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Chapter Text

It was late in the evening, that peculiar hour when the sky hangs half-alive with a dying glow, when Max Verstappen, with a strangely subdued expression, as though he had long rehearsed every word and now feared them, stood before George Russell, who sat at the edge of the sofa like a man awaiting a verdict he does not yet understand but already dreads. The silence between them trembled, fragile, full of invisible fractures.

“George,” Max began, in a voice that carried both irritation and a kind of exhausted resignation, “I can’t live like this anymore… I want a divorce.”

The words seemed to fall not merely from his mouth but from some precipice within his soul, tumbling down with a hollow weight. George’s hands tightened on the fabric of his trousers, and his eyes widened with a kind of disbelieving pain.

“A divorce?” he repeated, breathless. “After five years, Max? After everything? You—no, you can’t just say something like that. What’s happened to you?”

Max exhaled sharply, turning his head away as though the sight of George only deepened his irritation. “What’s happened,” he said, “is that I fell out of love. I don’t want to keep pretending, to keep leading you on with some illusion that died long ago.”

George’s voice cracked into anger before he could control it. “Fell out of love? Do you think I’m a fool? You think I don’t see it? You think I haven’t noticed the way you’ve been sneaking around, disappearing, avoiding even looking at me sometimes? Tell me, Max—who is it? Who are you cheating with?”

At this Max’s expression hardened, suddenly, sharply, as though stung by a truth he himself did not wish to acknowledge. “Don’t start this again,” he snapped. “If you won’t accept the divorce willingly, fine. I’ll get the paperwork tomorrow. And you will sign it.”

And with that he turned his back, walking away with the rigid, angry steps of a man escaping not a partner, but a mirror.

That night, as Max showered, the apartment lay in a suffocating quiet, broken only by the hiss of water behind the bathroom door. George, pacing aimlessly like a ghost bound to the floorboards, suddenly heard the faint buzz of a phone on the table, Max’s phone, its screen glowing with a notification that pulsed like the beat of a guilty heart.

He swore to himself he wouldn’t look. But betrayal has its own gravity, its own irresistible pull, and before he knew it, his trembling fingers had lifted the device.

A message from Carlos.

“Is the divorce happening tomorrow?”

George froze. His entire being seemed to collapse inward, as though lightning had struck him from within. A divorce—tomorrow—and Carlos knew?

The notification preview revealed more, a small glimpse of something that should not have been visible but now cracked open the entire truth, a group chat.

Max… Carlos… and Charles.

With a sudden dread he unlocked the phone—he knew the passcode, of course; trust had once made such intimacy feel righteous. Now it felt like a weapon.

The chat unfolded before him, line after line of words that seared themselves into his mind:

Carlos teasing Max about “finally ending domestic boredom,”
Charles joking about “how long Max could keep sneaking around,”
Max confessing, so easily, so casually, that he had been with both of them for a year,
and worst of all, his admission that sex with George had become too soft, too gentle, too predictable,
that George’s “housewife routine” had lost its charm,
that he needed thrill, not warmth.

A year.

A full year of lies, of secret rendezvous, of nights when Max came home late and George had believed every excuse, because love, his kind of love, was blind in a way that hurt only the one who gave it.

His breath shattered inside his chest.

He didn’t scream. Something in him went silent instead, a silence so total, so shattering, that it frightened even him. His heartbeat roared in his ears, drowning out every other sound.

He fled, like a child, like a man losing all dignity, like someone whose heart had been torn open by hands he trusted, and stumbled into the guest bedroom. He locked the door with trembling fingers.

And then he collapsed onto the bed.

And he cried, quiet, broken, desperate tears, tears of betrayal, confusion, humiliation, and a love that, even now, refused to die cleanly.

In that room, the shadows pressed close, as if listening to his sobs, as if bearing witness to another soul being crushed under the weight of a truth too sharp to touch yet impossible to avoid.

George whispered into the darkness, voice trembling,

“Why wasn’t I enough for him? What did I do? What did I do wrong?”

But no answer came.

Only the distant echo of water running in the bathroom, and the knowledge that the life he had built, the life he believed unshakable, had already begun to crumble long before he noticed the first crack.

>>

The next morning dawned not with light but with a kind of indifferent pallor, as though the sun itself, knowing the turmoil of the night before, hesitated to cast its warmth upon a home now split at the seams. Max left before the sky had fully awakened, his footsteps hurried, almost guilty, though he would never admit such a thing even to himself. George heard the soft thud of the door closing, a sound at once faint and yet devastatingly final, like the last breath of a dying violin string.

He lay in the guest bed for a long moment, eyes open but unfocused, staring at the ceiling as if it were an unfamiliar map drawn by some cruel cartographer lines of cracks he had never noticed, shadows that stretched like the fingers of a stranger. It was strange, he thought, how a single night can turn a familiar world into an alien landscape; how love, once sturdy as an oak tree, can decay in secret until it collapses in a single storm.

With hands still trembling, he reached for his phone.

He typed only one name:

Alex.

And almost instantly a reply came, warm, steady, and unmistakably human.

“Are you alright?”

George swallowed the tightness in his throat.

“Can we talk? Please.”

Within minutes Alex was driving toward him, and soon the two were seated across from one another in a quiet café tucked away from the main road, a place where the clinking of porcelain cups sounded like fragile truths being set gently on a table.

Alex studied him with the kind of gaze that belongs to people who have suffered enough to recognize suffering in others. “George… what happened?” he asked, his voice low, careful, as if afraid the wrong word might shatter George into finer pieces.

For a moment George couldn’t speak. His voice felt caught between worlds, the world of yesterday, when he was still loved, and the world of today, when he was nothing more than a memory Max was already trying to sweep aside.

At last, in a whisper that trembled like a dying flame, he said, “He wants a divorce, Alex.”

Alex leaned back, stunned, not dramatically, but with that deep internal recoil of someone who had hoped, perhaps foolishly, that such heartbreaks avoided people he cared about. “A divorce? Why? After everything you two—”

“He’s been…” George paused, unable to say the word at first, as though it carried a weight he needed both arms to lift. “…cheating. All year. With Carlos. And Charles. A—” his voice cracked, “a group chat. They laughed about me like I was a piece of furniture that stopped being interesting.”

Alex’s eyes darkened, not with hatred, but with that cold, righteous anger that good people feel when faced with profound injustice. “George… that’s monstrous. How could he treat you—someone like you—with such carelessness?”

George gave a bleak, broken smile. “Someone like me? Alex, Max said I was too soft. Too domestic. As if tenderness is some sort of illness.”

Alex leaned forward, his tone firm. “Softness is not a flaw. Only wolves pretend it is, because they fear the humanity they lost long ago.”

George felt something inside him crack a little more, not painfully, but with a peculiar relief, like the first fissure in an ice lake letting the trapped water breathe again.

They talked for a long time, about betrayal, about illusions, about how humans build their hopes the way prisoners build dreams of escape, desperately, secretly, and always with the knowledge that reality will try to crush them. In his grief George found himself speaking more honestly than he ever had with Max, confessing fragments of fear he didn’t know still lived inside him.

After some time, Alex checked his watch and lowered his voice.

“Let’s go,” he said. “There’s somewhere I want to take you. Somewhere nobody else knows. Somewhere you can think… clearly.”

George looked at him with a glimmer of hesitation. “Where?”

Alex smiled, not mysteriously, but gently. “Someplace quiet. Trust me.”

And so they left the café, disappearing into the soft grey morning, walking side by side like two souls tied together not by destiny but by suffering, which is sometimes a more honest tether.

When they finally emerged from the place, this unnamed sanctuary that would later become pivotal, George’s eyes were red but newly focused, sharpened by the kind of clarity only heartbreak and truth can carve out of a person.

Outside, by Alex’s car, Alex placed a hand on George’s shoulder, then pulled him into an embrace, not the passionate embrace of lovers, nor the delicate embrace of comforters, but something stranger and deeper: the kind of embrace two soldiers share before the final battle, when each understands the other’s silent wounds.

George closed his eyes, leaning into it, feeling for the first time since last night that perhaps he wouldn’t drown after all.

When Alex stepped back, George whispered, “Thank you… truly.”

Alex replied simply, “You’re not alone. Not now. Not ever—not while I’m here.”

And then Alex drove away, disappearing down the narrow road, leaving George standing there like a lone figure carved from grief and new determination.

George returned home, walked straight to the small office where the printer hummed quietly in the corner, like a machine waiting for orders from a man newly awakened.

He inserted the paper.

Pressed print.

And as the machine came alive, clicking, whirring, spitting out sheets as if exhaling a new destiny, the room filled with the soft mechanical heartbeat of change.

What he was printing, no one yet knew.

Not even Max.

But it would not stay hidden for long.

Chapter Text

Max returned home just past noon, the sky hanging over him like a lid screwed too tight on a jar—suffocating, oppressive, full of unspoken thunderstorms. In his hand he carried the divorce papers, crisp and newly printed, the edges sharp enough to slice the air between them. His footsteps echoed through the flat with a kind of self-righteous purpose, as though he expected the whole world to rearrange itself according to the certainty of his decision.

He found George in the living room, seated with a stillness that was almost unnatural, the stillness of a man who had finally stopped running from the truth and begunquietly, dangerously to negotiate with it.

Max cleared his throat. “George,” he said, his voice brisk, almost businesslike, “I have the papers. We should get this over with.”

George lifted his head slowly. His eyes were strange neither vacant nor furious, but focused in a way Max had not seen in years. They held the calm of a man who had crossed a private ocean of pain and somehow reached a shore Max did not yet know existed.

“I’ll sign them,” George said.

Max froze.

It was as though George had spoken in a foreign tongue, something utterly unimaginable to the version of Max who had prepared for resistance, for pleading, for tears. Instead he was met with acquiescence, which for some reason unsettled him far more.

“You… will?” Max asked, his voice faltering. A faint stutter of uncertainty crept into his tone, like a crack in a marble statue.

“Yes,” George replied. “I will.”

For a moment Max stood there, blinking as if something in the room had shifted in ways he couldn’t perceive. Victory tasted bitter. Triumph felt wrong. It was as though he’d pushed over a door he expected to be locked, only to stumble into a room that was watching him.

“Alright then,” Max muttered. “Let’s sign.”

But before he could lay the papers on the table, George rose to his feet with a strange deliberateness, walked to the office door, and returned carrying a heavy stack of papers—far thicker, far denser, far more ominous than the thin legal packet Max held.

He placed it gently on the coffee table between them.

Max stared at it. “What is that?”

George’s voice was soft, but beneath it was steel. “My terms.”

“What terms?”

“If you want my signature—and you will get it—you’ll have to sign this first.”

Max scoffed, but the sound was brittle, forced. “George, come on, don’t make this—”

“Read it.”

The command was quiet, but absolute, and Max felt an involuntary shiver pass through him, like a man who suddenly realizes the chessboard he thought he dominated had never been his in the first place.

Max picked up the document.

The first page alone pulled all color from his face.

A contract. A private agreement. Binding.

And in bold:
Thirty Days of Compliance.

He scanned the lines quickly, eyes darting like frightened birds.

In those thirty days, George retained the right to delay signing the divorce.
In those thirty days, Max must comply fully, without refusal, with any request George made.
No arguments. No avoidance. No “I can’t” or “I won’t.”
For thirty days, Max was bound.

By George.

“How—” Max stammered, looking up. “What is this? Some kind of joke?”

George shook his head slowly. “No. A condition. You want freedom? Fine. Earn it. For five years I was yours, with no conditions. For thirty days, you’ll be mine—with them.”

Max felt a strange heat crawl up his neck. Shame? Fear? Irritation? Something darker? Even he couldn’t identify it. “George, this is absurd—”

“You owe me,” George interrupted, his voice trembling with quiet fire, the fire of a man who has finally learned to stop apologizing for the wounds someone else inflicted. “After what you did, the lies you spun, the months you stole from me—I deserve thirty days of truth.”

Max stood there, chest rising and falling as though the air had thickened into something heavy and unforgiving. “And if I don’t sign?”

“Then I won’t sign either,” George said plainly. “And you’ll be married to me for a very, very long time.”

A silence followed, dense, suffocating, yet charged with some profound shift in power. For once, Max was the one cornered, the one placed in a narrow hallway with only one door out.

George watched him, not with cruelty, but with a strange, painful dignity.

“You wanted this divorce so eagerly,” George whispered. “So accept the path that leads to it.”

Max swallowed.

The truth was that he expected collapse, not composure. He expected desperation, not negotiation. And George, this version of George, felt like a stranger wearing the skin of the man he once pushed aside.

A stranger with teeth.

“What exactly do you plan to do in these thirty days?” Max asked cautiously.

George smiled, and it was not warm. It was the smile of a man who had survived a fire and now held the matchbook.

“You’ll see.”

Max’s pulse quickened.

He looked down at the papers again. They seemed to throb with a life of their own, as if the ink itself whispered of consequences he could not yet fathom.

Finally, with a long, shallow breath, Max said:

“…Alright. I agree.”

“You’ll sign?”

Max nodded, though his hand trembled slightly. “I’ll sign.”

George handed him a pen.

Max pressed it to paper.

And the instant the ink touched the page, something shifted in the room, subtle, electric, irreversible. As though the universe itself paused to witness the moment Max Verstappen, once so invincible, bound himself to a fate he did not yet understand.

George watched in silence.

The contract was signed.

The thirty days had begun.

