“What are you doing here?” Logan’s voice cracked; a broken thing caught in the waves of his chest. He didn’t want to look at Adrian, didn’t want to feel the pull of him, but his eyes betrayed him, clinging to Adrian as though the man himself was the last breath of air in an ocean that threatened to steal away every one of his remaining sunrises.
Adrian didn’t back down. He stood tall, a mountain of raw emotion. “Blocking me? I couldn’t believe it, Logan. You’re acting like a fucking child.” The words hit Logan right in the chest.
“I’m sorry.” Logan’s voice was a whisper, softer than the sand underfoot, his gaze dropped, the weight of guilt pressing on him. “I didn’t want you to convince me to come back.” The truthful words tasted bitter.
Adrian stepped forward, but not too close. There was a distance between them now, one that could never be bridged. But his words, soft and desperate, reached Logan’s heart, reached every hollow part of him that yearned to bask in Adrian’s presence.
“Don’t marry her,” Adrian whispered, and there was a tremor in his voice, a crack like thunder in the distance. “Logan, please...” His voice cracked, the sound of it breaking Logan’s heart all over again, the memory of what was lost rising.
Logan stood there, frozen, staring at the man who had once been everything, who was still everything. The man who kissed him as if his very purpose was to make Logan feel treasured, who held him as though the world had no greater task. The man who went further than anyone had ever gone, who smiled at Logan as if he were the sun rising, and loved him without tether or term, without boundary or pretense. Who had not only pulled him from the depths of water but from the deeper abyss within, saving his body, then cradling his soul. “This is what you came for?” His voice was a shell, a broken echo of the person he used to be. He ran a hand through his hair, fingers trembling, trying to hold himself together. “To tell me this?”
“Yes,” Adrian replied, stepping closer. After a heartbeat, he took another step. Logan remained still, yet inside, he felt a turmoil, waves of doubt crashing against all of him.
“Please,” Adrian whispered, pleading tenderly. “Don’t marry her, Logan. It’s a lie, and we both know it.”
Logan’s heart felt like it was breaking apart, like the earth beneath him was crumbling into the sea. The pain was a rip tide, pulling him under, dragging him down to depths he couldn’t escape from. He wanted to fight it, to swim against it, but all he could do was stand there, helpless.
“It’s not a lie,” he managed, but even as the words left his mouth, they felt muffled, empty. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. We’ve been together for a long time. It’s the right choice.” The words sounded like a lie even to him. Was he trying to convince Adrian—or himself?
“Logan...” Adrian’s voice was soft, like a wave receding, leaving Logan with nothing but the sand beneath his feet and the cold emptiness of the shore.
“If this is why you came all the way from Israel, then it’s a waste of time,” Logan’s words came out dry. “You can go back to whatever hole you crawled out of.” He felt his heart breaking as he spoke, each word cutting deeper. He needed Adrian to be angry, to walk away, to leave him in the silence he knew too well. But the truth, the truth was pulling at him.
Adrian didn’t flinch. He stepped closer, close enough that Logan could see the grief etched deep into every line of his face.
“I know you lash out when you feel vulnerable,” Adrian said, voice low, rough, now only a breath away. “I know you’re reckless sometimes,” he added, a hollow laugh escaping him—a laugh heavy with memories of every wild, beautiful, reckless moment they had ever shared. His eyes flickered, bright with something breaking. “I know you’re trying to run,” he said. “And I know... on some level, you’re drowning.” His voice cracked, barely holding. “I see it. I see you struggling. I see you, Logan. Even when you think no one else does… I do.” Adrian’s hand twitched at his side, like he was fighting the urge to reach out, to anchor Logan somehow, to pull him back before he drifted too far. “But I can’t save you if you won’t let me,” he whispered, raw, almost pleading. “And I won’t get the chance to try again.” He swallowed hard, every word a knife. “Please... don’t marry her.”
Logan’s breath came in shallow gasps, each inhale burning in his chest as if the very air had turned into saltwater, thick and suffocating. His body trembled, a wave caught mid-break, unable to crash or retreat, wedged in the pull of a tide that had risen too high, too fast, like the lone leaf that stayed on the tree at the break of winter a second before it descended to the frozen ground below.
