Chapter 2: The Late-Night Confession
The loon’s cry was a lonely punch through the dark. I finished the beer, the bottle empty as I felt. Inside, the cabin was quiet, just the hum of the ancient refrigerator. A faint orange glow pulsed from the stone fireplace in the living area. Chris had lit a fire.
I stood in the doorway, watching the flames paint shadows on the exposed wood walls. He was on the worn leather sofa, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees, staring into the embers. The firelight played over the contours of his back, the defined channels of muscle that framed his spine, the wings of his shoulder blades. He’d pulled on a pair of grey sweatpants, but his chest was still bare.
He didn’t turn. “Decided to risk the bears?”
“Seemed warmer in here.” I moved to the opposite armchair, its leather cool and cracked. The heat from the fire was a palpable blanket. “Couldn’t sleep?”
“Mind’s buzzing.” He poked at a log with an iron rod, sending a shower of sparks upward. “Happens sometimes. Out here, it’s like your brain finally gets a signal and remembers how to think all its thoughts at once.”
I knew that feeling. It was the feeling I’d been avoiding for months by collapsing into dreamless exhaustion. “Yeah.”
The silence stretched, comfortable but charged, like the air before a summer storm. The fire popped. I watched him, the steady rise and fall of his ribs. The question was there, a live wire in my throat. I took a breath, and it just came out, quieter than I’d intended. “Was it always there?”
He still didn’t look at me, but his shoulders relaxed a fraction, as if he’d been waiting for it. “The attraction?” He shrugged. “In the background. Like a song playing in another room. You don’t really hear the words, but you feel the bass. Sometimes.”
“And you just… never said anything.” The image of our younger selves, stupid and invincible in the college gym, flashed behind my eyes. All those years.
“What was I gonna say, Ben? ‘Hey, man, great set. Also, I occasionally check out the quarterback’s ass?’” He finally glanced over, a wry twist to his mouth. “It wasn’t the time. Wasn’t my story yet. I had a wife. I had a script. You learn to mute that channel.”
“But you couldn’t mute it forever.”
“No.” He sat back, the leather sighing. He ran a hand through his messy hair. “The divorce… it didn’t just end a marriage. It torched the whole script. Burned it down to blank paper. And once the smoke cleared, I looked at that empty page and thought, what do I actually want to write? Not what I’m supposed to.”
The raw honesty of it was disarming. This was the Chris I knew—direct, analytical, unflinching—but turned inward on a truth he’d never shared. “So you wrote ‘Elliot’.”
A genuine smile touched his lips. “For now. It’s not a manifesto. I’m not joining a parade. I’m just… following a feeling. Seeing where it goes.”
I stared into the fire, the flames making my eyes water. “What’s the feeling?”
He was quiet for so long I thought he might not answer. When he spoke, his voice was low, measured. “It’s curiosity. It’s… a different kind of familiarity. You know how with women, there’s always this… dance? This whole layer of mystery, which is great, it’s intoxicating. But with a guy…” He gestured vaguely, searching for the words. “It’s like speaking the same native language. You skip the subtitles. There’s a physical logic to it. You know what generally feels good, because you have the same equipment.”
The clinical phrasing should have made it easier. It didn’t. It made it more concrete. My mouth was dry. “So it’s just… practicality?”
Chris laughed, a short, surprised burst of sound. “Hell no. It’s not just anything. It’s… intensity. Less guessing. More…” He trailed off, his eyes reflecting the fire. “Look, I’m not giving up women. That’s not what this is. Ellie, this girl I’ve been seeing on the side, she’s incredible. This is just an ‘and’, not an ‘instead of’. It’s opening another window in the house. Lets in a different light.”
An ‘and’. The word expanded in the space between us, vast and simple.
I found myself asking the thing I had no business asking, the words leaving me like a confession. “And the appeal? Physically. What’s…”
I couldn’t finish. Chris watched me, his green eyes sharp in the flickering light. He understood the mangled question.
“Honestly?” he said, his tone softening, losing its lecture-hall quality. “It’s the strength. The… parity. There’s no assumed fragility. It’s two engines built roughly the same way, built to take a certain amount of force. You can push without that little voice in the back of your head worrying you’ll break something. It’s a different kind of power exchange. Cleaner, in a way.”
Force. Power exchange. The terms were from our world, the gym world. The language of effort and limits. He’d translated it into this new context, and somehow, that made it feel less alien. More plausible.
The fire was dying down, collapsing into a bed of pulsating coals. The room was warmer, the shadows deeper.
Chris stood up, his silhouette towering between me and the fire. “I’m gonna hit the sack for real this time. Don’t stay up all night thinking, Ben. It’s not a puzzle you need to solve. It’s just my life.”
He moved past my chair. For a second, his hand came down, squeezed my shoulder. It was a familiar gesture, one he’d done a thousand times after a hard workout or when I was stressed about work. A bolt of solid, comforting pressure.
But tonight, on my bare skin, with his words still hanging in the air, it felt like a brand. My muscles tensed under his grip. He felt it. His hand lingered for a heartbeat longer than usual before he released me and walked toward the hall.
“Night,” he said, not looking back.
“Night,” I managed.
I listened to his footsteps recede, the creak of the bedroom door, the final click of it closing. The cabin was silent except for the slow crackle of dying embers.
I sat in the chair, the ghost of his grip still warming my shoulder. My mind wasn’t buzzing. It was perfectly, terrifyingly clear. It wasn’t his life I was trying to solve.
It was the sudden, vertiginous realization that for the first time in fifteen years, I was desperately curious about the details. Not in an abstract way. I wanted the specifics. The mechanics of that parity. The texture of that different light.
And that wanting, solid and hot in my chest, felt like the most profound betrayal of every single thing I thought I knew.