“From the day I walked away from you…” Logan began, his voice breaking on the words, “I was drowning, Ad. Every day, every hour, I was sinking deeper. I thought I was doing the right thing, but it was a lie—I was a lie.”
Logan’s words poured out, a flood that had been dammed up for too long, surging between them with a force that neither of them could escape. His voice was unsteady, each word tumbling over the next, raw and unfiltered, as if the truth had finally broken free and couldn’t be held back. He began with Sandy, letting out the tapestry of a life he had stitched together from lies and duty, not love. Each sentence was soaked in regret, each memory laced with the bitterness of a choice that had shattered both their hearts.
“I did everything I could to avoid her,” Logan admitted. “I encouraged her to go on business trips, vacations, galas, conferences…anything to escape. I counted the hours she was gone as blessings. I spent most of the time at work…” He swallowed hard and avoided meeting Adrian’s eyes. “I couldn’t even touch her, Adrian. Not in the way she deserved, not in the way I wanted to touch you. My body shut down around her, like it knew I didn’t belong in that life. I couldn’t even be in the same room without feeling... trapped in someone else’s skin. Fuck, I had to have porn in the background to get it up…” His hands clenched, and his shoulders curled inwards, trying to disappear.
Adrian sat motionless, his face a mask of exhaustion and sorrow, his head throbbing from too many tears. For a fleeting moment, Logan lifted his head and watched Adrian carefully, as though afraid of the strength of the confession.
“I turned to the bottle,” Logan continued, his gaze dropping to their linked hands. “Every night, I’d drink until I couldn’t feel anything. Thepain, the regret…even my own body. I thought if I drank enough, I could drown the memory of you, but it didn’t work. Nothing worked.”
Adrian’s lips parted as if to speak, but no words came. Logan pressed on, his voice faltering as he revealed the cracks in his fragile façade. “Sandy and I fought constantly. She wanted a child, but I couldn’t do it, Adrian. I couldn’t bring an innocent soul into that mess, into that kind of misery. I wasn’t willing to be tied to her forever. Not when all I could think about was you.”
The room felt oppressively small, with thick air and pain seeping into the space. Logan finally released Adrian’s hand, standing to cross to the minibar. His movements were shaky, his frame a shadow of the man Adrian once knew. He rummaged through the bottles and cans, placing sodas and water on the table like offerings before cracking open a can. The sound of the carbonation hissing into the silence was almost jarring.
Logan drank deeply, the cool liquid soothing his raw throat. But there was no relief from the storm raging inside him. He sat back down and turned to Adrian, his voice quieter now, the weight of everything pulling him down.
“I thought about you constantly,” Logan said, his voice trembling. “Every fight with Sandy, every night I couldn’t sleep, every morning that I woke up, every time I took a breath…I thought about you. I missed you in ways I can’t even put into words, Adrian. It was like losing a part of myself. No, itwaslosing a part of myself.”
Adrian listened, silent but present, his tears falling steadily as Logan’s words cut into him. He felt the truth of it in every syllable, every unguarded look in Logan’s gray eyes. He wanted to speak, to saysomething—anything—but his voice was caught somewhere between his heart and his throat.
Logan had told him about the endless fights with Jane, how she had always felt something was off.
Logan continued, his gaze distant, his voice a hollow echo of the life he had lived without Adrian. “The first time I heard it—your voice…” His words caught, a tremor beneath the surface. “It broke me. I was a chaos. I cried so hard the bartender, Zack, told me to go home. But I couldn’t. I just sat there, drinking and crying, saying your name like it was the only thing keeping me alive.”
Adrian’s fingers curled into the fabric of his pants, his knuckles white against his skin. His chest rose and fell with sharp, uneven breaths, but he made no sound. His lips pressed together, a thin, fragile line, as if holding back the flood that churned beneath the surface. He didn’t trust his voice—not now, not with the image of Logan, broken and bleeding out his grief into the dark corners of a bar, lodged so deeply in his mind.
Logan’s words hung in the air, and Adrian’s vision blurred, not from tears but from the weight of everything he couldn’t say. He could see it—the way Logan’s hands might have trembled around the glass, the way his shoulders might have hunched, caving in around his own hurt.
“When I found out you deleted your Facebook account,” Logan’s voice was barely a whisper, a sound so fragile Adrian thought it might shatter if he breathed too loudly. “I broke down again. God, Adrian, I was stalking you. Every day. Just to feel close to you, to pretend you were still there, seeing you online… made me feel close to you, made me feel like… we exist in the same universe. It was stupid, but I… I needed it. And then, when I couldn’t find you anymore, it was like losing you all over again.”
Adrian’s eyes stayed closed, his lashes brushing against his cheeks as if shutting out the world might soften the blow. But he could still see it all—Logan hunched over a phone, scrolling through digital remnants of their life, looking for proof that Adrian was still breathing somewhere, still under the same sky. His pulse thudded in his ears, the rhythm uneven, a drumbeat that had lost its tempo. His body felt too small to hold the hurt, like every breath was a stretch against the confines of his own skin.
