The drive home was a blur of cologne and ghosts.

James stood under his shower, the water scalding, and scrubbed. He used the rough, pine-sitched bar soap his father bought in bulk, scraping it over his forearms, his chest, the back of his neck. He scrubbed until his skin burned a furious pink, but Matt’s scent was in his lungs, a phantom of sweat and cheap shampoo and them, under his nails, in the creases of his knuckles. It wouldn’t leave. He turned his face into the spray, opened his mouth, let the water fill it like he could drown the taste of Matt’s kiss, the memory of his weight. It didn’t work. The heat just made it worse, made the ghost of him rise from James’s own heated skin.

His knees gave out. He slid down the tile, the grout lines digging into his spine, and let the water pound his bowed head. The sound was a white roar, a nothingness he wanted to crawl inside. He was clean. He was the good son, home from a polite lunch, showered and presentable. He was hollow.

His hand moved from his thigh to his cock. It wasn’t arousal. It was a need for proof. A desperation that felt like grief, sharp and bottomless. His fingers closed around himself, already half-hard from the memory, from the sheer physical ghost of Matt still thrumming in his blood. He hissed, head thudding back against the wall.

He didn’t stroke. He gripped. A tight, punishing fist. The friction was almost painful under the stream of water. Good. He wanted it to hurt. He wanted to feel something that was his, that wasn’t a lie. His thumb smeared over the head, and the jolt that went through him was pure Matt—the way he’d gasp, the way his hips would stutter. James’s breath hitched, a broken sound lost in the shower’s din.

He let his eyes fall shut. Not the kitchen table, not the anger. He went back to the storage unit. The dust. The safe, dark quiet. Matt above him, inside him, his eyes wide open and so scared and so full of love it stopped James’s heart. The rhythm of him. Slow. Deliberate. A reclaiming. James’s hand on his own cock began to move, matching that remembered pace, a pathetic, lonely echo. His hips lifted off the wet tile, pushing into his own fist.

He thought of the ring. The cold, shocking slide of silver on his finger in the steam of another shower. The fantasy so real it stole his breath. He could feel it now, the ghost-band on his left hand. His strokes turned faster, rougher. The water made everything slick, his hand gliding, the sound wet and obscene. He was panting, his mouth open, water streaming over his lips, his chin.

He wasn’t in his parents’ beige-tiled shower. He was in Matt’s. Matt’s hands pinning his hips, Matt’s mouth on his throat, claiming, marking. “Mine,” Matt had growled, and James had believed it. He believed it now, here, alone. His back arched, his toes curling against the slick tub floor. The pressure coiled, tight and unbearable, at the base of his spine.

He bit down on the fleshy part of his own wrist to keep the sound in. The pain was bright, clarifying. He fucked up into his hand, a frantic, driving rhythm. The tile was cold against his shoulder blades, the water hot on his belly. The contrast was dizzying. He was everywhere and nowhere. He was James Chen, dutiful son. He was James, who belonged to Matt.

The climax tore through him like a theft. It was violent, wracking, a seizure of pleasure that felt like a punishment. His body locked, every muscle corded tight, and he came over his own fist and stomach, the release pulsing out of him in thick, helpless stripes only to be dissolved instantly by the relentless water. It washed away, white and vanishing down the drain.

He came with Matt’s name a silent scream on his lips. A shape his mouth made against his own skin: lips pressed together for the ‘M’, tongue against teeth for the ‘t’. A prayer with no sound. The water washed the evidence away, swirling it into nothing. The only truth he could afford.

He went limp. The shaking started in his thighs, a fine tremor that spread up through his gut, into his hands. He dropped his forehead onto his knees, the water cascading over his neck. The emptiness that followed was vast. Colder than the tile. He’d proven he could feel, and now he felt nothing. Just the steady, impersonal beat of the shower.

He didn’t move for a long time. The water began to cool. The shift in temperature was what finally roused him, the transition from punishing heat to a lukewarm disappointment. He dragged himself up, his body heavy, used. He turned the knobs. The silence that fell was absolute, ringing, pressing in on his ears.

He pushed the curtain back. The bathroom was thick with steam, the mirror a fogged gray slate. He didn’t wipe it. He didn’t want to see his face. He stepped onto the bathmat, his footprints dark on the pale fabric. He toweled off mechanically, the rough cotton abrading his sensitive skin. He was pink everywhere. Scrubbed clean. Sterile.

In his room, he dressed in the uniform: pressed chinos, a soft cashmere sweater his mother had given him for his birthday. He ran a comb through his damp hair. He looked at his phone, silent on the dresser. No notifications. The ring finger on his left hand felt conspicuously bare, a phantom limb. He made a fist, then released it.

Downstairs, the house was quiet. His father was in the study, the low murmur of a financial news channel seeping under the door. His mother was in the garden, clipping late autumn roses through the window. A postcard. He stood in the hallway, a stranger in a perfect museum.

The scent of his father’s cologne—that same, sharp, expensive mask—lingered in the hall. James had hung his jacket in the closet earlier. The scent clung to the wool, a layer over the ghost of Matt he could still smell beneath it if he tried, a secret beneath a secret. He breathed in. Citrus and sandalwood and lies.

He walked to the kitchen, his steps silent on the hardwood. He poured himself a glass of water. He drank it standing at the sink, looking out at his mother in the garden. She smiled, waving a gloved hand at him. He lifted his own hand in return, the smile already forming on his face, automatic, polite. It didn’t reach his eyes.

He was here. He was present. He was the good son. The truth was a seed of wet heat, remembered and erased, down a drain. The truth was a name screamed into silence. The truth was a ring that never was. It was all he had. It was everything. He turned from the window, placed the empty glass in the sink. It made no sound.

He left the empty glass in the sink and walked back upstairs. His footsteps were silent. In his room, he closed the door. The lock clicked, a soft, definitive sound. He sat on the edge of his perfectly made bed and picked up his phone. The screen was dark. He unlocked it. His thumb hovered over Matt’s name.

This was the risk. The connection. The thread that could unravel everything. He typed. Deleted. Typed again.

“I can still smell you on me.”