The Dripping Tap

"I've learned to read body language the way other people read headlines—it tells you the story everyone's trying not to tell. The trick is knowing when to look away and let someone keep their secrets."

The game wound down without ceremony — just a general consensus that everyone was tired and nobody was keeping score anymore anyway. Samuel claimed victory for our side, which James disputed with good-natured scepticism, and the argument dissolved into the usual post-game dispersal. People drifting toward bags and water bottles. Conversations fragmenting and reforming along the walls.

I needed a moment.

The corridor outside the cultural hall was quieter, the fluorescent hum replacing the echo of voices and basketballs. My shirt clung to my back, damp with sweat that was already cooling in the air-conditioned stillness.

The bathroom was at the end of the corridor, past the bishop's office and the clerks' room. I'd walked this route a thousand times. Could probably do it blindfolded, counting steps, knowing exactly where the carpet changed texture and where the drinking fountain hummed its low mechanical note.

I pushed open the door.

And stopped.

The bathroom was small — two stalls, two urinals, a pair of sinks beneath a mirror that needed cleaning. The lights were the same fluorescent tubes as the corridor, casting everything in that flat, shadowless glare that made skin look slightly grey. It smelled like industrial disinfectant and something underneath, something older. The particular staleness of rooms that never quite aired out.

Nate Baker was by the sinks.

He wasn't alone.

Ryan Holloway stood with him — close, closer than conversation required. Ryan's back was against the wall near the paper towel dispenser, and Nate was facing him, one hand braced against the tiles beside Ryan's shoulder. The space between them wasn't space at all. It was something else. Something that had its own texture, its own gravity.

I knew that closeness. Had seen it in nature documentaries, in the body language of animals during courtship rituals — the way two creatures could occupy the same air differently when something shifted between them. The tilt of heads. The angle of shoulders. The particular stillness that preceded movement.

They hadn't heard me come in.

For a fraction of a second, I stood frozen in the doorway, my brain still catching up to what my eyes were registering. The scene assembled itself in pieces: Nate's hand on the wall, Ryan's chest rising and falling too fast, the flush across both their faces that had nothing to do with basketball.

Then Nate leaned in.

It happened quickly — a tilt forward, a closing of distance, mouths meeting in a way that was neither tentative nor practised. Just urgent. Raw. The kind of kiss that happened when something had been held back too long and finally broke through.

Ryan kissed back.

For a heartbeat. Maybe two.

Then his eyes opened — I saw them in the mirror, catching movement at the door — and everything changed.

He shoved Nate away. Hard. The motion was violent, explosive, his palms flat against Nate's chest with enough force to send him stumbling back against the sinks. The sound of it — flesh against flesh, the crack of Nate's hip hitting porcelain — echoed off the tile walls.

Ryan's face had twisted into something I couldn't quite name. Fear, maybe. Or rage. Or both at once, tangled together so tightly they'd become the same thing. His eyes met mine for half a second — just long enough for me to see the panic there, the desperate calculation of someone whose world had just cracked open in front of a witness.

He didn't say anything.

Just moved. Shouldered past me with enough force that I had to catch myself against the doorframe, and then he was gone, footsteps receding down the corridor at a pace that was almost running.

The door swung shut behind him.

The silence that followed was absolute.

I stood there, one hand still braced against the frame, my heart beating somewhere in my throat. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, indifferent, filling the quiet with their thin electrical hum.

Nate hadn't moved from where Ryan had shoved him. He was leaning against the sinks now, both hands gripping the edge of the counter, his head bowed. His shoulders rose and fell with breaths that came too fast, too shallow. The kind of breathing that happened when your body was trying to process something your mind couldn't yet accept.

I should leave.

The thought arrived with the clarity of instinct. Walk out. Pretend I hadn't seen anything. Let this moment dissolve into the category of things that never happened, the way so many things dissolved in communities like ours. It would be easier. Cleaner. The path of least damage for everyone involved.

My feet didn't move.

"Nate."

His name came out quieter than I'd intended. Barely above a whisper in the tiled acoustics of the room.

He flinched. Actually flinched, like the word had physical weight. Then, slowly, he raised his head. His reflection met mine in the mirror above the sinks — his face pale, drawn tight, his eyes glassy in a way that might have been the harsh lighting or might have been something else entirely.

"Jerome." His voice cracked on the second syllable. "I — that wasn't —"

He stopped. Whatever explanation he'd been reaching for collapsed before it could form, crumbling under the obvious impossibility of explaining away what I'd just witnessed.

The silence stretched between us. I could hear the faint drip of a tap that didn't quite close properly. The distant thump of a door closing somewhere in the building. The continued buzz of the lights, relentless and mechanical.

Luke's face surfaced in my memory, unbidden.

