Jacob switched on the living room light without looking — a palm slapped against the wall, the way people do in a house where the body knows every switch. His keys dropped into the glass bowl by the door. His jacket flew toward the back of an armchair, missed, and slid to the floor; he didn't bother to pick it up.
Simon stayed standing on the mat.
Last time he had arrived here unconscious and learned the house from the top down: ceiling, window, an armchair draped with clothes, the bedroom door. The ground floor he was seeing for the first time. The living room was large and, like everything here, quiet: a dark sofa, a low table, a wall made entirely of glass, beyond which the garden had already dissolved into the night and reflected only the room — and the two people in it. One of them was standing right by the door, still in his jacket, not knowing what to do with his feet.
At home he always took his shoes off at the threshold. Not out of tidiness: footprints on the floor meant a conversation about footprints. Jacob walked in his sneakers all the way to the sofa, sat down, stretched his legs out on the table, and only then, it seemed, noticed that someone was still standing by the door.
"What are you doing over there? Come in."
Simon took off his sneakers and set them against the wall — neatly, toes pointing toward the exit. He hung his jacket on a hook he didn't find right away. Then he crossed the room and sat on the sofa, on the very edge: the way people sit when they're ready to stand up.
Jacob was already talking into his phone.
"Two larges. One with meat, double, spicy. The other one..." He looked at Simon. "What kind?"
"Whatever."
"That's not an answer."
"Plain," Simon said.
Jacob looked at him for another second, as if waiting for more, then repeated into the phone: "The second one plain. Cheese, tomato. Yeah, just that." He gave the address, briskly, without spelling it out. He set the phone on the table screen-up; it went dark at once.
"Forty minutes." Jacob slapped the sofa beside him. "Sit properly."
Simon moved a palm's width closer. Jacob snorted but didn't insist: he got up and went to the kitchen, where the fridge opened and closed. He came back with a bottle of water, fogged white with cold, and instead of handing it over, he pressed it himself — briefly, precisely — to Simon's cheekbone.
"Hold it like that."
The cold went into the bone. Simon drew a breath through his teeth, and Jacob let go of the bottle only once Simon's fingers had taken it. He sat down. Picked up the remote.
Water from the bottle ran down Simon's wrist into his sleeve. He held on.
The screen on the wall was the size of a window. Jacob scrolled through it the way you go through your own closet: not reading titles, by pictures, with his thumb — and stopped where a car was burning on the cover.
"What do you usually watch?"
"Nothing."
"At all?"
"We have one TV," Simon said. "It's taken."
Jacob didn't ask again. He clicked on the burning car.
For the first ten minutes Simon watched not the movie but the way it was being watched. Jacob sat sprawled, remote in hand, and talked to the screen — "come on," "no way," "where are you going" — in short bursts, the way you talk to a team on the field. When someone on screen got punched, he gave an approving jerk of his chin. He felt good here, on this sofa, in this room — as good as a person only feels in a place where they have never once had to ask whether they may sit down.
The sound of a television in someone else's house turned out to be a strange thing. At home that sound meant one thing: his father was downstairs in the armchair, and it was better not to go down. His body remembered this better than his head did; even now, for a second, it listened to the room as if waiting for the armchair to creak. There was no armchair. There was Jacob, who told the screen "not that way" and laughed.
Simon slowly lowered his shoulders.
The bottle had warmed. He set it on the table and immediately saw a wet ring spreading across the dark surface. At home he would have wiped it at once. Here he sat and looked at the ring and at the expensive tabletop beneath it, until Jacob asked, without turning his head:
"You like it?"
He could have said "it's fine." The word was ready — it was always ready.
"No," Simon said.
Jacob turned his head.
"No?"
"They'd all be dead by now. Every one of them."
"It's a movie."
"I know."
Jacob looked at him as though he'd just discovered a second button on the remote in his hand. Then he held the remote out — handle first.
"Here. You pick."
The remote was heavy and warm. Simon scrolled slowly, reading the titles, and felt Jacob waiting — not rushing him, but waiting — and under that waiting the pages swam. He stopped on a dark-blue picture: water, light coming from somewhere above, someone's flat shadow. A documentary, about the ocean. He chose it because in it, for sure, nobody hit anybody.
