The morning began with Simon failing to get up on his first try.
He sat on the bed, waited for the room to stop swimming, and only then rose — piece by piece, the way old men do. Yesterday caught up with him during the night: his stomach ached, his head throbbed, and his arms felt numb. He did not even serve himself breakfast — the smell of food made nausea rise in his throat.
His phone chimed while he sipped water. Ash: "How are you?" Simon wrote, "Alive." Her answer came instantly: "Text me tonight when you get home. That's not a request." He sent, "Okay," and for some reason kept holding the phone for several more seconds.
He took the bicycle out after all. Several days ago, after classes, he had found it in the university bike rack with its rear wheel bent. Some idiots had apparently amused themselves while the bicycle stood there; Simon never found out who. At home, he had spent a long time working on the rim and spokes: straightening them, spinning the wheel again, watching it veer sideways. It improved, but he could not eliminate the wobble completely. The chain turned with a squeal, but the wreck should still survive the ten-minute ride to campus — and today, walking for half an hour was beyond him. He rode slowly along the very edge of the road, watching not so much the road as himself: making sure his vision did not blur, making sure his hands held the handlebars. The cold air against him helped a little.
Craig was not at the university.
No one announced anything. He simply was not there — not by the lockers, not in the cafeteria, not in the gym — and the place where he usually stood remained empty: no one dared occupy it. Simon registered it from the corner of his eye, automatically. Yesterday's statement lay somewhere in the director's desk. Maybe the machine was already in motion. Maybe Craig had simply overslept. Simon forbade himself from counting it as a victory. Too soon.
He did not see Jacob. This time, not because he did not look. Because he did everything he could to prevent it.
Simon knew that man's map by heart: where he parked, which entrance he used, which lockers his entourage gathered around, what time he went to the gym. He had been compiling that map for years — and not always so he could disappear. Sometimes he knew he should turn away sooner — and did not. He lingered at his locker a few seconds longer, loitered by the right door until familiar laughter drew closer. There was an explanation for every such occasion: the lock had jammed, he had been lost in thought, he simply had not managed to leave in time. He lowered his eyes in advance and pressed himself against the wall, did everything to keep them from touching him — yet left only after Jacob's gaze found him. Sometimes one look was enough. Sometimes it was his name, tossed out lazily, mockingly. He was seen. He existed. The dirtiest part of his secret was that Simon knew that schedule far too well to believe his own explanations.
Today, the map showed him the way out. Other stairwells. Back rows near the second exit. He skipped lunch — the cafeteria was off-limits, and he did not want to eat anyway. Twice that day, catching a red-and-white blur at the end of a corridor, he turned away a second before rounding the corner. Both times, afterward, he had to stand against a wall and wait it out: his heart broke into a gallop, and the gallop darkened his vision. His body could not sustain even this kind of war. He fought it anyway.
After his last class, he climbed to the third floor — slowly, gripping the railing — to an empty classroom whose windows overlooked the parking lot. Jacob's car stood by the main entrance, straddling the lines. Waiting. Simon waited twenty minutes, went down the service stairs, and slipped out through the back courtyard, past the dumpsters, to the rack by the far building where he had left his bicycle that morning.
A few blocks later, the wheel finally gave out: the wobble went wild, and the rim began knocking against the pavement. Simon dismounted and pushed the bicycle by the handlebars. Home was half an hour away. On a sound wheel, he would have covered it in ten minutes.
And there was only one road from the university to his house.
The evening had been overcast from the start. The sky hung above the road in a low gray slab, but so far it had not shed a single drop. As Simon dragged the bicycle, he kept glancing upward as if the sky could be bargained with: just not now. Just let me make it home.
He heard the engine halfway there. There was no need to turn around. Jacob knew his schedule; after waiting by the main entrance and realizing Simon had slipped past him, he took the only road.
The car drew level and slowed to match his pace. The window lowered. Dry warmth breathed from the interior.
— Get in, — Jacob said. — I'll give you a ride.
Inside, the doors unlocked with a click.
The first drop struck Simon's hand where it rested on the handlebar. Large, icy. The second hit his temple, the third slipped beneath his collar. He shuddered so sharply that his back cramped beneath the hoodie; his fingers closed around the rubber grip on their own. His weakened body understood before his mind what would happen within minutes: wet fabric, violent shivering, darkness encroaching at the edges of his vision. It reached for the warmth of the open car, for the chance to sit down and stop holding itself upright.
Simon tightened his grip on the handlebar and kept walking.
The rain had not truly begun yet. It was only placing scattered dark spots on the asphalt.
— Simon. — The second time, his name sounded lower. Jacob's thumb tapped a short rhythm against the steering wheel. — Stop acting like a child.
— Leave me alone, — Simon said without turning his head. — Go to Priscilla.
