November 19, 2020—Tel-Aviv, Israel—Two Days Later #12
Though the weight of his choices and the separation from Adrian still burned in his chest, and the notion of being ‘alright’ felt foreign to him, he once again experienced that surge of hope swelling within.
After everything that had transpired, it was the only thing he had left.
It was this very hope that compelled him to board a plane, to come here, and to try to explain to the love of his life why he had left him stranded, why he had suffocated their love instead of letting it bask in the rising sun.
Adrian’s gestures—the blanket, the heater—spoke volumes in their quiet simplicity. They weren’t just acts of kindness; they were whispers of something that hadn’t been completely extinguished. Maybe, just maybe, there was still a sliver of a chance to mend the devastation he had caused.
Perhaps Adrian hadn’t entirely locked him out. Not yet.
With trembling hands and a heart burdened by years of unsaid words, Logan unlocked his phone. The faint glow of the screen illuminated his tear-streaked face as he began to type, every keystroke like a pebble dropped into an endless ocean, rippling outward with a mixture of hope and fear.
11:27 PM
Ad, I’m sorry. For everything. For barging back into your life like this, for opening wounds that haven’t healed.
I know this is too much, too soon. I know seeing me again, after everything, is probably the last thing you need right now.
And I don’t blame you for shutting me out.
I deserve that. But, Adrian, you have to know something.
I love you. I’ve never stopped. Not for a single moment.
You’ve been with me in every thought, in every breath.
Leaving you wasn’t just a mistake, it was the worst decision of my life, one I’ve regretted every single day.
I know I can’t make up for the pain I caused.
I can’t take back the nights you spent alone, wondering why I left.
But I can promise you this: I won’t be leaving again.
I will never leave you alone again. I realize now that standing outside your door like this is…
invasive. Maybe even cruel. So I’ll give you some space.
I’ll step back. But not too far, Ad. Not too far.
I’m staying at the Light Beach Hotel here in Tel Aviv, room 717.
If you ever feel ready, if you can find it in yourself to even speak to me, I’ll be there.
Every day, I’ll come back here. I’ll wait.
I’ll keep trying. Adrian, you are my everything.
Always have been. Always will be. And I swear to you, I will spend every moment I have left proving that to you.
Logan’s thumb hovered over the send button for a heartbeat that stretched into eternity.
Then, with a deep breath, he pressed it.
A muffled chime from the other side of the door confirmed the message’s delivery, and Logan felt a faint wave of relief wash over him.
Adrian would see it. He would read it. That, at least, was something.
Standing, Logan gazed at the door one last time, letting the silence settle around him like a cloak. “I’ll give you space,” he murmured. “But I’ll be back.” He promised.
And with that, he turned away, his gaze lingering for a moment on the softly humming heater. He bent down and unplugged it carefully. His footsteps were soft as he moved through the darkened house, each step echoing with unspoken regret.
At the threshold, he paused, his hand resting on the doorframe, hesitating as if the weight of the moment might pull him back.
For a fleeting second, he almost turned around, almost whispered something to the silence.
But instead, he drew a deep breath, steadying himself, and stepped outside.
The door clicked shut behind him, the sound too gentle to match the enormity of what it signified, leaving Adrian with the quiet—and the unspoken promise—that lingered like a faint heartbeat in the stillness of the night.
Adrian spent the better part of the next day in his room, the four walls feeling both protective and suffocating, a fragile cocoon he wasn’t ready to break.
The sunlight streamed through the window in golden streaks, but he stayed buried under the blankets, moving only between the bed and the bathroom, each step heavy as though gravity had doubled overnight.
Dean had knocked a few times, his voice muffled through the door, but Adrian couldn’t face him.
Not yet. The words Dean offered were undoubtedly well-meaning, but they couldn’t pierce the storm raging in Adrian’s mind.
Instead, he clung to the glowing screen of his phone, reading Logan’s message over and over until the words blurred together, burned into his heart as much as his memory.