"Seriously?" said Jacob.
"You said to pick."
Jacob leaned back with the air of a man who has only himself to blame, and blue light flooded the room.
He met the delivery guy himself. From the living room Simon heard the door open, a stranger's voice say something about change, and Jacob answer "keep it" — and a minute later two boxes landed on the table, one on top of the other, hot, with grease stains coming through the cardboard.
"Are there plates?" Simon asked.
"What for?"
Jacob opened the top box, pulled out a slice — heavy, with meat and peppers — folded it in half, and ate it right over the cardboard, dropping crumbs into it as if that was exactly what it was for. He pushed the second box toward Simon without looking.
Simon took a slice and held it over his open palm.
The very first bite found the cut inside his cheek — where his teeth had met after his father's blow. Hot tomato went over it like over a fresh scrape, and Simon shifted the food to the other side and kept chewing that way — on one side, slowly, watching something that looked like a cloud drift slow and enormous across the screen.
Jacob noticed. He said nothing; he just didn't reach for his next slice right away — first he watched Simon chew, and then he looked away.
The pizza was good. Simple, hot, on thin crust, the kind he'd have chosen himself if anyone had ever asked him. He ate one slice and didn't reach for a second.
"Eat," Jacob told the box.
Simon took a second one.
By the middle of the film Jacob's box was half empty, and Simon was no longer sitting on the edge. He hadn't noticed when he'd moved — at some point his back had simply found the backrest, his legs, tucked under him, had ended up on the upholstery, and he didn't take them down. Slow fish moved across the screen. The narrator explained, evenly and quietly, that at this depth there was no light and never had been, and that everything living here did without it.
"It's just fish," Jacob said twenty minutes later. And kept watching.
He closed his box, wiped his fingers on his jeans, and leaned back. His arm lay along the back of the sofa — not on Simon, next to him, at a distance Simon could have measured with his eyes closed. He knew what would come next, from the only schedule he knew by heart: the arm, then the weight, then everything else. His body braced in advance — habitually, economically, the way you brace for a blow that may or may not come.
The hand settled on his shoulder. Moved to the back of his neck; the fingers slid into his hair the way they always did — confidently, into their place. Jacob turned Simon's face toward him. Not by the chin — by the good cheek, and his thumb stopped a centimeter from the bruise without touching it.
The kiss began like all his kisses. Simon knew them by heart: pressure, air taken away, no time to decide. That's how it had been in the bathroom, in the hospital room, in the rain. He expected it and he got it.
And then he did something he had never done before.
He kissed back. Not allowed it — kissed back: leaned forward, caught the other's lower lip, the one with the rough little ridge of a scab he had put there himself, and held it a second longer than Jacob would let go. His hand found Jacob's neck, hot, with the vein beating under the skin, and settled there on its own, without permission.
Jacob froze. He didn't pull back, didn't grip harder — for one second he simply stopped leading, and Simon felt it as clearly as you feel a stair run out beneath your foot.
"What are you..." Jacob said into his mouth. Not a question: a question would have had an ending.
Simon didn't answer. No answer seemed to be expected of him — Jacob breathed out something short and wordless, and the kiss became different. Not taking. Searching.
Jacob pulled him by the shoulders — down, onto the cushions — and Simon lay back; the sofa was wide enough for two. Blue light moved across the ceiling in waves. Above him was weight: shoulders blocking out the screen, a knee between his knees. The weight was familiar, and his body told him what it always told him: freeze. He didn't freeze. He held Jacob by the back of his T-shirt, crumpling the fabric in his fists and pulling him closer — closer — and at the same time every muscle in him stood at attention, the way you stand against a wall. Both movements were true. Neither canceled the other.
Jacob's palm slid under his hoodie, under his T-shirt, onto his stomach, and Simon breathed in and didn't breathe out. Not like yesterday, when it had been the first time. Worse: now his body knew what it was waiting for, and waited openly. The fingers moved higher, along his ribs, and at the very edge of the dark patch beneath them they stopped and went around it — not blindly. Jacob knew where it was. Knew it from memory.
