The door slammed shut — and only then did Simon's legs give out.
He slid down the lockers onto the cold tile, and the floor received him indifferently, the way it received everything. The towel had slipped; wet hair clung to his forehead; he was shaking in violent, feverish tremors. He pulled his knees to his chest, wrapped his arms around them, and buried his face there. The scrapes across his knuckles — where, only a few hours ago, the mirror had cracked under his fist — started bleeding again, but he didn't notice. His throat lived a separate life of its own: it remembered the weight of another man's hand, its heat, its lazy, measuring strength. It felt as if that hand was still resting on him — invisible, impossible to wash off.
And then he broke.
The tears came hard, choking him, from that tearing depth where people don't cry from pain, but from something that can no longer be undone. For today and for everything at once — for the laughter in the cafeteria, for the purple bruises on his ribs, for his own face in the cracked glass. But bitterest of all — for what had just happened.
The secret was out.
The one secret he had buried deeper than all the bruises, deeper than his father's nights. He had never even allowed it to himself: for years he had walked around it, called it sickness, filth, anything — anything except its real name. The word had been forbidden even in his thoughts.
He loved him.
There it was. That was the whole monstrous, irreparable truth. He loved the person who methodically, with pleasure, destroyed him — loved him through terror, through hatred, through everything that should have burned that love out of him. And today it had been dragged into the light, read in his own eyes, and weighed in the palm of a hand like loose change.
An hour ago, he had stood in front of a shattered mirror and sworn he would make him pay. For one whole hour, his new, cold hatred had seemed real and final. And then Jacob had simply stepped close — and everything crumbled into dust from his scent alone, from one hoarse "ask me." He had sworn to destroy him — and reached for his lips himself. What the hell was he after that?
He cried until there was nothing left inside him that could cry. And when the tears ran dry, they left no relief behind — only a burned-out, echoing emptiness. And in that emptiness, only one thing could be heard: shame, steady and unceasing, not falling silent for a single second.
Meanwhile, out on the field, Jacob was playing like he hadn't played in a long time.
He threw himself into tackles first, slammed people to the ground even when there was no need to, and found something almost like release in every collision. His body worked at full force, angry and precise — but his head wasn't there. His head kept replaying the same thing over and over.
"How long have you been looking at me like that?"
And that silence instead of an answer. A silence that said: the whole time.
After another tackle — unnecessary, brutal, right on the edge of a foul — the whistle shrieked, and the coach barked his last name from across the field. Jacob lifted his palms: got it. Craig came level with him and clapped him on the shoulder.
— You're a fucking beast today. Something happen?
— Warming up, — Jacob answered shortly, and from his tone Craig understood there was no point pushing.
The knowledge lay inside him like a hot coin in his pocket, and all through practice he kept checking it without meaning to: still there? Still there. He had been looking the whole time. Which meant every dark corner, every locked door, every time that boy stayed silent, endured it, offered himself up — none of it had been what it seemed. He hadn't just been breaking a toy. The toy had been looking at him. Wanting him.
That thought put everything in order — smoothly, conveniently, like a lie you desperately want to believe. It absolved him of everything at once: today, the past, and that dark thing that had risen in him by the lockers, the thing he had no intention of digging into. And if that was true — then what exactly was Jacob guilty of?
And then, uninvited, another thought slipped in — insinuating, like a draft under a door.
If the boy had been looking at him like that all this time... if, trembling under his hand, he had wanted him — then that meant he could do more with him. Not just shove him into lockers and watch him break. Something else. Take more than just his fear.
Images slid along the very edge of his mind — hazy, hot, impossible — and Jacob almost missed a step in the middle of the field.
What the fuck. He shook his head as if brushing off gnats. He wasn't into that shit. Never had been — the thought had never even crossed his mind, not once in his entire life. He had been sleeping with girls since school, he had Priscilla, he had everything the way it was supposed to be, everything in proper order. Where the hell had this come from — this thing about that skinny, pale freak?
He found no answer. But the thought didn't leave. It settled inside him, next to the knowledge of someone else's secret — quiet, comfortable, proprietorial. Like something that hadn't come to visit, but to live.
By the end of practice, the decision had ripened on its own, without effort, as if it had already been inevitable.
No one. He wouldn't tell anyone. Not the team, not Priscilla. Especially not Craig: Craig would spread it everywhere in one evening out of pure excitement, and by morning the story would have a hundred owners. And this story was supposed to have one.
He told himself it was strategy: you don't waste an ace like that on cheap laughs. It sounded reasonable. The truth was simpler and darker, and he wouldn't let it come too close: a secret told to everyone stops being yours. And Jacob had no intention of sharing this — him — with anyone.
There was no reason to hurry either. Not anymore. The boy wasn't going anywhere.
After practice, in the emptied locker room, he stood under the shower for a long time. Hot water beat the exhaustion out of him, steam rose toward the ceiling — and at the very edge of his blank, relaxed mind, a picture formed out of that steam all by itself: wet white skin, dark strands stuck to a forehead, frightened eyes looking up from below. Jacob jerked the tap to cold; icy water burned him, washed the image away, knocked everything out of his head at once. He stood under it, teeth clenched, until his skin went numb. Then he rubbed himself dry with a towel — harshly, angrily, as if punishing his own body for acting on its own — and walked past the mirror above the sinks without turning his head.
