Chapter 5
ELLIOT
After last night on the deck, something had shifted between me and Anthony.
It was in the way he didn’t try to fix me. Didn’t rush to fill the silence. He just... existed beside me. In that present, quiet, and steady way he had. And in that stillness, something in me cracked, finally letting the light in after weeks of suffocating dark.
There was a weight in him I recognized. Not the performative kind people wore like armor, but something deeper.
The kind that came from surviving what should’ve destroyed you.
He didn’t tell me how to grieve. He just let me.
He saw me in a way no one had since the day Mom died. And worse—he understood me.
It was almost three when we stopped talking, when the bottle between us finally ran dry. It was too late for him to leave and drive back to the Inn. So he took the spare room—the one Mom always kept made up, just in case.
“Just in case,” she used to say with that sly, knowing smile. My throat clenched. Of course she was right. She always was.
A fresh wave of grief ripped through me sharp, and brutal.
She’d never fuss over the sheets again. Never yell up the stairs to remind me to eat.
Never say my name like it was a secret she’d been keeping safe.
Just gone. And somehow I was still here.
Breathing. Hurting. Existing in a body that didn’t know how to carry this kind of emptiness.
I laid in bed, unmoving, watching the shadows stretch and distort across the ceiling. Grief and memories twisted like vines around my ribs—tightening, tightening.
Anthony’s voice lingered in my ears. That low, gravel-edged rasp. The way he said my name like it wasn’t just a name, but a truth he’d decided to believe in.
My hand moved before I could stop it, reaching for the journal I kept beside my bed. I didn’t mean to draw him. It wasn’t a decision. It was instinct. He spilled onto the page like water through my fingers in fragments and impressions I hadn’t realized I’d memorized.
The slope of his shoulders. The curve of his lips around the neck of the bottle. The silver threading through his hair, soft and defiant. The arc of smoke as he exhaled. That scar under his left collarbone I kept pretending not to look at.
Not his face, not directly. That felt too intimate. Too honest. But his presence. The feel of him. Like a storm that hadn’t broken yet.
I didn’t mean to make it sensual. But it was. It always was with him. Even in silence. When I dreamed I felt him above me, breath tangled with mine. Just heat and closeness and the sense of being seen too completely. His presence pressed into mine in a way that had no shape but too much meaning.
I woke with a gasp, heart hammering, my skin burning like I’d touched something I wasn’t supposed to. Shame flooded in fast and vicious. I felt exposed. Filthy. Like I’d trespassed somewhere sacred and left fingerprints behind.
Wanting him felt wrong.
But not wanting him felt like tearing something out of myself.
“Coffee,” I muttered, too loudly in the silence. A distraction. A lie. “Just need coffee.”
The hallway was bathed in that disorienting gray of pre-dawn, the kind of light that makes everything look like a dream you’re waking up from too soon. Like the world hasn’t decided whether to vanish or come back to life.
A fog pressed behind my eyes. Not exhaustion—no, this was deeper. Bone-deep. Suffocating. Like wearing someone else’s wet clothes. Heavy and saturated, dragging with every step. The kind of grief that makes you forget what it was like to ever not feel this way.
I padded down the hallway, wood cool beneath my feet, the house hushed as if it knew what I’d dreamed. Anthony’s door was slightly ajar. A sliver of light bled through the crack, stretching across the floor like an outstretched hand.
I should’ve kept walking.
I told myself I would.
But my body didn’t care what my mind had decided. My body knew. Knew the sound of his footsteps. The shape of his absence. The pull of gravity that only existed when he was near. Like a moth to the flame, I moved closer.
The soft groan of the pipes echoed through the house. Steam crept into the hallway, warm and sweet with soap and something uniquely him. The bathroom door creaked open, and I looked up just in time to see him step out.
Backlit by soft gold light, barefoot and towel-clad, still damp from the shower.
Water clung to him in darkened lines. His golden-caramel skin caught the light, warm and glowing against the soft shadows, a map of sunlight and storms that made my chest twist. He looked unguarded.
Real. Like a moment that wasn’t meant to be witnessed.
His eyes were heavy-lidded with sleep, jaw covered by his untamed beard. He looked like a man pulled from myth. Sacred in the way only the broken could be.
Something in my chest twisted painfully. It wasn’t attraction, not quite, but recognition. The dangerous kind.
