November 26, 2020—Tel-Aviv, Israel—The Next Day #10
Logan hesitated, the sea of unspoken fears rising in his throat. “They don’t hate me?”
Adrian paused at the doorway, turning to face him fully.
“They did,” Adrian said softly, his gaze steady.
“I told them what happened. About how you left. And they saw how I broke.” There was no accusation in his voice, no bitterness—just the raw truth, weathered by time but never washed away.
“But they also know what you meant to me. What you still mean to me.” He reached for Logan’s hand, his fingers warm despite the chill of old wounds.
A gentle squeeze, a tether pulling Logan back from the drifting void he had spent two years lost in.
“And my mom?” Adrian’s lips twitched into something between fondness and amusement.
“She’s so excited to see you. Prepare yourself, because both of them are going to be extra embarrassing, and she probably cooked for an army. ”
Logan smirked as they stepped out of the house and into the car.
Adrian slipped into the driver’s seat without a word, muttering something about knowing the streets better and having a long drive ahead of them.
Logan didn’t argue. In truth, he was glad Adrian seemed at ease—glad he wasn’t burdened by the weight of Logan meeting his family.
The engine hummed beneath them as they rolled through the streets, the city lights flickering against the windshield like reflections on the water.
Logan glanced sideways at Adrian, tracing the familiar lines of his face, the quiet intensity in his eyes as he focused on the road.
He looked… different. Maybe it was the illness, or maybe it was just time, but there was something heavier about him now, something Logan hadn’t seen before.
“Will your brother be there too?” Logan asked after a stretch of silence.
“Yeah.” Adrian’s answer was clipped, his hands tightening slightly on the wheel.
Logan hesitated before pressing further. “Are things… better between you two?”
Adrian didn’t answer right away. The silence between them stretched, thick like the deep sea before a storm.
Logan remembered the first time he had heard the name Alon.
It had been an accident—just a passing mention in a conversation Adrian had with his parents one night when they were still traveling together.
That was the time Logan learned that Adrian had a younger brother.
“Not really,” Adrian finally admitted. His voice was steady, but Logan could hear the undertow beneath it. “He enlisted not long ago. Same unit I was in.”
Logan frowned. “Is that… good?” He searched Adrian’s face for some clue, but Adrian’s expression remained unreadable.
“Don’t really know,” Adrian muttered, taking a turn onto a narrower street. “We’re not talking much. He’s been even more resentful since I came back two years ago.”
When Logan stumbled upon the fact that Adrian had a younger brother, his curiosity was piqued, and he started to inquire further.
Logan, who had spoken of his own sisters and shared little anecdotes about them, found it surprising that Adrian had never mentioned his little brother before.
Adrian elaborated on their strained relationship, revealing that Alon had made hurtful and homophobic comments after Adrian came out of the closet.
This antagonistic sentiment was not new; even prior to that event, Alon had nurtured an underlying resentment and animosity toward Adrian, feelings that only intensified and festered over the years, casting a long shadow over their brotherly bond.
Logan didn’t miss the way Adrian’s grip tightened just slightly on the wheel, the way his jaw tensed at the words. He wondered what exactly had happened in those two years Adrian had spent without him—what wounds had been left open, what bridges had burned beyond repair.
Adrian’s eyes flickered for a moment, his mind clearly elsewhere. Maybe back in those first few months after Logan had left.
“He said some things,” Adrian murmured. “When I moved back home. When I was… trying to get back on my feet… it took us, me, Dean, and Tom a few months to find an apartment, so I lived with my parents for those months.”
Logan didn’t ask, but Adrian told him anyway. “Your fag friend ditched you,” Adrian repeated the words Alon had told him.
It had been a mutter, a careless cut from Alon that had sliced deeper than he would ever understand.
In the early months, Alon drifted through the house like a ghost, the echoes of his cruel words hanging heavy in the air.
Adrian, heartbroken and desperate, felt the chill of Alon’s indifference seep into the very walls, a palpable hatred that threatened to suffocate him.
With each moment spent in that stifling atmosphere, Adrian felt as though he might choke, teetering on the edge of despair.