My half-brother. Thirteen years older than me, which had always made him feel more like an uncle than a sibling — someone from the adult world who occasionally descended into mine rather than someone I'd grown up alongside. He'd already finished his mission and moved to Tasmania by the time I was old enough to really know him. The visits home had grown less frequent over the years, the phone calls shorter, the silences at family dinners longer and more loaded with things no one would say aloud.

I'd been maybe fifteen when I'd finally understood why.

Not because anyone told me directly — that wasn't how our family operated. But I'd overheard enough fragments, caught enough of Mum's tight-lipped comments and Dad's careful subject changes, pieced together enough from the way Luke's name had become something to navigate around rather than simply speak. He was living with someone in Hobart. A man named Jamie. They had a house together, a life that looked from the outside like any other life except for the part that made it impossible for my parents to look at directly.

The last time Luke had visited — three Christmases ago, maybe four — the tension had been suffocating. Mum had been excessively cheerful in that brittle way that fooled no one. Dad had spoken to Luke in the same careful, measured tone he used with investigators at church — polite, correct, maintaining appropriate distance. Luke had left a day early, claiming work obligations that everyone knew were fabricated, and I'd watched his rental car disappear down the street with something heavy sitting in my chest that I couldn't name.

He'd looked back, just once, before he turned the corner. I'd been standing at the window. I didn't know if he'd seen me.

We hadn't talked properly since. Not really. The occasional text message, surface-level and safe. Happy birthday. Merry Christmas. Hope uni's going well. The vocabulary of people who shared blood but had lost the language for anything deeper.

I didn't blame him for the distance. I understood it, in the way you understand weather patterns or migration routes — as something that followed its own logic, shaped by forces beyond individual control. My parents had made their position clear through a thousand small choices, a thousand careful silences, and Luke had responded the only way that preserved anything of himself.

But understanding didn't make it hurt less. Didn't fill the space where a brother should have been.

And now here was Nate, wearing a version of that same expression I'd seen on Luke's face at that last Christmas dinner. The look of someone bracing for the impact they'd spent their whole life expecting.

"It's okay," I said.

The words felt insufficient. Inadequate to the moment, to the fear radiating off him in waves I could almost see. But they were what I had. What I could offer in this small tiled room with its buzzing lights and dripping tap.

Nate stared at me. His hands were still gripping the counter, knuckles white.

"I'm not going to—" I started, then stopped, tried again. "Whatever that was. I didn't see anything."

"You don't have to do that." His voice was steadier now, but only just. "You don't have to pretend. I know what you saw."

"I'm not pretending." I took a breath, feeling my way through the words like navigating unfamiliar terrain. "I'm just telling you. As far as I'm concerned, I came in here to wash my hands and you were fixing your hair or something. That's it. That's all that happened."

He searched my face, looking for the lie. The catch. The moment where compassion would curdle into judgment, where understanding would reveal itself as a trap.

I held his gaze and let him look.

"Why?" he asked finally. The question seemed to cost him something.

I thought about Luke. About the Christmases that had grown quieter, the way my parents had chosen their theology over their son and called it love. About the text messages I sent that said nothing because I didn't know how to say anything that mattered. About the guilt of watching it happen and not knowing how to stop it.

"Because it's none of my business," I said. "And because I've seen what happens when people make it their business. When they decide someone else's life is a problem they need to solve."

Something shifted in Nate's expression. The fear didn't disappear — I could still see it there, lurking beneath the surface — but something else joined it. Recognition, maybe. The understanding that I wasn't speaking theoretically.

"Ryan's going to—" He shook his head, cutting himself off. "This is going to be a disaster."

"Maybe." I didn't have reassurance to offer on that front. Ryan's reaction had been unmistakable — the shove, the panic, the flight. Whatever had existed between them, it had shattered the moment a witness appeared. "But that's between you and him. It's got nothing to do with me."

Nate laughed — a short, humourless sound that bounced off the tiles. "You'd be surprised how few people see it that way."

"Yeah," I said. "I probably wouldn't be."

We stood there for another moment, the silence between us different now. Less charged. Still awkward, still heavy with everything we weren't saying, but no longer catastrophic.

"I should—" I gestured vaguely toward the door.

"Yeah." Nate straightened, releasing the counter, running a hand through his hair in a motion that was probably meant to look casual and didn't quite succeed. "Yeah, I'll be out in a minute. Just need to..."

He didn't finish the sentence. Didn't need to.

"Take your time," I said. "I'll tell anyone who asks that you're on a phone call or something."

He nodded. The ghost of something that might have been gratitude flickered across his face.

I turned and pushed through the door, leaving him alone with the buzzing lights and the dripping tap and whatever he needed to put back together before he faced the world again.