November 20, 2020—Tel-Aviv, Israel—The Same Day #8
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 was loved—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. But the 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.
But there was always one story that returned to him. The one he came back to more than any other. The story that made the most sense when the ache wouldn’t fade.
That Logan had left because he was a man.
That the way Adrian loved, the way he was, made their love impossible.
That even if Logan had felt it—even if he had truly, deeply loved him—it would never be enough.
Not in the world Logan came from. Not with the family, the expectations, the weight of that old American dream pressing down on his chest.
And so Adrian had swallowed it. Swallowed the ache, swallowed the shame, swallowed every tender memory that still haunted his skin.
He buried it under smiles and silence and the empty shell of a life that moved forward while his soul remained still.
And every night, those stories played in his mind, soft and cruel, reshaping the truth into something he could live with. Or at least survive.
But now—
Now, Logan was telling him there had been someone else. Another man. And it didn’t matter if Logan said it meant nothing, that it was just sex, just a way to silence the noise in his head. Because all Adrian could hear was the quiet shattering of every story he had clung to.
Logan could be with a man. Logan had been with a man. And not just any man, but someone who wasn’t him.
That truth lodged somewhere deep in Adrian’s chest, sharp and cold and breathless.
It wasn’t the sex that broke him. It was what it meant.
That Logan had given someone else what Adrian had begged for in whispers and silences and trembling hands.
That Logan had denied him not out of fear, but out of choice.
He had chosen someone else. Chosen convenience.
Chosen what was easy. And Adrian—the man who had loved him through fire, through oceans, through the brutal quiet of being left—had been nothing more than the wave that carried Logan toward something else.
Something less complicated. Something he didn’t have to cross the world or break his life open for.
He had been left, not because he was impossible to love, but because he was inconvenient to love. And Logan, for all his tears and apologies, had not chosen him.
And that was the wound that would never close.
“I know it hurts to hear this,” Logan whispered, his voice barely audible over the sound of their shared pain. “But I can’t lie to you. Not again. Not ever again.” His words hung in the air, climbing and pulling at Adrian’s walls brick by brick.
Logan hesitated, watching as Adrian turned his head slightly, his eyes distant now, staring at the far wall as if searching for something to anchor himself.
“It’s over,” Logan added, his voice breaking slightly.
“It ended a week ago. I was barely there with him, Adrian. Physically, sure, but emotionally? Mentally? It was always you.”
Adrian flinched again, this time more visibly, and Logan’s stomach roiled.
But he pressed on, determined to lay everything bare.
“I never slept in the same bed as Sandy after that first night with Zack. I couldn’t.
The guilt… God, the guilt was unbearable.
I hated myself for it, for everything. But I was too broken to stop, too far gone. ”