>>

That evening the apartment carried a strange hush, the kind that descends after a storm not because peace has returned, but because every object in the room is holding its breath, waiting to see what happens next. George cooked dinner, not grandly, not as a gesture of reconciliation, but with the simple, rhythmic focus of a man who had lived through pain and learned to survive by keeping his hands busy. The smell of garlic and herbs filled the air, and the clattering of utensils formed a kind of fragile bridge between them, though neither dared step fully onto it.

Max sat at the table, silent, watching George with an expression he could not name, something between nostalgia and unease, like a man staring at a familiar portrait only to discover suddenly that the eyes have changed direction.

They ate quietly at first, exchanging only minimal remarks, words that barely scratched the surface of the ocean between them. And then, just as Max reached for his glass, George placed a folded sheet of paper beside his plate.

Max frowned. “What’s this?”

“Your first task,” George said, wiping his hands calmly on a towel. “The contract starts tomorrow.”

Max unfolded the paper. A grocery list stared back at him—long, detailed, practical.

“You want me to… go grocery shopping?” Max asked with a tone hovering between disbelief and irritation.

“Yes,” George replied. “Tomorrow, after work.”

Max huffed a dry laugh, shaking his head. “I’ve never—George, I don’t even know where half of these things are.”

“That’s the point,” George said softly, almost kindly, though his eyes held something deep and unreadable. “Learning.”

Max felt a flare of annoyance—or was it embarrassment?—but ultimately he muttered, “Fine. I’ll do it.”

George nodded, and for a moment their gazes met. There was something faintly tragic in the way George’s eyes softened, not out of victory but out of a lingering love he was trying so hard to bury under duty.

Dinner ended without further conflict.

But when Max went to bed that night, the grocery list lay on the nightstand like a quiet judge, reminding him that tomorrow would be the first of thirty days where he was no longer the master of his own routine.

A strange new order had been set.

Day One:

Max arrived at the grocery store after work, still in his team jacket, shoulders stiff with a pride that felt strangely brittle in this fluorescent-lit world of vegetables and discount signs. The produce aisle stretched before him like an alien landscape. Tomatoes glistened like suspicious jewels, herbs looked like wilted secrets wrapped in plastic, and the spices, good God, the spices read like a foreign dialect printed on tiny glass jars.

He wandered helplessly, staring at items as though they were mocking him.

After several minutes, a staff member approached, young, cheerful, with an apron slightly crooked in a way that suggested he was probably too kind for the world.

“Need help, sir?” the worker asked.

Max hesitated, then sighed. “Yes. I’m looking for… all of this.” He handed over the list.

The staff’s eyes lit with recognition. “Oh! You must be Max.”

Max blinked. “How did you—?”

“George,” the staff said with a grin. “He’s a regular here. Talks about you all the time. I know everything—well, not everything—but I know how you take your hot chocolate, for example. Extra hot. Almost boiling, or it ‘doesn’t taste like winter,’ he always says. And your achievements, wow, he talks about those with so much pride—”

Something in Max’s chest twisted, subtle but sharp, like a string being pulled too tight. He didn’t know why it stung. Perhaps because he had forgotten, deliberately or conveniently, how much George had once adored him. Or perhaps because hearing about love after betraying it is like being handed a warm coat in the middle of a fire.

Max shifted uncomfortably. “Right. Can you help me find these?”

“Of course!” the staff said, cheerfully leading him through the aisles, filling the basket with practiced ease.

Max followed quietly, the ache in his chest gnawing softly, like a reminder he didn’t want but couldn’t ignore.

When he paid and left, the plastic bags cut slightly into his fingers, grounding him in a reality he had always left for others to handle.

When he returned home, George took one look at the groceries and nodded with a faint, approving hum. “Good. Then tonight… we cook together.”

Max looked up sharply. “Together?”

“Yes,” George said. “Lasagna. And a cocktail.”

Max raised an eyebrow, but said nothing.

They worked side by side in the kitchen, Max fumbling with onions as though they were bombs threatening to explode, George steadying his hands, guiding him with gentle instructions, touching his wrist lightly to show how to hold the knife, moving behind him to teach how to layer the pasta sheets. Their hands brushed occasionally, accidentally, yet each touch struck Max like a forgotten memory resurfacing from the deep.

At one point Max splattered sauce on his shirt and cursed under his breath; George laughed, not mockingly, but softly, warmly, the kind of laugh that once colored their kitchen every evening before everything went dim between them.

Max found himself laughing too, helplessly, absurdly, like a man who suddenly remembers what joy feels like but cannot admit it out loud.

For a moment, just a moment, the divorce papers dissolved from his mind like ink washed away in rain.

But when the oven timer dinged and the lasagna emerged golden and steaming, reality snapped back in place. The kitchen turned quiet again, their shoulders stiffening as though caught in a memory they weren’t supposed to visit.

They ate in silence, Max pushing the lasagna around his plate, George staring into his cocktail with the sorrowful contemplation of a man watching a ship leave a port he once called home.

The sweetness of laughter had evaporated.

What remained was the awareness that something was changing between them, something fragile, dangerous, and unspoken.

The thirty days had only begun.

And already, the world felt different.

Chapter Text

Day 2:

Morning arrived like a verdict, slow, pale, and indifferent to the souls crushed beneath its pale glow. Max awoke with a heaviness in his limbs, the kind that comes not from exhaustion but from the faint stirring of conscience, that old, stubborn ghost he had tried so hard to silence during the last year. George was already up, sitting on the edge of the bed with a stack of papers in his lap, the weak morning light framing him like some quiet saint of sorrow.

“These,” George said, handing him the packet, “are the full schedule. Everything you’ll need to do for the thirty days.”

Max took the stack. The pages were meticulously detailed, each line written in George’s neat, gentle handwriting, the same handwriting that once wrote him love notes tucked into his travel bags.

His eyes drifted over the list:
• Kiss George on the forehead every morning upon waking.
• Kiss George before leaving the house.
• Eat the lunchbox George prepares every day.
• No skipping meals.
• Check-in messages during work.
• Evening tasks to be announced daily.

It went on, simple things, painfully simple, but each carrying the weight of a ritual once born from love and now reborn from necessity.

Max swallowed. “You really wrote all this?”

“Yes,” George said quietly. “If you’re going to leave… you can at least remember how to stay.”

A strange silence thickened between them.

Max leaned forward, hesitated, then pressed a kiss to George’s forehead awkwardly, stiffly, like a man learning the gesture for the first time. George closed his eyes, whether in pain or nostalgia Max could not tell. Breakfast followed, quiet, domestic, almost peaceful, though the air around them trembled with ghosts.

Before Max stepped out of the house, he paused.

Then, fulfilling the second rule, he leaned down and kissed George softly on the lips.
A small kiss.
A familiar kiss.
A kiss that made something in Max’s chest feel disturbingly warm.

He picked up the lunch box George had packed with care, a small bento tied with a ribbon, and left.

>>

Max had barely sat at his desk when Carlos and Charles swept into the office like two storms dressed in expensive cologne and moral rot.

Carlos grinned, eyes sharp with mischief. “Max, cariño, we missed you.”

Charles smirked before sliding onto the leather couch like he owned the place. “Come here, mon cœur.”

They pulled him close, kissing him—one on the neck, the other on the cheek, their touches slick with confidence, with practiced betrayal, with the toxic ease of men who had long abandoned the weight of guilt.

Max let them—for a moment. Then he pulled back.

“I need to tell you something,” he said, running a hand through his hair. “About the next thirty days.”

Carlos raised a brow. “Oh? Another one of your little arrangements?”

Charles laughed softly. “Max, you do love drama.”

Max exhaled. “George made me sign a contract. Thirty days. I have to do what he says until he signs the divorce papers.”

For a moment both men were silent.

Then Carlos burst into laughter—loud, cruel laughter that bounced off the office walls like broken glass. “Oh my God—George is desperate, Max! What is this? Some pathetic attempt to cling to you?”

Charles nodded, chuckling. “It’s sad. So sad. And predictable.”

Max didn’t defend George.
He didn’t defend himself either.
He just sat there, silent, something tight and ugly forming in his stomach.

Before their laughter died down, the office door opened.

A young man stepped inside—tall, composed, sharp-eyed—Kimi Antonelli. George’s adopted little brother. A boy George loved like blood; a boy Max had always found disconcertingly perceptive.

Kimi stopped dead in the doorway when he saw the three of them—Max disheveled, Carlos fixing his shirt, Charles smoothing his hair. His eyes widened for half a second before he forced them neutral.

“Oh—sorry,” Kimi said quietly, bowing slightly. “I… I’ll come back later.”

Carlos snorted. Charles smirked. They swept out of the office without a care in the world, brushing past Kimi like he was furniture.

Kimi stepped forward hesitantly. “I brought the file you asked for, sir.”

Max moved to the table, and Kimi followed. They went through the client notes, discussing details with professional detachment, but Max kept glancing at him.

Finally Max asked, “Kimi… did George tell you about the divorce?”

Kimi froze.

His expression didn’t change, but something in his eyes flickered—pain? guilt? resentment? “No,” he said quietly. “He didn’t tell me anything.”

“That’s strange,” Max muttered. “He usually shares everything with his family.”

Kimi said nothing.

And Max, distracted, selfish, or simply blind, dismissed him without noticing the storm behind the boy’s controlled expression.

It surfaced in Max’s mind suddenly, horrifyingly vivid:

the day Kimi first discovered everything,
the day everything fragile in George’s world was unknowingly placed on a ticking clock.

It began one year ago, in this very office.

Max remembered the dim afternoon light filtering through the blinds, cutting the room into slanted divisions of gold and shadow. Carlos and Charles were with him, their hands all over him, their whispers sweetened with lies, their mouths stained with sin disguised as pleasure. Max remembered feeling invulnerable—like a king enthroned upon the ruins of morality, convinced the world would bend for him.

They were laughing, tangled in reckless intimacy, when the door burst open.

Kimi stood framed in the doorway like a young soldier stumbling upon a battlefield of traitors, his innocence pierced by the sight before him. The folder he held slipped from his hand, papers scattering across the floor like feathers from a bird violently torn apart.

“Mr. Verstappen—” Kimi began, but his voice cracked under the weight of witnessing something that no boy, no brother, should ever have to see.

Max scrambled to his feet, panic tearing the smugness from his face.
“Kimi—wait, wait, don’t leave.”

Carlos adjusted his shirt lazily. Charles smirked. They were already immune to shame.

But Max—Max grabbed Kimi’s wrist with trembling hands.

“Kimi, listen to me. Please. You can’t tell George. Not this. Not now.”

Kimi stared at him—eyes wet, lip trembling—torn between loyalty and disbelief.

“You… want me to lie to him?” Kimi whispered, voice breaking like glass.

Max swallowed. “Only this once.”

Kimi looked at him—long, searching, pained.

A boy forced into adulthood by another man’s cowardice.

“…Alright,” Kimi finally murmured. “I won’t tell him.”

He left without another word.

Max remembered watching him go, feeling a thrill of relief—relief that now tasted rotten.

>Five Months After:

Max remembered asking him, “Kimi, why did you help me? Why betray your brother like that?”

Kimi’s hands had trembled slightly as he adjusted a stack of papers. “Because… working under you is my dream. You’re my idol. I want to stay here. I didn’t want to lose everything I’ve worked for. And he’s not my real blood brother.”

“You and George aren’t blood,” Max had muttered carelessly. “Still… he sees you as a real brother.”

Kimi paused then, eyes lowering.

“This is life,” he said quietly. “Everyone wants to win. Sometimes you betray the one who fed you if that’s what it takes.”

Max had smirked then, arrogant, blind.

He didn’t smirk now.

As Kimi stepped out, Max’s phone buzzed.

A message from George.

“Today’s grocery list:”
followed by several items typed neatly.

Max stared at the message for a long time, longer than he meant to.
Long enough for the ache in his chest to return, tightening like a rope.

The thirty days continued.
The second day had begun.

And somewhere between guilt and habit, Max realized,

George had no idea how many knives had been lifted behind his back.

But one by one, those knives were beginning to twist.

>>

Max returned home late, his shoulders hunched with a fatigue that was not of the body but of the conscience—a kind of spiritual weariness that clings to a man like wet wool, suffocating and heavy. The hallway lights glowed softly, almost tenderly, as though the house itself pitied him.

The door opened before he could reach for the knob.

George stood there, framed by the warm light behind him, wearing an apron still dusted with flour—like some tragic saint of domestic devotion. His eyes were unreadable, their calmness an ocean whose depth Max feared to measure.

“Welcome home,” George murmured, and before Max could speak, George leaned forward and pressed a gentle kiss to Max’s forehead—slow, deliberate, almost ceremonial, as though marking him with a blessing or a curse.

The sensation was so light, yet it pierced him like a needle through paper.

Max swallowed something bitter and stepped inside.

They moved to the kitchen, and the air smelled of cheese, butter, and the faint bitterness of freshly brewed espresso. Tonight they were making mac and cheese with an iced cappuccino, a dish so simple it carried an almost childish innocence, a stark contrast to the moral labyrinth they inhabited.

George stirred the creamy pot with patient, almost meditative motions, while Max grated cheese with the tension of a man carving penitence into the grater itself.

At one moment their hands brushed, just slightly, yet the shock of it felt enormous, like two planets grazing each other’s gravity wells. They did not comment on it. They cooked in a strange, fragile harmony, like musicians who once knew the same melody and are now relearning it from memory.

When the food was ready, they sat across from each other.

George twirled a forkful of mac and cheese, then asked, calmly, “How was work?”