The car dropped half a length behind.
The thumb on the wheel stopped. At Priscilla's name, Jacob's cheek twitched once. He turned his head; his lips parted as if the answer was already there — then closed again. Rudeness would not have surprised him — Simon had snapped back before. What he had not expected was for Simon simply to refuse: without excuses, without bargaining, like someone entitled to decide. In three years, Simon had never seen Jacob forced to search for an answer to anything he said.
Then Jacob looked ahead.
The car moved several yards forward without a lurch. Red brake lights spilled across the dampening asphalt. Jacob guided it evenly to the roadside, set the parking brake, and killed the engine. Each movement separate and unhurried. He closed the door almost soundlessly.
That silence finally made Simon's heart slam against his ribs.
Jacob walked toward him. Slowly. As he crossed the distance between them, the rain had time to darken his shoulders in patches and flatten his hair against his forehead. His face went still — not calm, but locked.
He stopped in front of Simon, blocking the road.
— Say that again.
— You heard me.
Simon pulled the bicycle to one side. Jacob shifted with him.
— Get in the car.
— No.
Simon was already trembling — from cold, weakness, or fear, he could not tell. His hoodie darkened at the shoulders and grew heavier with every drop. His voice did not waver.
Jacob's gaze moved over his face, his whitened fingers on the handlebar, the warped wheel.
— You can barely stand.
— None of your business.
— I came to get you.
— I didn't ask you to.
Only the rustle of rain remained between them. The drops grew more frequent, drumming against the car roof.
Jacob reached for the bicycle.
— Don't touch it, — Simon said. — It's mine.
Jacob's fingers closed around the handlebar beside Simon's. For several seconds, they both held it. Then Jacob jerked it toward himself. The grip twisted in Simon's palm, stripping the skin. He did not have time to catch it again: Jacob had already seized the frame, lifted it with one short movement, and threw it off the road.
Metal crashed against the stones in the ditch. The rear wheel kept spinning, flinging water from the rim.
— Why?! — Simon stepped after it, and his steady voice finally cracked. — Why did you do that?! My father will kill me over the bike!
— I'll buy you a new one.
He said it so simply that heat flared inside Simon where the cold had been.
— You don't understand anything.
He lunged toward the ditch, but Jacob caught him across the body and yanked him back. Both arms closed behind Simon's back, pinning him against the other man's chest. Simon planted his fists against it and shoved once, then again. Jacob did not let go.
While Simon struggled, the scattered drops merged into solid rain. Water filled his eyes, ran into his mouth, and Simon could no longer tell what on his face was rain and what was not.
— Let go! — His voice broke into a rasp. — Let me go!
He fought in the other man's arms now not with strength but with desperation.
— You don't care what I want! You kiss her — there, in front of everyone. Then you kiss me — where no one can see. And when the door opens, you throw me to the floor. Now you come back again, ordering me around… I can't do this anymore. Do you hear me? I can't!
The words came out in pieces, along with his breath. Everything he had held in these past days burst out at once — the hospital room, the corridor, the shove to his chest, three years of someone else's hands. Simon pounded his fists against the other man's chest, no longer knowing whether he was trying to break free or hold on.
Jacob did not interrupt. At "you throw me to the floor," the arms around Simon loosened for an instant — then closed again, even tighter. Beneath his fists, Simon could feel the other man's heart. It beat fast and hard, nothing like Jacob's voice when he finally answered:
— I don't care.
One palm rose to the back of Simon's head, fingers digging into wet hair.
— You're mine.
Jacob crushed his mouth against Simon's — sudden and forceful, as if he could press the other man's "no" back inside him.
For the first instant, Simon did not resist.
His body recognized the old command before his mind did: freeze. Fold in. Survive. The fists that had just been pounding the other man's chest went still between them; his shoulders drew inward on their own. Beneath his ribs, the familiar emptiness was already opening — the place he could retreat into, leaving Jacob a quiet, obedient body. His father had taught him. Jacob had reinforced the lesson.
It was easier that way. That was how he had always survived.
But through that emptiness, the words sounded again: "You're mine." Not a confession. A sentence in which his "let go" meant nothing. If Simon disappeared now, Jacob would claim this second too — as he had claimed all the others — and decide for himself what it meant.
Resistance did not come in a flash. Simon had to choose it — in defiance of fear, habit, and every cell trained to submit.
Simon unclenched his fists.
Not because he had surrendered.
He no longer needed his hands.
Simon bit him.
It was not an accidental snap of his teeth, not a lip caught in an attempt to get free — he sank his teeth in deliberately, sharply, with all the rage he had failed to scream out. His teeth closed on Jacob's lower lip. Insulted disbelief flared in Jacob's eyes above the pain. For one brief instant, he looked not furious but bewildered: Simon had dared. Jacob gave a strangled groan through his clenched mouth, but Simon held on for another second. That bite contained everything at once: every shove, every blow, every time Jacob had grabbed him as if he had the right. Simon wanted him to hurt. For once, he wanted to see the mark on someone else's body.
