tom’s bedsheets, careful not to wake the sleeping duo.
He has been patient. He has been kind. He has been ignored.
He will not be ignored.
He needs Tom back.
The other man’s hand flexes in sleep, tightens fractionally at Tom’s waist. Daniel’s fingers curl into his palm until the nails hurt.
He remains there in the dark, standing, watching them.
Listening to the heartbeat he can’t quiet.
Feeling rage climb and settle and climb again.