The question was simple.
The weight behind it was not.

Max felt words claw their way up his throat, but he forced them down. He spoke instead about meaningless meetings, contracts, clients, anything but the serpents that had wrapped themselves around him earlier that day.

George listened with serene attentiveness, nodding, occasionally offering a soft hum of acknowledgment, as though trying to rebuild a world Max had carelessly burned down.

Silence fell after dinner—not tense, not peaceful, but heavy with unsaid things.

Before Max could retreat into the sanctuary of avoidance, George touched his sleeve lightly.

“Come with me,” he said. “Just five minutes.”

They went to the bathroom.
The mirror reflected them side-by-side: a broken sinner and the man he had broken.

George handed Max a cleanser, speaking gently, as though teaching a child lost in some dim corridor of life.

“Rub it in circles. Softly. No rushing.”

Their fingers brushed as George corrected Max’s motion, and for a brief moment, Max felt an ache, deep, ancient, almost prehistoric, like the ache of a man who suddenly remembers he once had a soul.

Toner.
Serum.
Moisturizer.

Each step quiet, meticulous, strangely intimate, like the slow, deliberate stitching of a wound that had been left open too long.

George smiled faintly. “Not bad.”

And Max, for the first time that day, felt something warm flicker in his chest.

As they left the bathroom, George paused.

“One more thing,” he said, almost shyly. “Every night, you’ll carry me to bed.”

Max blinked. “Carry you?”

“Yes. Bridal style.”
His tone gentle, but unyielding.
“This is part of the contract.”

Max hesitated for a heartbeat, just long enough to reveal the tremor of his guilt, before stepping closer. His hands slid under George’s knees and back, lifting him effortlessly.

George’s arms looped around his neck.

Their faces were so close that Max could feel George’s breath brush his cheek, warm, fragile, achingly human. Carrying him felt strangely symbolic, as though he were holding all the quiet years of shared mornings, shared laughter, shared trust he had shattered.

George rested his head lightly against Max’s shoulder. “Good night, Max.”

Max lowered him gently onto the bed, an action so tender it felt like a confession of the body where the mouth remains silent.

They lay down, apart, yet not far, two souls sharing the same darkness, their breaths weaving faint patterns in the night air.

And as sleep crept in, Max felt George’s presence beside him like a soft, persistent question he no longer knew how to answer.

Chapter Text

Day 3

Morning unfolded with a slow, reluctant gentleness, as if daylight itself hesitated to intrude upon the fragile truce that lingered between the two men. Max woke first, staring at the ceiling with the expression of someone who feared that waking consciousness would drag him back into a moral labyrinth he no longer had the tools to navigate. George lay beside him, his breathing soft and measured, as though he was practicing calmness rather than naturally experiencing it.

Max turned to face him, swallowed a sudden rush of complicated emotion, and leaned forward to press a kiss onto George’s forehead. The kiss felt like touching something that had been injured but still insisted on breathing, and George’s eyes opened the moment contact was made. He blinked, smiled faintly, and said in a quiet voice, “Good morning, Max.”

They made breakfast together yet spoke very little as they ate it. The silence was not hostile but contemplative, as if they were both listening to an invisible clock ticking somewhere, not marking hours but marking something far more delicate and irreversible. Max finished his toast, wiped his mouth, and rose from the table with the lunchbox George had prepared.

Before letting him leave, George stepped toward him, looked up with an expression that held both gentleness and a certain fragile pride, and said, “You forgot something.” Max hesitated only briefly before leaning down to kiss him softly on the lips.

George whispered, “Have a good day,” and watched him go with eyes that held an unreadable mixture of hope, regret, and carefully preserved dignity.

The office swallowed Max with its usual metallic chill. He walked into meetings, nodded through presentations, spoke with clients who looked at him as if he were some monument of confidence, never suspecting that his internal world felt like a cathedral collapsing in slow motion. The hours passed in a blur of forced professionalism.

Occasionally, his gaze drifted toward the lunchbox sitting beside his notes, as if the small container held not food but the weight of promises made to a man he had once loved without doubt. When noon arrived, he opened it and found a simple, beautifully arranged meal with a handwritten note tucked beneath the lid. The inked handwriting read, “Eat well. Come home safe.” Max stared at the words far too long before folding the paper away and forcing himself to continue the day.

Since it was Friday, he left the office early, the sun still bright in the sky like a reminder that some parts of life refused to dim themselves for anyone’s guilt. While driving, his phone buzzed with a message from George. It was a list of groceries written in neat lines. Max felt a brief, inexplicable tightening in his chest as he read the items, as if the normalcy of the list was somehow heavier than any accusation.

At the grocery store, he wandered aisles with a confusion that bordered on existential exasperation. A staff member greeted him warmly, their smile bright and unguarded. Another joined, and soon Max found himself surrounded by employees who seemed genuinely fond of George.

One of them said, “We really adore him here. He always asks how our day is going. He talks about you too. He says you work so hard and that he loves preparing your meals.” Max felt something shift inside him, a strange internal fracture followed by a spreading warmth that was not comfort but something more like a painful nostalgia. He nodded, thanked them quietly, and hurried through checkout with the awkwardness of a man who feared being seen not for who he was, but for who someone else believed him to be.

When he arrived home, George greeted him with a soft smile that seemed to brighten the entire doorway. The groceries were unpacked, and they began preparing dinner together. Tomato soup bubbled gently on the stove while George chopped vegetables for the salad with the calm rhythm of someone who had once mastered the art of domestic peace.

Max sliced bread unevenly, prompting George to lean over and say with a small laugh, “You’re going to cut your fingers one day.” Max rolled his eyes lightly, replying, “Maybe if someone would let me practice more often.”

George raised an eyebrow and said, “Do you want more practice now or are you just complaining for sympathy.”

Max smirked, “Maybe both.” For a few seconds, their laughter mingled like threads weaving an old, half-forgotten tapestry.

While stirring the soup, George flicked a droplet of tomato broth toward Max, who gasped theatrically and said, “You are becoming violent, George.” George laughed again, a sound that carried both genuine amusement and the faint undertone of someone who had learned to cherish even fleeting moments of levity. “You deserved it,” he said. “For what,” Max asked. “For existing,” George replied, smirking as he dodged Max’s halfhearted attempt to flick water back.

When everything was ready, they arranged the bowls of soup, the plate of fresh bread, and the salad on the table. George poured iced americanos into tall glasses, the clinking ice sounding strangely like fragile truth breaking in slow motion. They sat across from each other and began to eat. The taste of the warm soup contrasted with the cool bitterness of the coffee, a strange combination that matched perfectly the emotional duality of the evening.

George took a slow sip and then asked, “Was your day alright.” Max nodded and answered, “Just meetings and paperwork. Nothing interesting.”

George hummed, neither satisfied nor dissatisfied, and said, “At least it sounds peaceful.” Max hesitated, then added, “The staff at the store talked about you again.” George blinked, surprised. “Oh.”

Max continued, “They seem to think very highly of you.” George smiled softly, lowering his gaze. “They are kind people,” he said, though there was a faint tremor in his voice that Max could not decipher.

They finished eating in a silence that felt almost tender, a silence that acknowledged both their shared history and the fragile peace that existed now, suspended delicately above an ocean of unresolved truths. Somewhere in that quiet hour, Max felt the first true stirrings of something he had long believed himself too ruined to feel again.

>>

Night arrived with a softness that felt almost deceitful, like velvet laid over a blade. The house was dim except for the kitchen lights, which cast long shadows across the counter where George had arranged bags and boxes of snacks Max had bought earlier. It was the first time Max had ever purchased such a variety on his own, and George looked at him with an amused expression that carried both fondness and disbelief. Max set the snacks down one by one, feeling oddly self-conscious, as though he were being judged not on groceries but on character.

George opened a packet of pretzels and said, “You bought the salted ones instead of the honey butter ones.”

Max replied, “Salted is better.”

George stared at him as if he had admitted to preferring pain over pleasure and said, “You have terrible taste.”

Max raised his eyebrows and answered, “No, you just have childish taste.”

George gasped theatrically and said, “Excuse me, I have refined taste.”

Max shook his head and countered, “You think popcorn counts as dinner.”

George muttered under his breath, “At least I can cook,” prompting Max to say, “I am learning,” which made George smirk in victory. Their bickering filled the kitchen like warm smoke, rising slowly, curling into something strangely comforting, something that reminded Max of younger years when disagreements felt harmless rather than fatal.

They eventually arranged everything onto a large wooden platter, half curated by George’s aesthetic precision and half ruined by Max’s insistence on symmetry, which George said was “too clinical for a movie night,” and Max replied, “Order is beautiful,” to which George responded, “Chaos is also beautiful.” Max scoffed lightly and said, “You are chaos,” and George grinned as if Max had just complimented him.

When they finished, George turned to him and said, “Since it is the weekend, the contract says mandatory movie night. No getting out of it.” Max shrugged, pretending indifference even though a small part of him felt strangely relieved. “Fine,” he said quietly. George switched off the kitchen lights and carried the platter to the living room, where the couch waited like an old companion they had abandoned for too many months.

When the movie started, The Dead Poets Society filled the room with its melancholic warmth. George leaned back against the cushions with a sigh, the kind of sigh one releases only when returning to a ritual that once meant something profound. Max watched the opening scene and felt his chest tighten with a sudden, unwelcome familiarity. Without warning, his mind fell backward into time.

In the flashback, he saw himself and George from years ago, seated together in a tiny cinema with flickering lights. George had worn an oversized sweater that swallowed him whole, and Max remembered thinking he had never seen someone look so effortlessly soft. They had barely known each other then, their hands awkwardly close but not touching, their conversation that night filled with shy laughter and hesitant attempts at intimacy.

Max remembered the moment George cried during the scene with Neil, tears slipping down his cheeks silently. Max offered him a tissue, and George whispered, “I feel too much,” and Max whispered back, “That is not a flaw.” The memory hit him with a painful clarity, as though the years folded upon themselves and stabbed him with their sharp edges. Max blinked, trying to steady his breathing.

He returned to the present when he felt something warm lean against him. George’s head settled slowly onto his shoulder, gentle and deliberate, like a man performing a familiar gesture whose meaning he no longer dared to name. For a moment Max froze, not because he disliked the contact, but because he feared how much he suddenly needed it. George did not speak, did not ask for anything. He simply rested there with the quiet trust of someone who still carried invisible bruises in his heart.

Max lifted a hesitant hand, hovering above George’s hair, until he forced himself to lower it and gently pat the back of George’s head. The movement was awkward at first, then became smoother, softer, almost unconscious. George exhaled in a small, content sound that pierced Max like a thread pushing through fabric, stitching him to the moment whether he wanted it or not.

After the credits rolled and the room fell into a deep quiet, George looked up and said in a gentle voice, “We should do skincare now.” Max nodded, though his mind still lingered in the memory-laden shadows of the movie. The bathroom light was warm, reflecting both of them in the mirror as though it too remembered their youth. George handed him the cleanser, saying, “Gentle circles, not aggressive scrubbing,” and Max imitated him. George corrected his motions twice, touching his wrist lightly, and each touch sent a small jolt through Max’s body that he hid behind a neutral expression. The scent of toner and serum filled the room, faintly floral and strangely nostalgic, as if every product carried a small echo of previous nights they had shared when love was not something fragile but something unquestioned.

When they finished, George dried his face with a towel and said softly, “It is time.” Max blinked. “Time for what.” George studied him with a faintly incredulous look. “For you to carry me to bed. It is in the contract, remember.” Max almost smiled. “I remember.” George stepped closer, not touching him but standing near enough that Max could feel the warmth radiating from him. “Then carry me,” George whispered.

Max slipped one arm beneath George’s legs and the other behind his back and lifted him carefully. George’s arms wrapped around his neck, and Max felt the familiar weight of him settle into his hold, not heavy, not burdensome, but quietly human, like a responsibility he once cherished and then abandoned. George rested his head against Max’s collarbone, eyes half closed, and Max carried him down the hallway.

The journey felt long even though it was only a few steps, as if the air itself thickened with old memories. George murmured, in a voice almost too soft to hear, “Good night, Max.” Max lowered him onto the bed with a careful tenderness that surprised even him, then lay beside him, not touching but close enough that he could feel the faint rise and fall of George’s breathing in the dark.

Sleep eventually claimed them, but it was not peaceful sleep. It was the kind of sleep shared by two men lying not in the comfort of certainty, but in the quiet, shifting space between guilt and longing.

Chapter Text

Day 4

Saturday morning unspooled with a slowness that felt almost sacred, as if the universe itself recognized the fragility of the day and decided to tread lightly upon it. Dawn crept through the curtains in long, pale ribbons that touched the room with a hesitant gentleness. Max stirred first, blinking at the soft ceiling shadows, then turned his head toward George, who lay on his side, breathing evenly, his face relaxed in a way Max had not seen in years. Something tightened in Max’s chest, an emotion so delicate and ambiguous that he could not name it, only obey it. He leaned forward, his breath catching for a moment, and pressed a soft kiss to George’s forehead. George’s eyelashes fluttered as if kissed by a small wind, and he opened his eyes slowly.

“Morning,” George whispered.

“Morning,” Max replied.

They rose from the bed and walked into the kitchen together. The atmosphere was quiet, but not empty; it was the silence of familiarity rebuilding itself grain by grain, like sand returning to a shore it once abandoned. George took out flour, eggs, oil, and a container of dough he must have prepared the night before. Max blinked when he saw it and said, “Roti canai.” George smiled, the expression warm but tinged with something bittersweet. “You loved it when we had it in Malaysia,” he said. “Two years ago. Remember that roadside stall we stopped at. You said it was the best breakfast you ever had.” Max looked at the dough, then at George, then said softly, “I remember.”