Simon thought about that and immediately stopped thinking, because Jacob's mouth found his neck.
"I want you," Jacob said into his skin. Quietly, as if there were someone else in the house. "You hear me, baby? I want you."
The words ran down his spine, and there, at the bottom, where the watchman sat, something twitched — not disgust, but the old knowledge that words about wanting are followed by action, and that action in his life had never once asked. He didn't decide to tense. His body did it without him: shoulder blades pressed into the sofa, hips shifted aside, the fists on Jacob's back unclenched.
Jacob felt it. He raised his head.
His face was unfamiliar — not locked, as it had been in the rain, not bored, as in the hallway. Open and lost, with darkened eyes.
"I won't hurt you," he said. "You hear me? I won't."
The hand that was saying this lay on Simon's side — a few fingers' width from the mark its own fist had left.
Simon looked up at him and could not find a single lie in that face. That was the worst of it: he believed him. Believed him right now — the voice, the weight, the hand — and at the same time remembered everything that same hand had done, in order, the way you remember the multiplication table. One didn't interfere with the other. You could believe and remember in the same second; he hadn't known that was possible.
There was nothing to answer that with. He raised his hand and pulled Jacob back — by the neck, down, to him.
But even here his body didn't let go of him completely. When Jacob's fingers reached the waistband of his jeans and caught the buckle, Simon's hand caught him by the wrist — on its own, before he understood what he was doing. Squeezed. Not hard. Enough.
Jacob stopped at once — the way you stop a car for someone who has run into the road, no discussion. He hung above him, breathing heavily, and looked at him so long that Simon had time to be frightened of that look and to come up with explanations for it: he's angry, he's offended, he's about to get up and leave. None of them fit. Jacob drew his hand out from under the hoodie, laid it on Simon's cheek — the good one — and kissed him again. Slowly. Just lips.
"Okay," he said. "Okay."
Simon didn't understand what that meant. He understood one thing: his "no" — not even spoken, not even a "no," just fingers on a wrist — had worked. Once. For the first time.
On the screen something enormous and glowing was slowly turning. He wasn't watching. He was kissing Jacob himself, holding his face in both hands, and he was in it exactly as far as he could be: to the waistband, to the buckle, to the border beyond which his body did not yet know how to trust anyone. Jacob didn't test the border again. He went back to his neck, to his collarbones, to that place behind his ear that made everything go dark for Simon — and did it as though it was enough for him, too.
The phone on the table vibrated.
It lay screen-up and crept across the dark glass from its own trembling, glowing. Jacob raised his head. Looked at the screen — from below, Simon could only see the light fall across his face and the face close in that light. Not abruptly. The way you close a laptop.
"One second," he said.
He picked up the phone, jabbed the remote at the screen — the picture froze — and got up off the sofa all at once, in a single movement, the way you get up at a whistle. He left the room. Pulled the door shut behind him. Didn't slam it: just pulled it shut, to the click.
He answered on the other side of the door.
She counted the fifth ring out loud.
Priscilla sat in her cooling car with the phone to her ear, watching the window behind which, for going on two hours, blue light had been moving — brighter, then dimmer, the way light moves off water. The TV. Not a game: a game glows differently, harshly, with white flashes of commercials. Something slow. Jacob never watched anything slow.
She had seen the delivery guy arrive after ten on a rattling scooter, and Jacob take two boxes from him at the door. Two. She had seen the yellow light in the window change to this blue one. She had seen nothing more, and that "nothing" was worse than anything she might have seen.
Her mother used to say a woman doesn't call first after midnight. Priscilla looked at the clock on the dashboard and called. She had had two hours to come up with her first line, and she had come up with it at the very start — light, with a smile in her voice, the kind he liked.
"Pris." He answered after the fifth ring, and his voice was quieter than usual, as if from another room. "Did something happen?"
"Nothing happened, sweetheart." The smile came through. She could make it with her voice even with wet cheeks; right now her cheeks were dry. "I'm just nearby. I was driving past. I can stop by for ten minutes, if you're not asleep."
A pause.
