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In the golden mist of autumn, a black sedan raced along a road flanked by towering western yellow pines and golden weeping willows. Elon and Grimes sat in silence within the vehicle, their communication reduced to the quiet rhythm of shared breath. Elon gazed through the window at the undulating forest, where slender, elongated branches interlaced to weave a colossal net, shattering the tissue-paper thin deep orange sky. The sharp, pointed pine needles resembled the predatory claws of beasts, piercing through the fragmented shards of sky partitioned by willow tendrils. The autumnal landscape, once rich with golden-orange hues, now seemed reduced to remnants.
A flash of crimson suddenly fractured his vision. Only then did Elon notice the low-growing rose bushes clinging to the forest floor — fragile entities that appeared moments from being swallowed by the serene autumn palette, yet stood defiantly against the chilling wind. Those roses conjured a memory of someone who haunted the peripheries of his consciousness: a person he desperately wished to forget yet could never erase from memory, a soul he yearned to approach yet felt compelled to push away with both hands.
"Gavin, Gavin..." Elon sat mutely in the sedan, mulling over the name, acutely aware that his well-fed, fleshy face must have assumed that vacant contemplative expression again. A serpentine ache coiled through his chest cavity, as though countless steel needles had pierced his myocardium in precise surgical strikes, leaving behind a lattice of slender, elongated scars that throbbed with each measured breath he took.
"Will I see Gavin again?" The question coiled like smoke in Elon’s mind. Months had passed, yet he still didn’t know how to face him… But those things happened so long ago. Maybe he’s moved on by now? Elon had always relied on self-soothing lies to pacify his nerves — a survival tactic forged in childhood. A boy too sensitive, too porous, he’d let even trivial sorrows steep in his bloodstream for years. Only fiction could dilute the bitterness.
Anxiety compressed the sedan’s interior, pulling Grimes’ presence uncomfortably close while stretching the distance between Elon and Gavin into an infinite, suffocating void. No relief came with the illusion of proximity. Outside, the forest’s fractured golden veil gave way to steel-and-glass monoliths, their geometric shadows sharp as scalpels. It was only then, as modernity devoured the last traces of wilderness, that grief finally ruptured through Elon’s carefully measured exhale.
He let his skull thud against the chilled window, eyelids sealing shut. Darkness, at least, asked no questions.
In the darkness, there was nothing to see… no, not even darkness itself.
By the time they reached the hotel, the clock had long since devoured 10 PM. Though every muscle fiber screamed for surrender, Elon resolved to walk through the grove — he found the night’s temperament irresistible. This stellar autumn sky, lacquered with constellations, might have mirrored those he’d seen decades ago in South Africa? The air hummed with botanical alchemy: chlorophyll’s catalyzed decomposition released crisp herbal whispers, while actinomycetes in the soil exhaled a mineral musk, not unpleasant. These fragrances intertwined, suspended in the languid mist, dissolving Elon’s drowsiness like sugar in tea.
Dampness clung to his exposed skin — a lover’s chilled fingertips tracing his collarbones, his wrists — so tenderly that for a fractured moment, he succumbed to the delicious delusion of being cherished.
Elon advanced along the serene path, the rustling of leaves against his ears resurrecting a winter evening when he was ten — the night his father had locked him out for returning home mere minutes late. He remembered how he’d cried out, pleaded through the door, recounting how older boys had pinned him facedown in the gravel after school, their boots blooming violet carnation-like scars across his ribs. Errol offered no response, not even the grace of a slammed window.
God, how the cold had carved into him that day. The wind screamed like a whetstone, its scalpel-sharp blades flaying his skin. Tears and mucus froze upon contact, crystalline shackles binding his face. His blood thickened to sludge, yet paradoxically, the bruises stopped throbbing — his mind had numbed into a detached observer, floating somewhere beyond the prison of his flesh.
In the end, survival instinct overrode pride. He’d huddled behind trash bins, chafing his hands raw, the rasping friction of palm against palm becoming his only liturgy. That sound, he realized now pacing through the grove, never truly left him — it lived in the susurrus of autumn leaves, in the grind of molars during boardroom battles, in the shudder of rockets tearing through atmosphere.