George kneaded the dough with practiced motions, stretching it thin until it became nearly translucent, then folding it in layers before slapping it onto the pan with a sizzling sound that filled the kitchen. Max watched him, feeling a strange nostalgia. He tried to help, though he fumbled with the technique, and George laughed, a genuine laugh this time, rich and bright, saying, “No, no, you’re tearing it. You’re supposed to stretch it like this.” Max muttered, “I am stretching,” and George replied, “You’re massacring it,” which made Max glare half-heartedly while George continued laughing softly.

When the roti was done, golden and crisp at the edges, they sat at the small dining table with dipping curry George had prepared. The aroma filled the room with an earthy warmth that felt almost like home. They ate in content silence for a moment until George wiped his mouth and said, “I have plans for today.” Max looked up, his fork hovering in the air. “Plans?” George nodded. “Yes. We need to go to the laundry shop. I want to get some things washed. After that we can eat lunch outside somewhere. Maybe that little café near the park. And then I want to go to the park itself.”

Max blinked as if the idea of spending an entire Saturday following George’s plans was both foreign and strangely comforting. “The park,” he repeated. George nodded. “Yes. The one with the big lake and the ducks that always fight each other. You liked it last time we went.” Max thought for a moment, the memory rising slowly like a submerged object resurfacing. “I did,” he admitted. George smiled, small but genuine. “Good. Then we’ll go.”

Max finished his roti in silence, but it was the kind of silence that carried warmth instead of distance. George stood up to wash the plates, and Max joined him at the sink. Their shoulders touched briefly. Neither pulled away. The morning light grew brighter through the window, illuminating the kitchen like a hesitant blessing. And without fully understanding why, Max felt that Saturday might be the first day in a long time where he feared less and felt more, even if only in the smallest, most uncertain ways.

The morning carried them forward with an unspoken rhythm, as if they were two actors performing a play they had rehearsed long ago but forgotten until now. After cleaning the kitchen, George grabbed a laundry bag and handed it to Max, who took it with a puzzled expression.

“We… have a washing machine,” Max said as he followed George out of the house.

George glanced back at him with a small smile, not mocking, not amused, simply tired in a gentle way. “I know we do. But some things need special care. And,” he added after a breath, “I like the place. You’ll see.”

The laundry shop was a small corner-lot business with pastel blue walls and the scent of detergent hanging warmly in the air. Inside, a middle-aged man with silver hair lifted his head and his whole face brightened. “George! Good morning!”

George grinned. “Uncle Farid, this is my husband, Max.”

Max blinked at the word husband but said nothing. He shook the man’s hand politely. George then guided him through the process: separating fabrics, choosing settings, tagging items to pick up later. Max watched him, baffled at how confidently George moved around the shop.

“You come here often?” Max asked.

George’s eyes softened. “Every week.”

Max nodded slowly, feeling something shift inside him, as if a window he hadn’t noticed before had opened and let in a gust of unfamiliar air.

When the laundry was done, they walked to a restaurant nearby. Max froze when he saw the name on the signboard: the same restaurant where they used to eat during their early dating days, the place where Max used to insist they order too many side dishes, where George once spilled soup on himself from laughing at Max’s terrible imitation of a French accent.

Inside, nothing had changed. The same warm lighting, the same wooden tables, the same faint aroma of roasted herbs and tomato sauce. They ordered their usual, almost without speaking. When the food arrived, George smiled faintly. “It tastes the same.”

Max picked up his fork but hesitated. “It does.” He looked at George for a moment, but George didn’t notice, or pretended not to.

They finished lunch and walked to the park, carrying a small picnic mat George had packed earlier. The park was alive—children chasing bubbles, couples laying under sun-dappled trees, joggers moving like purposeful shadows along the trail. They found a quiet spot beneath a large tree and settled down.

George rested his hands on his lap and watched a family of four nearby. The mother fed the youngest child while the father tried to assemble a kite with the older one. George stared for a long moment, his gaze softened by something heavy and unspoken.

“They look happy,” he murmured.

Max followed his gaze but didn’t reply.

George continued in a low voice that trembled in the wind, “We used to talk about this, didn’t we? A family. A small house. Maybe a dog. You said you wanted a daughter who would bully you into letting her paint your nails.” He chuckled, a fragile sound. “I kept that in my heart for years.”

Max felt something twist inside him, a pain sharp as a cracked bone. He looked at George, but George did not look back.

“Funny how things turn out,” George whispered. “You spend years imagining a future with someone, then one day you wake up and realize the future ends sooner than you thought.”

Max’s lips parted, but no words came. The silence felt enormous.

They stayed at the park until the sun dipped lower, then went home. In the kitchen, they prepared chicken kebabs together. Max skewered the pieces clumsily, and George teased him for stacking all the peppers on one end. They laughed, though the laughter felt like borrowed warmth.

Over iced Milo, they ate quietly on the balcony, listening to the city hum below. After finishing, George disappeared inside for a moment and returned with a small speaker. He put on soft jazz, the notes drifting like candle smoke into the cool evening air.

He held out his hand. “Dance with me.”

Max hesitated, then took it.

They swayed slowly under the dusk sky, with the wind brushing their clothes and the music curling around them like an old promise. George rested his forehead on Max’s shoulder, and Max closed his eyes for a moment, feeling the faint pulse of a memory he had buried long ago.

When the song ended, they went inside. They performed their nightly skincare together, George gently tapping cream onto Max’s cheeks while Max tried not to stare too long into George’s eyes reflected in the bathroom mirror.

And at last, as the ritual required, Max bent down and lifted George into his arms. Bridal style. George wrapped his arms loosely around Max’s neck.

“Thank you,” George whispered.

Max didn’t know what he meant—whether it was for the dance, the day, or simply the effort. So he only tightened his hold slightly and carried him to bed, the soft weight in his arms feeling both familiar and unbearably foreign.

Chapter Text

Day 5:

Day five unfolded with the same soft ritual that had begun to stitch itself into the fabric of their mornings. Max awoke to the faint rustle of sheets, the gentle warmth of another presence. He leaned over instinctively and pressed a kiss to George’s forehead, a gesture that had once been natural, then unfamiliar, and now something trembling between obligation and longing. George blinked awake, offering a quiet smile that carried an invisible weight. They ate breakfast together, the clinking of cutlery and the murmur of small conversation forming a fragile harmony neither dared disturb.

After clearing their plates, George announced, “Today we’re cleaning the entire apartment.”

Max stared at him for a moment, baffled. “The entire thing?”

“Yes,” George said, rolling up his sleeves. “Every corner. Every shelf. Today we make this place breathe again.”

Max obeyed, though he looked as if George had asked him to climb a mountain barefoot. Yet as the morning progressed, something strange and unexpected happened. Max found himself laughing, genuinely laughing, as he struggled with the vacuum cleaner that seemed determined to drag him along like a rebellious dog. The machine’s roar echoed around the living room, while George reorganized the kitchen with surgical precision, humming softly as he moved spices, wiped the counters, and rearranged the drawers he claimed he had “always hated but tolerated for the sake of peace.”

They switched tasks occasionally. Max helped hang clothes on the balcony, fumbling with clothespins while George grinned at his clumsy attempts. They changed the bedsheets together, getting stuck inside the duvet cover at one point and laughing until Max fell backward onto the mattress, breathless and flushed. For a moment, it felt like years ago, when joy came easily.

By noon, the apartment smelled faintly of lemon cleaner and fresh laundry. Max gathered the trash bags and said, “I’ll take these downstairs,” and George nodded, wiping sweat from his forehead.

Max left his phone on the shoe rack by the door.

It lit up once. Then twice. Then again.

George didn’t intend to look. Or perhaps he did. Perhaps intention was meaningless when the heart was already cracked open and bleeding. His hand moved before his thoughts caught up. He saw Max’s name highlighted in bright blue, saw Carlos’s words, then Charles’s.

Baby, we miss you.
Come see us.
When can we talk without the dead weight around?

George stared. The world seemed to tilt. His breath caught in his throat like a lodged stone.

He scrolled. He should not have scrolled.

Charles: Are you surviving the husband act?
Carlos: You owe us a night after all this.
Carlos: You know we’re better for you.
Charles: Does he still pretend he doesn’t notice?

George dropped the phone onto the rack as if it had burned him. His vision blurred. His stomach twisted violently, a deep, wrenching pain. He stumbled toward the kitchen sink and leaned over it, trembling, then vomited. The sound was small but raw, something animal and broken.

He rinsed his mouth, washed his face, closed his eyes. When he heard footsteps returning from the hallway, he stood up straight and forced a breath through his shaking diaphragm. He placed his hands on the counter until they stopped trembling.

Max walked in. “Everything okay?”

George turned around with a soft smile. “Yeah. Just thirsty.”

Max believed him. Or pretended to.

“Let’s start lunch?” George said, stepping away from the sink.

They cooked together, the motions smooth and practiced. Max chopped vegetables while George seasoned the pan, their hands brushing once, then twice, then both pulling away awkwardly. The light from the window fell across George’s face, pale and composed, revealing nothing of the storm inside.

They plated their food. They sat at the table. They ate.

Max talked about work in a quiet voice. George nodded along. The air between them felt heavier than the ceiling itself, but neither spoke of why.

Both smiled, and both hurt, and the day carried on as if nothing had shattered.

>>

After lunch, the air inside the apartment felt too tight, too heavy, so George suggested they go out. His voice was light, too light, as if he feared it might crack under its own weight. Max agreed without hesitation, slipping on his jacket while George grabbed a tote bag and the apartment keys.

They walked down the street side by side, the space between them deceptively normal. George led the way without explaining where they were going, and Max followed, hands tucked into his pockets, head tilted toward George every few steps as if searching for a clue in the set of his shoulders.

When George stopped in front of a small building with bright pastel murals of cats across the front wall, Max blinked. “A cat shelter?”

George smiled. “I volunteer here sometimes. And I figured… it might be nice.”

Inside, the shelter was warm and smelled faintly of shampoo and cat treats. The staff greeted George with cheerful familiarity.

“George! You’re back again!”
“You brought your husband today?”
“Oh, Max, welcome! George always talks about—”

George gently interrupted, “We’re just here to play with the cats.”

Max looked at George with widened eyes. “You come here often?”

George crouched so a small calico kitten could climb onto his knee. “Almost every week.”

Something tugged inside Max, something eerily similar to the feeling he felt at the grocery store when the staff spoke of how much George talked about him. A strange ache, cold at the edges. He looked around at the room filled with soft purring, tiny meows, and toys scattered like confetti.

“I didn’t know,” Max murmured as he picked up a fluffy white cat that immediately curled into his chest.

“You didn’t ask,” George replied softly, but not unkindly.

George guided Max from room to room, showing him which cats liked belly rubs and which preferred gentle pats on the head. Max watched George more than the animals—watched the way he smiled without forcing it, the way his fingers moved gently over small furry heads, the way he relaxed here as if laying down a burden he never spoke of.

At one point, George held a ginger kitten to his chest, and Max startled himself by thinking: he looks like he belongs here.

When the staff joked, “You two look like proud parents,” George only laughed while Max felt something hot flicker in his stomach before he turned away.

After an hour, George finally said, “Come on. Let’s go to the park.”

They walked to the same park they visited the day before, but instead of sitting under a tree, George stretched his arms overhead. “Let’s jog.”

Max blinked. “Jog? Now?”

“Yes. Come on. It’ll be fun.”

They started jogging together on the paved path. At first their pace was steady, normal, but then George suddenly sped up with a mischievous grin.

“Catch me if you can!”

Max let out a surprised laugh and sprinted after him. Their footsteps pounded lightly against the earth as they wove between trees and clusters of people. George laughed—really laughed—and the sound was so bright it made Max’s chest tighten in a way he didn’t understand.

“Slow down,” Max called out, half laughing, half breathless.

“Then run faster!”

“George!”

George turned around and stuck out his tongue. Max lunged forward, finally catching him around the waist, spinning him slightly before letting go. George stumbled but laughed harder, bracing himself on Max’s arm.

“You’re annoying,” Max said between panting breaths.

“You’re slow,” George replied, cheeks flushed, eyes sparkling.

They jogged a little more, then slowed to a walk, breathing in sync. The sun dipped lower, casting golden light across George’s face.

For a moment, they looked like two people who had not broken anything between them.

For a moment, Max forgot the contract. George forgot the pain in his stomach. And the world forgot to be cruel.

They walked home together, silent but smiling, and the warmth of their laughter still clung to them like the last light of day.

>>

They returned home with the last warmth of the day still clinging to their skin like a memory unwilling to fade. The apartment felt unusually quiet, as if the walls themselves held their breath when they stepped inside, unsure whether to welcome them or mourn them. George flicked on the kitchen lights and said, in a voice gentle but lined with fatigue, “Let’s cook dinner.”

Max nodded. He didn’t trust his voice. He followed George into the kitchen, where the two of them moved around each other with a strange mixture of grace and awkwardness, like dancers who once knew every step of a waltz but now struggled to remember which foot led first. The pot sizzled when George dropped in the onions, and Max stirred the sauce with a wooden spoon that clicked against the sides like a metronome marking the death of an old symphony.

“You cut the peppers,” George said softly.