She listened to it the way you listen to footsteps behind a door. Behind his voice there was nothing — no television, no street, none of whatever was playing on his screen. So he'd stepped out. Somewhere with thicker walls. Who do you leave the room for, to answer?
"No," Jacob said. "Not tonight. I'm... wiped, Pris. This whole week. The police, their questions, the hospital. I just want to lie down."
The police hadn't been tonight. She remembered that night in her own way: four rings into emptiness and a phone that never called back.
"Of course," she said. "Of course you're tired."
And she gave him what she had come for. She didn't need the question anymore; she gave him a door — open, wide, onto the brightly lit side, where everything could still be understood and maybe forgiven.
"Jacob." The lightness left her voice on its own; she didn't manage to hold on to it. "If you have something to tell me — tell me now. Me. Whatever it is. I'll understand. I promise I'll understand."
She watched the blue light in the window.
"There's nothing to..." He stopped. She heard him take a breath to start over. "Everything's fine, Pris. Really. We'll talk tomorrow. During the day. Okay?"
The door she had been holding open closed. He didn't close it — it was just that nobody walked through.
"I love you," Priscilla said.
She said it evenly, without pressure, the way she had said it hundreds of times — in the parking lot, in bed, into the phone between classes — and for the first time she heard that there can be silence after those words. Short, three heartbeats long. During which the person on the other end was choosing what to cover it with.
"Go to sleep," Jacob said. "Tomorrow. You hear me?"
"Good night, sweetheart."
She took the phone from her ear before he hung up. She didn't want to hear him do it.
For a few seconds she sat very straight, both hands on the wheel — at ten and two, the way they taught in driving school — and looked at the window. Blue light moved across the ceiling of the room she wasn't in.
Then she hit the wheel.
The horn screamed down the whole sleeping street — short, disgustingly loud — and she ducked at the sound herself, sank into the seat like a schoolgirl about to be caught. She watched the window and waited: any second now the curtain would twitch. Any second now he'd come to the glass, see the car, recognize it.
The curtain didn't twitch. The blue light went on moving across the ceiling. No one in that house heard her — not the horn, not any of the rest.
Then she cried. Without a sound, eyes open, still looking at the window, because looking away would have been even worse — like letting go of the edge. Her mascara ran down toward the corners of her mouth; she wiped it with the back of her hand, smearing it across her cheek to her ear, and in the rearview mirror she saw someone she didn't know: a black streak on her face, a wet chin, in an expensive car across from someone else's house. That was what girls looked like who waited under windows. Not her. Never her.
For three years she had been perfect. She had done everything right: waited when she was supposed to wait, laughed when she was supposed to laugh, never asked questions that couldn't be answered prettily. It had been enough. It had always been enough — until tonight's porch light.
With another girl she would have known what to do. Another girl could be understood — taken apart, figured out, what she'd won him with, and then you took back what was yours. A thin pale boy in a hoodie, with his bruise on his cheekbone, with his way of standing against the wall — him she couldn't understand. And while she tried, the light in the window stayed blue.
She took out her phone and opened her call log. Scrolled. Found it.
She no longer needed information. She needed something else.
Where are you, she typed, without a question mark, and started the engine before the reply came.
The door closed, and the room became different.
Simon sat up. Not right away: first he lay there looking at the ceiling where the blue light moved, and listened to the voice behind the door, low, wordless. The words couldn't be made out — the walls in this house knew how to hold sound. Only the intonation came through, even, short, and it told him nothing. Then he did sit up. Tugged his hoodie down, straightened the collar. His feet found the floor on their own; his back moved away from the backrest on its own and ended up where it had been at the start of the evening — on the edge.
His body had gone back to being a guest. It always knew when it had stopped being held.
On the screen the paused image hung frozen: something transparent with long threads, suspended in the middle of the blackness. Jacob had hit pause on his way out. So he meant to come back. Simon noted this the way he noted everything — without drawing conclusions.
He didn't know who was calling. The guess lay right on the surface, it had a name, and he himself had said it the day before yesterday in the rain — but a guess wasn't knowledge, and he knew too well what happens when you fill in the blanks for other people. So he didn't fill them in. He sat, listened to the voice behind the door that neither rose nor fell, counted the wet rings on the table — one from the bottle, one from the box — and waited to see what would happen when the door opened.
