“I love seeing him like that…”
Adrian hummed in response.
“I love the chaos of mornings, the spilled cereal, the endless questions, the tiny socks that vanish into thin air. I love it when he crawls into our bed in the middle of the night, even if he throws a leg in my face at four a.m. I love waking with him there, hearing his laugh before the day even begins. I love how happy he is. And I love when he sleeps through in his own bed, when the nightmares don’t come. That’s how I know he’s healing.”
“You are such an amazing father,” Adrian replied. “I love it too, every moment of it.”
Adrian leaned deeper into Logan’s embrace, sinking into him the way the tide melts into the shore. His eyes softened as they drifted over the beach, over the place where the water met the land, and a quiet sort of nostalgia flickered in his gaze.
“I actually like the idea of going back to that cabin…” he murmured, his voice quieter now, suspended somewhere between memory and longing. He lifted a hand, pointing toward a distant curve of the shoreline. “I think it was there.”
Logan followed his gaze, the past unfolding in his mind like an old, sun-faded photograph. The place where it all began. Where Adrian had once pulled him from the depths of the ocean, and where, without even realizing it, he had also saved him from drowning in something far deeper: his own fear.
The tide had come and gone a million times since that night, pulling them apart, only to bring them back to each other again.
“Yeah,” he murmured, his voice barely above a whisper, his gaze locked on the spot where it had all begun. Where the ocean had tried to claim him, and Adrian had refused to let it.
The sea before them was calm now, a wide sheet of sapphire glinting beneath the late sun, dotted with swimmers and boarders who trusted the water to hold them. But Logan could still see it—the ghost of that storm. How it had torn across the horizon without warning. The wind screaming. The waves towering, rising like liquid walls, furious and merciless.
He remembered the moment his board slipped out from under him. The cold snap of water. The weightless free-fall. The silence. The sudden knowing:this is too deep, I’m too far, no one will reach me in time.
And then—Adrian.
Logan could see it, still. Not in fragments, but whole. Adrian sprinting from the beach, carving through the waves like something pulled by instinct alone. Fighting the tide. His body a defiant, unwavering line against the chaos. And then his hands—finding Logan beneath the surface, holding him fast, dragging him from the deep with strength that didn’t just come from muscle, but from something else.
Something that said:I will not lose you.
A life given, for a life taken.
The way he had breathed life back into him.
Logan swallowed hard, blinking against the sting of salt in his eyes. He could almost see his younger self, sprawled on the shore, coughing up seawater, wide-eyed and dazed as he looked up into the face of the man who had just saved him. A stranger then.
His whole world now.
In the present, reality blurred. The sounds around him—the chatter of beachgoers mingled with Jay’s laughter, carried effortlessly on the breeze—began to fade. Even the warmth of the sun, which gently kissed his skin, felt clouded for a fleeting moment. Logan found himself suspended in time, eight years younger, gasping for breath as he stared up at Adrian for the very first time. In that split second, before he could fully grasp its meaning or name it, something profound shifted within him.
Beneath the surface of the ocean, a treasure lay concealed—a gift quietly bestowed by the depths, disguised in chaos. On that clever subterfuge of waves, something unfolded for him, something sacred and strange, hidden beneath the performance of danger. The current whispered like a lover, sweet nothings braided with warning, luring him in with a siren’s promise. It danced around him, feigning death, pretending to drag him under—when in truth, it was offering him something far deeper.
It had given him Adrian.
And in a single breath—in the blink of an eye—Adrian went from stranger to something else entirely. A lighthouse in the storm. A constant in the pull of an unpredictable world. A gravity he could never escape, even when he tried. His past. His present. His future.
“But I can’t with that room…” Logan’s voice wavered as he exhaled, his grip tightening around Adrian’s fingers. The weight of the past settled in his chest, a bittersweet ache he couldn’t quite put into words. “I almost cried when I woke up. Too many memories… ones Iloveto think back on, but in that room, it’s not just remembering them—it’s like I’mrelivingthem. It makes me…” He trailed off, shaking his head, lost in the vastness of everything he felt. “I don’t think I can explain it.”
Adrian squeezed his hand. “Try.”
Logan closed his eyes for a moment, letting the words rise and fall inside him, before finally speaking. “It pulls me back into those moments, and they were beautiful—so much love, so much… everything, so much confusion too. And being back in them feels overwhelming, because I can feel it all again, not just in my head, but in mybody. It’s like time folds over itself, and I’mthere. But then, I remember what comes after, and suddenly, that beauty—” He inhaled sharply. “—thatoverloadof joy and love turns unbearable. Because I know what’s coming next.”
Silence wrapped around them, heavy and fragile as sea glass. Logan stared at their joined hands, his grip firm, as if holding on to Adrian was the only thing keeping him from drifting too far out into the past.
Adrian turned Logan’s hand over, pressing a soft kiss to his palm, his lips warm against the skin. “You explained it beautifully, ahuv sheli,” he whispered, reverence in his voice, like he understood every piece of Logan’s heartache without needing to ask for more.
Logan let out a breath, a small, tired smile curling his lips. And then—
“Dad! Abba! Look at me!” Jay’s voice rang through the air again, bright and full of laughter, pulling them both back to the present. Arms spread wide, knees bent in perfect imitation of the surfers he saw, he leapt from the board into the sand, a child’s barrel ride ending.
Logan and Adrian erupted into cheers, clapping and whooping like he had just won a championship, their love for him as boundless as the ocean.
