I remember the way his hands gripped the sheet afterward, stripping it from the bed in one sharp motion. The way he held the knife. And the moment that returns to me every night when the house goes quiet and I’m left alone with my thoughts.
The way he slipped his bleeding finger into his mouth.
It lasted less than a second. Automatic. Meaningless.
Except my body didn’t seem to understand that.
I felt something then, low in my stomach. A slow, unfamiliar pull that had nothing to do with sympathy and everything to do with the shape of his mouth.
I’ve replayed it every night since.
That is the part I don’t know how to handle.
Desire is not something I have experience with. In my father’s house there was no room for it. Every emotion was reserved for survival and performance. Boys were threats. Men were dangers. My body was something to be protected, not something I inhabited.
And yet now I lie awake in Killian Orlov’s house, in a bed that was meant for both of us, thinking about the shape of his mouth.
I don’t know what to do with that.
What unsettles me most is that my feelings toward him are changing in ways I don’t fully understand. I notice when he enters a room now. I recognize the sound of his footsteps on the stairs. Sometimes I find myself lingering in the kitchen longer than necessary simply because he is there. The habit of mapping danger has slowly become something else, something closer to anticipation.
That change should frighten me, and in some ways it does.
But it also feels like breathing deeply after years of shallow air.
And that is the part I trust the least.
Kindness in my father’s house always came with a price. Patience was simply another form of control. Every gentle gesture eventually turned into leverage.
So I wait.
Every morning when Killian pulls out my chair, I wait for the moment he expects something in return. Every night when hebrings my tea, I wait for the conversation that turns it into a debt.
Seven days have passed.
The price hasn’t come.
And that leaves me with a new and deeply unsettling thought.
When I close my eyes, I see him again standing in the hallway earlier tonight, handing me the mug and saying goodnight the same way he always does before turning away.
I haven’t invited him into this room.
Not yet.
The word surfaces in my mind before I can stop it.
Yet.
Killian
Two hours ago, I stood in the kitchen making my wife a cup of tea.
Chamomile. No sugar. On the second night I offered honey and she refused it so quickly it felt like a reflex. The kind of reflex that comes from learning that anything extra might come with a cost later. So now I make it the same way every night. Consistency is the only language she trusts right now, and I intend to become fluent in it.
Ma was sitting at the table when I filled the kettle.
“Sit down, son.”
