His back met the lockers before Simon understood he was flying.
The metal answered with a booming, rattling crash that ricocheted through the empty locker room and refused to die down for a long time. The back of his head struck the door; pain lashed up from his shoulder blades to his neck, and for an instant his vision went dark. The towel slid from his hips — he snatched it back with one hand, the other groping along the smooth cold steel for something to hold on to. His bare feet skidded on the wet tile. For several endless seconds he simply tried to stay upright and breathe — dazed, his head ringing, his heart pounding somewhere up in his throat.
And then he looked up.
Jacob stood two steps away, exactly where he always stood — and something terrible was happening to his face. The lazy, drawn-out, almost tender game he had been playing this whole scene was sliding off him the way water slides off glass, and beneath it another face was surfacing — hard, petrified, the wings of his nose gone white and his eyes darkened to black. He looked at Simon as though seeing him for the first time in his life. And as though what he saw had no right to exist.
Because the game was his game. He set the rules in it — always, from the very first day. He decided when to come close and when to let go, when to strike and when to almost caress. And .
— What the fuck do you think you're doing? — His voice was quiet. Level. Almost calm. And that levelness made everything inside Simon go still far more than any shout could have.
— I… — his lips wouldn't obey. — Jacob, I didn't…
— You. Just now. Tried. To kiss. Me. — Jacob dropped each word separately, deliberately, as if driving nails. And then he broke — barked so hard the locker doors shuddered: — You fucking faggot, did you really just reach out to kiss me?!
Simon pressed himself into the metal with his whole body, as if he hoped to push through it with his back and disappear. His body reacted before his head did — by the old, domestic, fatherly schooling: freeze. Make yourself smaller. Don't look him in the eye, don't answer the fury, breathe every other breath. His shoulders crept up on their own, his chin down, his knees buckling, bracing to take the blow he was waiting for with every cell. He had held out under someone else's rage this way a thousand times, and a thousand times it had saved him. Somewhere at the very bottom a pitiful, childish hope still flickered: if he made himself small enough, quiet enough — the storm would pass him by.
— No… — he forced out. — I didn't mean to… it's not what you think…
— Say it again. — Jacob stepped closer, unhurried, as though he had eternity to spare. — "I didn't mean to." Go on. Out loud. I want to hear you lie to my face.
Simon fell silent. He had never known how to lie. Least of all to him.
Jacob closed the remaining distance in one step, and his palm settled onto Simon's throat.
It didn't strike — it settled, exactly that. Broad, hot, heavy, it wrapped almost the whole of his neck: the thumb found the little vein throbbing beneath the skin, the rest closing along the side, right at the nape. He wasn't really squeezing — air still passed, thin, with a whistle — he was holding. Weighing. Letting him feel with perfect clarity how easily this hand could close all the way, and savoring that it didn't.
And he held him — Simon realized this through his terror, by the sheer precision of the movement — with practiced ease. Skillfully. Just below the jaw, calculated exactly so that by tomorrow not a single mark would remain on the white skin.
Jacob moved in flush against him, pinning him to the lockers now not with his hand alone but with the whole of himself. His hot, solid, all but naked body pressed against Simon's wet one: chest to chest, a thigh wedged between his trembling legs, scalding skin against cooling, damp skin. One slipping towel and the thin fabric of the other's trunks were all that divided them, and the closeness of it was so deafening, so obscenely complete, that Simon's head began to swim. He hung between the palm on his throat and the body against him — pinned, crucified, unable to move — and with horror, with self-disgust, he felt that his head was swimming not from the lack of air alone.
— I thought you were just some fucking jerk, — Jacob said, leaning down to his very face. His breathing had turned heavy, loud; his nostrils flared. — A weird, twitchy, useless jerk. But it turns out you're a pervert on top of it. Did you really decide you were allowed? That I'd permit it? That I need… — he ran his gaze slowly, mockingly over everything he held pinned to the lockers, — …you?
The pulse under his thumb hammered — quick, small, choking, like a caught bird's. Jacob felt it with his whole palm, and from that feeling — another life beating in his hand, another's fear transmitting straight into his skin — a dull, viscous, leaden pleasure spread through his own veins. His breathing deepened. He felt good. The way he only felt in moments like this — when this boy trembled, broke, went faint under his hands — and neither Priscilla, nor the field, nor the roar of the stands gave anything even remotely like it. He didn't look too closely at that thought, as he never had. He simply stood and drank the other's terror — greedily, in gulps, the way you drink water after a long thirst. And forbade himself to notice that it wasn't only Simon whose breath had faltered here.
His gaze slid lower — over the tipped-back pale face, over the neck beneath his own palm, over the bare chest, over the shuddering ribs — and snagged on the bruises.
Up close they were even more distinct: a whole scatter of them across the white skin, fresh over fading, purple over yellow-green. His own Jacob recognized at once — these here, at the shoulder, a neat imprint of fingers. But the broad blotch on the ribs, heavy, with blurred edges, wasn't his. Craig. His signature — to hit with a follow-through, with his whole mass, never gauging his strength, because he has nothing to gauge it with.
