Logan floated above it.
Adrian’s face burned behind his eyelids—sharp at first, so vivid it ached, then blurring at the edges, dissolving into smoke no matter how hard he clung to it. He tried to chase it, tried to hold him in place, but each frantic kiss, each hollow motion, stripped another layer away.
Zack’s hand gripped his hip. Logan didn’t feel it.
Somewhere inside him, a voice screamed Adrian’s name, begged him to turn around, to come back, to hear him. He wanted to tell him everything, to confess, to explain, to say the words he had swallowed for years:I love you, I love you, I love you.
But Adrian kept slipping further, his face dimming, until Logan was left touching someone else’s body while mourning his own.
He closed his eyes tighter, pressed harder, as if he could force the ghost back into the room, but all he found was silence, and a body he didn’t want beneath his hands.
Logan’s breath hitched as he sank to his knees. His hands were moving, tugging, pulling, but it wasn’t the rough denim he felt; it was the cool air of a beach at dawn, the memory of Adrian’s laughter in the waves. He pressedforward, his mouth opening, but it wasn’t Zack he tasted—it was salt, the sea, the remnants of a love he had drowned in.
He wanted to forget, he wanted to run, but somehow he ended up back there again.
He let his hands roam, fingers digging into flesh, but they found no purchase. Every touch felt hollow, a ghost of something he couldn’t hold onto. His body moved out of rhythm, jerky and frantic, as though trying to outrun itself. His chest ached, not from the exertion but from the weight of everything he couldn’t say, couldn’t feel, couldn’t face.
When Zack turned, when their bodies came together again, Logan felt a flicker of sensation—a heat, a pull—but it wasn’t enough to ground him. His hands trembled as Zack pressed a condom into his palm, the small packet slick and foreign. He opened it mechanically, like a man following instructions in a language he barely understood.
The lube came next, another packet handed to him with a smirk that Logan could hardly process. His fingers moved as if detached from his body, slicking the liquid onto himself, then dipping down to Zack’s opening. He felt the give of flesh, the heat of another person’s vulnerability, and pushed his fingers inside, slow and deliberate. Zack gasped, his voice rising in broken moans, but to Logan, it sounded distant, as if it were echoing through water. Dim. Barely there.
He heard Zack speaking to him, words carried on shallow breaths, but they didn’t land. He understood them, and yet he didn’t, like trying to hold onto the words of a dream slipping away upon waking.
When Logan positioned himself against Zack, pressing forward, the sensation hit him like a wave—not the soft, rolling kind but the kind that knocked the air from your lungs, tumbling you helplessly beneath thesurface. It was too much, and it was not enough. A paradox that twisted inside him, pulling him apart. His body responded—his hips moved, his muscles clenched—but his mind was elsewhere, sinking into an ocean of memory, guilt, and longing.
As he moved, the tears began to burn behind his eyes, hot and insistent, threatening to spill over. But he bit them back, swallowing the lump in his throat. He couldn’t cry. Not here. Not now. Yet the feeling surged anyway—a rising undertow of grief and self-loathing that left him gasping for air he couldn’t find. He felt like he was underwater again, drowning in a sea that didn’t care whether he lived or died.
His fingers threaded through Zack’s hair, roaming aimlessly, desperately. The strands beneath his touch were too stiff, too neat, slicked back with pomade that felt foreign against his skin.
He tried to trick his mind, to let memory overwrite reality. Tried to believe.
Tried to imagine that the hair beneath his fingertips was longer, softer, sun-kissed and salt-streaked, wavy from the ocean, wild from the wind. That if he just closed his eyes, just breathed deep enough, he would find traces of the sea, of Adrian.
But the illusion slipped through his fingers, dissolving like foam against the shore. No matter how hard he tried, the waves would not come back.
He thought of Adrian—not in the quiet, deliberate way of remembering but in the desperate, reflexive way of a drowning man reaching for the surface. He thought of Adrian’s arms pulling him from the waves, the sound of his voice, clear and sure, calling him back to life. He thought about the way Adrian unraveled beneath him, how his body trembled, how his breath hitched and broke into something raw, something real. Hethought about how, in those last moments before he came, Adrian always retreated into his native tongue, words slipping from his lips in whispered Hebrew, syllables tangled with gasps, lost somewhere between prayer and surrender. And afterward—that look. That hazy, dream-drunk expression, eyes glazed like sea glass softened by the tide, lips still parted, skin flushed with the afterglow of something that felt too big for either of them to hold.
It was the kind of beauty that branded itself into the bones, the kind of memory that no amount of time, no amount of distance, could ever wash away.
He thought of how Adrian had steadied him when he couldn’t steady himself, had been his lifeline, his lighthouse.
His lifesaver.
But Adrian wasn’t here.
Logan’s movements faltered, his breath hitching. The room blurred around him, the edges fading like the horizon on a foggy day. He felt Zack’s hands on his back, Zack’s voice urging him on, but it only deepened the ache. He wanted to feel something—anything—but all he could feel was the weight of the ocean pressing down on him, cold and relentless.
Adrian’s name caught in his throat, unspoken but heavy, as he moved. His hands gripped Zack’s hips, but in his mind, it wasn’t Zack at all. It was Adrian, turning to him with that half-smile, that look of pure devotion that Logan had never deserved. He squeezed his eyes shut, trying to block it out, trying to lose himself in the physicality, but Adrian was everywhere. In the tilt of a head, the shift of a body, the heat of skin.
Logan’s movements grew erratic, his breaths ragged. He chased something he couldn’t hold until his body shuddered and stilled. But eventhen, the emptiness remained, vast and unyielding, a void that no amount of heat or friction could fill.
When it was over, when the quiet settled back in, Logan pulled away. The air felt too cold now, his skin damp and clammy. He avoided Zack’s gaze, his own eyes fixed on the floor as he tied the condom, threw it out and buttoned his pants, his hands trembling. He felt hollow, a shell of a man, and Adrian’s name echoed in his mind like a song he couldn’t forget.
He had tried to run from himself, to drown in someone else, but it hadn’t worked. It never worked. Adrian was still there, lingering in the spaces between, in the silence that stretched after every desperate gasp.
Zack turned, unabashed by his half-nakedness, his body catching the faint glow of the rising sun filtering through the grimy blinds. His abs and pecs gleamed like carved stone, a satisfied, sleepy smile playing at the edges of his lips. He looked at Logan, head tilted, his gaze half-curious, half-knowing.
“Something you like?” Zack’s voice was low, teasing, each word dripping with lazy seduction. He took his time tucking himself in, his fingers lingering as if daring Logan to keep watching.