Just above Logan’s most recent message, Adrian saw the thread of his own words, still suspended in time, some undelivered, all of them unanswered.
Dozens of messages he’d sent on that frantic morning, frozen behind the gray icon of rejection.
A graveyard of his own love, still marked undelivered like a wound that refused to close.
He despised the way his heart stuttered, remembering how it had once kept beating for a man who could vanish without a word.
He despised the way his heart betrayed him, stirring to life the moment Logan reentered his world, an old injury reopening with a whisper of his name.
He loathed the warmth that surged through his frail body when he found him there, asleep in the dimly lit hallway, curled into himself, so vulnerable, so unbearably familiar.
The sight of Logan—Logan Vaughn—sitting on the cold floor, waiting for him, his sandy hair tousled, his face softened in sleep, stole the breath from Adrian’s lungs.
Even in the quiet stillness, even in the hush of the night, Logan was a storm.
A storm Adrian had spent years trying to forget, yet one he longed to be swept away by, just once more.
It was cruel, the way memory laced itself into the present, the way the past refused to loosen its grip.
Logan was thinner now, worn by time and the weight of regret, just as Adrian himself had withered, his body stripped of the strength it once held by a cruel illness.
And yet, no matter the shadows beneath his eyes, no matter the way he carried his sorrow in the set of his jaw, Logan was still devastatingly, impossibly beautiful.
And Adrian—dying, exhausted, terrified Adrian—was still hopelessly, helplessly weak for him.
At first, Adrian had convinced himself that Logan’s presence was a hallucination, a cruel trick of his dying mind.
The kind of cruel comfort a body offers in its final stages, blurring the edges of reality to make death feel a little less like an abyss, reshaping the contours of the truth to soften the ache of his dying body.
Perhaps he had already traversed the fragile boundary between life and the unknown that lay beyond—Heaven, maybe?
Or a realm resembling the haunting embrace of purgatory.
Yet if this was indeed Heaven, could it not be deemed a cruel irony?
Adrian stared at the message again, his fingers trembling slightly as he traced the words on the screen.
He could hear Logan’s voice in every letter, the rawness, the desperation, the weight of love tangled with regret.
It was as though Logan had reached through the phone and placed his heart in Adrian’s hands, fragile and bleeding.
Adrian exhaled shakily, his chest tightening with a pain that felt like both longing and grief.
He was broken beyond repair—a shell of the person he used to be.
He had accepted that. The cancer hadn’t just ravaged his body; it had hollowed out parts of him he never thought could be touched.
And yet, no agony, no sickness, no slow betrayal of his own body had ever carved through him as deeply, as mercilessly, as Logan had.
But then again, Logan wasn’t every man.
Adrian knew, with a certainty as deep as the ocean herself, that Logan was his soulmate. The kind of love that felt written in the waves, etched into the fabric of who he was. And yet, that certainty was a double-edged sword, cutting into him with a question he couldn’t silence: Was he Logan’s?
He closed his eyes, his head resting against the pillow, as he tried to push the thought away.
But it clung to him, like a half-remembered song that refused to fade.
Logan’s message offered promises, but Adrian wasn’t sure if promises were enough.
His heart whispered that Logan meant it, that this time would be different, but how could he trust it? How could he risk it?
The memory of Logan standing at his door, broken and pleading, flickered in Adrian’s mind. The way his voice had trembled when he spoke, the way he’d said I love you as though it was the only truth he had left.
Adrian pressed his hand to his chest, feeling the faint, uneven rhythm of his heart beneath his fingertips. It wasn’t just Logan’s words that haunted him; it was the way they made him feel. Alive, even in the shadow of his own mortality. And that, more than anything, terrified him.
Because if he let Logan back in, he wasn’t sure he could survive losing him again.
But did it matter anymore?
Adrian lay still, the faint rhythm of his breath filling the silence of the room.
His gaze was fixed on the ceiling, where the morning light danced in soft, shifting patterns, like the reflection of water on a distant shore.
The thought settled over him like a heavy mist: he didn’t have the luxury of time anymore.