Jacob looked at that other man's mark on this skin, and inside him, slowly, from below, an irritation rose — dull, inexplicable, mean. It wasn't pity: he didn't know how to pity and had no intention of learning. It was another feeling, far uglier and far less permissible, and he didn't stop to examine it. He simply moved his free hand — and pressed his fingers into the purple blotch. Unhurried. With pressure. Looking Simon in the eye.
Simon jerked with his whole body; a thin, strangled sound tore from his gripped throat.
— Craig? — Jacob asked, almost conversationally. And without waiting for an answer, he gave a slight tilt of his head: — He overdid it.
What that was — an appraisal, displeasure, — no one would have understood. Least of all himself.
— Jacob… — Simon rasped. — Please… it wasn't like that…
— Is that so. — Jacob bent lower, right to his ear, and his voice dropped, went quiet, insinuating, almost tender — and that tenderness was more frightening than the snarl. — But your eyes say otherwise, baby. Want me to tell you what they say? — His hot breath scorched Simon's temple. — That right now you're ready to get down on your knees for me. I'd only have to ask — and you would. Go on. Tell me I'm lying.
Simon squeezed his eyes shut. A tear crawled scalding down his cheek, and after it a second.
It was worse than a blow. Worse than the soda, worse than the laughter of a whole cafeteria, worse than everything that had been done to him over all these years. Because before, they had beaten him for who he wasn't — for being a freak, for being strange, for being an easy target. But now, for the first time, they had struck him with who he actually was. The most hidden, most shameful thing, the thing he hid even from his own reflection in the mirror, Jacob had dragged into the light with a single sentence — and now held on an open palm, examining it with cold curiosity, the way you examine something small caught under a glass.
And the most monstrous thing of all was that beneath the animal terror, beneath the shame that made him want to die on the spot, something else rang through him — thin, foul, treacherous — the thing he would not have confessed to a single living soul, and for which he hated himself more than Jacob, Craig, and his father combined. His throat remembered the weight of that palm with more than fear.
— How long? — Jacob asked suddenly. He drew back a little and studied his face now with a new expression — cold, tenacious, investigative. — How long have you been looking at me like this? A year? Two? — A pause, and quieter: — The whole time?
Simon didn't answer. No answer was needed: the silence said everything, down to the last day.
Something strange moved across Jacob's face — not a smile, but its shadow, crooked and dark. He was slowly taking in what he'd heard, and you could almost see the whole picture rearranging itself behind his darkened eyes: every past time, every dark supply closet, every hour this boy had stayed silent, endured, and obeyed — all of it looked different now. All this time. All this time what he'd had in his hands hadn't been just a toy.
The locker room door banged against the wall.
— Hey! What the hell is going on in here?!
The coach.
What happened next Simon remembered almost more sharply than all the rest. Jacob let go of him — didn't snatch his hand back like someone caught red-handed, but let go, precisely that: calmly, smoothly, carelessly, the way you set back on a shelf a thing you'd picked up to look at. He stepped back. And in the second it took him to turn toward the door, his face rearranged itself completely: the fury, the dark hunger, the crooked shadow — all of it wiped away without a trace, smoothed over, and it was the old Jacob already smiling at the coach. The golden boy. The captain. The pride of the department. An open gaze, a light annoyance at a trifling interruption, even breathing. Not a single muscle betrayed that three seconds earlier this same hand had been resting on someone's throat.
And that transformation truly horrified Simon — almost more than the minute before had. Because he suddenly understood, with full and final clarity: .
— Everything's fine, Coach, — Jacob said lightly. — We were just talking.
The coach shifted his heavy gaze from him to Simon — wet, pressed into the lockers, in a slipped towel, his hands shaking.
— Simon? Is that right?
The silence lasted a second. Telling the truth was impossible — and not even because they wouldn't believe him, though they wouldn't. But because the truth wasn't about Jacob. The truth was about himself — and it had just been spoken aloud in this very room.
Simon gave a barely perceptible nod.
— Get dressed and out. — The coach turned to Jacob. — And you — on the field. Now.
— On my way.
But Jacob didn't go right away. Unhurried, savoring it, he pulled his bag over, took out his kit, and began to dress — measured, calm, as though the room held neither a coach huffing irritably in the doorway, nor time itself, nor what had just happened. Shirt. Shorts. He sat down on the bench to lace his cleats — without hurry, in neat loops. In that demonstrative slowness lay the last, most vivid reminder: he was the one in charge here. Always him.
Passing Simon, he checked his step for a brief moment. He didn't touch him — that wasn't allowed now. He only leaned in, just enough for Simon alone to hear, and let fall in a low voice, almost tenderly:
— We're not finished, baby.
And he walked out. The door slammed shut behind him and the coach, cutting off the noise of the corridor.
The locker room went deaf. All that remained was dripping somewhere in the showers, the hum of pipes in the walls, and his own ragged breathing that would not, no matter what, even out. Simon stood, holding on to the lockers with his shoulder blades, because his legs refused to hold him on their own. His throat still remembered the stranger's palm — its weight, its heat, its terrible careless power — and he knew he would go on remembering it for a very, very long time.
The worst had happened. The secret he had buried inside himself for years, deeper than any bruise, now lay in someone else's hands.
And what Jacob would do with it next — Simon couldn't even bring himself to think about. Not yet.
The screen goes dark.
Continued in the next episode.