The Reset

“Sometimes survival isn’t about the world outside—it’s about silencing the storm inside long enough to stand again.”

Discarding the last of my soiled garments into the empty bathtub, I vowed to deal with them later, my mind recoiling from the thought of their eventual disposal. The jeans lay twisted against the white porcelain, the dark stains spreading where Joel's blood had soaked through to my skin. The shirt was worse—crumpled, tacky, reeking of copper and bile and the particular sourness of fear-sweat that clung to fabric like a confession.

The stink of blood and bile hung in the air like a phantom, soaked into fibres and skin alike, a lingering accusation I had no answer for. I could still feel it on my hands even though I'd scrubbed them raw at the sink—that slick warmth, the way his pulse had been absent beneath my searching fingers, the terrible stillness of flesh that should have been alive.

Stepping into the shower, I felt like a newborn—unsteady, uncertain, vulnerable—seeking refuge in the embrace of the warm spray. The glass door closed behind me with a soft click, sealing me into a space that felt, for the first time in hours, like it might actually be mine. Outside this cubicle, the world waited with its impossible demands and its murdered boys and its witnesses who knew too much. But here, in this narrow column of steam and water, I could pretend for a moment that none of it existed.

The cubicle transformed into a sanctuary, the hiss of water against tile cocooning me in sound, drowning out the chaos beyond the door. White noise. Blessed, merciful white noise that filled my ears and pushed back the clamour of thoughts threatening to tear me apart. Liquid heat cascaded down my spine, tracing the ridges of muscle and bone, but its cleansing torrent could not reach inside me.

The filth wasn't just on my skin. It was in my head, in my chest, in the pit of my stomach—a corrosion that water alone could never wash away. Joel's blank stare. The gape of his throat. The way Beatrix had studied him like a curiosity rather than a corpse. Jamie's face when he would inevitably learn what had happened to his son—a son he'd never known he had, a son who was now cooling in the back of a delivery truck in my driveway.

I braced myself against the wall, palms splayed wide, forehead pressed to the cool tile. The contrast between the heat on my back and the cold against my skull created a strange equilibrium, a physical anchor when everything else threatened to drift away. My breath came ragged, fogging the air around me, each exhale visible for a moment before the steam swallowed it.

What do I do?

The question looped endlessly, a mantra that mocked with its simplicity while offering no reprieve. To move Joel into Clivilius was unthinkable—a desecration, a betrayal not only of Jamie's son but of Jamie himself. The thought of his body lying in that alien dust, unmarked and unmourned, while his father remained ignorant of both his existence and his death... it turned my stomach in ways that had nothing to do with the vomit I'd left in the truck bed.

Yet to leave him here, to invite police, questions, exposure, was equally damning. The moment investigators started pulling at threads, the entire fabric of my life would unravel. The Portal. Clivilius. The supplies. Jamie and Paul, stranded in another dimension with an infected wound and two bewildered dogs. Every secret I'd fought to protect would spill out into the light, and once that happened, there would be no putting any of it back.

There was no path that wasn't littered with ruin.

The water struck harder as I leaned into it, rivulets crawling over my body, catching in the creases of my neck and chest, sluicing down to pool at my feet. Pink-tinged at first—Joel's blood, still washing out of my hair, still draining from beneath my fingernails—then gradually clearing as the last physical traces of him spiralled down the drain.

My hands trembled, restless, unable to still. They moved of their own accord, sliding over slick skin, seeking something to hold onto when my mind offered nothing but freefall. At first, it was grounding—a way to tether myself to something tangible, to remember the borders of my own body when my thoughts threatened to fragment into pieces too small to reassemble. Here was my shoulder, the muscle knotted with tension. Here was my chest, my heart still hammering too fast beneath the cage of ribs. Here was my stomach, taut and hollow from hours without food.

I was still real. I was still here. I hadn't dissolved into the nightmare that surrounded me.

But the movements lingered, circled, grew deliberate.

It was a ritual as old as my earliest fears, an instinct I'd carried from childhood when silence and touch were the only comforts left to me. Back then, in dark corners and beneath warm blankets, it had been proof that I was real—proof that I could feel something other than fear. Children weren't supposed to know about such things, weren't supposed to discover that their own bodies could offer solace when the world offered none. But I had learned anyway, in the quiet hours when my parents thought I was sleeping, when the weight of expectations and the strangeness of my dreams pressed too heavily on my young chest.

Now, as the water beat against my shoulders and steam rose thick around me, the memory of that discovery merged with present need. My palm slid lower, across the flat plane of my stomach, following the trail of dark hair that descended from my navel. The touch was tentative at first—almost questioning—as if my body needed permission my mind couldn't grant. But the body knew what the mind could not accept: that sometimes the only way through was to surrender to something simpler, something that bypassed thought entirely and spoke directly to the animal beneath.

My fingers wrapped around myself, and I drew a sharp breath at the contact. Already half-hard from the warmth and the water and the strange alchemy of crisis, my body responded to the familiar grip with an urgency that felt almost desperate. This wasn't about pleasure, not really. It was about claiming something—anything—in a day where everything had been taken from me. Control. Sensation. The fundamental proof that I was still alive when Joel was not.

I began to move, slowly at first, relearning the rhythm the way you might relearn the words to a song you hadn't sung in years. The soap made everything slick, frictionless, my hand gliding with an ease that let me focus on the building heat rather than the mechanics. Each stroke pulled me further from the horror, deeper into something purely physical—a tide rising to drown the noise in my head.