Jacob recoiled with a choked cry, covering his mouth. A dark stream seeped between his fingers almost at once. The rain diluted the blood, drew it down his chin, washed it onto his neck and the collar of his T-shirt. For a second, Jacob merely stared at his palm, as though he did not immediately understand that the blood was his.
Then he raised his head.
Rage was rising in his eyes.
Familiar rage.
The kind that always started everything: clenched jaw, whitened knuckles, half a step forward. Simon saw it before Jacob could do anything, and his body prepared itself for the usual continuation — his stomach muscles tightened, his shoulders lifted almost imperceptibly, as if trying to absorb the blow in advance.
But this time Simon did not step back.
— Come on. — He stood before him, soaked through, his lips trembling. — Hit me. Like you always do. Go on!
He did not hear an answer.
The sound vanished all at once, as if someone had yanked out a cord. The rain continued to fall, but it fell in silence. His knees buckled. The last thing Simon saw was the rage on the other man's face — before it had time to become anything else.
Jacob caught him in time.
He caught him by reflex, before he understood what he was catching — and the limp body sagged into his arms with its full weight all at once.
— Simon. — He shook him, gently. — Simon!
His head lolled and came to rest on Jacob's shoulder. The rage fell away like a sheet ripped from a bed, revealing naked fear underneath. Jacob bent close to Simon's face and froze until he felt breath against his cheek. Weak, steady. Alive.
The hospital. The blow to the stomach. Nights with almost no sleep. And this breakdown in the rain — the final drop. Simon's body presented the bill for everything at once, in the middle of the road, into the arms of the only person who happened to be there. Or who had done everything to make sure he was.
Blood from Jacob's split lip broke free and fell onto Simon's collar. Mark upon mark.
Jacob lifted him into his arms — whole, in one motion. Simon was terrifyingly light; Jacob carried him the three steps to the car and could not make sense of that lightness. He had dealt with this body for so many years — and had never once lifted it.
The bicycle lay in the ditch, one wheel sticking up. Jacob glanced at it while settling Simon into the passenger seat — and looked away.
Behind the wheel, he turned toward the hospital — and slowed down two blocks later.
The hospital. Simon had run away after one day and said he would not go back. He had also begged Jacob not to take him home in that condition: his father could not learn about the hospital room or why Simon had ended up there. Jacob remembered both refusals. He knew Simon's address. His fingers tightened around the wheel: both the hospital and home meant doing precisely what Simon had asked him not to do.
At the next intersection, he turned around again.
"My place."
The words decided everything — and revealed everything. Because beneath the fear, beneath the rain, beneath the taste of his own blood, something vile sat inside him, honest enough to make him sick: he was taking Simon home with him, and part of him was glad. It had required only one thing: for Simon to be unconscious.
The house greeted them with darkness and silence — no one was there today. Jacob carried him upstairs, pushed the bedroom door open with his shoulder, and laid him on the dark sheets — soaked through, foreign here in every way, from his sneakers to his face.
The phone vibrated in his pocket. Priscilla: four missed calls, two messages. Jacob turned it facedown and set it on the dresser.
He could not leave him in wet clothes. He repeated that to himself twice as he unzipped the other man's hoodie.
He lifted Simon by the shoulders — his head trustingly rolling back onto Jacob's forearm — and pulled off the hoodie together with the T-shirt, one sleeve at a time, supporting him as one holds something that has already been broken once.
And froze.
Simon lay on the dark bedding — snow-white, almost luminous in the lamplight. Jacob had seen this body hundreds of times: in the locker room, in glimpses, always moving, always braced for a blow. But now, with nothing hiding it, his gaze caught on details he had only ever noticed in secret: narrow shoulders, the long line from collarbones to stomach, a slender waist, the lean outline of muscle beneath almost translucent skin.
And all of it was ruined by bruises.
A dark contusion beneath the ribs — the size and shape of a shoe sole. A yellow mark from the IV at the bend of his elbow. Several older stains along his side. His skin was so thin that blue veins showed beneath it.
How could anyone hit him at all? Jacob thought. Where could you even hit? Everything here went straight through him.
He stared at the bruise beneath the ribs, and memory obligingly returned the blow. Too clearly. Simon standing before him. Jacob already angry before he even approached. His fist sinking into the soft stomach, Simon's body folding instantly as if someone had pulled out its support. At the time, it had seemed like almost nothing — a second, a flash of irritation, another way to show who was stronger. Now that second lay before him as an enormous dark stain.
