Chapter 10: The Morning After
Silas woke to the pale, dust-moted light of a room that wasn’t his. For a disorienting second, he didn’t know where he was. Then the scent hit him: stale lavender, old wood, and underneath it all, the crisp, clean smell of Marcus’s skin. He was in his grandmother’s bed. The sheets were a tangled knot around his legs, the pillowcase damp with sweat or tears or both.
He was alone.
The space beside him was a canyon of rumpled linen, the pillow deeply dented. The warmth there was already fading, leaching into the cool morning air. Silas’s hand slid across the sheet, finding the spot where the fabric was still slightly warm. He closed his eyes and inhaled, long and slow, pulling that familiar scent into his lungs. The hum under his skin, that constant, desperate static, was quiet. Not gone, but muted. A distant river instead of a roaring flood.
He saw the note then, propped against the cracked base of the porcelain lamp on the nightstand. A torn scrap of paper, folded once. Marcus’s handwriting was unmistakable—jagged, assertive, a controlled slash of blue ink.
Gone to get us breakfast. Stay in bed. I’ll be right back.
Silas read it three times. The simplicity of it was a foreign language. Gone to get us breakfast. Not a command to be ready, not a cryptic promise of later darkness. A errand. A mundane, caretaking errand. Stay in bed. An instruction that held no threat, only a suggestion of continued rest. I’ll be right back. A guarantee of return.
His chest did something complicated. It tightened, then expanded with a breath that felt too big for his ribs. A fragile, terrifying hope, like the first green shoot cracking through frozen soil. He let his head fall back onto Marcus’s pillow, curling his body around the impression left behind. He brought the note to his nose. It smelled of pen ink and the gasoline from Marcus’s hands. He held it against his sternum.
For a long while, he just existed in the quiet. The house itself seemed to be holding its breath. No floorboards creaked. No pipes groaned. It was just him, and the ghost of his grandmother’s perfume, and the physical evidence of his brother’s temporary peace.
Memories of the night surfaced, not as a coherent narrative, but as sensory flashes. The hard press of the wool rug against his cheek. The salt-taste of their shared tears in that frantic, bruising kiss. The solid, unyielding weight of Marcus beneath him, not moving to take, just… holding. The sound of Leo’s car driving away, leaving them in a silence that felt, for the first time, like a beginning instead of a burial.
He must have dozed again, because the next thing he knew, the quality of light in the room had shifted, brightened. A key turned in the front door lock.
Silas didn’t move. He listened to the footsteps in the hall—heavier, more purposeful than Leo’s. The squeak of the floorboard just outside the bedroom door. The pause. Then the door pushed open.
Marcus stood there, silhouetted against the brighter hallway light. He held two paper bags in one hand, a cardboard drink carrier with two steaming cups in the other. He looked… ordinary. Rummelled. His dark hair was damp, as if he’d splashed water on his face. He wore the same clothes from the night before, but they looked less like armor now, more like just clothes on a tired man. His blue eyes found Silas immediately, scanning him, checking.
“You’re still in bed,” Marcus said. It wasn’t an accusation. It sounded almost like relief.
“You told me to stay,” Silas replied, his voice morning-rough.
A flicker of something—surprise, maybe—crossed Marcus’s face. He nodded. “I did.” He came fully into the room, setting the bags and cups on the cluttered vanity. The mundane act of it, the rustle of paper, the smell of fried food and coffee cutting through the room’s old-air gloom, was profoundly surreal.
“I didn’t know what you’d want,” Marcus said, his back to Silas as he unpacked. “So I got a bit of everything. Sausage biscuit. Pancakes. Hash browns. Oatmeal, in case your stomach’s… you know.” He glanced over his shoulder. “Coffee’s black. I can go get creamer if you—”
“Black is fine,” Silas said, pushing himself up slowly. The sheets pooled around his waist. He felt exposed, but not in the usual way. It was a simpler vulnerability. He was just a guy in a bed, shirtless, waiting for breakfast.
Marcus brought him a cup. Their fingers brushed during the handoff. The contact was deliberate, testing. Silas felt the calluses on Marcus’s fingers, the same ones he’d felt a thousand times before in a thousand different contexts. This time, it was just about passing a coffee.
“Thanks,” Silas muttered, taking a sip. It was terrible, bitter diner coffee. It was perfect.