Max nodded, chopping slowly, eyes drifting to George’s profile again and again—his concentrated frown, the tiny tremor in his fingers he pretended wasn’t there, the slump in his shoulders that looked like a man carrying a cathedral made of grief. Twice Max opened his mouth to speak, and twice he shut it again, because every possible sentence tasted like a lie, a betrayal, or a knife.

Dinner tasted warm but heavy, like nostalgia mixed with regret. And when they finished eating, George wiped his mouth, set down his fork, and said quietly, “Music?”

Max hesitated. “If you want.”

George wanted. So he played something soft, something old, something that wrapped around them like smoke from a candle. He stepped onto the balcony, and Max followed.

The night air was cool, brushing their skin like a ghost’s fingertips. City lights flickered in the distance like distant fires burning behind thick glass. George extended his hand and said, “Dance with me.”

Max took it—almost against his own will. George leaned into him, resting his cheek against Max’s shoulder. They swayed slowly, their feet shifting in patterns that felt familiar and foreign at once. It was a dance that once meant love, then habit, then obligation… and now felt like a plea from a drowning man.

“Max,” George whispered, voice trembling like a frayed thread. “Tell me… is there truly no chance? For us. For this. For what we were.”

The question fell between them like a stone thrown into deep water—silent at first, then echoing endlessly.

Max’s hand froze on George’s back. He pulled away slightly, his eyes shuttering, turning colder than marble left under winter rain. “George… don’t.”

“Please,” George breathed. “Just tell me the truth.”

Max’s jaw tightened. Something flickered behind his eyes—fear, guilt, anger, or all three tangled like vines around a dying tree. Then he stepped back, breath sharp, and said, “I… can’t do this conversation.”

He turned and walked away before George could utter another word.

The sound of the bathroom door shutting rang through the apartment like a gunshot.

George stood alone on the balcony, music still playing, his hands trembling as if they had been dipped in cold water. He pressed them to his face, swallowed hard, and tried to breathe through the cracking sensation in his chest—the feeling of something once whole turning to splintered glass.

Max returned because he had to. The contract demanded it. They went through the familiar motions of skincare, but this time in utter silence. Only the faint tapping of cream on skin and the soft running of water broke the oppressive quiet.

George did not look at Max. Max did not look at George.

And when it was time, Max carried him to bed. Bridal style, like the nights before. George wrapped his arms around Max’s neck with the stiffness of someone gripping a memory, not a man. Max laid him down gently, pulled the blanket over him, and turned off the lamp.

George closed his eyes.

Max did not.

He lay beside him, staring at the faint outline of George’s profile illuminated by the last trickle of streetlight through the curtains. George’s breath was steady, but Max could feel the pain radiating off him in waves, like quiet thunder.

Max whispered, barely audible, “I’m sorry, G. I don’t want to hurt you. You don’t deserve someone as broken and driven by lust as me.”

His voice cracked on the last word.

He slid out of the bed quietly, picked up his phone, and stepped into the hallway. It vibrated almost instantly, as if waiting for him—Carlos’s name glowing on the screen, then Charles’s.

He answered.

George’s eyelids opened the moment he heard the faint click of the door closing. His face remained still on the pillow, but his eyes shone with a dull, defeated light. He stared at the door as if it were both a grave and an escape.

A small, bitter smile tugged at his lips.

Of course.

Of course Max went back to them the moment he could.

George turned on his back and looked at the ceiling, tears gathering without falling.

In the quiet darkness, he whispered to himself, “Thirty days, Max. Thirty days… and I promise I’ll let you go.”

But the words tasted like blood in his mouth.

Chapter Text

Day 6:

Day six dawned with the same choreography, the ritual that had become both comfort and torment. Max woke before George and pressed the familiar kiss to his forehead, soft and hesitant, like someone touching a bruise they themselves had caused. George opened his eyes with a tired smile, and they slipped through the motions of breakfast, small polite exchanges layered over the silent ocean rising between them.

Halfway through cleaning the dishes, George’s phone buzzed. He wiped his hands on a towel and checked the notification. His parents.

“Please check on Kimi today. He hasn’t replied to us for two days.”

George frowned slightly. “That’s strange,” he murmured. “He always replies.”

Max stiffened a little at the mention of the younger boy, but he said nothing.

Two hours later, after Max left for the office, George stared at Kimi’s contact name glowing on his screen. He hesitated only a second before calling.

“Kimi?” George’s voice was warm, hopeful.

On the other side of the city, Kimi Antonelli froze when he saw the name flash across his phone. He was standing at the edge of Max’s meeting room, holding a folder, waiting for the meeting to end. Inside, Max sat comfortably beside Carlos, the two leaning close, Carlos whispering something that made Max smirk. Charles typed something into his laptop while tapping Max’s knee under the table.

Kimi’s stomach churned.

He stepped into the hallway and answered, “Hey, George.”

“Are you free?” George asked, his voice carrying a brightness that stabbed Kimi straight through. “Want to have lunch with me? It’s been a while.”

Kimi swallowed. His throat felt raw. “Lunch? Uh… yeah. Yeah, I’m free.”

Max’s voice drifted faintly from inside the room. “Kimi. One minute.”

Kimi turned to see Max staring at him with cold warning eyes—the kind that reminded him exactly why he had chosen silence over loyalty.

Kimi stepped inside for a second. Max leaned close, voice low but sharp. “Keep to your word. You promised me.”

And Kimi nodded, because he always nodded, because he was too weak to do otherwise.

When Kimi arrived at the lunch spot—his favorite place, a small restaurant with outdoor seating and warm lights—George was already waiting. His smile grew when he saw Kimi approach.

“Kimi! You finally made time for me.” George stood and pulled him into a tight hug. “I missed you.”

Those words alone nearly ripped Kimi in half.

They sat down, ordered their usual dishes, and George talked animatedly about small things—laundry, cooking, the cat shelter, the park. He seemed… happy today. Fragile, but brighter.

And every laugh from George made the guilt inside Kimi swell like poison.

“Kimi,” George said eventually, leaning forward with soft eyes. “Can I ask you something? And can you… be honest?”

Kimi’s heart plummeted. “Of course.”

George’s smile trembled. “Did you know Max was cheating on me?”

It felt like the world held him by the throat.

Kimi stared at his plate. Stared until the pattern blurred. His heartbeat pounded in his ears like a fist slamming against a locked door.

“No,” he whispered. “I didn’t know.”

George exhaled a shaky breath of relief—relief that pierced Kimi deeper than any accusation would have. “I’m glad… I’m glad you’re not part of this, Kimi. I don’t think I could bear it if you also—”

His voice cracked, but he laughed it off.

Kimi couldn’t even lift his head.

They finished lunch with gentle conversation, though Kimi barely tasted the food. When it was time to leave, George hugged him again, tighter this time. “Take care, okay? If anything’s wrong, you can always talk to me.”

Kimi nodded with a stiff smile. “Yeah. Of course, George.”

They walked to the parking lot together, then separated at their cars. George waved as he drove away, his expression soft, unaware of the battlefield inside Kimi’s chest.

Kimi climbed into his driver’s seat, closed the door, and the moment the silence swallowed him whole, he broke.

His shoulders trembled. His hand flew to his mouth. Tears streamed down his face in violent waves. The guilt he had been burying for months surged forward, sharp and unforgiving.

“I’m sorry,” he choked. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m so sorry…”

He repeated it like a prayer to a god he no longer believed he deserved.

And in the empty car, he sobbed for the brother who loved him without blood, and for the betrayal he still chose to continue.

>>

That night unfolded with the same familiar choreography, but there was something quieter beneath it, something trembling like a candle flame in a room with closed windows. Max returned home later than usual, looking worn, the shadows under his eyes darker than the night outside. George greeted him with a small smile, soft and weary, but still pulled him into the kitchen.

“Let’s cook,” he said simply.

Max nodded.

The kitchen filled with the sounds of chopping, sizzling oil, soft laughter that neither quite recognized anymore. George reached over Max at one point to grab a spice jar, their shoulders brushing. Max froze for a heartbeat, before stepping aside silently.

Dinner tasted warm and comforting, but neither of them spoke much. It was the kind of silence that filled the room like thick fog—gentle, but suffocating.

Afterward, George turned on the bathroom lights and began their nightly skincare ritual. Max stood beside him at the sink, their reflections side by side in the mirror. George dabbed cream on Max’s cheek with the soft familiarity of someone who had memorized the texture of his skin, the angle of his jaw, the lines at the corners of his eyes.

Max stayed still, unable to meet his gaze.

When they finished, Max bent down and lifted George into his arms. Bridal style again. His arms wrapped around George automatically now, but his heart felt like it was being scraped against stone.

As they stepped into the hallway, George suddenly reached up. His palm cupped Max’s left cheek—warm, gentle, achingly familiar. Max stopped walking as if the touch rooted him to the floor.

George’s thumb brushed the edge of Max’s jaw, slow and trembling. His eyes softened, and his voice came out in a whisper that cracked down the middle.

“I miss your face.”

The words were simple. But they landed like a knife slipped quietly between ribs.

Max felt his breath stutter. His grip on George’s waist tightened involuntarily, as if some instinct begged him not to move, not to breathe, not to let the moment shatter.

George’s smile was small, tired, fragile. A smile made of memories and bruised hope.

And Max—who had betrayed him, who had chosen lust over loyalty, who had spent nights in another man’s arms—stood there frozen, heart pounding like a trapped bird, because he didn’t know how to answer without breaking George all over again.

Without saying another word, George lowered his hand, resting it limply against Max’s chest for a moment before letting it fall away.

Max swallowed. Hard.

Then he carried George the rest of the way to the bed, lowered him gently onto the sheets, pulled the blanket over him, and stood there for a long, unbearable moment before turning off the light.

George closed his eyes.

Max wished he could.

Chapter Text

Day 7

The morning unfolded like a familiar dance that both of them knew by heart. Max woke first and leaned in to press a quiet kiss on George’s forehead. George blinked up at him with soft sleep-filled eyes and whispered good morning. They cooked breakfast together, the sound of sizzling butter filling the kitchen and cloaking them in the kind of warmth only routine could create.

George asked if Max wanted extra honey on his toast today. Max nodded without looking at him, afraid that meeting his eyes would show too much. They sat across from each other, talking about trivial things like the weather and a neighbor’s loud dog barking at dawn. George laughed and said it was cute. Max said it was annoying. Their difference in tone made George look down at his plate, pushing crumbs with his fork.

Before leaving for work, Max leaned in and kissed George on the forehead again. George closed his eyes tightly, as if trying to memorize the feeling. Max slipped on his coat without another word. George placed a lunchbox in his hand and whispered, “Eat well, okay.” Max nodded and left the apartment.

At the office, Carlos and Charles greeted Max with easy smiles. Carlos slung an arm around Max’s shoulder while showing him a new meme. Charles tugged at Max’s sleeve, teasing him about looking prettier today than yesterday. Max forced a laugh but something inside him twisted uncomfortably. George’s message buzzed in his pocket. He did not open it immediately. The chatter of his coworkers felt safer, even though it tasted like guilt.

That night, everything repeated again. Dinner cooked together, small talk floating around them like feathers too heavy to stay in the air. The skincare routine shared in silence. Max lifting George into his arms and carrying him to bed. George kept his eyes closed because if he looked at Max for too long, his heart would crack again.

Day 8

Max woke up feeling heavier than usual, but still leaned forward and placed a gentle kiss on George’s forehead. George smiled sleepily and whispered, “You are early today,” with a hopeful tone that made Max’s chest feel like it was collapsing inward. They ate breakfast slowly, talking about a news article George read the night before. Max tried to contribute, but his voice faded halfway through a sentence, leaving George to fill in the rest. When Max kissed him before leaving, George held onto his shirt for a second longer than normal, as if trying to anchor him in place. Max gently pulled away.

At work, Carlos showed Max a video of a cat stealing someone’s sandwich and Charles laughed so loudly the whole office turned. They pulled Max onto the couch in the meeting room, insisting on hanging out before their next task.

Carlos rested his head on Max’s shoulder while scrolling through his phone. Charles leaned close enough to brush Max’s arm. Max smiled at them, but it was the kind of smile that hid shadows. George sent him a picture of the plant on their windowsill blooming for the first time in months. There was a caption saying, “I thought you would want to see it.” Max stared at the photo for a long time but did not reply.

That evening, George chopped vegetables in the kitchen with a softness that felt like a prayer. Max stood beside him, hands steady but heart trembling. George asked, “Did you have a good day?” Max answered yes, his voice clipped. George nodded without looking up because he already knew the truth behind silence. When it was time for the skincare routine, they stood in the bathroom mirror, two people reflecting a life they could no longer hold. George whispered, “Your eyes look tired today,” and Max said, “I am fine.” George smiled as if he believed him. He did not.

Max carried him to bed again. George wrapped his arms loosely around Max’s neck during the lift, but Max looked past him as if afraid of drowning in the closeness.

Day 9

Another morning began with a forehead kiss that lingered a second longer than Max intended. George’s eyes softened, and for a moment, he looked like the man Max once fought the world for. They cooked breakfast quietly. George hummed a melody he used to sing while watering their plants, and Max found himself watching him in silence. When George caught him staring, Max quickly looked away. George pretended he did not notice.

On the way out, Max kissed George’s forehead again. George whispered, “Thank you,” like it was something precious he did not deserve anymore. Max paused for a heartbeat but walked away without responding.

