The car was parked by the curb, a good five-minute walk from the university. The engine idled, and in its smooth, contented rumble Simon could hear only one thing: when are you getting out?
The message had come the night before, at 9:47 p.m. "I'll pick you up. Maple corner. 8:00." No question mark — Jacob didn't ask, Jacob scheduled. Simon had reread those six words so many times that by midnight they had stopped making sense and turned into a kind of spell. Downstairs in the entryway stood his bike with its rusted chain — ten minutes to campus, a tested route, independence that required no favors from anyone. That morning Simon walked right past it without looking back.
That was what hope did to him. It made him choose someone else's car over his own wheels.
He slipped out of the house at seven twenty, while his father's heavy, whistling breathing could still be heard through the wall. He had discharged himself from the hospital the day before, against medical advice. The doctor had talked about observation; Simon had nodded and thought about one thing only: his father could not find out. Not about the ambulance, not about the ward, not about why. Another night with his son missing from home — his father had stopped counting those a long time ago. In that house Simon had learned a simple equation as a child: the less visible you are, the less they hit you. He had learned how to disappear before he learned how to tie his shoelaces.
And now he sat in the passenger seat, hugging his backpack — visible, accessible, here of his own free will — watching Jacob's thumb drum against the steering wheel. Again and again. Faster every time.
Simon knew this language better than his native one. In all these years, he and Jacob had never had a single calm conversation — but Simon had spent thousands of hours reading shoulders, clenched jaws, knuckles. Jacob's body always spoke before his mouth did, and more honestly. Right now it kept repeating the same thing to the beat of that drumming thumb: I want this conversation not to happen.
Yesterday, in the hospital room, that same body had said something else. Yesterday there had been a hand against his cheek — that same heavy hand with bruised knuckles, the hand that only knew how to hit and had somehow become gentle. There had been words that knocked the ground out from under him, and it still hadn't come back. "Now you're mine. Only mine." Simon had spent half the night awake, taking those words out of his memory and examining them like stolen goods — carefully, in the dark, afraid he might wear them away from touching them too often.
He knew this seat. At night, when streetlights swept yellow stripes across the ceiling, it had been the safest place in his life — a cramped dark capsule where only two people existed. In daylight, the seat felt foreign. Daylight made everything foreign: it showed things as they really were, and no one here could stand that.
His phone buzzed in his pocket — the third time that morning. Ash. "Where are you?" "How are you?" "Call me?" He didn't answer. She had spent the whole night beside him on a hospital chair, she had seen him at rock bottom — and that was exactly why he had no idea what voice he was supposed to use with her now. Shame was a debt he couldn't even begin to imagine how to repay.
Hope was the worst part. Simon knew how to live without it — years of training, perfected technique, not a single unnecessary expectation. But this — sitting in a car that smelled of leather and cold coffee, half a meter away from a man whose scent he knew against his will, and hoping — was new and unbearable. Hope demanded that he look. Wait. Be seen. No one had ever taught him how to do any of that.
— Don't you think we parked kind of far away? — he asked evenly, keeping his eyes on the window. — I still have a hell of a walk from here.
The thumb on the steering wheel stopped.
Jacob swallowed. Guilt and awkwardness surfaced on the same face that had been leaning so close to him yesterday.
— I'm sorry, — he forced out without looking at Simon. — It's just… I promised Priscilla something, and I can't let her down. And if anyone from her crowd sees me dropping you off at the university… — He stopped and gripped the wheel so hard the leather creaked. — It'll be really bad.
He didn't explain what "really bad" meant. He didn't have to. Priscilla Ashford was one of those Ashfords — the kind whose money half this university breathed. You didn't leave her. You didn't hide around corners with a guy like Simon. Everything Jacob was inside those walls stood on her family's ground — and they both knew it.
Simon slowly lowered his head.
So that was how it was. Yesterday — now you're mine. Only mine. Today — if anyone sees.
Inside him, everything happened quickly and familiarly, like a safety switch tripping after years of perfect maintenance. Turn off hope. Turn off the face. Find the exit and offer it yourself — before anyone asks you to disappear. His father's house had taught him that too: leave first, then it looks like your decision. He had always done the work for them. Removed himself from the way so neatly that no one else had to get their hands dirty.
And the most disgusting part was that he could see himself from the outside. He knew exactly what he was about to do. And he did it anyway.
— Yeah, — he said quietly. — I understand. — A pause. — Don't pick me up anymore. I don't want you getting in trouble because of me. I'll take my bike, it's not far.
He turned to Jacob and smiled — genuinely, because he didn't know how to do it any other way. Which was exactly why tears started running down his face through the smile, without asking permission. Simon jerked his head away, shoved the door open, and got out.