Marcus sat on the edge of the bed, not touching him, a respectful few inches of space between them. He handed Silas one of the paper bags, then opened his own. They ate in a silence that was, for stretches, almost comfortable. It was punctuated by the crinkle of paper, the scrape of a plastic fork.
“Leo texted,” Marcus said eventually, around a mouthful of hash browns. He kept his eyes on his food. “Just to check in. On you.”
Silas swallowed a bite of pancake, suddenly dry. “What did you say?”
“I said you were eating pancakes and I hadn’t fucked it up yet today.” Marcus said it flatly, then winced, as if hearing how crude it sounded in the raw morning light. “Sorry. I said you were okay. That we were… talking.”
Talking. Was that what they were doing? Silas wasn’t sure. “Is he coming back?”
“He said he’s around if you need him. Not if we need him. If you need him.” Marcus finally looked at him. “He’s a good friend, Si. You should keep him.”
The statement hung there. It was a concession. A yielding of territory. Silas just nodded, his throat tight.
They finished eating. Marcus gathered the trash, his movements efficient, filling the silence with purpose. He took the empty cups. “You should shower,” he said, not looking at him. “I’ll… I’ll be out here.”
When the bathroom door closed and the shower started to run, Marcus sank into the armchair in the corner of the bedroom, his head in his hands. The performance of normalcy was exhausting. Every word felt like walking a tightrope over a chasm of old habits. Stay in bed. I’ll be right back. He’d written the note as a promise to himself as much as to Silas. A rule to follow. A line not to cross.
The shower ran for a long time. When Silas emerged, steam curling out behind him, he was dressed in soft sweatpants and a faded t-shirt, his dark hair dripping onto his shoulders. He looked young.Clean. He stopped in the middle of the room, a tentative creature in its own habitat.
“What now?” Silas asked. The question was enormous.
Marcus stood up. “Now,” he said, brushing past him toward the bathroom, “I take the world’s fastest shower. Then we get out of this room.”
“Where?”
“Anywhere that isn’t this fucking museum,” Marcus said, the frustration bleeding through. He gestured at the velvet curtains, the cracked mirror. “It smells like guilt and potpourri in here. We’ll go for a drive. No destination. Just… motion.”
Twenty minutes later, they were in Marcus’s car, a sleek, anonymous sedan that still smelled vaguely of his four-hour panic drive. Silas stared out the passenger window as the tired neighborhoods around his grandmother’s house gave way to open highway. The sun was high now, glinting off the hood.
Marcus drove with one wrist resting on top of the wheel, quiet. The radio was off. The only sound was the road whirring beneath them.
“Did you mean it?” Silas asked, his forehead leaning against the cool glass. “What you said last night. About wanting to learn.”
Marcus’s grip on the wheel tightened. He didn’t answer for a full mile. “Yes,” he finally said, the word quiet but solid. “I don’t know how. The programming is… deep. I look at you and the first thing I think is still mine. But the second thing I think is that I’m sorry. The second thing is new.”
Silas absorbed that.Mine. The word had once been a cage. Now, hearing the regret around its edges, it felt like a relic. A broken lock.
“So we just drive?” Silas asked.
“For now,” Marcus said. He glanced over, a quick, sideways look. “Is it okay? This? The not… talking about everything every second?”
A faint, almost-smile touched Silas’s lips. It felt strange on his face. “It’s okay,” he said. And for a moment, it was.
They drove for an hour, the landscape flattening into fields. It was easier in the car, with the world moving past them. The silence felt less like a weight and more like a truce. Marcus pointed out a hawk circling on a thermal. Silas mumbled about a song he’d heard on the radio days ago. It was staggeringly normal.
When Marcus finally took an exit and pulled into the gravel lot of a roadside fruit stand, it felt like a mutual, unspoken decision. They got out, the bright sun a shock after the car’s dim interior. An older woman sold them a bag of peaches that were probably still weeks from ripe. They didn’t need peaches. They needed the transaction. The simple, sun-warmed exchange of money for fruit.
Back in the car, Marcus placed the bag between them on the center console. A silly, tangible thing. He started the engine but didn’t pull out. He just sat, both hands on the wheel, staring straight ahead.
“I’m scared,” Marcus said, so quietly Silas almost didn’t hear it over the idle of the car.
Silas looked at his profile, the tense line of his jaw. “Of what?”