At the office, Carlos teased Max for zoning out during a presentation. Charles elbowed him and said, “You look like a man in love.” Max’s breath caught, and for a moment, he almost confessed everything. But the words remained trapped in his throat, bruising him from inside. He forced a laugh and said he was simply tired. They believed him.

That evening, George welcomed Max home with soft eyes and a quieter voice. They cooked together again, brushing past each other like fragile paper figures afraid of tearing. After dinner, George turned on soft music, hoping Max would ask him to dance the way he used to. Max did not. George forced a smile and said, “Maybe tomorrow.” Max said nothing.

During the skincare routine, George’s hands trembled faintly. Max noticed but pretended not to. He lifted George into his arms afterward. George rested his head against Max’s shoulder and whispered, “Your heartbeat sounds sad.” Max did not answer. He simply placed him gently on the bed and turned off the light.

Day 10

Friday arrived with a strange heaviness. The morning was the same as last week. Max woke, kissed George softly on the forehead, and whispered a quiet good morning. They ate breakfast with the same familiar silence between them, interrupted only by the clink of cutlery and the soft sigh George tried to hide. Before leaving, Max bent down and kissed him again. George closed his eyes, pretending it was enough.

Work ended early just like the previous Friday. Carlos and Charles waved at Max as he left the office, calling after him that they would see him next week. Max walked out with their laughter echoing in his ears like a reminder of choices he should not have made.

George sent him a grocery list again. Max followed it, visiting the same store where the staff greeted him warmly. One of them said, “George was here earlier. He spoke about you again.” Max smiled weakly, a faint crack forming at the edge of his heart.

When he returned home, George met him at the door with a soft smile. They cooked tomato soup and sliced bread and prepared salad together. Their hands brushed occasionally. George giggled when Max dropped a tomato slice, and Max felt something inside him ache in a way that frightened him.

During dinner, they ate while talking about their day. George listened attentively to every word Max said, even when Max shortened the story to avoid mentioning anything painful. George nodded and smiled, trying to hold onto the fragments of what they used to be.

Later that night, George watched Max as they cleaned the kitchen, as if memorizing the shape of his back, the curve of his shoulders, the way he moved around the space that once belonged to both of them equally.

Nothing was said, but everything was felt.

The night ended the same way, with skincare done side by side and Max carrying George tenderly to bed.

George pretended to sleep quickly. Max lay beside him, staring at the ceiling, wishing he knew how to undo the damage he had done.

Chapter Text

Day 13

The morning unfolded in its practiced pattern. Max woke first, leaning in to press a soft kiss on George’s forehead. George opened his eyes slowly, offering a small smile that carried both gratitude and sorrow. They cooked breakfast together, the sound of eggs frying filling the quiet kitchen. George asked, “Do you want extra butter today?” and Max nodded without lifting his gaze from the pan. They ate across from each other, trading small remarks about the schedule for the evening. George reminded him, “My family dinner is at seven. We already agreed, right? We act like everything is fine.” Max paused just a moment too long before he replied, “Yes. I remember.” George smiled at the answer as if it was enough to keep him standing.

At seven, they entered the familiar dining room of George’s family home. The table was already filled with dishes George’s mother prepared, warm scents drifting in the air like childhood memories. The family welcomed Max with genuine affection, unaware of the cracks beneath the surface. George’s mother hugged him tightly while saying, “It has been too long, sweetheart.” George laughed softly and answered, “I know. I missed this too.”

They sat side by side, and Max rested his hand on George’s lower back in a gesture so natural that George almost forgot it was an act. During dinner, every touch felt amplified. Max brushing crumbs off George’s cheek. Max leaning in to whisper that the soup was good. Max placing food onto George’s plate without being asked. These were things Max used to do without thinking. Tonight, he did them because of the agreement, yet George absorbed them like a starving man learning how to chew again. His face softened each time Max reached for him, as if he was memorizing the shape of the affection even if it no longer belonged to him.

Kimi watched everything from across the table, silent and tense. Every time Max’s hand brushed George’s arm, Kimi’s jaw tightened. He looked at his plate, unable to meet George’s eyes. At one point, George caught the expression and tilted his head, but he said nothing. The grief in the room was invisible to the rest of the family, but Kimi felt it like a bruise he could not hide.

George’s father asked Max about work, and Max answered politely. George added small details about Max’s recent projects as if he still belonged in those conversations. Max looked at him quietly, realizing how much George still remembered. George’s mother laughed at a story George told about Max burning pancakes once, and Max smiled too, but it was a thin smile, stretched and fragile.

When dinner ended, George’s mother pulled George aside while Max helped clear the table. Her voice was gentle as she asked, “Are you alright, darling? You seem tired.” George paused with his hands still on the edge of the countertop. He tried to spread a smile across his face, but it faltered at the corners. “I am okay, Mom,” he said quietly. “I am just… taking things one day at a time.”

She cupped his face with tender palms, searching his expression for something he could not hide forever. “You know you can tell me anything,” she murmured. “You do not have to carry things alone.” George swallowed hard and nodded. “I know.”

But when she pulled him into a hug, George’s eyes softened with the kind of sadness a person only shows when they have already accepted that love alone cannot keep something alive.

Later that night, back at the apartment, George walked in first, still carrying the soft scent of his mother’s cooking in his clothes. Max followed, closing the door quietly behind them. Neither spoke. They changed into comfortable clothes, washed their faces in silence, and Max lifted George into his arms to carry him to bed.

George rested his head against Max’s chest and whispered so softly it felt like he was afraid the night itself would hear him, “For a moment tonight, I almost believed we were still us.”

Max froze. Something painful crawled up his throat, but he forced himself to swallow it.

George closed his eyes before Max could respond. His eyelashes trembled slightly, like someone trying to hold back a lifetime of unshed tears.

Max laid him gently on the bed, turned off the light, and sat on the edge for a moment, listening to the quiet thud of George’s breathing.

Neither of them said goodnight.

They didn’t need to.

The silence spoke too much already.

>>

Day 15 unfolded not like a day, but like a blade drawn quietly in the dark, cold and without mercy.

The morning ritual happened as usual, though the tenderness in it had thinned. Max kissed George on the forehead, but it was hurried, barely a brush, a gesture performed without thought. George looked up at him, his eyes lingering for a moment longer than Max’s lips did, but he said nothing. They ate breakfast in silence, the kind of silence that tasted of metal and exhaustion.

When Max left for work, he forgot the lunchbox George prepared. George stared at it for a long moment, the small blue container sitting on the kitchen counter like a reminder of something slowly rotting between them. He exhaled and whispered to himself, “He will need it,” and without another thought, he grabbed his coat and headed to Max’s office.

When George entered the building, the entire staff practically froze. Whispers stirred like soft winds in a churchyard. George never came here. George never needed to.

Kimi hurried toward him immediately, almost stumbling in panic. “George, no, please, you can’t go up there. Please listen to me. Not today.”

George barely slowed down. His eyes remained fixed on the hallway that led to Max’s office. “Move, Kimi.”

Kimi grabbed his arm, desperate, voice cracking. “George, I’m begging you, you don’t want to see this.”

George looked at him calmly. It was the calmness of a man who had seen storms and finally understood they had no reason to spare him. “Then let me see it.”

He opened the office door.

The world inside seemed to freeze.

Max was kissing Charles. Not a simple kiss either. Max was half-leaning over the desk, Charles’s hands pulling him closer, their breaths tangled, bodies pressed together as if the office wasn’t an office at all but a room built for betrayal.

Both men jerked apart at the sound of the door. Max’s face drained of color. Charles stepped back, wiping his mouth, eyes widening in genuine alarm.

But George showed no expression. Not anger. Not shock. Not heartbreak.

Just emptiness.

He stepped forward calmly, the lunchbox held loosely in his hands.

He walked around them as if they were furniture, placed the lunchbox neatly on the desk, right beside a stack of contracts, and finally looked at Max with a gentle smile that broke something inside the room.

“You forgot your lunch,” George said softly. “I came to bring it to you. I will see you tonight. And do not forget to buy the groceries.”

He turned to leave.

Max moved as if stabbed. “George, wait, I can explain.”

George paused, turned slightly, and his confused expression was so painfully sincere it twisted the air itself.

“Explain?” he repeated quietly. “Why are you explaining, Max? We are at the end of our empire, right?” He gave a small nod toward Charles. “And hi, Charles.”

Charles opened his mouth to speak, but George had already turned and closed the office door behind him with a soft click.

Outside, Kimi stood frozen, his eyes wide, his face pale.

George looked at him.

“Why, Kimi?” His voice did not tremble. That made it worse.

Kimi dropped his gaze to the floor. His hands shook slightly. His voice was a whisper. “Because this is life, G. You want to be happy, I want to be happy. You want to win, I want to win. We… we’re brothers, but not by blood. And even if we were, I would have done the same.” His throat tightened around the next words. “I respect Max too much. He is my idol. I looked up to him my whole life. He has been nothing but kind to me. That doesn’t mean I hate you.”

George stared at him, then laughed softly. Not loud. Not hysterical. Just a broken sound slipping out of a tired man.

“You’re not wrong, Kimi,” he said. “You are just like everyone else in this world. It is me that is the problem, for expecting people to be loyal in this era.”

He stepped past Kimi.

“They don’t make loyalty like they used to.”

George did not move after the words left his mouth. The hallway felt too quiet for a building filled with people. Kimi stood stiffly in front of him, looking as if someone had dug a hole in his chest and left it there, open and leaking. George breathed in slowly, his expression still calm, but not the kind of calm that soothed. It was the calm of surrender, the calm of a man who had finally realized that nothing he clung to was ever actually his.

“Kimi,” George said again, softer this time. “Tell me the truth. All of it. Let me hear you without the excuses.”

Kimi closed his eyes for a moment before lifting them back to George. “You will hate me.”

“I will not,” George replied. “I am too tired to hate anyone.”

Kimi’s voice cracked as he tried to swallow the guilt that had been sitting in his throat for months. “I did not want you to find out like this. I did not want you to walk into that room. I tried to stop you.”

“Why?” George asked. “To protect me or to protect Max?”

Kimi hesitated. The silence between them stretched, slow and suffocating.

“To protect myself,” he said finally. “Because if you saw it with your own eyes, I knew you would look at me differently too. I knew your disappointment would be another weight I would have to carry. I did not want that.”

George tilted his head slightly, studying him. “So you protected yourself by letting me walk into a betrayal without warning.”

Kimi’s eyes glistened. “George, you have to understand. This world is not kind. I am not strong like you. I do not have your heart. I do not have your stability. I do not have your ability to love someone so deeply that it hurts. I am surviving the only way I know how. I admired Max. He was the person I wanted to become. So when he asked me to stay silent, when he asked me to keep his secret, I said yes. I wanted to stay in his good graces. I wanted to keep my job. My dream job. I finally felt like my life was going somewhere.”

George stared at him, his expression unreadable. “So you chose ambition over loyalty.”

Kimi nodded slowly. “I chose a future I could see clearly. And I chose it over the one that felt uncertain.”

George let out a soft breath, a laugh without joy. “But Kimi, loyalty is not about certainty. Loyalty is about faith. It is about choosing someone even when the world offers you a thousand reasons not to. What you call uncertainty, I call commitment. What you call survival, I call fear. And what you call ambition, I call hunger.”

Kimi’s shoulders trembled. “Is hunger wrong? I wanted something for myself for once. I wanted success that did not slip through my fingers. You always had love, George. You always had people who adored you. You had Max. You had your friends. You had your family. I had nothing except the idea that maybe one day someone like Max could look at me and say that I deserve to be here. I needed that validation. I needed it more than I could ever explain.”

George took a step closer, his eyes softening with something that was almost pity. “And did you get it?”

Kimi pressed his lips together. His voice came out fragile. “No.”

“Exactly,” George said. “That is the irony. You sold your loyalty to someone who will never give you back what you want. You traded family for a god you created in your mind. But idols do not love their worshippers, Kimi. Idols enjoy being adored, but they never return the devotion.”

Kimi’s breath hitched. “Do you think I do not know that? Do you think I do not feel the consequences every day? You think I do not see your face every time Max looks at me as if I am just a convenient shadow? I know I betrayed you. I know I failed you. I know I am a coward. But I am trying to survive in a world that rewards wolves and punishes sheep.”

George’s laughter was so soft it barely existed. “But Kimi, I was not asking you to be a sheep. I was asking you to be a brother.”

Kimi’s eyes filled with tears he could no longer blink away. “I do not deserve that word.”

“No,” George answered gently. “You do not. Not today.”

The tears slipped down Kimi’s cheeks silently. He did not hide them. There was no point.

George looked at him for a long moment, his voice finally breaking just slightly. “You know what hurts the most, Kimi? It is not that Max cheated. It is not that you stayed silent. It is the fact that the two people I trusted most in this place both looked at me, saw love, and decided it was something they could use.”

Kimi cried harder now, his breath shaking. “I am sorry. George, I am so sorry.”

George nodded slowly. “I know.”

He placed a hand on Kimi’s shoulder, not kindly, not cruelly, simply as acknowledgment.

“You are not a bad person,” George said. “You are just human. And humans are capable of the most exquisite cruelty when they are afraid.”

Kimi sobbed openly now. “I never wanted to hurt you.”

“I know,” George said. “But you did.”

Kimi lowered his head, unable to look at him anymore.

George took a step back.

“They do not make loyalty like they used to,” he whispered. “But I suppose this is the world we live in. Everyone starving for something. Everyone willing to steal a little piece of someone else to feed their own hunger.”

George turned and walked away.