Images clashed behind my closed eyelids: Joel's blank eyes staring at nothing, the gash across his throat like a second mouth screaming silently. Jamie's festering wound, the pus and blood that had oozed between my fingers when I'd lifted his shirt. Paul's careful words about concrete slabs, his loyalty stretched thin but not yet broken. Gladys swigging from her bottle with the desperate determination of someone who needed reality to blur at the edges. Beatrix's callous curiosity, her fingers tapping the crime scene like she was browsing antiques.

Each one jabbed at me, sharp, relentless—but the rhythm of my hand, steady now, insistent, began to bring order to the storm. Each stroke anchored me, pulling me away from panic, back into something I could control. This, at least, I could control. This, at least, followed rules I understood. Cause and effect. Tension and release. The body's ancient contract with itself.

My grip tightened, pace quickening. The sensation sharpened, concentrated, demanding more of my attention until the images began to blur at the edges, losing their power to wound. I wasn't thinking about Joel anymore. I wasn't thinking about Jamie or the Portal or the impossible choices waiting for me. I was only this—muscle and nerve and the blood rushing hot through my veins, my own pulse thundering in counterpoint to the water drumming against tile.

I was acutely aware of the need for silence. Beyond the thin walls, Beatrix and Gladys lingered—I could picture them in my kitchen, Gladys hunting for another bottle whilst Beatrix poked through my cupboards with that restless curiosity that seemed to govern everything she did. Their presence was a constant reminder that even here, even now, I could never afford complete abandon. Privacy was an illusion. Safety was a fiction. Every sound I made could carry, could betray, could add another complication to a situation already drowning in them.

My jaw clenched, teeth grinding together, every muscle taut with the strange intensity that comes from suppressing sound whilst everything inside screams for release. The restraint heightened everything—every pulse of sensation, every rush of blood, every inch of me caught between eruption and secrecy. I bit down on my lower lip, the small pain another anchor, another way to stay present when the pleasure threatened to carry me somewhere I couldn't control.

The water continued its assault, hot against my skin, steam rising around me until the bathroom beyond the glass became a blur of white and shadow. I existed only in this moment, in this narrow space between the tile and the spray, suspended between horror and hope, between the man I'd been this morning and whoever I would have to become to survive what came next.

My free hand pressed flat against the wall, fingers splayed, bracing myself as my hips began to move of their own accord—short, involuntary thrusts that drove into my grip, my body taking over where my mind had failed. The pleasure coiled tighter, gathered low in my belly and at the base of my spine, a pressure building toward something inevitable.

I thought of nothing. I thought of everything. The two states collapsed into each other, became indistinguishable, became irrelevant. There was only sensation now, only the relentless climb toward release, only my own ragged breathing masked by the hiss of the shower.

It built slowly, inexorably, a knot of sensation and need, body and mind entwined so tightly it felt as though it might strangle me. My legs trembled. My stomach clenched. The pressure gathered at the base of my spine, in my groin, in my chest—a physical manifestation of everything I'd been holding since I first saw Joel's foot jutting from the shadows. All of it—the fear, the guilt, the desperate calculations, the grief I couldn't afford to feel—coiled tighter and tighter until there was nowhere left for it to go.

And then—release.

Silent, stifled, but seismic. My knees buckled as the orgasm tore through me, my hand working frantically through the spasms while I clutched the wall to keep from falling. The sound that wanted to tear from my throat remained locked behind clenched teeth, emerging only as a shuddering exhale that the water mercifully covered. My whole body shook with the force of it, waves of sensation crashing through me, washing away—for one blessed moment—everything else.

I watched myself pulse into the stream of water, evidence of my humanity swirling down the drain alongside the last traces of Joel's blood. There was something grotesque about that—something that should have horrified me more than it did. But I was beyond horror now, beyond shame, beyond anything except the simple animal relief of a body that had found its release.

In the aftermath, clarity trickled in with the same inevitability as the water dripping from my fingertips. The chemicals—oxytocin, dopamine, whatever alchemy of biology this was—coursed through me, smoothing jagged edges, silencing the clamour. The terror, the anger, the helplessness—muted. Not gone, but quieted, pushed back to a distance where I could observe them without being consumed.

For the first time in hours, perhaps days, the world inside my head stilled.

I stood there beneath the spray, breathing slowly, feeling my heartbeat gradually return to something resembling normal. My hand released its grip, fell to my side, fingers pruned from the water and faintly trembling with aftershock.

This was my reset. My mind, once a battlefield of dread, sharpened, recalibrated. I could breathe again. I could think again. Decisions that moments earlier had seemed impossible began to take shape, their edges defined not by fear but by necessity.

Joel's body needed to be moved—that much was certain. Gladys and Beatrix needed to be managed—their knowledge of the Portal made them liabilities if I couldn't secure their silence. Jamie needed to be told about his son—eventually, somehow, in a way that wouldn't destroy him or turn him against me entirely.

Each problem still loomed, but they no longer blotted out the sky. They were challenges to be addressed, not apocalypses to be endured. In the silence of my body's surrender, I had found balance—the cold, clear balance I needed to face what lay ahead.

I turned off the water and stood for a moment in the sudden quiet, steam curling around me, droplets tracing paths down my skin. The bathroom beyond the glass slowly sharpened into focus as the fog on the door began to clear. I could hear muffled voices from beyond the bathroom, and the sound no longer filled me with dread.

I had work to do. Terrible work, necessary work, work that would stain me in ways no shower could ever wash clean.

But I could do it now.

I could do it.