— Simon, wait! — Jacob shouted after him.
The door slammed, swallowing the end of the sentence. Simon adjusted his backpack and walked away — alone, down the long gray street toward gates that were still far, far ahead. He never looked back. He just walked and counted his steps, the way he used to in hallways — only the count kept slipping away from him.
The car behind him didn't move until he reached the end of the block. He heard it finally pull away — and forbade himself from thinking about what that pause had meant. Hope had already gotten enough from him today.
The hallway with the green lockers was crowded and loud — an ordinary morning, hundreds of voices, locker doors slamming, someone laughing near the trophy case.
Jacob moved through the noise in his red-and-white jacket with the proud letter "U" on the chest, and the crowd parted for him out of habit — half a step, according to some ancient law no one had ever written down. He had put the jacket on that morning without thinking — and only as he was leaving had he realized he wasn't putting on clothes, but his old self: the captain, the man without cracks. The cuff rubbed against the bandage underneath his left sleeve. The old Jacob had never worn bandages.
Behind the glass of the trophy case he passed every morning stood last year's team photo: himself, holding a cup, wearing a perfect smile. Today, for the first time, Jacob passed it with his head turned away, the way you pass someone you owe money to.
The night at the station was still inside him — not as fear, but as the sound of his own lies. He could still hear how evenly, how smoothly they had come out while someone else's pen scratched across paper: games. Consensual. He took too much. The detective had nodded and written, and with every line of the report their story — all of it — became Jacob's version. He had invented it in a single second and hadn't even understood where it came from. No. That wasn't true. He understood. The truth would have taken Simon away from him — handed him over to cases, investigations, other people's hands. The lie let Jacob keep Simon. That was the whole equation. He hadn't chosen between truth and lies. He had chosen between give him up and keep him for myself.
Priscilla was already waiting by his locker, and she looked anything but affectionate.
— Jacob, what the hell? — she hissed, arms crossed over her chest. — You ignored me all day yesterday. All. Day.
— I'm sorry. — His voice came out unusually uncertain. — A friend of mine got into trouble. Serious trouble. There was… police involved, he needed help. I didn't want to drag you into it. I really didn't have a chance to answer.
The words were almost true, and lying was disgustingly easy. He listened to his own steady voice and understood: this was how it was going to be now. A life built on almost-truths. At four in the morning, staring at the ceiling, he had rehearsed something else — we need to take a break, cowardly even in his own head — and even that version was now buried somewhere underneath the jacket, underneath the letter "U," with no intention of surfacing.
The irritation on Priscilla's face flickered into surprise, then into unexpected tenderness.
— Oh my God, the police? — She pressed a hand to her lips. — Were you stuck there that whole time? At the station?
— Yeah, — Jacob answered dully. Then, gathering his courage, he added, — Priscilla, we need to talk.
Everything inside him tightened. Now. I'll say it now.
But she was no longer listening.
— Oh, you poor thing, — she breathed. — I was so worried about you…
She wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him — right on the lips, in front of everyone, slowly and possessively, the way someone signs a document.
Jacob didn't close his eyes. Her lips were soft, familiar, carrying the known taste of lipstick — and never before had that taste felt so alien. He stood there waiting for it to end the way you wait for a shot. Over her shoulder, at the far end of the hallway, Simon stood motionless with notebooks in his hands, staring directly at them.
Their eyes met across the entire corridor, through the crowd, through the noise. One second. Jacob felt that look against his skin like a burn through fabric.
Priscilla pulled back, pleased. And with a tiny splinter lodged somewhere inside her.
She had kissed Jacob hundreds of times and knew his lips by heart. Today they had responded correctly — and still, by a fraction of a second, later than they should have. A tiny thing. Nothing. But Priscilla had grown up in a house where her father could tell by a single change of tone at dinner how many millions someone was trying to cheat him out of, and she had inherited that ear in full. She had chosen Jacob freshman year the way her father chose assets: flawlessly, on the rise, before the competition. The investment had paid off in full. They were the most beautiful couple on campus, and she already had their future mapped out in her head down to the smallest detail, down to the color of the napkins. She loved him — sincerely, genuinely, the way people love the best thing in their life: with pride and a sense of ownership, unable to separate one from the other.
We need to talk, he had said. And then he hadn't talked. And he had looked somewhere over her shoulder. And he had responded a fraction of a second too late.
He's tired, she decided. Police, somebody else's problems, no sleep. She allowed herself to believe that explanation — but she didn't throw the splinter away. With the same neat, practiced motion she used for everything else, she set it aside in the place where she kept anything that might one day be useful. In her family, nothing was ever discarded.