Anthony wasn’t conventionally handsome—he didn’t need to be.
He was beautiful in the way wild things were.
Broad shoulders, muscled from a life built with his hands.
Arms that could carry people, and hold steady in ways words never could.
All danger and gravity. Like he’d been carved from a memory you couldn’t quite let go of.
His body was the map of a life he didn’t talk about.
Scars inked into skin like secrets, each one a silent confession.
I wanted to learn them all. With my hands. My mouth. My soul. To say: “I see you. You’re still here. You still matter.”
Something inside me lunged forward, unbidden. But I stayed, letting the air hum between us. The heat of him, the scent of cedar and soap and smoke, made it impossible to look away. I was tethered to him in a way that didn’t need words.
I didn’t touch him. I couldn’t. It wasn’t right. But I wanted to. So much so I thought I might rip open.
He glanced toward me. Not fully awake. His eyes passed over the hallway and didn’t see me.
Maybe that was mercy.
Maybe it was a warning.
I turned back, pulse skittering, every nerve in my body lit up with something raw and volatile. I didn’t know what the hell I was doing. Just that if I wasn’t careful, Anthony would ruin me. Body. Mind. And soul. The worst part? I was starting to think I wanted him to.
My breath caught.
A broken, guttural sound clawed its way from my throat—a moan, low and shame-laced.
A sick, unwelcome heat coiled low in my gut, like my body had betrayed me without even asking.
I stumbled back a step, unsteady, pulse roaring like thunder in my ears.
My heart pounded traitorously, loud enough to drown out reason, louder still than the part of me screaming to run.
But I didn’t move. Because every cell in my body was whispering the same terrifying truth: I didn’t want to escape him.
I caught my reflection in the darkened window—hollow-eyed, breathing too fast, face flushed with something I didn’t recognize. My own expression felt alien, like I was staring at someone else entirely. I looked away before the glass could accuse me fully.
My phone buzzed in my pocket. The sound was violent in the quiet. I flinched like I’d been caught. Fumbled it out of my pocket with shaking hands.
Madeline
Missed call
Missed call
Missed call
Missed call
Missed call
My stomach dropped. I turned the screen face down without answering as it lit up once again.
I made it back to my room before my legs gave out. Shut the door quietly like shame had a sound. My back slid down the wood until I was sitting on the floor, knees to chest, breath too fast and too shallow like I’d just run from something that was still inside me.
He didn’t see me come undone. Didn’t see the tremble in my hands. Didn’t see the way I bit down on the inside of my cheek, trying to anchor myself to the pain and not the way the light curved along his spine.
I’d never reacted to anyone like this before. I’d always known I was gay. Girls were never anything but background noise. But even then… I’d thought I was broken. Ace maybe. Emotionally flatlined. Like my body had been permanently muted.
But now it felt like something inside me had been ripped open with violent hands. Like I’d spent my whole life sealed in ice, and he’d walked into the room and shattered me with a glance I never asked for.
Having spent a week sharing the same space as him. His scent soaked into the air, lingering in the fabric of my clothes, in the fucking hallway like a ghost.
Sleep became a haunted thing. When it came, it brought mom. Her final breaths in that sterile, antiseptic room. Her hands cold and still. The weight of her loss pressed against my ribs until it felt like I was breaking open from the inside out.
But then he was there too. Slipping through the cracks. Every night, every goddamn dream, they blurred together. Her death, and him.
His hands. His voice. The way he smelled like smoke, cedar and sea salt and everything I was never supposed to want.
I’d wake up drenched in sweat, my skin slick, my dick hard and aching like it was punishing me for feeling anything at all.
I felt sick.
Sick in a way that curled around my bones and stayed there, silent and rotting. Because I wasn’t supposed to want this.
Not from him. Not like this. Not with this kind of hunger—this desperate, clawing ache that made my chest tighten and my throat close up with guilt.
He was my dad’s best friend.
He’d known me since I was a kid.
Yet all I could think about was what it would feel like to put my hands on him. To be held. Touched. Ruined.
My stomach twisted. My skin crawled. I wished I could outrun the way my body had just betrayed me. The air buzzed around me, humming, alive with something electric and wrong. I braced my hand against the doorframe, but it didn’t ground me.
Nothing did.