Jenna's door was closed, a thin line of light underneath. He was grateful for it. He couldn't have borne her kindness tonight, her easy defiance. It would have felt like a reproach, like evidence of something he'd lost and couldn't find his way back to.
He went straight to his room. Closed the door behind him with a soft click. Pressed his forehead against the cool wood.
He stood there a long minute. Eyes closed. Breathing in the familiar scent of his own space; laundry detergent, old books, the faint hint of dust. It was supposed to feel like something.
It did nothing. The hollowness remained.
He pushed away. Kicked off his shoes. Crawled into bed without bothering to change.
He curled onto his side, knees drawn up to his chest, arms wrapped tightly around them. He stared at the blank wall, washed in the sickly blue glow of a streetlamp filtering through the blinds.
He didn't cry.
The shame was too deep for tears. Too solid. It sat in the center of his chest like a lodestone, dense and leaden, displacing everything else. An ancient tenant, familiar and permanent. He had never known a time before it.
He was hollowed out. Scraped clean of the day's fragile potential. Filled only with cold certainty.
He carried his mother's voice down into the dark with him. She was always there, waiting. A constant, whispering curator of his flaws.
And beneath the silence, under the weight of it all, pulsed the old unspoken fear. The one that gave her words their true, devastating power.
Maybe she's right.
Barely a whisper. So quiet he could almost pretend he hadn't heard it.
But he had always heard it.
The streetlamp flickered. His wall shifted from blue to gray to blue again.
Adriel closed his eyes. And the silence swallowed him whole.
∞∞∞
3 years ago
The film had been on for forty minutes before either of them acknowledged they weren't watching it.
Adriel was aware of this in the peripheral, distracted way he was aware of most things that evening; the glass in his hand, the cushion at his back, the careful distance he was maintaining between his body and Zach's on the wide grey sofa.
Two weeks. They'd been doing this for two weeks, the texts and the coffees and the evenings that ended here, and Adriel still hadn't worked out the rules. What he was allowed to want. How much space he was permitted to take up.
He kept his arms loose at his sides. Kept his breathing even. Kept a careful six inches between his thigh and Zach's, because touching felt like something he should ask permission for, and he didn't know how to ask.
Zach was looking at him.
Adriel felt it before he turned his head, that particular quality of attention, warm and direct, that he had no framework for and no idea what to do with. It landed on his skin like sunlight. He glanced over. Zach sitting with his elbow propped on the back of the sofa, unhurried.
Adriel looked back at the television. The movie played on, muted colors and distant voices, something he'd already forgotten the plot of.
A beat passed. Then Zach reached over and tucked a strand of hair back from Adriel's forehead. His fingers barely grazed his skin, but Adriel felt it everywhere; a trail of warmth that lingered long after the touch was gone.
"You're pretty," Zach said quietly.
The laugh came out before Adriel could stop it; startled. He looked down at his glass, at the condensation beading on the sides, at anything that wasn't Zach's face.
Zach's fingers caught his chin. Tilted his face back up.
"Don't do that," he said.
