Okay, Gotta Run

The afternoon had stalled. Winter light pressed flat against the windows of Vaucluse, casting the corridors in the particular pallor of places where time thickens rather than passes. Fluorescent tubes hummed. The smell of overcooked vegetables and disinfectant hung permanent as wallpaper.

Jamie placed the back-in-five sign on the reception counter and walked toward the staff bathroom with the stride of a man seeking the only solitude a workplace permits. The door swung shut behind him. He positioned himself at the urinal, let his shoulders drop, and for thirty seconds existed in blissful emptiness. No thoughts. No partner growing stranger by the week. No gnawing awareness that his life was quietly disintegrating while he smiled and fetched and coped.

The door creaked.

Ben had waited precisely five seconds. Not hiding, not hurrying — moving with the deliberate quiet of a man who understood the difference between secrecy and discretion. He entered and stopped. Did not approach the second urinal. Did not speak. Simply occupied the space behind Jamie with the patient intensity of someone conducting an experiment whose outcome he had already predicted.

The silence took on weight. Jamie felt it at the base of his skull — that primitive awareness of being observed, the animal knowledge that something was present and waiting. His stream faltered. His hands fumbled with his fly.

Ben broke the tension with theatrical precision — a callback to Bob Gangley's accusation from earlier that shift, delivered in tones of exaggerated outrage and punctuated by a slap to his own backside that cracked off the tiles like a punchline. Jamie laughed with the full-bodied relief of someone who had braced for threat and received absurdity instead.

But laughter opened doors that silence kept sealed. Jamie pressed him on who Gangley had actually caught him with — light in delivery, heavy in implication. Ben deflected. Jamie countered with the quiet observation that Gangley, for all his complaints, was seldom wrong. That landed like a change in temperature.

Ben stepped closer. His hand found Jamie's forearm — not possessive, not tentative, but clear. He pulled. Jamie went. That was the detail that would matter later, the hinge on which everything turned: Jamie went without resistance, his body answering a summons his conscience had not authorised.

They stood close enough to share breath. The height difference required Benjamin to angle his chin upward. Jamie catalogued the flecks of darker brown in his irises, the pulse in his throat, and felt the closeness collapse from theoretical to irreversible.

Then Jamie's mind left the room. It travelled twenty-five years to a school bathroom in Elizabeth, South Australia, where a boy named Luke had looked at him with eyes that held storms, and something had passed between them that neither possessed the language to name. The memory surfaced not as nostalgia but as accusation — ten years of shared life built on the foundation of that childhood bond, now cracking under silences neither man knew how to break.

Ben read the withdrawal. He watched Jamie leave without moving, saw the focus turn inward to something old and bruised, and chose not to pursue. He waited, then asked with calibrated gentleness whether Jamie was all right.

Jamie returned with forced brightness. What followed was theatre — spanking offered as comedy, submission performed as joke, each escalation deniable until the moment it was not. Ben's trousers descended. The pretence evaporated. Jamie froze between arousal and conscience, his body's response unmistakable, his mind listing reasons this was a catastrophe while his hands did nothing to prevent it.

He whispered for Ben to pull his clothes up before someone walked in. The words might have ended it. The bathroom might have returned to its ordinary function.

But Jamie's phone vibrated against his thigh.

Across the river in Berriedale, Luke pressed the call button and listened to the rings fall like hammer strikes against glass he already knew was cracking. He had missed Jamie's earlier call. The guilt of that sat alongside the guilt of everything else — the secrets, the portal that had opened in his study that afternoon, the two-thousand-dollar tent purchased in desperate hope, the conviction that he was building a bridge to another world while the bridge to his own partner rotted beneath his feet.

Jamie answered with a steadiness that bordered on miraculous, given that Ben stood two paces away with knowing patience. Luke apologised for the missed call. Jamie accepted the apology in two syllables that landed with the weight of everything they did not contain — no curiosity, no reproach, no evidence that his absence had been noticed.

Luke asked when Jamie would be home. The hesitation that followed — that drawn-out, stalling vowel — told him more than any sentence could. It was the breath people drew before delivering disappointment.

Jamie offered a fabrication about Gangley having taken another fall, delivered with professional calm while Ben's hand found the front of his trousers, cupping him through the fabric with confidence that left no room for misinterpretation. Luke heard only a partner managing a workplace crisis. He did not hear the zipper. He did not hear the shift in Jamie's breathing as Ben's mouth descended.

Jamie told Luke not to wait up. Luke offered love — spoken softly, stubbornly true despite everything, weighted with meaning he needed Jamie to hear.

Jamie returned four words: acknowledgement, announcement of departure, farewell. No reciprocation. No warmth. No acknowledgement that three words had been offered and required only three in return. The line went dead.

Luke sat with the phone still pressed to his ear, listening to the absence where Jamie's voice had been. The screen went dark. His own reflection replaced Jamie's contact photograph — a man who looked like someone who had just been told something important without any actual words being spoken.

The tent confirmation glowed on his computer screen. Hours ago, a portal had opened in this room and shown him a world that should not exist. He had nearly died. He had heard a voice speak his name with the familiarity of a lifelong companion. And his partner had just ended a phone call the way one ends a transaction.

He sat in the fading light and weighed whether the impossible truth of Clivilius might save what was fracturing between them — or whether it would become the final weight that collapsed whatever remained. The possibilities branched and none of them led to certainty.

At Vaucluse, the cubicle door closed. The lock engaged with a click that echoed longer than its mechanism warranted. Jamie surrendered — not to Ben, not to desire precisely, but to the need to feel something other than the slow suffocation of a love reduced to its sparest equations. Ben understood this. He understood that he was being used as escape, as anaesthetic, as the warm body that happened to be present when presence was what Jamie craved. He accepted the terms because he was not certain his own motives were any cleaner.

What occurred between them was not passion and not tenderness but something more tangled — the frantic collision of two people who had run out of other ways to manage what they carried. Need dressed as want. Relief disguised as connection. An act that solved nothing but briefly silenced the questions that had driven both men to this room.

When it was done, they did not speak. They remained close but not together, breathing in a space that smelled of bleach and sweat and the faintly metallic aftermath of decisions that could not be unmade. Jamie's eyes did not meet Ben's. Not fully. And that told Ben everything he needed to know about what this had been, and what it had not.

The lock still held. But something else had come undone.

Across the river, Luke set his phone on the desk and let himself feel the fullness of what four words had communicated. Tomorrow, Paul would arrive. The tent would arrive. Something would have to give — some truth spoken or buried or transformed into action.

But tonight, he would sit in the silence between words and try not to count what he was losing.