Back then, Elon couldn't comprehend: why, as the victim, had he been subjected to such cruelty? Shouldn't his father have at least offered a consoling embrace, or even a single word of solace? Now, in hindsight, perhaps Darwin's merciless logic did govern human societies after all, Elon's suffering stemmed from the unforgivable sin of being fragile in a world that worshipped clenched fists.
Elon pressed deeper into the grove. Few who could afford this hotel ever stayed here, and fewer still wandered its woods with his breed of melancholic curiosity. Above him, a crescent moon — veiled intermittently by migratory clouds — slid through the latticework of branches like a phantom gondolier. Only when the crisp "tap-tap" of leather soles striking flagstones fractured the silence did he realize another soul shared this nocturnal vigil.
Who else wandered this late? Did the sepulchral breeze agitate their dormant sorrows as it did his? Truthfully, Elon neither desired nor dreaded an encounter. His neurons fired in fractal patterns as he walked, until two silhouettes crystallized ahead: a man and woman, their edges blurred by mist yet sharpened by moonlight into phosphorescent geometry.
Elon squinted through the aqueous moonlight. They could be spouses or lovers, he supposed, though they maintained a chaste distance, no interlaced fingers, no conspiratorial whispers. The man stood preternaturally tall, his silhouette devouring the woman until she existed only as gilded fragments: a corona of blonde hair, the glint of a clavicle. The man’s own hair caught the lunar glow — an aristocratic flaxen, the exact hue that had haunted Elon’s periphery during those nights of damp, languorous kisses; of limbs entangled in fevered ambiguity; of pulse points hammering against sweat-slicked skin like Morse code transmissions.
Memories metastasized behind his eyelids, and a hundred suppressed nights detonating in sixty seconds. Tremors wracked his frame, synapses firing like shattering glass. His legs buckled, no more capable of bearing weight than overburdened pylons in a quake.
The man turned slightly, clutching a dewy crimson rose in his hand.
He raised the blossom to his lips, inhaling its fragrance with slow reverence — his face melting into rapture, as though savoring the phantom scent of a lover... or perhaps a mother long lost to time.
Elon should have left.
Yet he lingered like a bee drunk on rose nectar, his heart thrashing against his ribs with such violence he feared it might crack bone.
He knew that man.
The way he cradled the rose — Elon had been told once, in a voice soft with confession, that this flower carried the scent of two ghosts: a mother’s forgotten embrace, and the musk of Elon’s own skin pressed close in the dark.
That face. That face. No amount of years could blur its edges. Gavin Christopher Newsom, his full name, though Elon had always preferred the intimacy of just Gavin. A decade of concussions (courtesy of schoolyard boots to the skull) had turned Elon’s memory into a sieve, where even breakfast plans slipped through the gaps. Equations? Immutable. Faces? Fleeting. But this — this name had seared itself into his neurons with the permanence of a brand.
A sentiment long entombed by Elon's will now burst forth, vines of memory strangling his lungs as they surged. He watched, transfixed, all resolve to avoid this encounter disintegrating like ash. Gavin remained unchanged: forearms corded with mountainous ridges of muscle that once rippled beneath Elon's palms like currents in a dark river; a waist simultaneously lean and unyielding, which Elon's legs would lock around during fevered nights, anchoring himself to the burning reality of Gavin's presence; those knuckled hands, broader than his own, capable of pinning him to the mattress with effortless authority...
Elon had never imagined encountering him here... and yet, paradoxically, the sight stirred no surprise. They were mirror fractures of the same glass, their edges aligned with eerie precision across a hundred shared dimensions.
Was he thriving now?
In these moth-eaten months since their fracture, had Gavin’s fingers ever brushed against the fossil of Elon’s memory?
Did midnight ever find him clawing at the walls of that Californian decision, regret seeping through the cracks like groundwater?
