Chapter 4: Breakfast Aftermath
The smell of coffee hit me before I even reached the kitchen. It was a small mercy. It meant he was up, and I wouldn’t have to linger alone with the memory of last night staring back at me from every shadow.
He was at the rustic wooden table, one long leg stretched out, scrolling through his phone. Sunlight streamed through the window, catching the dust motes in the air and painting a bright bar across his sharp cheekbones. He looked up as I entered.His green eyes were clear, rested, knowing.
“Morning, Sleeping Beauty,” he said, his voice a low rasp. He took a slow sip from his mug, watching me over the rim.“Hey,” I managed, my own voice sounding rough. I beelined for the coffee pot, a desperate need for something to do with my hands. “You’re up early.”
“Could say the same about you last night.”
The carafe nearly slipped from my grip. I poured the coffee, the dark liquid sloshing dangerously close to the rim. “What?”
He set his mug down with a soft click.“Floorboards. This old place creaks like a haunted ship.Heard you pacing.” He paused, and the silence stretched, thin and brittle. “Sounded like you had a lot on your mind.”
I kept my back to him, stirring sugar into my coffee with unnecessary force.My face was on fire.He’d heard me pacing. Had he heard the rest?The ragged breathing?The final, silent collapse against the door? The possibility was a live wire in my chest.“Yeah,” I said finally, turning. I leaned against the counter, the cool laminate a grounding pressure.“Just… weird night. Not sleeping great lately.”
“The baby will do that,” he said, but his tone lacked the usual commiseration.It was flat, observational. He leaned back in his chair, and his t-shirt rode up, just an inch, exposing the defined lines of his lower abdomen.A deliberate motion.A show. My eyes tracked it before I could stop them, the memory of those same ridges in the firelight flooding back, visceral and unwanted.I took a gulp of scalding coffee to cover my reaction. It burned all the way down.
“Thought we could go for a swim,” he said casually, as if suggesting another beer.“Lake’s like glass right now. Before the motorboats ruin it.”
A swim.An activity.Something normal.Something to wash the filth of last night away. “Sure,” I said, too quickly. “Sounds good.”
We changed in silence, him in his room, me in mine.Pulling on my board shorts felt like preparing for battle. When we met back in the living room, he was just in his trunks, a towel slung over his shoulder. The morning light sculpted his body, that lean, swimmer’s frame all taut muscle and sinew.He was a statue of calm anticipation.
The path to the dock was damp with dew, the pine needles soft underfoot. The lake was breathtaking, a vast, mirror-like expanse of deep blue reflecting the perfect sky.It was so still it felt like a held breath.
Chris dropped his towel on the sun-warmed planks of the dock.He didn’t test the water. He just walked to the end and dove, a clean, sharp incision into the silence. He surfaced a moment later, shaking the water from his hair, slicking it back. “Jesus, it’s cold,” he called, but he was grinning.“Get in. The shock’s good for you.”
I stood at the edge, my toes curling over the rough wood. The clarity of the water was deceptive; I could see the dark, weed-strewn bottom sloping away into nothingness. My heart hammered.It wasn’t the cold I was afraid of.
“You gonna stare at it all day?” Chris treaded water, waiting.I dove.
The cold was a physical blow, a stunning, heart-stopping vise that squeezed the air from my lungs and shocked every thought from my head. For a second, there was only the shocking clarity of the water and the frantic need for air. I burst to the surface, gasping.
Chris laughed, a real, full-throated sound that echoed over the water. “Told you!”
We swam, at first with purpose, laps from the dock to the buoy and back. The work was good, the burn in my muscles a clean, welcome pain.But eventually, the rhythm slowed. We floated on our backs, the world reduced to the vast, silent sky and the gentle lap of water against our ears.
“It’s different out here,” Chris said, his voice quiet beside me.“Everything sounds louder at night. In a house like that.Every sigh.”
I didn’t answer. I just kept staring at the seamless blue above.
“When I first figured stuff out,” he continued, as if discussing the weather, “after the divorce, I’d lie awake and think about all the nights I’d spent in that house, next to her, wanting something else. The silence felt like it was screaming.” He turned his head in the water to look at me.“You ever feel like that? Like you’re screaming inside a soundproof box?”
The question hung between us, bobbing on the gentle surface of the lake.I rolled upright, treading water.He did the same. We faced each other, a few feet apart, the deep, unknowable water beneath us. Drops beaded on his shoulders, on the defined plane of his chest. His eyes were unguarded, waiting.
Last night’s shame curdled in my stomach, but beneath it was something else, a raw, terrifying honesty, pulled to the surface by the cold, clean water and the vast, empty sky.
“Yeah,” I said, the word leaving me like a stone dropped into the lake. “I think I do.”
He didn’t smile.He didn’t look away. He just nodded, slowly, as if I’d confirmed something he already knew. “The box is only soundproof if you let it be, Ben.”
He pushed off then, swimming with smooth, powerful strokes toward the dock, leaving me alone in the deep, silent center of everything. The weight of the water, the weight of his words, the weight of all the unsaid things—it all pressed down, and for the first time, I didn’t feel like fighting to stay afloat. I felt like letting it pull me under, just to see what was waiting in the dark below.