Chapter 33 Noah
Noah
The drive back to my apartment is silent except for the click of the blinker and the nervous thrum of my pulse filling my ears. My father sits beside me, hands resting on the wheel. He’s a wall of pressed slacks and cologne, with sunglasses perched on the bridge of his nose despite the clouded sky.
His mouth is set in a line so tight it could slice through steel. I keep my eyes fixed forward—even when the road turns familiar, even when I recognize the corner store and the stop sign with the sticker peeling off the back—because looking at him feels like inviting the blade to my throat.
“Get out,” he says when we stop in front of my building, tone measured, volume low, and I obey before my brain catches up.
My hands are trembling when I unclasp my seatbelt.
My chest feels packed with cotton. I step out onto the curb, and the cold air hits my face.
He kills the engine and follows me up without asking if I want him there, without asking anything at all.
Because he never asks, he decides, and my body has been trained for years to follow no matter what.
Inside, the apartment is as I left it—neat and quiet. It’s supposed to be my sanctuary, but he ruins it just by being here. He brings all the cold, stifling pressure of our house with him, fills up the space with it until there’s nowhere for me to breathe.
He stands in the living room and surveys it all with a clinical detachment, as if he’s inspecting a crime scene.
“You know,” he begins, voice quiet, almost conversational, which is worse, because it means he’s controlled.
“I’m embarrassed, Noah. Mortified. I did everything right.
I gave you every opportunity, sent you to the best schools, and put you in the best trainers’ hands.
I made sure you always looked like you belonged, even with your…
issues. I tolerated it because you were useful. Because you could still perform.”
I swallow hard, my heart breaking slowly. Issues. As if my existence is a stain he’s spent years scrubbing at, like every oddity or difference I carry is a thing that happened to him, not to me.
He walks around my living room, hands behind his back, cataloguing my life, pausing to straighten a photo on the shelf—one of me when I was five years old, with my mom before she left for Milan the first time.
Both of us laughing, our hair wet from the rain.
His mouth curls at the sight, and he puts it face down.
“I even let you have your little blue-haired rebellion. And what do you do, huh? How do you repay me? You let Damien fucking Moore corrupt you,” he says, spitting Damien’s name as if it were poison.
I shrink back instantly, the instinct older than memory. “Dad, please. I—”
“Do not interrupt me.” His voice snaps, finally losing its polished edge. “You’ve already embarrassed me enough today.”
I flinch despite myself, shoulders curling inward on instinct. I hate that my body betrays me this way. Hate that no matter how old I get, some part of me still reacts like I’m thirteen and trapped in the echoing hallway of a pool complex.
“This is not you, Noah,” he goes on. “You had focus. You had discipline. You knew your place.”
I bite down on the inside of my cheek, tasting blood. “I was miserable.”
“You were successful, and now?” he continues without acknowledging what I just said. “Now, you want to throw all of that away for a cheap thrill. For a phase.”
“It’s not a phase,” I say, my voice shaking despite my effort to steady it. “I love him.”
He laughs at that. It’s a short, disbelieving sound meant to make me feel small. “Love? You don’t know what love is. You know fixation and dependency. You know how to mirror what people want from you so they keep you around.”
Each word slices deeper than the last. I feel myself shrinking under it, my thoughts going fuzzy. I force my hands to stay still, because if I start moving—if I start stimming, if I start rocking, if I start doing any of the things that keep me from dissolving—he will weaponize it. He always has.
“I will not allow this,” he says, his voice hardening. “I didn’t raise a faggot.”
The slur lands like an anvil dropped somewhere deep in my chest. I can’t move, can barely breathe, but I don’t dare flinch. It would make it worse.
“I should never have allowed you to come here, knowing that degenerate was here as well,” he sneers.
“So, effective immediately, I’m pulling you out of this school.
You’ll finish the season, because appearances matter, but after that, we’ll reassess.
I’ll speak to your coach again. I’ll speak to your doctors. We’ll get you back on track.”
“I don’t want to swim,” I say, the words tumbling out before I can stop them.
His head snaps toward me, and the look in his eyes makes me shrink back instinctively. “You don’t get to decide that. You get to do what’s best for you.”
