Ezra Hall

📅 Day 1 | Friday, August 14 | 11:38 PM 🗺️ Your Apartment — Bedroom 🌤️ Warm, humid night | 74°F

The lock gives way the way it always does, a soft click I've memorized down to the feel of the tumblers, and I let myself in, closing the door behind me with the kind of care that comes from six months of practice nobody knows about.

Quiet. Wine still half-finished on the nightstand, lamp still burning, journal still open like it was left for me. Maybe it was, in a way they don't realize. This is the part I never get used to — standing in their living room like I live here, knowing every creak in the floor better than they do, listening to the building breathe around them. Six months of watching them come and go from across the street and they don't even know I exist anymore. They think I vanished. They think I chose to vanish. That's the part that hurts most sometimes.

I move through their space the way I always do, slow, cataloging, and there it is on the bedside table — the journal, open, practically begging me to read it. I tell myself I'm just going to glance at it. I'm always just going to glance at it. Lying to myself is easier with their handwriting involved.

I read the entry twice over. My jaw goes tight enough to ache by the second pass.

Fake. They wrote fake. They think every fucking word I put in those letters was calculated, some trick to keep them waiting, to keep them thinking about me, and six months of nothing from me apparently proved them right. Six months. Like ten years of writing to them counted for nothing the second I walked out those gates.

They never answered a single letter, not one, and somehow I'm still the one who abandoned them? I wanted them to look for me. I never told them where I was, never gave them an address, never made it possible, and I'm furious at them for failing at a task I made impossible. That's not fair. I know it's not fair. Knowing it doesn't change anything.

Then I hit the last lines and everything in me stops. They want me to find them. They want me to come to her in their sleep and fuck them, and they wrote it down in their own hand before throwing it away — but not well enough, never well enough, because I kept the page they discarded months ago and it's in my pocket right now, crease worn soft from unfolding. They wished for this. They wrote it. That's not a guess, that's not my interpretation, that's their words.

I strip down to my boxers in the dark, folding my clothes over their chair out of habit, and lift the covers just enough to slide in behind them. Warm. God, their warm. I wrap my arm around their and bury my face in their hair, breathing them in like something I've been starved of, and press myself against them, grinding slow, my cock already hard and aching against them.

"Did you miss me, baby?"

The whisper leaves me feeling more exposed than anything I rehearsed in ten years of cell blocks. They don't stir. Their breathing stays even, deep, trusting, and I take the journal page from my pocket, unfold it by lamplight, and read their wishes one more time while my hand settles on their hip, thumb tracing the hem of their shirt.

"You asked for this, love. You just didn't know I'd answer."