The question wasn’t about survival anymore; it was about choice. Did he want to leave this life with Logan’s name still a wound he carried, orcould he face him one last time, offer him something real—a chance for both of them to say the things they had left unsaid? Did Adrian want his final memory of Logan to be one of distance, or of closeness, even if it came at a cost?
Adrian turned his head toward the door, where just hours ago Logan’s voice had seeped through, pleading. He could still hear the words as clearly as if they were etched into the walls:I’m not going anywhere… Because I love you.
His heart ached at the memory, but it also stirred, faint and uncertain, like the flicker of a candle in a room full of shadows. Did he have the strength to risk that flame, to let Logan in, knowing it might burn him one last time?
He sat up slowly, his body protesting the movement, each joint and muscle heavy with exhaustion. His phone sat on the nightstand, Logan’s message still glowing softly on the screen. Adrian reached for it, his fingers trembling slightly as he reread the words for what felt like the hundredth time.
I’ll be there. Every day, I’ll come back here. I’ll wait. I’ll keep trying. Adrian, you are my everything.
Adrian closed his eyes, his thumb hovering over the screen. He didn’t know if he could forgive Logan entirely, but forgiveness wasn’t the point anymore. He wasn’t searching for absolution or guarantees; he was searching for peace. For himself. For Logan. For the love that had bound them together, no matter how much time or distance had tried to unravel it.
The stars might take him soon, but before they did, Adrian thought, maybe he owed himself one final moment of truth. One last chance to decide what mattered in the end.
Did he deserve to feel the burn of Logan beside him again? That heat, that impossible gravity. It had scorched him in the end—left scars in places no eye could see. But God, the moments before the collapse… they had been galaxies. Every stolen glance, every laugh tangled in salt air, every night spent in the hush of a world that was only theirs. They were worth it. Every ember. Every ash.
He would burn for the rest of eternity, gladly, if it meant orbiting Logan’s sun one final time.
Even now, with the illness hollowing him out from the inside, something ancient stirred beneath the decay. His soul. The atoms that built him. The blood and bones and sinew that had felt like nothing more than survival for so long—suddenly they remembered how to feel. How to long. How to live.
Adrian had never truly lived before Logan. And after Logan, there had been nothing. Just air that didn’t fill his lungs. Days that didn’t belong to him. Silence that didn’t comfort, only echoed.
But now… now the memory of that love was waking the dead inside him.
All those years ago, Adrian hadn’t known what compelled him to do it. He hadn’t paused to think, hadn’t questioned the primal force that surged through him as soon as he pulled Logan from the water. It was as though something ancient, something as timeless as the tides, had moved him to slip the bracelet from his own wrist and give it to Logan. It was instinctive, unspoken—an act that felt less like a choice and more like an inevitability.Like the wind brushing against his skin, like the ocean’s everlasting rhythm. It simplywas.
The bracelet had been his most treasured possession, a link to his mother, who had been taken by the same disease that was growing in his body. It was the last thing of hers he had, a talisman that he’d clung to through the years, as if her essence was braided into the threads of its weave. Giving it to Logan had been a surrender, a prayer. A plea to his mother to watch over Logan, to guard his soul in the moments Adrian couldn’t. And in some distant, childlike corner of his heart, Adrian had believed she would.
Even now, years later, he couldn’t quite shake the belief that his mother was still out there, somewhere… somewhere just beyond the veil, stitched into the winds that followed him across oceans, hidden in the hush between crashing waves. Maybe she was woven into the salt in the air or the light that danced on the waves. Maybe she lingered in the pull of the tide, in the way the sea always seemed to answer when he felt lost. He knew it was a fantasy, the kind of thing you tell yourself to soften the ache of grief, to fill the void left by someone who had gone too soon. However, it was a belief that had taken root when he was a boy, and he had never fully relinquished it.
And now, as he sat on his bed, the weight of Logan’s return pressing down on him like the heavy humidity before a storm, Adrian couldn’t help but wonder if his mother had sent Logan back to him. After Adrian had passed the bracelet on, maybe she had whispered to him, guided him, nudged him toward Adrian when he needed him most. That maybe—just maybe—she had prodded him from whatever corner of the world he’dvanished to. That she had found him, reminded him, carried some piece of Adrian’s voice to him through the settled emptiness between them.
But if that were true, wouldn’t she be angry with him now? Adrian could almost hear her voice, sharp and warm, scolding him for the choices he had made since his diagnosis. For giving up before the fight had truly begun. For turning his back on life even as it clung to him, fragile but present.
It was all a conjuring, he knew that. A tapestry of longing plucked from the strings of grief, played by a heart too young to understand death, and too stubborn to ever let go. He had been just a child when she died. The memories he carried were soft-edged and uncertain, resembling old photographs left too long in the sun—half real, half imagined, blurred by time and the stories others told him, crumbling through his mind like friable earth slipping between his fingers, impossible to sift truth from dream. And her voice… it was long gone. Just broken syllables now, scattered echoes in his dreams, filled in by his own voice trying to remember how hers once felt, more than heard.
Adrian sighed, running his fingers through his hair as the thought twisted in his chest. It was a choice he’d made consciously, a quiet rebellion against the pain and the indignity of the disease. A choice he would carry to its inevitable end, as surely as the tide carries the driftwood to shore.
But now Logan was here.
The thought circled his mind, merciless, as if the universe itself was determined to hammer it into his consciousness. Logan was here. Logan, the man who had shattered him but who still held every piece of his broken heart. Logan, who had stood at his door, pleading and raw, spilling truthsAdrian had longed to hear and feared to believe. Logan, who had been a world away and was now just ten minutes down the road.
Adrian leaned back, his gaze fixed on the ceiling, his mind a whirlwind of emotions he couldn’t untangle. It felt surreal, like a dream fabricated by the deepest recesses of his mind. Logan was suddenly in his life again, after years of silence and aching absence. And as much as it scared him, as much as it made his heart feel like it might burst from his chest, Adrian couldn’t shake the thought that maybe—just maybe—this was heaven.
Not the kind he’d imagined as a boy, filled with clouds and angels and light. But this: the sound of Logan’s voice murmuring through a locked door, the faint warmth of Logan’s body blanketing him in the middle of the night, the knowledge that Logan had come back, that he hadchosento come back.
Adrian’s breath hitched, his hands curling into fists. Hope burned in him, it was fragile, flickering, yet impossibly alive, refusing to go out, no matter how hard he tried to smother it.
Logan was here.
And for the first time in years, Adrian didn’t know whether to feed that fragile flame or drown it in the rising tide of his doubts.
Eventually, Adrian left his bed and moved to the bathroom, his body heavy but his steps unflinching. He took a quick, scalding shower, letting the rush of water crash over him, jolting him from the fog that had clung to him ever since he had heard Logan’s voice saying “Ad” in that wonderful American accent of his. He brushed his teeth, then toweled his long hair dry, tying it into a loose half bun that dripped faint droplets down his back. Dressing was methodical: jeans worn soft with age, a sweater layered overshirts to stave off the growing chill that seemed to settle deeper into his bones each day.
When he stepped out of the room, Dean was waiting in the hallway. He stood with his arms crossed, leaning casually against the wall, but his eyes gave him away. They were watchful, thoughtful, filled with a concern he never said aloud.
“Hey,” Dean greeted softly, his voice careful, like he didn’t want to startle Adrian from whatever fragile resolve he’d summoned.
“I’m going to him,” Adrian replied simply in Hebrew.
