Chapter 6 #2
Jamie rolled onto his side. Drew his knees up.
The tears had stopped, or paused, or run out—he wasn't sure which.
His chest ached in a way that felt physical, structural, like something had actually cracked.
Not his heart; he wasn't that sentimental.
Something in his ribs. The framework. The scaffolding he'd built around the soft parts to keep them from being touched.
Marcus hadn't broken him at the club. The scenes, the commands, the restraints, the edges—none of that had broken him.
What had broken him was the aftercare. The warm hands.
The water brought to his lips. The blanket around his shoulders.
The voice that said you did so well with a tenderness that didn't match the club, didn't match the masks, didn't match the arrangement.
The tenderness had been real, and Jamie had known it was real, and he had taken it and taken it and taken it without ever giving anything back except his body and his obedience and his absolute, ironclad refusal to be known.
And Marcus—patient, steady, disciplined Marcus—had eventually had enough of loving someone through a locked door.
Jamie understood. Lying in the dark, listening to the silence of two people sleeping peacefully on the other side of the wall, he understood for the first time in his life why people left him.
Not because he was unworthy. Not because he was too much or not enough.
Because he made it impossible to stay. Because he constructed elaborate architectures of distance and then stood inside them, alone, and called it abandonment when no one came to find him.
His mother had tried. He remembered—dimly, through the defensive fog of adolescence—his mother standing in his bedroom doorway in Portland, saying talk to me, Jamie, tell me what's going on in your head.
He'd said I'm fine, Mom. She'd said you're not fine.
He'd said then I don't want to talk about it.
And she'd respected that, because she was his mother and she loved him and she thought respecting his boundaries was the right thing to do, and Jamie had added her to the list of people who didn't care enough to push.
Tom had tried, in his clumsy, golden-retriever way.
The invitations. The guest room with the good light.
The I just want you to be happy. Jamie had taken all of it and given back monosyllables and sarcasm because that was safer than saying I want you to know me, Dad, and I'm terrified that if you do, you'll wish you hadn't.
And Marcus—Marcus had tried hardest of all. Had tried with his hands and his voice and his patience and, at the end, with his absence, which was the only language Jamie had left him.
Jamie reached for his phone. Not to call Sasha—this was beyond Sasha.
This was between him and the dark and the fading sounds of a household settling into sleep.
He opened his notes app and typed, because typing was closer to honest than speaking, and because the words needed to go somewhere before they ate him alive.
Things I should have said at Veil:
My name is Jamie.
I'm 23 and I'm scared of everything.
You're the only person who's ever made me feel like I'm not performing.
When you hold me after a scene I think about what it would be like if you held me before one. Just held me. No protocol. No structure. Just your arms and my body and a room with lights on.
I want to have dinner with you.
I want to know your name.
I want you to know mine.
I'm sorry I never let you.
He stared at the screen. The words glowed in the dark room. He considered deleting them—his first instinct, his always-instinct, the reflex to erase vulnerability before it could be held against him.
He didn't delete them.
He locked the phone. Set it on the nightstand.
Pulled the covers up to his chin and lay in the guest bed of his father's house and listened to the silence that was Marcus sleeping eighteen inches away on the other side of the wall, and let himself feel the full weight of what he'd done, and what had been done to him, and how much of the wreckage was his own architecture.
He didn't cry again. He was past that. He was in the place on the other side of crying, the still, raw, scooped-out place where the emotion has passed and what's left is just the truth, sitting in your chest like a stone, too heavy to carry and too solid to break.
He'd had something extraordinary. A man who saw him, who read his body like scripture, who gave him exactly what he needed and asked for almost nothing in return except the one thing Jamie couldn't give: himself.
And he'd let it go. Not dramatically, not in a blaze of conflict. He'd let it go the way you let anything go when you're twenty-three and terrified: by holding so tightly to the illusion of control that the real thing slipped through your fingers.
Marcus hadn't left him. Marcus had been standing right there, hand extended, and Jamie had been the one to step back.
That was the knife. Not the sounds through the wall.
Not the image of Marcus in another man's bed.
The knife was the understanding that Jamie had done this to himself, and the even sharper understanding that if he'd made one different choice—one single moment of courage, one Thursday where he'd said my name is Jamie, take me to dinner—the man on the other side of that wall might have been holding him instead.
He thought about the pen on the kitchen floor. The way his body had gone still at Marcus's voice. The two seconds of eye contact before Marcus had retreated behind paper samples and professionalism.
Marcus was still standing there. Hand extended.
Even now, after Tom, after the engagement, after the kitchen and the garage and the pen—Marcus was still looking at Jamie with the expression of a man who hadn't stopped wanting, and Jamie could feel it through the wall, through the silence, through the careful architecture of avoidance they'd built together.
The question wasn't whether Marcus wanted him. The question was whether Jamie was brave enough—or reckless enough, or stupid enough—to finally open the door.
He didn't know the answer. He suspected the answer was going to destroy someone.
He closed his eyes. He breathed. And sometime around two in the morning, with his hand pressed flat against the wall he shared with the master bedroom—not reaching through it, not knocking, just touching the plaster the way you touch the edge of a wound to confirm it's real—Jamie fell asleep.