The ground beneath Logan felt like sand washing away, and all he could do was cling to the fragile thread of his own will. The ocean inside him was surging, rising higher with every moment, and there was no escape, no turning back from what had always been inevitable. Not from Adrian. Not from the truth. He was already neck-deep in it.
Adrian’s hand reached for him, a lifeline in the swelling storm. His fingers wrapped around Logan’s palm, warm and urgent, grounding him, pulling him closer. Tears streamed down Adrian’s face like rain chasing a storm, each drop an echo of the pain he carried. “Logan, look at me,” he whispered, his voice reminded Logan the sound of waves braking on the shore. With a tenderness that sent a shiver through Logan’s spine, Adrian brought Logan’s palm up and kissed it, his lips pressing softly against the skin. The gesture was a quiet prayer, a plea for something that felt impossibly out of reach. “Ahuv sheli,”my loved one, Adrian uttered.
Letting the only words he had left pour out of him, Adrian reached for the language of his mother—the only language that could hold the weight of what he felt. It was how he chose to sayI love youto the man standing infront of him. The man who had once held his heart and then walked away, leaving behind nothing but ruin and wreckage.
What remained were scattered pieces: memories tucked into corners, forgotten belongings littered like debris, the faint scent of Logan still clinging to the sheets, and the echo of their last kiss, its heat barely faded from the air.
“Ahuv sheli,” Adrian breathed again, his voice a thread unraveling from the center of his chest.
It was the only truth he had left. The only shape his love could still take. The only measure of hope he dared to offer—fragile, desperate, holy.
He used the words of a different language not to hide, but to shield what was left of his heart. A final barrier. A quiet act of faith. Because even after everything, it still beat only for Logan.
Logan’s eyes—wide, open, vulnerable—looked back at him, and what they held was deeper than the ocean’s abyss. The weight of it crushed him, the pain heavier than the deepest tides, each beat of his heart sending ripples through him he couldn’t outrun. It was there, floating in the space between them, everything Logan could never say, everything Adrian had always known but never asked for. And Logan was helpless to stop it, helpless to hold back the flood.
The language of love need not be translated. Logan understood the words, though they were spoken in a tongue not his own. He didn’t need to reach for a dictionary, didn’t need a definition. He understood them in Adrian’s voice, in the way it cracked open when he said them. In the way his eyes always lit with something akin to admiration and vulnerability when those words escaped his lips. He understood because Adrian hadalways whispered them in quiet, sacred moments, like a secret offering, too precious to speak aloud, too heavy to hold in.
“Ahuv sheli.”
Logan understood, because he and Adrian had always spoken the same language. The language that lived beneath words. A language of glances, of touches, of breath held between kisses. A language that required no translation.
So Adrian’s attempt to build a final wall, to hide behind a language not born of their shared world, was futile. It crumbled at Logan’s feet like everything Adrian was: soft, breaking, and still somehow trying to protect the last flicker of his soul.
“You’re everything to me, Logan,” Adrian’s voice cracked, and Logan felt it in his own soul. “I think about you all the time. Every second. Every moment…” His words broke like waves shattering on a jagged reef. “I think… of the last night…” His voice trembled, raw and exposed, as tears streamed from his whisky-colored eyes and Logan felt every piece of him unravel in response. “I think of our last days together… it was like a dream.”
A single tear slipped down Logan’s cheek, tracing a path of salt that mingled with the heat coming from Adrian’s body, and the rawness of the moment tore through him like an undertow. Adrian’s hand cupped his face with a tenderness that felt like the gentlest wave lapping at the shore, his thumb brushing away the tear, as if to steal away the pain that had no words. Logan leaned into it, into Adrian’s touch, closing his eyes as if he could lose himself there, just in the heat of his skin.
Adrian’s other hand drifted to Logan’s wrist, his fingers brushing against the bracelet, the only tether to a past Logan had tried to forget but never could. Adrian’s breath caught, and Logan felt the shudder in his body as heran his fingers over the material. “You still have it,” Adrian’s voice carried a note of awe, of reverence, of hope.
