Flat Palms

"There's a particular cruelty in being wanted and refused at the same time—proof that the rejection isn't about capability but about choice."

As night settled over our camp like something with weight and intention, the atmosphere shifted in ways I felt more than saw. The darkness wasn't merely absence of light—it was presence, a thick velvet that wrapped around our small gathering and seemed to muffle the sharp edges of the day's accumulated horrors. The campfire had burned down to embers that pulsed like something breathing, casting warmth that barely reached beyond arm's length.

The whiskey bottle had become a ritual object, passing from hand to hand with the particular reverence of something sacred. My fingers had traced its neck more times than I could count now, the glass warm from collective handling, the liquid inside diminished to dregs that sloshed with each transfer. The alcohol had settled into my blood like an old friend taking up residence, softening the world's edges, loosening the tension that had been coiled in my shoulders since I'd woken to discover someone had been in my house.

A sudden burst of laughter shattered the contemplative quiet—Paul's cackle erupting with the particular abandon of someone who'd crossed from pleasantly drunk into genuinely intoxicated. The sound echoed into the void around us, loud enough to make me wince.

"Shh," Glenda chided, her own smile undercutting any real severity as she pressed a finger to her lips. "The zombie is sleeping," she quipped, the dark humour sparking a ripple of amusement that swept through our small assembly.

Kain's laughter joined the chorus, a robust sound that seemed to shake something loose in him. "Well, I didn't know how else to describe him," he retorted, his defence adding another layer to the collective mirth. The earlier hostility he'd directed at me had mellowed under whiskey's influence—not forgiveness, but at least a temporary ceasefire.

Paul's voice cut through the laughter, louder than probably intended, his words carrying genuine concern beneath the jest. "Are we sure it's safe in there? We don't really know what's going on," he said, his tone fuelling the flickering flames of uncertainty that had never truly died.

"Oh," I exhaled, a deep sigh that bore the weight of frustration I'd been attempting to drown all evening. The whiskey was supposed to be helping with that. Instead, it seemed to be stripping away the filters I usually maintained. "Don't be so stupid, Paul," I found myself saying, the words sharper than I'd intended—a reflection of my own inner turmoil rather than any fair response to his reasonable query.

Paul's reaction was theatrical, a gasp of mock offence that might have been comical in any other state. I couldn't quite muster the energy to apologise.

Feeling the sudden need to move, to do something other than sit and watch Jamie attend to Joel, I staggered to my feet. My hand found Glenda's shoulder, using her as an anchor while my head performed a slow rotation that had nothing to do with surveying my surroundings. The whiskey had gone to my legs as much as my head, turning them into something less reliable than I was accustomed to.

"Of course, it's safe," I muttered, the words directed more to myself than anyone else. The tent where Jamie had laid Joel down called to me with a pull I couldn't quite articulate—part concern, part something else I wasn't ready to examine too closely.

My steps toward the silent tent were uneven, feet finding the ground at angles I hadn't intended. Each footfall sent small shocks through my knees that my whiskey-numbed body registered only vaguely. The cool night air felt good against skin that had gone hot from drink and the fire's proximity, and I found myself breathing deeper, pulling the air of Clivilius into lungs that expanded with a satisfaction the whiskey enhanced.

At the tent's entrance, I paused, pressing my ear against the cool fabric. The canvas was rough against my cheek, grounding me in the physical whilst I strained to hear what lay within. Soft, rhythmic breathing reached me—faint, barely perceptible, but unmistakably present. Joel was still with us, whatever "with us" meant for a boy who'd died twice and kept forgetting to stay dead. The raspy quality of those breaths was unsettling, but they anchored me to one simple fact: he was breathing. For now.

With a gentle nudge, I eased the flap aside and slipped through, my movements carrying the exaggerated care of someone who knows they're drunk and is trying to compensate. The transition from campfire glow to tent's interior left my eyes struggling, blinking rapidly against darkness that seemed more complete than the night outside had suggested.

The tent's occupants resolved slowly from shadows into shapes. Joel's form lay still on the mattress—a quiet mound that embodied fragile peace, his chest rising and falling with those ragged breaths I'd heard through the canvas. And across the tent, Jamie's presence marked itself in the subtle displacement of darkness, his body stretched out over one of the new sleeping bags I'd purchased that afternoon.

Jamie.

Something twisted in my chest at the sight of him—longing and frustration and want all tangling together into a knot that the whiskey seemed to tighten rather than loosen. I'd watched him all evening, watched the way he cared for Joel with an intensity and tenderness I couldn't help but covet. Touch was my language. Physical connection was how I understood love, how I gave it and received it. And Jamie had been speaking that language fluently to his son all evening whilst I sat across the fire, thirsty for contact that never came my way.

With something approaching reverence, I lowered myself to my knees on the tent floor. The fabric was cool beneath my palms as I began my advance—a slow crawl across the space that separated me from Jamie. My hands felt every texture, every grain of dust that had infiltrated despite our best efforts, the particular give of ground beneath canvas. I moved with the careful deliberation of someone navigating sacred territory, drawn by need I could no longer pretend wasn't driving me.

My progress brought me to Jamie's waist, and there I paused, hovering in the near-darkness, close enough to feel the warmth radiating from his body through the thin fabric of his clothes. His chest rose and fell with the deep, regular rhythm of sleep—or what I hoped was sleep. The campfire's muted sounds filtered through the canvas, a gentle backdrop to the blood now rushing loud in my ears.

Six months. It had been six months since Jamie had touched me with anything approaching desire. Six months of excuses and distance and "not tonight" and the growing certainty that I was failing to hold his attention in ways I couldn't seem to fix. The rejection had calcified into something I carried in my body—a hunger that had gone from acute to chronic, from something I noticed to something that had simply become part of existing.

