The dinner was a pantomime. James chewed his mother’s roast, tasted nothing, felt only the deep, tender throb Matt had left inside him. His father’s voice droned about market projections, but James heard only the echo of a whisper: *You remember who you are.* He shifted on the hard dining chair, and the secret ache flared—a compass point in a featureless sea of beige walls and expectation.

“James?” His mother’s voice cut through. “More potatoes?”

He looked at her, at the silver serving spoon poised over his plate. Her smile was a question. He saw the concern in the tightness around her eyes, the unspoken catalog of his silence, his untouched wine. “No, thank you,” he said. The words felt thick, borrowed. He forced his own smile. It strained his cheeks.

“You’re quiet tonight,” his father observed, not looking up from slicing his meat with surgical precision. “Long week?”

“Just tired.”

“The market doesn’t sleep for fatigue.” His father pointed his knife briefly at him. “Vigilance. That’s the price of success.”

James nodded. Vigilance. He was vigilant. He was vigilant for the ghost of Matt’s hands on his hips, for the phantom weight of his body. He was vigilant for the scent of cedar and sweat that sometimes, in a trick of memory, would flood his senses between one breath and the next. He shifted again. The dull, sweet ache between his legs was a bruise he cherished. A receipt. Proof.

The conversation washed over him—aunt’s health, property values, a cousin’s acceptable engagement. His responses were automatic, polite echoes. Inside, he was a raw, vibrating wire. Every laugh from his father was a flinch. Every clink of cutlery was too loud. He felt transparent, as if the love marks hidden under his starched shirt were glowing through the fabric, as if the memory of being fucked raw and tender just hours before was written in the dilation of his pupils.

He excused himself to use the washroom. The hallway was cool, silent. He locked the door and leaned against it, closing his eyes. He breathed in the sterile lemon cleaner. Nothing of Matt here. Nothing of them. He looked at himself in the mirror. The ‘good son.’ Hair perfectly in place. Collar crisp. His own eyes looked back, dark and hollowed out. He pressed the heels of his hands into them until he saw stars.

He thought of the shower that morning. Matt’s hands soaping his back, his chest, washing him with a reverence that felt like a sacrament. The water hot. Matt’s forehead pressed between his shoulder blades. The silent shudder of his breath. James’s own body had felt like a foreign country then, a landscape Matt was memorizing for the last time. Now, in his parents’ perfect bathroom, he felt like a souvenir. A hollow thing, brought back from a real place.

He unbuttoned his shirt cuff, pushed the sleeve up. On the inside of his wrist, faint but there, was a red line. A scratch from the rough grain of Matt’s workbench, from when Matt had pinned his hands above his head days ago. James brought his wrist to his nose. Nothing. But he remembered the smell of fresh-cut wood and sex. He pressed his thumb into the mark. The pain was clean. Sharp. His.

Back at the table, dessert was served. A perfect slice of apple pie. His mother watched him take the first bite. “Well?”

“It’s great, Mom.” The cinnamon was ash. The crust was dust.

“You used to love it,” she said softly, a hint of an old lullaby in her tone.

“I do.” The lie was automatic. He ate another forkful. He felt the ghost of a different taste—the salt of Matt’s skin on his tongue, the bitter tang of coffee they’d shared from the same chipped mug in the grey dawn. That was food. This was fuel.

His phone buzzed in his pocket. A single, short vibration. A text. His entire body went still. The world snapped into a terrifying, exquisite focus. The buzz was a live wire against his thigh. He kept chewing, slow, forcing his jaw to move. His father was talking about interest rates.

“May I be excused?” James’s voice was calm. “I just remembered, I promised a colleague I’d glance at a report tonight. It’s time-sensitive.”

His father waved a dismissive hand, already moving on to a new topic with his mother. Permission granted. James stood, his legs steady. He carried his plate to the kitchen, placed it in the sink with a quiet clink. He walked, don’t run, up the stairs to his childhood bedroom.

He closed the door. Locked it. His breath came out in a ragged rush. He fumbled the phone from his pocket. The screen glowed in the dark room.

A single message from Matt. No words. A photograph.

James’s knees buckled. He sat hard on the edge of his bed.