A soft, shuddering exhale escaped him, and he bit down on his lip, hard enough to taste iron. His hand moved without thinking, pressing against his chest, fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt as if he could anchor himself to the present, to the room, to the truth. But beneath his touch, his heart thudded erratically, a reminder of the love that had never truly died, only buried itself deeper, waiting for a moment like this to rise again.
Adrian’s breath hitched, and his tears came harder now. He had heard the same thing from Jane, on the day he survived the pain of seeing Logan marry someone else. But hearing Logan admit it, seeing the torment etched into his face, made it almost unbearable.
“I listened to your song on repeat,” Logan confessed, his voice cracking under the weight of his emotions. “It was torture, but it was the only thing I had of you. Every lyric, every note…it felt like you were there, screaming at me, reminding me of what I’d lost. And every day, Adrian, I died a little more.”
Adrian wiped his face with a trembling hand, his heart breaking anew with each word. Logan’s pain mirrored his own, their shared suffering stretching like a vast ocean between them. For a moment, there was only silence, the quiet hum of the minibar filling the space where their voices had been.
Logan’s voice faltered as he approached the hardest part of his confession, the part that felt like trying to navigate jagged reefs in a storm. He shifted in his seat, suddenly too aware of his own body, his own presence, like a trespasser in the space between them. His eyes flicked to Adrian’s face, reaching—hoping—for an anchor in the very soul he’d once abandoned.
Adrian held his gaze, unmoving. Steady, almost calm. As if hearing Logan say he missed him, hearing the ache in his voice, had quieted some ancient, gnawing doubt—the fear that Logan had walked away from their love story untouched, unharmed, and unscarred. As if the words held the proof, the unmistaken declaration he hadn’t been forgotten on that sun-kissed stretch of sand in Australia, akin to a chapter sealed shut and shelved to gather dust. That their time together hadn’t been reduced to a hazy summer memory, something to be laughed about in passing—What was his name? That surfer guy?—a blur of harmless fun quickly filed away, never looked at again. That Adrian’s name hadn’t been carved in wet sand only to be swept away before it ever had the chance to set. He needed to hear it. Needed to know that the nights had been just as hollow for Logan. That he wasn’t a memory discarded, but a heart carried. That he was missed. That he wasloved—not just then, but still.
But in his eyes, the storm hadn’t passed. It churned in silence—pain, restrained fury, and beneath it all, something quieter... more fragile. Not forgiveness, not yet. But the ghost of it, laying in the shape of Adrian’s broken armor.
As if his heart, or whatever had been left in the gaping hole in his chest, had already given in—smashed and bleeding, held together by threads of stubborn hope and old devotion, delicate as cobwebs spun over a wound.A heart that wanted to believe again. But didn’t yet know how to survive the believing.
“I need to tell you about Zack,” Logan began, his voice a low rumble that barely carried over the tension thickening the room. “It started after I found out you deleted your Facebook account. That night… I was… lost. I went to Zack’s bar, and—” His throat tightened. “We slept together.”
Adrian didn’t move, not at first. His expression remained a careful mask, but Logan saw it—the smallest flinch, a ripple across still water. It was there in the way Adrian’s eyelids fluttered, too quick, too controlled, like he was bracing for impact. His lips pressed into a thin line, the tendons in his neck tightening as if holding back the force of his reaction. Adrian’s fingers twitched, a tiny, involuntary movement, as if he had reached out in his mind but reined himself back in reality. His gaze dropped to the floor, collecting himself between breaths.
“I didn’t plan it, Adrian. I wasn’t… I wasn’t even present. It was like I was somewhere else entirely—half-dissociated, thinking about you.” He paused, his hands gripping his knees as though grounding himself. “I know that sounds impossible, ridiculous even, but it’s the truth. It happened that night, and it didn’t stop there. It became… a thing.”
Logan made himself hold Adrian’s eyes. “Zack and I… we had this… sex-based relationship. I can’t call it anything else. It wasn’t love. It wasn’t even a connection, really. It was just a way to not feel alone.”
Adrian’s chest rose sharply, his breath catching in that unsteady rhythm he knew too well, the one that came with grief, with shock, with the unbearable weight of things he wasn’t ready to know. His fists tightened in his lap, the knuckles pale and straining, the kind of white that belonged to salt spray on a storm-wrecked sea. He didn’t speak. Didn’t move. Butthe silence around him swelled, thick and punishing. It was the silence of a man being pulled beneath the surface by something he couldn’t fight—the silence of an undertow dragging him back through memories he had tried to drown with time and grit and the brittle armor of resilience.
In the years without Logan, Adrian had told himself stories. He had no choice. The nights were too long without them. Too hollow. Too filled with ghosts. So he stitched together versions of the truth to survive. Some nights, Logan had never loved him at all, and it had all been adrenaline, a fleeting high on sunburnt skin and saltwater kisses. In some of the stories, he wondered if he’d only hallucinated that surfer he had once loved; perhaps it was a fever dream so vivid it left scars behind. In other stories, they were written in the waves, a once-in-a-lifetime collision of souls that the world had torn apart. And sometimes, when the loneliness crept in so deep it ached in his bones, Adrian convinced himself it had all been in his head. That Logan hadn’t meant any of it—that maybe he had imagined the look in his eyes, the tremble in his hands, the love that felt so impossible it had to be real.