Jacob looked away, but not for long.
The jeans were soaked through. His fingers paused on the button — a second longer than necessary — then undid it. He pulled the heavy wet fabric down from the narrow hips, one leg at a time, trying not to look.
And, of course, looking.
Simon's legs were slender, almost fragile against the dark bedding, but not insubstantial — long and lean, with a faint definition of muscle. A whole constellation of marks showed on his skin: old bruises already fading to yellow-green; fresh purple ones; an abrasion on his shin — from today, from the pedal. A map of everything that had been done to this body. Including by his hands.
Jacob sat on the edge of the bed. Slowly, barely touching, he traced the darkest bruise on Simon's thigh with his fingertips — following its outline as if reading it. The skin beneath his fingers was cool and impossibly smooth.
Pity rose first — unfamiliar, almost humiliating in its intensity. He looked at the mark and remembered not only the blow itself, but everything around it: the way Simon winced when he thought no one was looking; how he sat down more carefully after especially hard days; how he sometimes instinctively covered his stomach with one hand when Jacob approached too quickly.
Until this moment, Jacob had never connected those details directly to himself. Now the connection was too obvious.
Then memory turned in another direction.
He remembered the trembling.
He had liked watching Simon grow afraid before the first touch. The way his shoulders tensed when Jacob stepped closer. The way his breathing faltered when fingers crushed the fabric of the hoodie against his chest. Then the trembling would pass through the entire thin body and echo straight into Jacob's hands.
He had liked feeling it.
Not merely the fear — the knowledge that he was the one causing it. That his voice alone was enough to make Simon freeze. One movement enough to make him look away. All Jacob had to do was tighten his grip, come closer, block the exit, and Simon's entire world instantly narrowed to the person standing in front of him.
To Jacob.
In those moments, power became almost tangible. It lived in the racing pulse beneath his fingers, in the other man's broken breathing, in a body that still tried to resist but already knew how it would end. Jacob felt larger, stronger, taller. Felt that he could do anything he wanted to Simon — and Simon understood it.
He told himself that was what he kept coming back for.
Superiority. Submission. Proof of his own strength.
Convenient words. Safe words.
But power was not supposed to answer with a heavy heat low in his belly. It was not supposed to make him hold Simon closer than necessary, notice the warmth of his body through their clothes, listen to every ragged breath. It was not supposed to bring that dense, almost painful pleasure when Simon finally went still in his arms.
Every time Jacob noticed that response, he squeezed harder. Shoved more brutally. Added another insult. Turned arousal back into power — something he could understand, something that did not require another name.
It went on for years.
He convinced himself that he liked control.
The truth was that he was aroused by the particular way Simon surrendered that control to him: fear in his eyes, trembling beneath his palms, the helpless knowledge of his own defeat.
Jacob could not accept that truth even now.
But the word had already risen from within.
Desire.
It surfaced with those memories, sudden and inappropriate — a heavy heat inside him, the familiar physical response to the image of Simon alive: tense, looking straight at him. And when that desire collided with what now lay before him, Jacob felt almost physically sick.
Because the body was the same.
But Simon was not.
Now he was not looking. He could not push Jacob's hand away. Could not say anything if he disliked the touch. Could not catch Jacob staring.
Jacob realized that his breathing had changed. That his fingers still rested on Simon's thigh. For a second, he saw Simon in the locker room again — alive, conscious, irritably sweeping wet hair from his forehead — and that image made the heat inside him grow stronger.
Then his gaze dropped to the bruise beneath his own hand.
This was what all that desire he had refused to acknowledge for years had achieved.
Not closeness.
Not touch.
Bruises.
Jacob snatched his hand away — as sharply as if from a hot stove — and sat for several seconds staring at the floor, listening to his heart pound and his bitten lip pulse. In time with each other.
Neither the pity nor the desire disappeared. They existed at once, grotesquely locked together, and that frightened him most of all. He could desire Simon while remembering how he had beaten that same body. He could look at those narrow hips and immediately see the marks upon them.
After that, he did everything quickly and correctly.
He dried Simon's hair with a towel. Pulled his own T-shirt onto him — it hung from the sharp shoulders like a hanger. Tucked the blanket tightly beneath his chin — as though closing a door behind himself. Draped the wet clothes over the back of a chair.
He opened a search on his phone: "what to do if someone faints." Read. Leaned close and listened to Simon's breathing — steady. Checked his hands — warm.
Then he sat in the chair opposite and remained there.
Simon breathed without knowing where he was or who he was with. For the first time, he was completely in Jacob's hands — with no ability to stand up and leave.
And Jacob had no idea what to do with everything inside him now.
Rain fell beyond the window. His bitten lip pulsed in the darkness.
The mark remained.
The screen fades to black.
Continued in the next episode.