It was a picture of Matt’s own hand, palm up, resting on a rumpled sheet. The sheet was the one from his bed, the one James had slept in. In the center of Matt’s palm lay a single, spent matchstick. The wood was blackened and split. The meaning was immediate, visceral: *I burned it for you. I am burning.*

James made a sound, a choked gasp. He brought a fist to his mouth. His eyes burned. He stared at the image until the pixels blurred. This was their language. More honest than any of the words spoken downstairs. This was a flare sent across the void. A signal: *I am here. I am real. You are real.*

He typed with trembling thumbs. *I can still feel you.* He sent it. A confession.

The reply was instant. *Where?*

James lay back on his bed, the stiff, familiar quilt beneath him. He put his phone on his chest. He closed his eyes. He let his hand drift down, over his stomach, beneath the waistband of his trousers. He was already hard. Aching. Needy. The contact was electric. He hissed, arching off the bed.

He typed one-handed, his movements jerky. *Inside. You’re still inside me. It aches.*

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again. The wait was agony. A fresh wave of want, hot and desperate, rolled through him. He squeezed himself, a rough, punishing grip, just to feel something that wasn’t the ghost of fullness.

Matt’s reply came. *Tell me how it aches.*

James undid his belt, his button, his zipper. He shoved his clothing down just enough. The cool air hit his heated skin. He wrapped his hand around his cock. It was slick at the tip. He was leaking for a ghost. He stroked once, a slow, tight pull that made his toes curl. He picked up the phone.

*It’s a deep ache,* he typed, his breath coming short. *Low. In my guts. Feels like you stretched me and left the shape of you behind. Empty and full at the same time. I move and I feel it. A reminder.*

*What kind of reminder?*

*That I belong to you.* James’s vision swam. He was laid bare, more naked now than he’d ever been in Matt’s bed. *That I’m yours. That you had me. That I let you.*

*Show me.*

James’s heart hammered against his ribs. He angled the phone down, pointing the camera at his own body. At his hand moving on his cock, slow and desperate. At the thatch of dark hair, the pale skin of his thighs against the dark quilt. He took the picture. Sent it. It was the most vulnerable thing he’d ever done.

The response was a video. James fumbled to open it, his hands slippery.

It was Matt. In his own bed. Shirtless. The video was dark, lit only by a streetlamp outside his window. Matt’s face was in shadow, but his eyes glinted. His hand was moving on himself, a slow, relentless rhythm. James could hear his breathing, ragged and low through the phone’s speaker. Then Matt’s voice, a raw whisper. “This is for you. This is because of you. You feel that ache? I feel the emptiness. I feel where you’re supposed to be.”

James moaned, the sound torn from him. He matched Matt’s rhythm, stroke for stroke, his own breathing syncing with the audio. He was there, in that room with him. The beige walls of his childhood prison fell away. He was back in the only place that was real.

“I can smell you on my sheets,” Matt whispered on the video, his voice breaking on a thrust of his own hand. “I taste you. I’m fucking empty, James. And I’m so hard for you it hurts.”

“Matt,” James gasped aloud to the empty room. His hips jerked up into his fist. The pleasure was a tight coil, winding impossibly deep. It was mixed with the profound, physical memory of Matt taking him, claiming him, the burn and the bliss of it. He was chasing that feeling, chasing the ghost of his lover inside him.

“Come for me,” Matt’s voice commanded from the phone, soft and fierce. “Come remembering how I felt. Come remembering who you are.”

It was the permission, the connection, the secret shared across the digital void that shattered him. James’s back arched off the bed. A broken cry was muffled by his own arm. His release hit him in waves, hot stripes painting his stomach and shirt, a mess he didn’t care about. He shook with it, pleasure and grief and defiance twisting together into one unbearable peak.

He lay there, spent, the phone clutched to his sweaty chest. The video had ended. Silence pressed in, heavier than before. The scent of sex, his sex, filled the sterile room. A different kind of truth.

His phone buzzed once more. A final message.

*I love you. Remember the plan. Three days.*

James looked at the mess on his body. At the locked door. At the perfect, lifeless room. He felt the hollow ache, now soothed and yet more pronounced. He was a secret in his parents’ house. A hidden, pulsing truth. He would have to clean up. He would have to go downstairs and smile and be the son. But for now, he lay in the aftermath, the proof cooling on his skin, and he remembered. He remembered who he was. His. Matt’s. Real.