Elon couldn't pinpoint the exact moment Gavin turned, only that when their gazes locked, the man exhibited no discernible surprise. Seconds coagulated between them, thick and syrupy. Under the ochre-tinted light, Gavin’s irises held a fractured glint like mica trapped in obsidian. His brows knitted not in anger, but with the leashed intensity of a man restraining a dam’s worth of unsaid words.
Then, abrupt as a switchblade flick, Gavin bared his alabaster teeth and sank them into the rose’s petals — a chromatic violence, their arterial crimson against his pallor. A tilt of his head, a hunter’s jerk, and he tore free a cluster. His tongue swept the plundered blooms into his mouth, where they met exaggerated mastication — a grotesque pantomime, as though he were performing rather than consuming.
Gavin wanted Elon to witness this carnage. The act’s symbolism blazed too conspicuously. Elon’s body jerked as if seared by live coals, scorching blood surging to stain his cheeks incarnadine. His lips quivered, forming abortive syllables, but the words congealed in his throat like cooling magma. Defeat tasted metallic. He spun on his heel and retreated, stumbling slightly over roots that seemed to coil around his ankles in mockery.
"Elon!"
He hadn't anticipated being halted. By the time cognition reasserted itself, Gavin’s vise-like grip had already cinched around his wrist.
"It’s been ages." The words vibrated with suppressed voltage. Gavin’s forest-darkened green eyes held him — features carved with Euclidean precision, a complexion like sun-forged bronze. Subcutaneous rivers of cerulean capillaries branched beneath his jawline, as if his very flesh rebelled against the stoicism of his expression. He resembled something unearthed rather than born: a deity’s discarded prototype, chiseled from the finest Makrana marble yet inexplicably flushed with mortal imperfections.
The heavens had shed their gauzy veils. Above, the firmament deepened into bruised amethyst, its expanse now pierced by stars — diamond dust scattered across a jeweler’s velvet. The moon unveiled herself at last: a celestial courtesan discarding modesty, her glacial radiance spilling over the mountains’ inkblot silhouettes, over flagstones veiled in spectral mist, over the fevered topography of their skin. Bathed in this argent alchemy, they too became celestial debris — fallen stars phosphorescing in the terrestrial gloom.
Violet saturated the night. The air thickened with all they dared not name.
"Mmm... It really has been a while," Elon replied, offering a resigned smile that didn't quite reach his eyes. His gaze flickered pointedly toward Jennifer, still lingering in the shadows — a silent warning.
"That doesn’t matter." Gavin’s thumb traced idle circles over Elon’s pulse point, his touch featherlight yet deliberate. In the low light, his eyes gleamed like phosphorescent jade — luminous, unsettling, as if lit from within by some unnameable hunger.
Elon sensed the words teetering on the edge of Gavin’s thin lips — parted slightly, yet no sound emerged, as if sentences serpentined through his throat only to dissolve like sugar in black tea. The hand still gripping the rose dipped into his trouser pocket, retrieving a key card pressed insistently into Elon’s palm. “Come find me tonight. If you want to.”
His eyes were a cathedral of unvoiced pleas.
With those words, he pivoted and retreated just like a boy who’d slipped a love letter to his crush only to flee before witnessing her reaction. Elon stared at the key card, its edges biting into his palm. When he glanced up, Gavin had already reoccupied his place beside Jennifer, yet his gaze remained anchored to Elon. A smile flickered across his face, half-challenge, half-apology. Elon mirrored it reflexively before catching himself, severing the eye contact with a sharp turn of his head. His hand rose in a dismissive wave — I’m leaving.
He should have left.
He should have dissolved into the night.
But the key card burned a command into his flesh.
Elon couldn’t articulate why his feet carried him through the hotel’s labyrinthine corridors hours later — only that they did, with the inevitability of iron filings drawn to a magnet’s cry.
Elon swiped the key card lightly against the sensor, and with a soft click, the door unlocked. He pushed it open as quietly as he could, yet the heavy door still let out a reluctant creak.
Gavin was on the balcony, smoking. The white smoke curled upward, caught in the warm air before the night wind tore it apart, scattering it like willow catkins adrift in the breeze. When he saw Elon, he stubbed out the cigarette, the anxiety on his face dissipating with the fading tendrils of smoke. His gaze, now tender as still water, enveloped Elon once more.