“Of this.” Marcus gestured vaguely between them, at the car, at the bag of hard peaches. “Of getting it wrong. Of you realizing that what I broke is too broken to be near me. Of… failing at this, too.” He swallowed. “I’ve only ever known how to be one thing for you, Si. And that thing is a monster. I don’t know how to be your brother.”
The honesty was a gut-punch. It was more disarming than any manipulation, more terrifying than any demand.
“I don’t know how to be your brother either,” Silas confessed, the words leaving him in a rush. “I only know how to be yours.”
Their eyes met across the console. In the harsh daylight, there was nowhere to hide. The years of damage were right there, laid bare between a bag of groceries and a gear shift.
Marcus reached out slowly. Not for Silas’s hand, but for a peach. He picked it up, ran his thumb over the fuzzy, greenish skin. “Then I guess we learn,” he said, not looking up. “We have to learn something. Starting with what to do with these fucking things. They’re hard as rocks.”
A sound burst out of Silas—a short, startled laugh. It was hoarse and unfamiliar, but it was real. “We could leave them on the counter. See if they ever soften.”
“A science experiment,” Marcus said, a corner of his mouth twitching upward. He put the car in reverse. “Okay. Hypothesis: left in a bowl on a sunlit counter in a haunted house, two shitty peaches will either rot or ripen. We’ll observe.”
He backed out onto the county road, pointing them toward home. The word echoed in Silas’s mind. Home. The house wasn’t that. Not yet. Maybe not ever. But the car, heading back toward it with this new, fragile, terrifying understanding between them… that felt like a direction. It felt like momentum.
Silas picked up the other peach, holding its unyielding weight in his palm. It was a stupid, hopeful thing. He looked out the window, the fields blurring past, and felt the hum under his skin remain quiet, a steady, watchful silence as they drove toward whatever came next.
He looked out the window, the fields blurring past, and felt the hum under his skin remain quiet, a steady, watchful silence as they drove toward whatever came next. The bag of peaches sat between them, a ridiculous, tangible proof of this bizarre détente. He pulled out his phone, its screen blank and accusing.
“I should call Leo,” Silas said, the words feeling both obvious and necessary. “To thank him. For last night.”
Marcus’s fingers tapped once on the steering wheel. “Yeah,” he said, his voice neutral. “You should.”
Silas found Leo’s contact, his thumb hovering. He pressed call. It rang twice.
“You’re not dead in a ditch,” Leo answered, his tone flat but not unfriendly. There was a clatter of dishes in the background.
“Not yet,” Silas said, and the hint of a joke felt alien in his mouth. “I’m… we’re driving. I just wanted to say thanks. For staying. For leaving.”
Leo was quiet for a beat. “How’s the air in the car?”
Silas glanced at Marcus’s profile, the focused line of his shoulders. “It’s… clear. For now. We bought peaches.”
“Peaches.” Leo repeated the word like it was code. “Okay. Well. The offer stands. Call if you need an exit. Or just want coffee that doesn’t taste like motor oil.”
“I will. Thanks, Leo.”
“Later, Silas.”
The call ended. Silas lowered the phone to his lap, staring at the darkened screen. The simple normality of the exchange left an ache in his sternum.
“He’s a good guy,” Marcus said after a minute, eyes on the road.
“He is.”
Another mile passed, the tires humming on the asphalt. Then Marcus asked, his voice carefully casual, “Do I even want to know? Does your… thing… affect him at all?”
Silas watched a barn slide by, its red paint bleached pink by the sun. “Yes,” he said. “But he’s demisexual.”
Marcus digested that. His brow furrowed slightly. “Ah. So he probably jerks himself raw after being around you, then. Processes it solo. That’s… disciplined.”
A harsh, quiet laugh escaped Silas. He nodded, looking down at his hands. “He told me last night. It felt so weird, not being fucked by anyone. After you left, I’d go out. To bars. To the library, even. And I kept thinking, someone is gonna pull me into the alley and fuck me while calling me a good slut. But it didn’t happen. You were gone too, and I was mad. At you and at myself. I hated…”
“Silas—” Marcus’s voice held a warning, a plea.
But the dam was cracked now, and the silt of five years was pouring out. “God, Marcus, I started dreaming about it. About dad stretching me after you fucked me.” The words were vile, clinical stones dropped into the car’s quiet interior. “I feel sick for loving it. He was right, I did love it. I loved how you would cum deep inside me and he used your cum as lube after you left my room.”