And then, months later, when Adrian had told his family about the cancer, when he had told them he wasn’t planning to fight it, his brother had looked relieved.
It had hurt.
Logan clenched his fists in his lap. He wanted to say something, but what could he say? He had no right to be angry on Adrian’s behalf, not when he had been the first blade in his back.
The rest of the drive was quiet. Logan watched the city lights blur past, their glow fading into something dimmer, rougher, as they moved away from the heart of Tel Aviv. The streets grew narrower, the buildings more worn, the sense of abandonment sinking into the very air around them.
“We’re here.” Adrian declared. His stomach clenched as he looked up at the six-story building before them.
It wasn’t pristine, wasn’t grand, but it stood firm.
The beige paint was streaked with time; the balconies were lined with mismatched chairs, wind chimes, and the soft glow of potted plants reaching for the night air.
That was, in the simplest and most innocent way imaginable, home.
It wasn’t the world Logan had imagined for Adrian, not the one his mind had built in the absence of truth. But it was real. And it was Adrian’s.
Logan’s gaze flickered down the quiet street, where similar buildings stood side by side, like weathered sentinels guarding a lifetime of memories.
Some looked newer, some older, but all bore the same quiet endurance.
This place wasn’t luxurious, far from it, yet it embodied the essence of simplicity, a simple life well-lived and modestly flourishing.
This was the space that had shaped Adrian—the winding streets, the sun-cracked corridors, the quiet corners that had once cradled his boyhood dreams. Here, the man Logan loved had first been stitched together by time and tenderness and grief.
If this place had birthed a soul as fierce and tender as Adrian’s, then somewhere beneath its ordinary skin, it must hold a whisper of something divine.
Then, he glanced back at the car.
The sleek, black Maserati gleamed under the flickering streetlight, a glaring, unwelcome guest in this world. The sight of it made his skin crawl. It felt like an intrusion, an arrogance, a testament to just how little he had understood.
Adrian was already climbing the steps, and Logan followed, though something began to press in his chest with every stride, a quiet storm gathering under his ribs.
He had never truly seen the world Adrian had come from, not like this, not the bones of it, not the walls that had once echoed with his footsteps, or the corners that might still remember his laughter.
Were these the hallways Adrian had raced through as a boy, beach-sand clinging to his ankles and sea-salt water drying on his skin after long days spent chasing waves?
Were these the same stairs he climbed after the war, when the world had grown heavier, when his soul had become older and more fragile, when the silence between breaths had changed shape?
Had he once walked here with sunburned shoulders and lucent dreams in his eyes, only to return years later, not with hopes but with memories too vivid to forget and an unheeded threnody crying Logan’s name?
And now Logan was stepping into that same space, into that same past, as someone who belonged.
And it awakened something in him—something cold yet familiar.
He had always existed on the periphery of places, never truly immersed in them.
He had always been the outsider; adrift and unanchored, the one who never truly fit in, never truly belonged.
The one persistently ready to flee. The one who avoided attaching to anything significant until he met a pair of whisky-colored irises and full, luscious lips framed by stubble, igniting a desire to connect with the man standing before him.
In that first meeting, without understanding why, Logan wanted to be known.
Wanted to be held still in someone’s memory, in someone’s hands.
And somehow, impossibly, Adrian had looked at him—really looked—and loved everything scattered and unfinished within him.
It was the kind of love that didn’t ask for permission, didn’t seek to fix, only to hold, and the weight of that kind of love—pure, wild, undeserved—was almost unbearable.
“Did you grow up here?” The question left Logan’s lips before he could stop it, a desperate need gnawing at his insides. He wanted to see it all, wanted to map Adrian’s childhood, to touch the places that had shaped him, to stand where he had once stood.
More than anything, he wanted to take Adrian back to his own childhood home.
Show him the bed where he had lain awake, night after night, drowning in heartbreak.
Show him the walls that had absorbed his screams, his sobs, his mistakes, the ones he had made when Adrian wasn’t there.
Show him the spot where he had crashed and burned, after fleeing from the other half of his soul and the one person he had loved wholeheartedly.
“Hm... yeah.”