He knew one version of what happens when a door opens. He had shouted it in Jacob's face, in the rain, in pieces: where no one can see — and then when the door opens, onto the floor. Now the door was closed, and Jacob was behind it, with someone for whom Simon did not exist in this room. Nothing had changed. Or everything had, and he was just sitting on the edge of the sofa because he didn't know how to do it any other way.
The voice behind the door went quiet.
Simon wiped the ring left by the bottle with his sleeve. He didn't have time for the second one.
The door opened and Jacob came in — phone in hand, with a face Simon didn't manage to read: it was changing as he came in. A second ago there had been something dense in it, heavy, turned away from here. Then Jacob saw him — on the edge, hoodie tugged straight, feet on the floor — and something in that face unclenched.
He put the phone on the table screen-down.
He sat down beside him, right up close, thigh to thigh. Took Simon's face in his palm — the way he had under the streetlight, earlier that same evening; his thumb settled at the very corner of Simon's mouth, on the good side.
"Did something happen?" Simon asked.
Jacob looked him in the eyes. He seemed to have had his answer ready while he was still behind the door.
"You definitely have nothing to worry about."
"Definitely." Simon heard the word — the way you hear an extra part in a familiar mechanism: in an answer to "did something happen," it had no business being there. He could ask again. He could ask differently — who, about what, why behind the door. There were questions. He looked at the thumb by his mouth, at the phone lying screen-down, at the person who had come back — come back, not stayed out there behind the door — and sat right up close, and the questions came to weigh less than that.
He nodded.
Jacob kissed him — differently than before the call: without hurry, without weight, just lips, as if apologizing for something he didn't name. Simon kissed back. The warmth didn't return all at once, it came back in pieces, the way feeling returns to a leg that's fallen asleep — but it returned. His shoulders dropped. His back found the backrest again. Jacob's arm lay across his chest and stayed there — heavy, warm, leading nowhere.
The transparent creature with its threads still hung on the screen. No one pressed the remote.
Craig answered four minutes later: Gas station on the highway. The 24-hour one.
She found it by its light. The gas station stood at the edge of town, flooded yellow down to the last inch — under light like that there are no shadows and no faces, only flat masks. A truck dozed by a pump with its engine running. Craig's car was parked behind the car wash, nose toward the exit, and he sat in it without getting out: waiting for her to come to him first.
Priscilla pulled up alongside and didn't get out either. For a minute they sat in two cars three meters apart, and that minute was enough for her to understand she had lost it. Then she rolled down the window.
Craig got out, walked around her car, and got into the passenger seat without asking. The interior immediately became smaller. He smelled of beer and cold; the hoodie was pulled on over bare skin. He sprawled the way people sprawl at home and looked at her — once, carefully, top to bottom and back.
She had managed to wipe her face. She knew it hadn't been enough.
"You've been crying," he said.
"None of your business."
"It is now." He smirked, and the smirk came out not mean — pleased. "So you drove over. Saw it for yourself."
Priscilla didn't answer. She looked straight ahead, at the yellow light and the truck, and held the wheel as if the car could take her away from here if she held it tightly enough.
"I don't need what you know anymore," she said.
"I got that."
"I need him gone."
Craig was silent. She could feel him looking at her from the side — heavily, with interest, the way you look at someone who has just said too much.
"Gone how?" he asked at last. Quietly.
"From beside him. From his house. From his..." The word stuck. "From his life. I want him to leave and not come back. To understand where his place is — so that he never comes near again."
"Leave on his own." Craig shook his head. "Guys like that don't leave on their own, Ashford. You haven't seen how that freak looks at him. I have. Three years."
"Then make him leave."
"You even understand who you're asking, and for what?"
She turned to him. The gas station light lay flat across his face, like stage makeup.
"I'm not asking..." She stopped. The word that came next she wouldn't have said out loud even alone in the car. "I don't mean anything irreversible. You know what I mean."