Kimi watched him go, tears falling freely, knowing he had just lost the only person who ever treated him like family.

Chapter Text

Max returned home that evening expecting silence, tension, maybe even the cold side of George’s back turned toward him. Instead, when he opened the door, he was greeted by a smile. Not a bright one, but a soft, tired curve of lips that carried something almost holy in its fragility. George stood in the hallway with the porch light spilling over his shoulders like he had been waiting there for hours.

“You are home,” George said, his voice warm in a way that clung to the air.

Max felt his throat close. His knees buckled before he even chose to kneel. He dropped to the floor in front of George like a sinner collapsing at the feet of a saint, hands trembling as he tried to speak.

“George,” he whispered. “Please listen. I need to explain. Today, what you saw… I know it is unforgivable. I know I hurt you. I know I broke things I cannot fix, but I swear to you, George, I did not want you to see it, I never wanted—”

George’s hand came up gently, resting on his shoulder. “Max,” he murmured. “It is okay.”

Max looked up, shattered. “But you saw me with Charles. You walked in on—”

George knelt down with him, their eyes level. His voice was soft, painfully tender. “I already knew.”

The words struck Max harder than any accusation could have. George smiled again, a smile so gentle it felt like it could bruise. “You do not need to explain anything to me anymore.”

Max felt tears burn behind his eyes, but George stood up before he could say anything more.

“Come on,” George said quietly. “Help me cook dinner.”

Max followed him into the kitchen like a ghost. George handed him vegetables, spices, instructions. They moved around each other with a practiced rhythm that felt more intimate than forgiveness. Max chopped slowly, carefully, watching George from the corner of his eye, as if afraid George might disappear if he blinked too long.

Dinner tasted like peace pretending to be normal.

After they finished washing the dishes, George wiped his hands on a towel and turned toward Max with a small spark in his eyes. “Dance with me,” he said softly.

Max blinked. “Dance?”

George nodded and walked toward the balcony. The night sky waited for them, pale moonlight spilling over the floor tiles like silver water. George picked up his phone, pressed play, and the haunting voice of Lana Del Rey filled the air, humming with melancholy.

Chemtrails over the Country Club.

George stepped close, placing his hand in Max’s. “This is my favorite,” he said.

Max swallowed, unable to speak.

They began to sway, their bodies moving slowly beneath the tender light. George leaned his head against Max’s shoulder, humming along to the song. His hair brushed Max’s jaw. The wind carried the scent of George’s cologne, mixed with dinner spices, mixed with something heartbreakingly familiar.

Max looked down at him.

And for the first time in months, he saw him.

Not the husband he had taken for granted. Not the man he had betrayed. Not the soft place he assumed would always be waiting.

He saw George.

He saw the beauty he had ignored, the devotion he had bruised, the love he had walked away from as if it were replaceable.

He saw George under the contract, shining and fragile and finite, drenched in moonlight like a creature touched by tragedy.

George looked up at him then, eyes shimmering under the pale glow. His smile was gentle, resigned.

“Fifteen days left,” he whispered. “Let us make them all count.”

>>

Day 18 stretched out with a kind of fragile beauty, as if the universe itself knew there were only so many mornings left and decided to place this one gently in their hands. Their morning ritual unfolded as it always did: Max kissing George’s forehead before George even opened his eyes, the soft murmur of good morning passing between them, the quiet breakfast where the silence felt less like an absence and more like a truce.

But after breakfast George stood, wiped his hands on a towel, and said, almost casually, “Let’s go to the shelter. I want to see the cats.”

Max agreed without a second thought. He found himself agreeing to everything these days, as if each yes might make up for all the things he had destroyed.

The shelter greeted them with the warm scent of fur and the soft chorus of meows. The moment they stepped inside, several cats trotted straight to George, their tails raised high in recognition. Max stared in quiet awe. It was one thing to know George came here often, another to see living, breathing proof of how deeply he had become part of a place.

“You really are a regular here,” Max said, spotting his husband kneeling on the floor with three cats competing for space on his lap.

George shrugged, scratching under one cat’s chin. “Everyone needs somewhere to be loved without conditions.”

Max swallowed hard. “Is that why you come here?”

George didn’t answer. He just smiled, and a cat purred louder.

They browsed the rooms for a while, playing with the cats and watching them weave around each other like small, warm shadows. Eventually Max stopped in front of a pair curled up in one bed: a white cat with soft gray streaks and a brown cat with two different colored eyes. They slept pressed together so closely they looked like one creature.

“This one,” Max said. “We can take this one.”

George tilted his head, his expression soft. “But what if he gets lonely?”

Max blinked. “Lonely?”

George reached down, gently stroking both cats. “They’ve been together since they arrived. If you separate them, one will keep searching for the other. They’ll look calm on the outside but fall apart when no one’s looking. Cats pretend well. People pretend better.”

Max felt something twist inside his chest. He did not know if George was still speaking about the cats.

Max whispered, “Then we take both.”

George smiled again, and this time it touched something deeper in his eyes. “Both,” he repeated softly.

The adoption paperwork took time, but neither of them minded. The cats stayed close to each other in the carrier, their small bodies pressed together like they understood they had narrowly avoided heartbreak.

“We need names,” Max said as they settled onto the couch at home, the cats exploring the living room.

George sat cross-legged on the floor, one of the cats batting playfully at his sleeve. “You choose.”

“Achilles and Patroclus,” Max said after a moment. “They belong together.”

George chuckled quietly. “Of course you’d choose tragic heroes.”

“You do not like the names?”

George shook his head. “No. I love them.” He reached out, lifting the gray-striped Achilles into his lap. “Besides, stories like theirs always tell the truth about devotion.”

They spent the next few hours talking about the Iliad, lounging on the couch while the cats curled between them. George explained the myths with a storyteller’s instinct, describing Achilles’ blazing rage, Patroclus’ soft courage, the bond that lived between them with a tenderness that felt too pointed to be accidental.

At one point Max asked, “Do you see yourself as Achilles?”

George looked up immediately. “No.”

Max frowned. “Then who?”

George returned his gaze to the cats. “I think I am more like Penelope.”

Max felt his breath catch. “Penelope?”

“Yes. The woman who waited. The woman who believed. The one who kept weaving hope into her days even when she had every reason to stop.” George ran a hand along Patroclus’ back. “She stayed loyal to a man who left her for twenty years. She trusted a love that had abandoned her. She waited so long she had to rebuild herself just to endure the waiting.”

He laughed quietly, but there was no joy in the sound. “Penelope was the quiet kind of tragic. The kind who keeps stitching her heart back together because she believes someone will still want it.”

Max felt something collapse inside him. He could not find words. He could not even find breath.

The rest of the day unfolded in gentle motions. They fed the cats, played with them until they settled in a sunbeam together, and cooked dinner with the kind of easy rhythm that came only from years of familiarity. There were small moments when their hands brushed, moments when George laughed softly at something Max said, moments when Max looked at him and wondered how he had ever let this become broken.

Night came slowly.

Their skincare routine was quiet, not tense but fragile, like folded paper that might tear if handled wrong. When it was time for bed, Max lifted George into his arms. He did it every night now, but tonight something felt different. George looked up at him in the dim hallway light, his expression open in a way Max had not seen in a long time.

Then George reached up and took Max’s hand.

He held it as if holding something precious, something long believed to be lost. And he brought Max’s hand to his lips, kissing his knuckles with a tenderness that seemed older than grief itself.

Max froze, unable to breathe.

George kissed the back of his hand again, slower this time, as if memorizing the shape of him.

“Thank you,” George whispered.

Max’s voice shook. “For what?”

“For giving Achilles his Patroclus,” George murmured.

Max held him tighter, because he could not speak, because the truth was too heavy, because the love was too painful.

He carried George the rest of the way to bed, and for the first time in days, he did not want to let him go.

Chapter Text

Day 20 unfolded with the soft kind of sunlight that made everything look gentler than it really was. Max and George spent the morning cleaning the apartment together, something that had slowly turned into a comforting ritual between them. They stripped the sheets from the bed, shaking them out on the balcony while laughing at how the wind kept trying to steal them away. They swept the floors, reorganized drawers, and chased dust bunnies like children playing pretend. Max found himself laughing without thinking, without calculation, and each time he caught George smiling back at him, the familiarity felt like a warm hand pressed to an old bruise.

While Max was stuffing pillows into fresh pillowcases, George’s phone began to vibrate on the kitchen counter. He excused himself, stepping into the hallway with his voice lowered to a hush. Max tried not to be curious, but the whispers carried the distinct sound of something private, something soft and fragile. When George returned, Max raised an eyebrow.

“Who was that?” Max asked.

George wiped his hands on a towel, not quite meeting his eyes. “No one important. Really, Max. Just… something I’ll handle.”

“You sound nervous,” Max said carefully.

George smiled, small and practiced. “I just do not want to ruin the day. Let’s finish lunch, alright?”

Max knew that meant the conversation was over.

They cooked together, the kitchen filling with the familiar rhythm of clattering utensils and quiet laughter. George tasted the sauce and pointed his spoon at Max. “More salt.”

“You always say more salt.”

“Because you always under-season, Max.”

“And you always over-season.”

“That is because I have taste,” George said, tapping Max’s forehead with the spoon. “And you have ego.”

Max chuckled and dipped a finger into the sauce. “Fine. Maybe you’re right.”

“Of course I’m right,” George said, but his smile looked softer than usual, almost tired.

Later that afternoon, they went for their usual jog. The sky had been threatening rain all day, and halfway through the park the drizzle turned to a real downpour. Max groaned, shielding his head with his hands. “Great. Perfect.”

George only laughed — really laughed — the kind that made his shoulders shake. “Run, Max!”

They sprinted through the park like reckless teenagers, chasing each other between trees as the rain soaked their clothes and hair. George slipped once, and Max caught him by the waist, pulling him upright. They froze like that, breathing hard, the cold rain sliding down their faces like tears neither wanted to shed.

George whispered, “You’re holding me.”

Max swallowed. “Yeah. I am.”

Something shifted. Maybe it was the way George was looking at him, with that fragile, stunned kind of hope. Maybe it was the rain making everything feel dreamlike. Maybe it was the 20 days of pretending they were still a couple, pretending they still belonged to each other. Whatever it was, Max leaned forward at the exact same moment George did, and their lips met under the storm.

It was not passionate. It was not hungry. It was gentle, trembling — a kiss that felt like the shaking breath before a goodbye.

When they pulled apart, both of them froze.

Max whispered, “We shouldn’t have done that.”

George stepped back. “I know.”

The walk home was silent. Dinner was silent. Even the cats seemed confused by the heaviness in the air.

They didn’t speak until the skincare routine. George stood in front of the mirror, washing his face a little too slowly, lingering on every step as if stretching time. Max watched him through the reflection, noticing the way George’s eyes kept flicking toward him. When Max handed him the moisturizer, George’s fingers lingered on his wrist longer than usual.

“Are you okay?” Max finally asked.

George nodded, though the motion was unconvincing. “Just… tired.”

But that wasn’t the truth. Max could feel it. George was clinging to every second, every breath, every accidental brush of their skin. It was the look of someone who knew the end was coming and was memorizing everything before the light went out.

When Max lifted him into his arms to carry him to bed, George wrapped his hands around Max’s neck with a desperate tightness. Halfway to the bedroom, George’s breath hitched. Max paused.

“George?”

A tear slipped down George’s cheek, blending with the remnants of rain. His voice was so small Max almost didn’t hear it.

“I love you,” George whispered. “I love you so much, Max.”

Max felt something inside him break open, raw and aching. He held George tighter, pressing his forehead to George’s temple. “George… please don’t cry.”

George shook his head. “I have to. If I don’t cry now, I won’t survive later.”

Max carried him the rest of the way in silence, laying him gently on the bed before climbing in beside him. George curled into him immediately, burying his face in Max’s chest, and Max wrapped his arms around him like a shield he wished he could actually be.

Max whispered into George’s hair, voice cracking, “I’m here. I’m right here.”

They stayed like that until their breathing synced, until George’s trembling eased, until sleep pulled them under, still holding each other as if the night itself might steal them apart.

Chapter Text

Day 21 came with a cold, unnatural stillness, as if the apartment itself had stopped breathing. Max woke up with the faint memory of George curled in his arms the night before, his warmth, his trembling breath, the whispered confession of love. He reached out instinctively to the other side of the bed, expecting the familiar shape of George’s body. His fingers touched cold sheets.

“George?” Max called softly.

No answer.

He sat up, confused. The pillow was untouched, the blanket smoothed out as if no one had lain there at all. He walked to the kitchen, expecting to see George cooking, humming quietly under his breath like he always did. The kitchen was empty. The lights were off.

“George?” Max’s voice grew sharper.

He checked the balcony. The bathroom. The study room. The laundry area. The cats were sleeping curled together, but their food bowl was full, and their water recently changed. George had been up long before Max.

Max pulled out his phone and called George. It rang once, then disconnected. He called again. Straight to voicemail.

He swallowed, his heartbeat rising painfully. He called Alex.

The call was declined instantly.

“Alex,” Max whispered, calling again. Alex declined again.

A cold dread settled into his spine.

He checked the living room for any sign of George’s morning routine. The mug George always used was gone from its place. The pen he used for the grocery lists was gone. His slippers were gone.

Max felt something crack inside him.

“No no no no… George?” he said to the empty apartment, as if the walls could answer him.

Something told him to go to the wardrobe. He opened the doors with shaking hands.