— So what did you want to talk about, baby?
Jacob looked into her expectant eyes. The words he had spent half the night assembling turned around and walked away.
— Nothing. Nothing serious. — He forced himself to smirk. — You look great today.
Priscilla laughed and gave him a flirtatious shove in the chest.
— Aw, thank you. You're so sweet. Love you.
And then an angry voice cut through the hallway:
— You sent me there?! You fucking faggot!
A dull impact. Jacob turned before he even realized he was turning.
At the far end of the hallway, Simon was sliding down the lockers onto the floor — folded over, gasping for air. His notebooks had scattered like a fan. Craig stood over him. Put the sole of his shoe on Simon's chest. Pinned him against the metal.
The hallway reacted the way it always did: the noise dipped slightly, dozens of eyes flicked toward the scene and then slid away again — back to their lockers, back to their phones. People here knew how not to see. Every freshman girl learned it in her first week: what happened to people like Simon was weather. You didn't complain about the weather.
Something happened inside Jacob that he neither chose nor planned. It wasn't nobility — he knew himself well enough to know he had plenty of things in him, but nobility wasn't one of them. It was simpler than that. Darker. Dirtier. Someone else's shoe was standing on his thing. On what he had spent years marking, hiding, breaking — and never giving away. That night by the fireplace, he had said it out loud and frightened himself with how true it sounded in his own voice: he had never wanted anyone else to leave marks on Simon. Marks on that skin were his to leave. No one touched his toy.
The word was filthy. Jacob knew that. He didn't have another word yet — and maybe that was the filthiest part of him.
He took half a step forward before he had time to think.
— CRAIG, ENOUGH!
His voice carried through the entire corridor — louder than he intended, the captain's voice he used to stop fights on the field. Several heads turned. The noise dropped another degree, and in the half-silence Jacob heard his own heart.
Priscilla's fingers tightened around his elbow — manicured, perfect, unexpectedly strong.
— Jacob, what are you doing? — There was no anger in her voice. There was genuine confusion, and somehow that was worse. — Since when are you defending that freak?
He saw himself through her eyes. Through everyone's eyes. Team captain, Ashford's boyfriend, the man from the photo behind the glass — yelling at one of his own over the freak with the notebooks. The rage didn't disappear on its own. He had to strangle it — fast, with his own hands, the way you destroy evidence.
— I'm not… I'm not defending him, — he muttered.
He walked over. Simon sat on the floor holding his stomach, looking up at him. There was no anger in that gaze. No fear. There was hope — the last kind, desperate and naked: tell them. Say one word. Just one, and everything that happened last night becomes real.
Jacob held that gaze for two seconds. He couldn't manage a third.
— You know what this faggot pulled? — Craig jerked his head downward, his face twisted with anger. — Texted me that you were, like, tied up in his country house. Fucking key under the mat, the whole setup! I drove out there in the middle of the night — and the place was empty. Nobody!
Jacob looked at Craig and saw what no one else did. Under Craig's anger sat something else, something worse: he had run. He had gotten a text in the middle of the night — and run like a dog after a thrown stick, speeding through the dark toward someone else's country house, searching under the mat. And he had come back with nothing. You didn't forgive the person who made you feel like a dog.
The truth stood in Jacob's throat — all of it, down to the final minute of that night. Priscilla stood beside him. The hallway stood around him.
And Jacob burst out laughing.
He had to force the laughter out — loud, fake, alien. He heard it from the outside and didn't recognize it.
— Ha-ha! Damn, he got you! — He slapped Craig on the shoulder. — You fell for that shit that easy? Dude, that's on you for buying such a cheap trick. Leave him alone, I actually liked the joke.
He laid each word down like a brick — building a wall between himself and the person on the floor.
Craig spat irritably and looked down at Simon.
— Fuck, — he muttered.
And they walked away down the corridor — the king and his dog, shoulder to shoulder, like always. Priscilla caught up with them and slipped her arm through Jacob's, and the picture assembled itself again, seamless and perfect: the jacket, the girl, the team, the trophy case. Jacob walked through it all without looking back. Not because he didn't want to. Because he knew what he would see if he did — and he wasn't sure he could keep walking afterward.
Simon stayed on the floor. His stomach burned. He gathered his notebooks slowly, one by one. A gray shoeprint crossed the top cover diagonally over his handwriting. Simon rubbed at it with his sleeve. It didn't come off.
He pressed the notebooks to his chest — an old childhood shield — and watched them leave until his vision filled with tears.
The men's restroom was empty and echoing.