"Didn't offer." He shrugged. "There are simpler ways. How — don't sweat it. Afterward you won't even want to know."
The truck at the pump finally cut its engine, and in the silence you could hear the lamps humming.
"Now my part," Craig said.
He said it calmly, in a businesslike way, and Priscilla understood he had been thinking about this part the whole drive here — and the whole day before that, ever since the parking lot.
"No disciplinary committee. None. The suspension gets lifted, the inquiry gets closed, I come back — to school, to the team, to the locker room, like nothing happened. Not 'I'll try.' Not 'I'll talk to Dad.' Done." He raised a finger. "That first. Then — your thing."
"You're not in a position to set the order."
"And you are?" He looked at her cheek, where a gray streak still clung under the hastily wiped mascara. "This afternoon you were offering me a staircase for a piece of gossip. Tonight you drove out to a gas station. You don't need gossip anymore. You need hands." He laid them on his knees — big, calm. "Hands cost more."
She was silent. He was right, and that was the worst of it: she'd have accepted being right from anyone but him.
"The day after tomorrow," she said.
"Tomorrow."
She thought of her father. Of his voice on the phone, of how easily he said "I'll take care of it." One call. She had never had to ask twice.
"Tomorrow," she agreed.
Craig nodded — briefly, the way you nod on the field — and opened the door. Already standing with one foot on the asphalt, he leaned back into the car.
"And, Ashford. How — you don't ask. Ever."
The door slammed. She watched him walk to his car through the yellow light — big, light on his feet, drawn up to his full height — and understood what she had just done. And what she would do tomorrow. And that neither would give her back the blue light in the window.
She raised her palm to her cheek and finally wiped the streak away completely.
They went upstairs around two.
Jacob turned off the TV — the transparent creature went out along with the screen — said "come on," and went first, without looking back, the way you walk through your own house. Not a single stair creaked. Simon registered this with his feet, out of habit, and couldn't find anything to do with it.
He knew the bedroom. Dark sheets, a wall-to-wall window, the armchair where his clothes had dried the day before yesterday. Jacob pulled out a drawer, tossed him a T-shirt — like the one last time, smelling of someone else's detergent — and went into the bathroom. Simon changed while he was gone: quickly, back to the door. He folded his hoodie and jeans on the armchair. He looked in the mirror over the dresser once — his cheekbone had turned dark and dense, like a plum — and turned away before he could think anything about it.
His phone had stayed downstairs, in his jacket.
He remembered this only under the blanket, lying on his side, facing the window — and didn't get up. At home his phone was always under his pillow. Here he could leave it in a jacket on a hook, two floors away, and just lie there.
The mattress dipped. The light went out.
Jacob lay down behind him — right up close, chest to his back — and laid his arm across him, heavily, the way you slide a bolt shut. His palm came to rest on Simon's stomach, over the T-shirt, and stayed there. He reached for nothing more: didn't move the fabric, didn't go lower, didn't say a word. He just settled his chin against the back of Simon's head and breathed out — long, the way you breathe out when you've finally arrived.
For the first few minutes Simon listened.
Listened the way he had listened all his life: to the house, the stairs, the door. Here the house was silent, the stairs had no voice, and the door was closed, and it turned out there was nothing to listen to except the breathing behind him. He listened to it the way you listen to a stranger's house: waiting for it to change. It didn't change. The palm on his stomach didn't move. The weight didn't become a grip.
Gradually the watchman who had stood inside him all his life, counting other people's hands, stopped counting. Not because he'd been told to. There was simply no work for him.
His cheekbone burned. The cut in his cheek answered his tongue. Beneath his ribs, where Jacob's palm lay without pressing, an old mark ached — dully, familiarly, the way things ache before a change in the weather. All of it was there. All of it was somewhere far away, beyond the edge of the warmth, and didn't need to be watched.
He thought he should check one more time where the door was.
He didn't check.
The breathing behind him evened out before his own did; then he stopped being able to tell whose was whose. The wall-to-wall window stood dark — no stars were visible from this side of the house — and he looked into that darkness until it no longer differed from the darkness behind his eyelids.
Simon slept.
The screen goes dark.
To be continued in the next episode.