Nearly grateful, Gavin stepped toward him. As he slid the glass door shut and drew the curtains, Elon closed the door behind him — a silent, mutual agreement sealing them away from the world.
Gavin's footsteps were featherlight, as if wary of shattering the fragile silence of the night. As he approached Elon, his eyes held a tentative expectancy, testing whether this charged atmosphere might collapse at any moment.
Elon remained rooted in place, the key card still pinched between his fingers. His thumb absently traced its smooth edge, as though searching for some thread of reason woven into its unyielding plastic.
"You actually came."
His voice was low, threaded with a tremor so faint it might have been imagined — the sound of a man testing the boundaries of a dream. He halted just before Elon, close enough that the scent of faded tobacco and sandalwood cologne clung to the space between them. The balcony’s glass door muffled the world beyond, leaving only the syncopated rhythm of their breathing: a staccato duet, weighted with everything unspoken.
Elon parted his lips, grasping for words to fracture the suffocating silence, but his throat had gone bone-dry.
Gavin seemed to read his hesitation. A quiet laugh escaped him, tinged with self-mockery, yet softened by something unbearably tender.
"I didn’t think you’d come," he murmured, his gaze never wavering from Elon. "I half-believed I’d lost my mind, handing you that card."
"Why give it to me then? I thought we were finished." The words slipped out softer than Elon intended, as though afraid to rupture some delicate equilibrium.
Gavin hesitated, his fingers fidgeting with his shirt cuff — a nervous tell he’d never quite mastered. "I don’t know how you feel," he began, voice taut, "but I can’t stand beside you anymore pretending nothing’s broken."
The admission struck like a pebble cast into still waters, ripples unfurling through Elon’s chest. Memories surfaced — Gavin anchoring him through panic-riddled nights, murmuring reassurances until dawn bled through the blinds. Gavin coaxing him onto the talk show stage, their laughter that day so effortless it hurt to recall.
The air congealed into something palpable, each breath thick with the arrhythmic staccato of Elon’s pulse. Gavin closed the distance — a single step that eliminated the remaining oxygen between them. "You owe me nothing," he breathed, the words grazing Elon’s jawline. "But stay. Just tonight."
Elon’s mind became a synaptic storm — thoughts colliding, fracturing, none coalescing into coherence. What emerged instead was a stammering deflection: "I can’t — Grimes is waiting —"
Gavin's eyes dimmed instantaneously, like candle flames extinguished by a sudden gust. His lips quivered faintly, as though suppressing a surge of darker, more volatile sentiments. The silence between them thickened into something suffocating, punctuated only by the metronomic whisper of a vintage wall clock's second hand carving through the stillness.
"Grimes," he echoed, the name laced with acid mockery that couldn't quite mask its underlying bitterness. "You always do this — retreat into shadows, into... into others." His hand fell from his cuff, fingers curling into a fist where knuckles blanched ghostly under strain.
Elon felt his throat constrict, words lodged like stones, impossible to dislodge. Grimes wasn’t just someone else; she’d been his anchor through abyssal nights, much as Gavin once had. But here, in this claustrophobic room, he realized he was trapped in the liminal space between two worlds — one woven from the shared history with Gavin, the other half-built with Grimes, its scaffolding still trembling with uncertainty.
"I’m not running, Gavin," he managed, his voice a frayed whisper that startled even himself. “I just… need time.”
"Time?" He let out a hollow laugh, devoid of any warmth. "We've already wasted too much of it. Did you really think I hadn't tried? Tried to pretend everything was fine, tried to stand by your side while watching you with her..." His voice trailed off as he drew a sharp breath, visibly steadying himself. "I thought I could do it. But I can't."
His gaze locked onto Elon, piercing and unrelenting — a stare that left no room for evasion. Elon remembered that talk show recording, Gavin watching him from across the set, eyes brimming with tenderness. Now, that tenderness seemed devoured by anger and disappointment, leaving behind only a weary man standing before him, stripped bare of illusions.