A new mirror hung above the sinks — smooth, whole. The old one had once cracked beneath his own fist; they had replaced the glass in a single day — faster than bruises faded. Simon turned on the cold water and held his hands under it. Thin white scars from that glass still lived across his knuckles — the only thing in this building that remembered his anger. The water was freezing. He didn't pull his hands away.
Inside him, it was unnaturally quiet. The kind of quiet you get in a house after all the furniture has been carried out.
The door opened and closed. He recognized the footsteps before he lifted his head — he would have known them out of a thousand, in any hallway, with his back turned, in his sleep.
Jacob stopped behind him — close. Too close for someone who, five minutes earlier, had turned him into a joke in front of everyone. In the mirror they finally fit inside the same frame. It had taken them three years and one night.
— Yeah, Jacob, — Simon said, looking at his reflection, his voice ringing with quiet, acidic bitterness. — It really was a great joke. I'm glad you liked it.
Jacob flinched as if he had been hit.
— Simon, I'm sorry, — he said, guilt heavy in his voice. — But I can't change everything that fast. Give me time. I'll fix it.
Time. A dry laugh rose inside Simon and settled before it reached his throat. He shut off the tap and turned around.
— Yeah, sure. — The words came easily. They had been ready for a long time, just waiting for silence. — For three years you turned me into your personal punching bag. You hit me. Humiliated me. Showed Craig that he could do anything he wanted to me — I'd take it and keep my mouth shut. You trained your fucking guard dog so well that now you don't even know how to stop him. Your whole little entourage knows Simon is shit you can wipe your shoes on. — His voice shook, but he didn't look away. — You taught them all of this yourself. And now you're asking me for time.
Saying it was strangely calm — as if he were behind thick glass. But Simon already knew the price of that calm. His armor had always been permeable. And there had always been one person who could dissolve it.
— Fuck… — Jacob dragged a hand over his face; the cuff shifted and the bandage flashed beneath it. — Simon. I'm sorry.
And he stepped toward him.
The hug was awkward — which made it real. Jacob gathered all of him into both arms, crushed him against his body, and buried his face in Simon's neck — hot, heavy, like someone hiding. Like that night by the fireplace. Simon felt Jacob's breath against his skin — ragged, too fast for a man who was merely apologizing — and the heat of his body through two layers of fabric, and how hard and fast the other man's heart was beating. Not very captain-like. He smelled familiar and impossible: cold coffee, clean cotton, and Jacob himself — that exact scent Simon hated himself for remembering.
His body reacted before his mind did: his palms settled on Jacob's back on their own. His fingers clenched into the red-and-white fabric — into that jacket, into the proud letter, into everything that stood between them — gripping it the way you grip something you hate and cannot live without. His mind only had time to notice. Then it went quiet.
Jacob pulled back — only a few centimeters, without letting him go. He looked Simon in the eyes from close enough that their breath mixed. There was the same thing in his gaze as yesterday in the hospital: dark, greedy, hungry. Something that no longer fit inside him.
And he kissed him.
Not like in the hospital. There it had been gentle, almost questioning — the way you touch something you nearly lost. Now the kiss held guilt — and a hunger that didn't care about guilt. Jacob kissed him as if he were apologizing and taking him at the same time: one hand settled on the back of Simon's head, fingers tangling into the hair at his neck, leaving no choice; the edge of the sink pressed into Simon's lower back, leaving nowhere to retreat — not that he retreated. There had been no choice from the beginning. Simon kissed back — first frozen, then yielding, then greedily, shamefully, breathlessly, clutching the jacket until his fingers went white. Everything in him trained by pain screamed that this was the same trap — warmth in exchange for humiliation, tenderness as the run-up to another fall. And everything in him kept answering anyway. He hated himself for it for exactly as long as he had the strength to. The strength lasted one second.
The world narrowed to someone else's lips, to the hand at the back of his head, to one shared ragged breath between them. Somewhere very far away there was a hallway, Priscilla, Craig, a report filled with a beautiful lie. None of them existed here.
— Baby… — Jacob breathed against his lips, barely pulling away, almost soundless.
Footsteps clicked in the hallway outside.
They managed to separate their mouths — and nothing else. Their hands were still holding on.
The door flew open with a crash.
Craig stood in the doorway.
How much had he seen — a second, half a second, nothing? His face gave nothing away. But Jacob was no longer reading him. He recoiled — sharply, with his whole body — and shoved Simon away with force. The hand that had just been cradling the back of his head struck his chest. Simon lost his balance and fell backward onto the cold tile, awkwardly landing on his elbow — the same one still marked from the IV.
The tile was ice-cold. His lips were still burning.
Simon sat on the floor where he had been thrown.
And Jacob had already turned away — toward the witness in the doorway.
The screen fades to black.
To be continued in the next episode.