The bathroom fan stuttered off. Silence swelled to fill the space—thick, stale, like dust caught in the gray spill of light beneath the door.
Milo remained perched on the tub’s edge, porcelain cold enough to bite deep along his spine. Beneath the navel, something low pulsed—tender as a prodded bruise—the shape of another body still pressed firm and sure into his own.
Plink…plink…
Water slid from him in slow drops. The rhythm of absence. Steam clung to the air, thick as breath, unable to lift what clung beneath: cedar, salt, the ghost-spill of flesh-warmth pressed skin to skin, soft-slick. The soap had washed nothing. It had sunk too deep.
The t-shirt peeled away, damp cotton dragging over the delicate places where hands had held too tight. Air struck bare skin, raising a shiver that cut along his nerves.
He splashed water over his cheeks, but it did nothing to erase the taste at the corner of his mouth, the drag of burning breath against his throat.
The quiet thickened. He lifted his gaze to the mirror: blurred flesh, pale gold hair, a crimson scrape blooming high on the cheekbone.
His fingers brushed it—heat, tenderness, something lit from within. The skin pulsed as though remembering something beyond the sensation of being gripped.
Breath caught before he could stop it. A shiver ran through: in the dark, the scrape of denim pulled down just enough, knees locked, the chill of Jude’s zipper brushing sharp against the delicate underside of his thighs.
The flush down his throat deepened.
When he rose, the ache pressed back, low and needling. The towel slipped from his hips. Air licked across bare skin, lifting the fine hairs between the spread of his legs, teasing the shiver it stirred like breath over a pulse.
Ribs. The faint cut of muscle. Pale as before, yet not quite his own. Fingertips skimmed the line of his sternum, and it was as if a mouth followed the path in memory: the slick trail of breath still warm against open pores.
The lightest brush over a nipple and his thighs flexed, the skin there thinned by muscle poised to spring. Too quick to rise. The sensation leapt, a spark that hissed and itched lower. He flinched from how willingly the flesh answered.
Milo's hands moved without command over his stomach, hip, the narrow band of bone. The skin stretched too tight over cells that still hummed with it. Something had been left behind, deep where fingers had touched but left no mark.
His palm found the place where calloused hands had steadied him, pressing down. Neither slow nor calm. The weight of it pushed back in his mind: the crush of the floor, the clink of teeth, the beer scent of skin and the wet smear of breath moving from one mouth to the next.
His thoughts pulled taut. Every nerve thrummed. Shadows lay woven into lashes that had flickered over rolled-back eyes.
Lower still, along the ripeness of a pale curve, over the place where warmth had settled—where lips had found the hollow, tongue and nail pressed into the vein—where breath had rushed into the crook of a sticky shoulder and licked.
The brush of fingertips sparked deep—staggering, sharp. His hands caught porcelain as a prickle spilled along his scalp. The pulse of the memory opened him somewhere marrow-deep.
He bent into it, breath giving out, the skin along his thighs still strained from the stretch needed to take sensation deeper inside.
The ache curled low. Kept curling.
His wrists. He turned them over. Pale. Traced in faint blue. No mark where hands had bound them—fingers flared out to weave Milo’s in—but the thumb's swipe met with a sting.
Skin thinned by memory.
Clothes lay folded on the lid of the toilet. He reached for them. Pulled them on: denim rasping harsh, cotton dragging over skin still thick with damp.
The fabric felt wrong. The body beneath it shifted, nerves too quick to spark. Each layer was an irritation over something newly sensitized. He was not what he had been.
Something had been pressed into him that no fabric could hide. The old border between him and Jude had splintered apart. This body carried something else now. Milo blinked at it—and at himself—from the outside.
He pressed his forehead to the glass, dragged a breath from somewhere hollow, wiped a smear with his palm. His own eyes stared back: too dark, too wide.
The pull of Jude through him—thick and sharp-set—had faded, but the body still bore its weight. A pressure folded into bone and sinew, stubborn and raw beneath mapped veins.
He could feel it: how easily he’d opened, how easily he’d been taken in through skin rushing to cover every inch of him. And deeper still, how the marrow stirred, restless for the beat of Jude’s blood beneath its living veil.
The faucet. He shut it off. The dripping stopped. Nothing remained but the tremor in his hands. He almost laughed.
Let them break. Let them bend and throb and hurt enough to drag him back to the quiet of being his alone—no ache tuning his ear to the drift of Jude’s movements. No wrench to the knot of muscle and vein when he pulled away.
Knuckles rubbed his eyes raw before he stepped into the hall. The air touched him and sprang back. From below, the soft slap of the ceiling fan.
Ordinary sounds. But the body moved differently now, still bearing the trace of what it had come undone around.