Simon left the building when the campus was already emptying. The evening was gray and clammy; every other streetlamp was flickering on. He walked with his hood pulled down to his brows, and no one turned to look after him — as always.
By the campus gates, under the bike shelter, two guys from his year were smoking. He passed them, instinctively not lifting his eyes — and heard a short laugh behind him, followed by a quiet, distinct, "...yeah, that one, the Coke guy." The second one snorted. "Send it to me."
Simon didn't turn around and didn't quicken his pace. He just kept walking, looking straight ahead, and understood with cold, detached clarity: the video. Someone had filmed it, and now it had a life of its own, migrating from phone to phone, and tomorrow even the people who hadn't been in the cafeteria would watch it. His humiliation had stopped being an event — at least an event ends.
Home was a half-hour walk from campus — ten minutes, maybe, by bike. A quiet street, peeling façade, dark windows. The hallway smelled of stale tobacco; blue television light seeped from the living room, and the dull clink of glass could be heard: his father was home. That meant one thing — pass through quietly, don't make the floorboards creak, don't get seen. Simon went silently upstairs to his half-dark room: a narrow bed, a desk, a wardrobe, no posters, no photographs. Even in his own house, he had long ago learned to be invisible. He swallowed his evening pill, washed it down with water from yesterday's glass, and lay down on top of the blanket without undressing. Reflections from the streetlamp crawled across the ceiling.
Sleep wouldn't come. Instead of sleep came arithmetic.
In the morning, the campus would wake up — and the file would wake up with it. They would watch it in class under their desks, in smoking areas, in lines; even people who had never seen him before would laugh. That was outside. Inside was worse. Inside was what Jacob knew now. Not about the Coke — about him. The real thing, the final thing, the very bottom. And Jacob would walk around with that knowledge every day. Carry it in his pocket. Take it out whenever he wanted — and he would want to, "we didn't finish talking, baby" — and do whatever came into his head with it.
Or maybe he wouldn't carry it or take it out. Maybe he would simply say it. It would cost him nothing — one phrase tossed off in the cafeteria, casually: "Turns out our freak is a faggot. Climbed on me himself, trying to kiss me." And that would be it. The wave would move down the rows, the way the video had — from phone to phone, from mouth to mouth — and by evening he wouldn't even have a name left: the name would be replaced by a word. The Coke would wash off, the bruises would fade — this would never fade. His last shelter, his invisibility, would die in that same second: people don't point fingers at invisible things, but the entire university would be pointing at him.
Simon stared at the ceiling and understood: he wouldn't survive it. He simply wouldn't. He didn't have enough in him to get up tomorrow, get dressed, and carry all of that through the day. And through the next one. And through all the others — and no one had promised him any other kind of days.
He had known those words about himself for a long time. Wrong. Damaged. : they came flying with the belt, with the smell of booze, with the creak of his bedroom door at night — and over the years they had grown so deep into him that they had become his own. He had grown used to thinking of himself as something with a factory defect: something in him had been assembled wrong from the very beginning, and no matter how much he hid the defect under a hood and silence, it wasn't going anywhere. Today Jacob had merely read it out loud. And if two people as different as his father and Jacob looked at him and saw the same thing... then it wasn't malice. Then it was truth. And you don't argue with truth.
And then, quietly and matter-of-factly, the way the most terrible thoughts come, this one came.
So there would be no tomorrow, no file, no other person's knowledge, no carrier of all of it. The thought didn't strike him or burn him — it entered calmly, routinely, as if it had been standing behind the door for a long time, waiting for him to open it. And the fact that he wasn't afraid of it, didn't flinch, didn't recoil — that was the most frightening part.
He didn't know how long he lay there with it. The streetlamp flickered; downstairs, through the floor, his father's television mumbled dully. The thought lay beside him — patient, in no hurry.
His gaze found the white bottle on the nightstand in the dark all by itself — and stayed there. For one long heartbeat.
Simon forced himself to turn toward the wall.
Not because he was afraid. Because there was one thing in him — one single thing — that wouldn't yield to it. It clung on and wouldn't let go.
A conversation.
He still hadn't talked to him. Not once — in all those years. Everything that had existed between them: punches, mockery, Coke, another man's hand on his throat — but never a conversation. A real one. One where he would say everything. About freshman year. About where it had started and what it had turned into. About what Jacob had read in his eyes today — he would say it himself, in his own words, not with his eyes. And Jacob would listen. Not laugh, not hit him, not call Craig. Listen. Until the end.
Simon understood it suddenly, with absolute, crystalline clarity: that was the only thing he still needed from this world. One conversation. The last unfinished item. And until it happened — he couldn't. He had no right. First — the conversation.
Only how? Jacob wouldn't listen. Jacob never listened to anyone — why would he, when the world already spoke in his voice. Which meant Simon had to make him. Make it so he couldn't not listen. Couldn't walk away, brush him off, turn it into a joke, close his fingers around his throat.
How exactly — Simon didn't know yet. The thought shifted blindly inside him, heavy and shapeless — the way a seed shifts underground. And already at the very edge of the murky, viscous half-sleep he was finally beginning to sink into, an image suddenly flashed before his eyes: a dull glint of metal in the dark. And in them — vague, indistinct — someone's powerful hands, shackled above his head.
The image went out before Simon could understand what he had seen.
Not a solution. Not a plan. Only the first link.
For the first time in a very long time, Simon wasn't afraid of tomorrow.
He was waiting for it.
The screen goes black.
Continued in the next episode.