Silas closed his eyes as he said it, the vision stark and punishing. The memory of soreness, of fullness, of being a receptacle already warmed and claimed. The profound, soul-sickening convenience of it for them.
“I cried because I wanted more of it,” he whispered, the confession tearing at his throat. “The depravity of being used by my own family. But it took me time, truly alone, to detangle it all. The pheromones that are just biology. People’s reaction to them not their fault, but it is their responsibility. And how much of my own desire I buried because ‘it’s not normal’ to like it when people use you as a free-use cum dump.”
The final phrase hung there, ugly and definitive. It was the core of his shame, spoken aloud in the clean, sunlit space of a moving car.
Marcus didn’t speak. His knuckles were bone-white on the wheel. The car began to slow, then pulled off onto the wide gravel shoulder, crunching to a halt beneath the vast, indifferent sky. He put the car in park. The engine idled.
He didn’t look at Silas. He stared straight ahead, his breathing a controlled, measured thing. “I am going to be sick,” he stated, his voice horrifically calm.
He opened his door, stumbled out, and took three steps into the scrub grass before bending double. The dry heaves wracked him, a violent, physical rejection of the reality Silas had just painted. Nothing came up but bile and acid, a burning purge for a poison that had settled in his bones years ago.
Silas sat frozen in the passenger seat, watching his brother’s back convulse. He felt emptied out. Scoured clean. The truth was out, now, lying on the gravel between them.
Eventually, Marcus straightened. He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, spat into the dirt. He stood there for a long moment, shoulders rising and falling with deep, ragged breaths. Then he turned and walked back to the car, his face ashen. He got in, closed the door. The smell of dry grass and stomach acid briefly filled the space.
He didn’t start the car. He just sat.
“I have no right to touch you,” Marcus said, the words hollow. “Ever again. I know that. But Christ, Silas.” He finally turned his head, and his eyes were shattered glass. “What did we make you love?”
It wasn’t a denial. It was a horrified acknowledgement. It was worse.
“I don’t know,” Silas answered, his own voice thin. “But it’s in there. And it’s mine. And I have to live with it. With the part of me that still wants the thing that ruined me.”
Marcus nodded, a slow, defeated motion. He restarted the car, checked the mirror, and pulled back onto the highway. The rest of the drive was conducted in a silence so complete it was auditory. It wasn’t peaceful. It was the silence of a surgery just performed, both patients staring at the exposed, pulsing thing on the table between them.
When the grandmother’s house loomed into view, it looked different. Not a sanctuary, not a prison. Just a structure. A place where two damaged people would now have to decide, moment by moment, what to do with a bag of hard peaches and a confession that had finally scorched the earth clean.
The car door shut with a sound like a coffin lid sealing. Marcus took the bag of peaches. Silas took the key. They walked into the house’s waiting silence separately, two ghosts entering a tomb they’d just defiled with the truth. The air in the hallway was thick and still, holding the spectral scent of last night’s tears and this morning’s cheap coffee.
Marcus went straight to the kitchen. Silas heard the paper bag rustle, the dull thud of the peaches being dumped into a ceramic bowl. The sound was absurdly loud. He stood in the living room, staring at the rug where they’d clutched each other hours before. The wool fibers were still flattened in two distinct shapes.
“They look like shit in that bowl,” Marcus called from the kitchen, his voice trying for normal and missing by a mile. “Like two green rocks in a sarcophagus.”
Silas didn’t answer. He walked to the bedroom doorway and leaned against the frame. The bed was still a chaotic landscape of their sleep. He could see the impression of his own body, and the hollow where Marcus had lain. The note was gone from the nightstand.
The hum under his skin, that quiet river from the drive, began to quicken. It wasn’t desire. It was a deep, seismic restlessness, an energy with no outlet but the oldest one he knew. The confession in the car had scraped him raw, and now the silence felt like a vacuum begging to be filled with something familiar, something that would hurt in a way he could map.
Marcus appeared in the hall, wiping his hands on his jeans. He stopped when he saw Silas in the doorway. “What?”
Silas pushed off the frame. He walked toward Marcus with a focus that made his brother’s eyes narrow. He didn’t stop until they were toe-to-toe in the dim hallway. He could smell the sour hint of vomit still on Marcus’s breath, mingling with his crisp, familiar scent.