But here, now, with whiskey dissolving the walls I usually maintained and the darkness granting permission I wouldn't have claimed in daylight, I found myself acting on impulses I'd been suppressing for longer than I wanted to admit.

I raised my right leg with careful deliberation, manoeuvring it across Jamie's body until I straddled him. The position was intimate in a way that sent heat rushing through me—my thighs bracketing his hips, my weight settling gradually onto his pelvis. The proximity was almost overwhelming. I could smell him now—sweat and dust and something underneath that was simply Jamie, a scent I'd known for years, a scent that still made my pulse quicken despite everything.

Blood thrummed through my veins with renewed urgency, my heart hammering against my ribs in a rhythm that matched the desperate wanting that had taken hold. I leaned forward, closing the remaining distance between us, and pressed my lips to the soft skin of Jamie's neck.

The taste of him flooded my senses—salt and warmth, the faint trace of dust from Clivilius that coated everything here. I kissed him there, in that vulnerable junction where neck met shoulder, a silent plea for connection that I couldn't have articulated in words. My body remembered this. My body craved this. Touch was how I spoke, and I was trying to tell him something I'd been choking on for months.

Jamie didn't respond. His body remained still beneath me, neither welcoming nor rejecting, simply present in a way that could have been sleep but felt increasingly like something else.

Emboldened by the lack of immediate rejection—or perhaps just desperate enough not to care—I let my tongue trace a path upward, exploring the terrain of his neck until I reached his ear. The whiskey had made me brave, or stupid, or both. I wanted him to feel me. I wanted him to remember that I existed, that I was here, that I needed him in ways he seemed to have stopped noticing.

The rejection came without warning.

Jamie's hands pressed flat against my chest, firm and unyielding, creating a barrier where I'd hoped to find welcome. The push was physical and emotional simultaneously—a jolt that sent me rocking back on my heels, the space between us suddenly vast despite the intimate position I still occupied.

"What the fuck are you doing, Luke?" His voice emerged as a hissed whisper, confusion and indignation sharp enough to cut through my whiskey haze.

The sting resonated deep, a familiar pain I'd grown too accustomed to feeling. But the whiskey had stripped something away—some protective layer I usually maintained—and instead of retreating, I leaned closer. My lips found their way to his ear again, breath hot against the shell of it as I confessed what I'd been carrying like a weight for longer than I could calculate.

"I want you so badly," I whispered, the words emerging raw, honest in a way I rarely allowed myself to be. Desire and despair fused in those five syllables—everything I'd been aching to say, everything he no longer seemed interested in hearing.

"You're drunk." Jamie's accusation hung between us, technically accurate but beside the point in ways that made my frustration spike. Yes, I was drunk. But the want wasn't manufactured by whiskey. The want had been there for months, festering into something that felt increasingly like mourning.

I settled back onto my heels, retreating from his ear but not from my position straddling him. Frustration and indignation kindled into something hotter in my chest. "Oh, come on, Jamie. It's been at least six months since we've been intimate," I reminded him, hearing the desperation in my own voice and hating it, unable to modulate it. The words were accusation and plea simultaneously—a history of unmet need compressed into a single statement.

"I'm not in the mood," Jamie retorted, the bluntness of his response landing like a slap. Simple words, but they carried the weight of countless similar rejections, each one another brick in the wall that had been building between us.

"That's always your excuse," I countered, my frustration boiling over into something I couldn't contain. My arms folded across my chest—defensive, hurt, unable to hide either. "You're never in the mood, are you! Oh wait. I'm not Ben. Is that it?"

The accusation escaped before I could catch it, sharp and bitter and aimed directly at the wound I'd been nursing in private. Ben. The name I tried not to think about. The suspicion that had been eating at me for months—that Jamie's distance wasn't about stress or exhaustion or anything as simple as that. That someone else had gotten what I was being denied.

"That's not fair, Luke!" Jamie's protest was louder than it should have been, given Joel sleeping mere feet away. Emotion flared in his voice—defence against the accuracy of my aim, perhaps, or genuine outrage at the accusation.

"I know it's not fair!" My response emerged equally loud, equally raw. Nothing about this was fair. Not the rejection. Not the suspicion. Not the way I'd spent the day drowning in responsibilities whilst watching him lavish attention on a son he'd known for less than twenty-four hours when I'd been waiting years for something similar.

With a heaviness that went deeper than physical exhaustion, I rose to my feet. The movement was unsteady—whiskey and emotion making my legs unreliable—but I managed it, creating distance that felt more significant than the mere space between standing and kneeling.

"Luke!" Jamie's whisper was sharp, urgent, reaching for me as I turned toward the tent's exit. A last-ditch attempt to bridge the gap I was actively widening with each step.

But the time for words had passed. The moment had dissolved into something I couldn't salvage, couldn't reframe, couldn't pretend hadn't happened. The familiar cycle of his rejection and my hurt feelings had completed another revolution, but something felt different this time. Final, perhaps.

As I approached the tent flap, resolve crystallised within me with a clarity that cut through the whiskey's fog. I knew what I'd felt beneath me when I'd been straddling him—the unmistakable evidence that his body, at least, hadn't been entirely indifferent. He'd been hard. Hard for me, or hard from proximity, or hard from whatever dreams I'd interrupted—I couldn't know. But he'd chosen rejection anyway. Chosen to push me away despite his body's obvious interest.

That combination—the physical response paired with the verbal rejection—had become a pattern I could no longer endure. This time, I told myself, would be the last time I let it break something in me.

I pushed through the tent flap into the cool night air, leaving Jamie and his contradictions behind in the darkness.