“I hate it,” I whisper. “I’ve always hated it—”
His hand slams down on the counter, the sound making me jump. “You hate it because you’re undisciplined. Because you indulge every feeling instead of mastering them.”
I fold in on myself without meaning to, arms crossing protectively over my stomach.
My vision blurs at the edges. My heartbeat is so loud that it’s drowning out parts of what he’s saying, but the tone is familiar enough that I don’t need every word.
This is the part where he takes me apart, piece by piece, listing my failures as evidence in a trial where the verdict has already been decided.
“You are broken and already require more management than most,” he says coldly. “Your coaches bend over backward to accommodate your… sensitivities. You think Damien will keep indulging that? You think he’ll keep treating you like some delicate little thing when you stop being interesting?”
My chest squeezes so tight it hurts, and I want to scream that he’s wrong, that Damien is gentle, that Damien asks and waits and watches my reactions.
But I can’t get the words out. My body is locked.
My mind is already retreating, pulling the shutters down.
“There’s nothing wrong with—I’m just… me. ”
He laughs again. “You’re a boy who had everything handed to him and still managed to come out wrong.”
That’s the moment when something in me finally snaps. Not in a loud way, or even with shouting or tears. Just a clean, internal break—a wire pulling loose.
I stop arguing.
I stop responding.
I stop trying to explain.
I make myself small and compliant and empty. I say “yes, sir” and agree with what’s best for me because that’s the only way to survive this. That’s the only way it ever ends.
Eventually, satisfied that he’s reasserted control, my father straightens his jacket. “I’ll be checking in frequently. Don’t make me regret not handling this more aggressively.”
“I understand, sir,” I whisper automatically, because my body is trained to agree, even though my ears ring and my eyes sting. I don't know what I’m agreeing to anymore.
“And eat something,” he calls over his shoulder. “You look like hell.”
The door clicks shut behind him, and the silence that follows is enormous. The pressure is building behind my eyes, and my ribs feel too tight to expand.
Eat something.
That part echoes.
I drift to the kitchen without really deciding to. My limbs feel disconnected, like I’m a puppet whose strings have been cut. I open the freezer and stare at the tubs inside until my eyes land on the ice cream—mint chocolate chip, the flavor I always buy, even though I know what comes next.
I don’t think. Thinking would hurt.
I grab it and a spoon and sit down on the floor with my back against the cabinet. The cold seeps through my pants, grounding me in a dull, physical way. I scoop mechanically, not tasting anything, just shoveling it in, one bite after another.
My mind goes blank. That’s the goal. Blank is safe.
I eat until my stomach feels tight and uncomfortable, until my chest feels heavy, until the container is empty, and my hand is shaking from the effort of holding the spoon.
I stare at the empty container for a long time, trying to remember the last time I actually enjoyed something I ate, the last time food wasn’t just punishment or comfort or penance. The answer doesn’t come.
Muscle memory sends me to the bathroom, the door clicking shut behind me, the tiles cold and unforgiving under my bare feet. I fall to my knees in front of the toilet and press two fingers against the back of my throat without a second thought.
It happens quickly—the gag, the burn, the flood of relief as everything I just forced down comes back up, leaving me hollow and shaking.
I retch until there’s nothing left, until my stomach cramps and my throat burns and tears leak from my eyes.
I rest my head on the rim, pressing my forehead to the porcelain, breathing in the sharp sting of bleach and bile.
After a few minutes, I let myself collapse fully onto the floor and curl up there, knees pulled to my chest, arms wrapped tight around my shins.
The bathroom light flickers overhead, washing everything in harsh white.
My chest heaves, but no sound comes out.
I stare at the tile, counting the cracks, the lines, anything to distract from the ache.
I feel empty in a way that has nothing to do with hunger; a bone-deep exhaustion that comes from fighting battles no one else sees. My mind drifts, the world reduced to the ache in my body and the memory of my father’s words echoing in my head.
I didn’t raise a faggot.
My chest aches with a familiar, crushing heaviness. A question presses at the back of my mind, one I’ve tried not to ask for years.
What’s the point?
What’s the point of fighting so hard to exist when the people who are supposed to love me seem determined to erase me? What’s the point of existing if being myself is something that needs to be corrected?