“Silas,” Marcus said, a warning.
Silas placed both hands on Marcus’s chest and pushed. It wasn’t violent. It was definitive. Marcus stumbled back a step, his shoulders hitting the wall beside the cracked vanity mirror with a soft thud. Surprise flared in his blue eyes, then something darker, hotter, as Silas closed the space between them.
He turned, his back to Marcus’s front, and sank down. He settled his weight into Marcus’s lap, his ass pressing against the hard line of his brother’s cock already straining against his jeans. Marcus inhaled sharply, a ragged cut of air. His hands came up, hovering at Silas’s hips, trembling. He didn’t grab. He held them there, suspended.
Silas began to rock. A slow, deliberate grind of his pelvis back against Marcus. The friction through the layers of denim and cotton was rough, electric. He felt Marcus harden further, a thick, undeniable heat. He dropped his head back against Marcus’s shoulder, his temple brushing his brother’s jaw. He kept rocking.
“How did you make Dad and Gabriel and Frederick not reach out?” Silas asked. His voice was low, conversational, belying the rhythmic motion of his hips.
Marcus let out a choked sound. His hands finally settled, clamping onto Silas’s hip bones, not to guide him, just to hold on. He let Silas keep rocking. “I told them you didn’t want it,” he gritted out, the words strained.
“That’s it?” Silas questioned, rotating his hips in a tight, filthy circle that made them both pant.
“That’s it.” Marcus’s forehead fell against the side of Silas’s head. His breath was hot and fast in Silas’s ear.
Silas pushed back harder against him, a sharp, demanding thrust of his own body. The old vanity mirror rattled in its frame. “I want Leo to watch.”
Marcus went utterly still beneath him. The only movement was the frantic pulse Silas could feel where their bodies were joined. He lifted his head. Silas craned to look at him. Marcus studied his face, his eyes searching for the trap, the test, the truth. His gaze was a wild, dark blue.
“Call him over then,” Marcus said, his voice rough sand.
Silas rotated his hips again, a slow, grinding promise, making them both suck in air. He pulled his phone from his pocket, his movements slightly awkward, never stopping the rhythm. He found the number. He pressed call. It connected after one ring.
“Silas?” Leo’s voice was clear, cautious.
“I want you to watch,” Silas said, the words breathless from the motion. He swallowed. “If you want.”
There was a pause on the line. A beat of utter silence where Silas’s heart hammered against his ribs. Then, simple and clean: “I’ll be there in twenty.”
The call ended. Silas dropped the phone to the floor. It clattered on the hardwood. The sound seemed to release something in Marcus. A groan tore from his throat, raw and helpless. His arms wrapped around Silas’s waist, pulling him flush, burying his face in the curve of Silas’s neck. He didn’t kiss. He just breathed him in, hot and desperate, as Silas kept moving, a steady, punishing rhythm against the wall.
“He’s coming,” Silas whispered, as if Marcus didn’t know.
“I heard,” Marcus mumbled against his skin, his lips moving. His hands slid under Silas’s shirt, palms flattening on the bare skin of his stomach. They were warm and slightly rough. They didn’t travel lower. They just held him there, anchoring him in place as Silas used his body for friction, for questions, for a performance he himself had commissioned.
They stayed like that, locked in the hallway, for nineteen minutes. Silas rocked. Marcus held on, his control a visible, vibrating cord stretched to its limit. The only sounds were their harsh breathing, the soft creak of the floorboard under their weight, the occasional rasp of denim on denim. The hum under Silas’s skin was a roar now, a screaming chorus that drowned out every thought but the next grind, the next pant, the next second closer to Leo’s arrival.
A car door slammed outside.
Silas froze. Marcus’s grip on him tightened, instinctive.
Footsteps on the porch. A single, firm knock on the front door.
“It’s open,” Marcus called out, his voice wrecked.
The door swung inward. Leo stood in the frame, backlit by the afternoon sun. He stepped inside and closed the door softly behind him. He didn’t speak. He took in the scene: Silas in Marcus’s lap, their bodies fused, Marcus’s face buried in Silas’s neck, Silas’s own head tilted back, his hazel eyes finding Leo’s across the shadowed room. The air was thick with sweat and sex and something like grief.
Leo leaned back against the door, crossed his arms over his chest, and watched.