"Go," Gavin said abruptly, his voice barely above a whisper. He turned away, his back to Elon. "If you think Grimes is your answer, then go."
Elon stood frozen, feet rooted to the floor. That silhouette — so familiar, yet now a stranger’s. A thousand words swirled in his mind: confessions of confusion, assurances that he never meant to hurt him. But all that escaped was a feeble sigh.
"Gavin..." Elon began, then faltered.
Gavin didn’t turn. "Don’t choose someone who can’t make you happy," he murmured.
Elon bit down on his lip and turned toward the door, each step as precarious as treading on knife blades. When he pushed it open, an icy gust of midnight air rushed over him, sharp with the season’s bite. He glanced back once — Gavin remained motionless, his back still turned, a silhouette carved from silence itself.
The door clicked shut behind him, sealing away the room and all that had transpired within. Alone in the hollow expanse of the hallway, the ripples in his chest had swelled into a riptide. He didn’t know if he’d chosen rightly. He didn’t know what dawn would bring. But he knew, with a certainty that ached, that something between them had fractured irreparably tonight.
That night, Elon didn’t return to Grimes.
Instead, he booked another room on the seventh floor, his movements mechanical as he swiped the key card at reception. Jacket slung over his arm, he drifted out of the hotel and into a dim alleyway, where a neon sign hummed above a nondescript door: ADULT NOVELTIES.
Inside, the air clung thick with synthetic jasmine and the acrid tang of PVC. He kept his gaze down, shoulders tense as he snatched the first silicone toy within reach — a nondescript beige shaft, still sealed in sterile plastic. The cashier’s bored glance burned hotter than the fluorescents. Bills slapped onto the counter; change clattered back. He was gone before the door’s bell finished chiming.
Back in the room, Elon locked the door, the curtains drawn tightly as if they could have shut out the world and the turmoil in his heart. He lay on the bed, the sheets cold, carrying the unfamiliar scent of disinfectant. The dildo was clutched in his hand, its hard, alien texture making him pause, desire and shame weaving a net that trapped him. But in the end, desire won — not for physical release, but for Gavin, for the nights that had once belonged to them.
Elon closed his eyes, trying to conjure Gavin’s image in the darkness. His breathing, his touch, the warmth of his low voice murmuring in his ear. Elon imagined him lying beside him, his fingers tracing his skin with familiar tenderness and possession. He slid the cold dildo into his ass, mimicking Gavin’s rhythm, slow and tentative, as if it could have summoned those lost moments. His body responded gradually, heat pooling low in his abdomen — yet with each movement, a fissure yawned wider in his chest, a raw reminder that this was, and always would be, a soliloquy of one.
The climax crashed over him — swift and brutal, a squall with no afterglow. His body convulsed, but what escaped his throat was a choked sob, not relief. In that moment, there was no catharsis, only a hollowness that carved through him like a blade twisting between ribs.
He flung the toy aside and clutched the pillow to his chest, fingers digging into the fabric as if it were the last driftwood in a drowning sea. Tears came unbidden, soaking the cotton, and between shuddering breaths, he gasped Gavin’s name — once, twice, a litany — as though the syllables could bridge the chasm between them.
Memories ambushed him: nights spent pressed against Gavin’s chest, ear to his heartbeat, believing himself loved, believing himself whole. Now, the pillow stayed cold and silent, absorbing his cries until the room echoed with nothing but his own fractured gasps.
Elon curled into himself on the bed, tears smearing the neon glow outside his window into watery streaks of color. The city pulsed on mercilessly — time refusing to still, the world indifferent to his unraveling.
He didn’t know if he could keep moving forward. But tonight, he’d tried to fill that bottomless void with hollow fantasies, like cupping moonlight in his palms and calling it water.
At 3 AM, Elon finally dragged himself upright and reached for his phone. The screen flared to life, illuminating Grimes’ unanswered message from yesterday: "I’m here if you need me."
His fingers hovered over the keyboard — hesitant, suspended — before retreating. He knew seeking her out might dull the ache for a night. But she wasn’t Gavin. Could never be Gavin.
And Gavin, now, was gone.