The space where George’s clothes used to be — the neatly arranged shirts, the soft sweaters Max used to bury his face in, the jeans folded with precise care — was empty.

Completely, utterly empty.

“No,” Max whispered, stepping back. “No, George, what did you do, where did you go, why didn’t you tell me, why—”

His breath caught, sharp and painful. He began going through drawers, checking the shelves, the nightstand, even behind the washing machine. Nothing. Not a single trace of George’s belongings.

He called Kimi next, pacing back and forth in the living room like a man slowly losing his mind. “Pick up, pick up, Kimi please pick up.”

Kimi answered after five rings, sounding exhausted. “Max?”

“Is George with you?” Max demanded.

“What? No,” Kimi said quickly. “We have not spoken since… everything.”

“He’s gone, Kimi. He took everything, his clothes, everything. He didn’t say anything to me, he just— he just left.”

Kimi went silent. Max could hear the faint tremor in his breath. “I do not know anything, Max. Really.”

Max hung up without saying goodbye.

He called Charles. “George is gone.”

“Oh?” Charles’ voice brightened a little too much. “So he finally left?”

“Max, this is good,” Carlos chimed in through the speaker. “You should be relieved.”

Max’s voice dropped to something dangerously hollow. “Shut up.”

Both men went silent.

Max ended the call.

He stood in the empty living room, staring at the faint marks in the carpet where George’s suitcase must have been dragged. Achilles and Patroclus jumped onto the couch, meowing softly, confused by the sudden shift in energy.

Max ran a shaky hand through his hair. His chest hurt like it was being squeezed in a fist.

Twenty-four hours. He had to wait twenty-four hours before reporting him missing — that was what the law said. But every instinct screamed that something was wrong. Something was terribly wrong.

He sank to the floor, pressing his palms into his eyes until he saw sparks of light.

That was when he noticed a small piece of paper tucked into the side of the shoe rack, half hidden under one of George’s old pairs of house shoes.

Max grabbed it with trembling fingers.

It was folded neatly. The handwriting was unmistakable.

Max,
This is a part of the contract.
In nine days, your dream divorce will come true.
I want you to stop searching for me.
Someone will come and give you the divorce papers in nine days.

With love,
George.

Max read the note again. And again. And again, until the words blurred with tears he stubbornly wiped away.

His dream divorce.

He had begged for it. Demanded it. Fought for it.

And yet now, holding the note that promised everything he supposedly wanted, he felt nothing like relief.

Instead, his stomach twisted with dread, grief, longing. His hands shook around the paper. The apartment felt too big, too hollow, too painfully quiet without George’s laughter echoing in it.

Max whispered into the empty room, his voice breaking.

“Why doesn’t this feel good? Why do I feel like something is tearing me apart?”

The note fell from his hand to the floor.

Achilles meowed beside him, brushing against his leg.

Max didn’t move.

The realization seeped into him slowly, like poison slipping through the cracks of his bones:

George was gone.
And Max had never expected that the feeling would be this much like losing air.

He pressed a hand to his chest, trying to ease the ache that only worsened with every passing second.

He thought he wanted freedom.

But freedom did not feel like this. Freedom felt like the echo of George’s absence, vibrating through the walls like grief itself.

Max whispered again, voice trembling.

“George… what have I done?”

>>

Day 22 arrived without mercy. There was no gentle sunrise, no warmth slipping through the curtains, no soft breathing beside him to fill the room with life. Max woke up to silence so complete it felt like a weight pressed against his chest. He lay there for several minutes, staring at the empty side of the bed, the sheets still untouched and cold from the night before. His hand drifted across the mattress, searching blindly for George the way a drowning man searches for air, but there was nothing. Only the quiet fabric and the echo of a memory.

He forced himself out of bed, moving with the slow, dull heaviness of someone wading through a dream that refused to end. The kitchen was unfamiliar without George in it. The lights felt too bright and too cruel when he turned them on. He cracked eggs into a pan, stirring without thinking. George always took over halfway through because Max cooked like someone who never quite learned how to care for himself. This morning, Max stood alone, watching the egg burn slightly at the edges and doing nothing to fix it.

“Breakfast is ready,” he said softly, looking toward the empty dining table. “Come eat, G.”

There was no reply. The silence stretched like a wound.

He made his lunchbox next, cutting vegetables too slowly, dropping the knife once because his hands were shaking. George always prepared the lunchbox with small details, tiny touches of affection like notes or folded napkins. Max packed his own lunch with the mechanical precision of someone who had forgotten how to live with intention.

He sat at the table out of habit, two plates set instinctively. He stared at George’s empty chair until his vision blurred. After several minutes he whispered, “I miss you.” Then he wiped his face with the back of his hand and got up to go to work.

He walked into the office like a ghost. Carlos greeted him with a cheerful good morning and Charles leaned in for a kiss, but Max brushed past them without stopping. His footsteps did not even falter.

Carlos called after him, “Max, what is wrong with you?”

Max did not answer.

It was Kimi who approached him hesitantly. “Max,” he said gently, “are you alright?”

Max nodded once, though the lie was so thin it nearly tore in the air. “I am fine, Kimi.”

“You do not look fine.”

“I said I am fine,” Max repeated, his eyes fixed ahead as if Kimi were not even standing there.

Kimi said nothing more. He simply watched Max walk away, shoulders heavy, movements slow, like someone carrying a grief he had no tools to set down.

Max spent the entire day sitting in his office, not working, not speaking, not moving much. He opened a drawer filled with wedding photos he once tucked away because they made him feel too soft. Today he placed them all on the table, each one a dagger. George smiling with flowers in his hands. Max kissing George’s forehead during their vows. Their first dance. Their honeymoon. Moments of a life Max had carelessly thrown aside for cheap desire.

His thumb brushed George’s face in one of the photos. “I am sorry,” he whispered to it. “I should have chosen you. I should have loved you better. I should have stayed.”

Throughout the day he sent voice messages to George. Some were seconds long, some minutes.

“Are you eating properly?”

“Please tell me you are safe.”

“I cannot sleep without you.”

“I am sorry.”

“Please come home.”

None of them were delivered. None of them were heard. But Max sent them anyway, desperate to cling to the illusion that George might listen.

When he returned home that evening, the apartment felt even emptier than before. He cooked dinner alone, speaking aloud as if George were still beside him slicing vegetables or humming softly. He set two plates again, out of a habit his heart refused to break.

He took a bite of food and murmured, “You would say it needs more seasoning.” A dry laugh escaped him. “You always said I had no palate.” He looked at the empty chair across from him, forcing a smile that collapsed immediately. “Tell me what else I did wrong, G. Just tell me. Please.”

He finished his meal in silence.

The skincare routine was unbearable. He stood at the sink, lining the products George always used, touching each bottle as if touch could summon the man who once taught him how to apply them. His hands shook as he spread cream across his face. It felt wrong. It felt cold. It felt like pretending to live a life that had already ended.

When he crawled into bed, the loneliness hit him with full force. No warm body curled against him. No soft voice murmuring good night. No gentle weight in his arms.

He turned to George’s pillow and buried his face in it. It did not smell like George anymore.

His breath broke. His chest tightened painfully. He clutched the pillow so hard his knuckles turned white.

“I made a mistake,” he choked out. “I made such a terrible mistake. George, please, I need you, I need you, I need you.”

The sobs came without warning, cracking through him violently until he could barely breathe. He curled into himself, shaking, whispering George’s name over and over like a prayer that no longer had a god to hear it.

And in the midst of all that breaking, one truth rose clear and sharp inside him, stabbing deeper than anything else.

He still loved George.
He never stopped.
And now he understood too late that losing George was not freedom.
It was devastation.

Chapter Text

Day 26 arrived without mercy. Morning light filtered into the apartment in pale streaks, yet nothing inside felt alive. Max woke up in the same stiff position as the night before, curled on George’s side of the bed, clutching at the cold sheets like they were a lifeline. He dragged himself through the motions once again. Making breakfast. Packing a lunchbox he knew he would not eat. Wiping the kitchen counter. Ignoring the silence that screamed louder than any argument they had ever shared. He moved with the dull emptiness of someone whose heart had been wrung dry. His eyes were constantly swollen. His throat never stopped hurting.

By midday he finally collapsed onto the couch, phone trembling in his grip. He had already sent twelve voice messages since morning, some pleading, some choked with sobs, some quiet apologies he had repeated so often that the words felt like ash. He hit record again.

“George, please,” he whispered. “Please tell me you are safe. I do not care if you hate me. I do not care if you never want to see me again. But I need to know you are alive. Please. I miss you. I miss you so much.”

He sent the message even though he knew it would not be read. Then he opened George’s Spotify playlist, the one George always played when cooking or cleaning or dragging Max onto the balcony to slow dance for no reason. The familiar melodies drowned the apartment, bringing memories that strangled more than soothed.

He lay back, staring at the ceiling as he cried quietly. Song after song passed, until one came on with an opening line that split something open inside him.

“My baby, my baby
You are my baby, say it to me
Baby, my baby
Tell your baby that I am your baby.”

Max froze. His breath caught. The memory hit him so hard he had to sit up.

The first time he ever saw George.
The first moment their fates aligned.

He had been in the men’s bathroom of their college, hiding in a stall while trying to swallow the devastation of discovering Charles’s affair with Carlos. Everything felt like it fell apart in that moment. His first love. His boyfriend. Two people he trusted above all. Betrayal was a sharp taste in his mouth, metallic and humiliating.

He remembered leaning against the cold tiled wall, tears running down his face uncontrollably. He hated crying in public, hated being vulnerable, hated feeling like a discarded toy. The sound of the bathroom door had startled him. He tried to stay quiet, but his choked sobs must have given him away.

A gentle knock sounded on the stall door.

“Hey,” a soft voice said. “I am sorry to bother you. But are you alright?”

Max had stayed silent. He was embarrassed, ashamed, wounded. The voice came again.

“I am sliding some tissues under the door. Take your time.”

That was the first thing George Russell ever said to him.

After several minutes, Max stepped out of the stall with eyes red and cheeks wet. George was standing by the sinks, holding a bottle of water and looking at him with genuine concern.

“I am George,” he said softly. “I am not here to judge. You look like you need someone, and I can be that someone for a little while.”

Max broke down again. Not loud, not dramatic, just a quiet collapse. George did not flinch. Instead, he placed a hand on Max’s back and guided him to sit near the window where the sunlight softened everything. He listened as Max explained what happened. Charles cheating with Carlos. The betrayal of a best friend. The humiliation of feeling replaced. George offered no clichés. He simply said, “I am sorry. You did not deserve that.”

It was the first time anyone had ever said that to him sincerely.

From that day forward, George became a shelter. A calm presence. A gentle voice. A hand on his back when he could not breathe. A person who brought him food during exams and insisted he sleep during finals week. A person who picked up all the broken pieces left behind and stitched them with patience and kindness. By the time Max healed, he realized he had fallen deeply, hopelessly in love. And when George finally kissed him months later in the library gardens, Max felt like he had been given something rare. Something sacred.

He had forgotten all of this. Or rather, he had buried it beneath years of routine, comfort, and eventually the arrogance of believing that George would never leave.

Back in the present, tears spilled uncontrollably. The song reached the next verse, the one that made Max’s entire body go still.

“Will you let me, baby, lose on losing dogs?
I know they are losing, and I will pay for my place by the ring
Where I will be looking in their eyes when they are down
I wanna feel it.”

His breath shook as he listened. The lyrics echoed in his head, twisting painfully.

Those words described him now.
A losing dog.
A man sitting by the ring of his own ruined marriage, desperately staring into the memory of the person he had failed.
A man who would pay anything to feel George’s eyes on him again.

A voice broke out of him, strangled and small.

“I lost you,” Max whispered into the empty room. “I lost you the way fools lose everything precious. Carelessly and far too late.”

He buried his face in George’s blanket, gripping it as if his life depended on it.

“I should have fought for us. I should have protected you. I should have chosen you every time. I do not deserve you, but I love you. I love you and I cannot breathe without you.”

The apartment stayed silent.

The song continued.
Max cried harder.
And George remained gone.

Last year, he would say that loving George was a chain, a lock, a cold set of bars that kept him trapped in a room he never chose.

But that day, something shifted. He realized loving George was freedom, like diving into an ocean of diamonds only to find that, among all that glitter, George was the single piece of pure gold. The only one that mattered.

Having George felt like the reason God created humans in the first place, to lead with gentleness, to rule with love, to prove that the heart could be righteous.

Losing George was like the sun forgetting to rise.
Like waking up to a world where morning never comes.

Losing George was the moment he understood how far humanity has wandered from the path God intended, how easily we ruin the sacred things meant to save us.

Losing George wasn’t just heartbreak.
It was the loss of freedom itself.

Chapter Text

Day 27 began in the same colorless way as the days before. Max woke to an empty pillow and a cold mattress, and the sight of George’s absence was becoming a kind of torture that never dulled. He forced himself through the morning ritual again, though now every movement felt meaningless, a performance for no audience. Breakfast for one. Lunchbox for one. Silence everywhere. He sat for a moment at the dining table, staring at the steam rising from his untouched tea, when the doorbell rang softly.

He opened the door to find Kimi standing there with an expression that was a mixture of guilt and exhaustion. His shoulders slumped as if he carried a weight far heavier than his own body. He stepped inside without a word, and Max closed the door behind him.

For a moment they simply stood facing each other, the air thick with unspoken regret. Max’s voice finally broke the silence.

“Why are you here,” he asked quietly, almost afraid to hear the answer.

Kimi looked down at his hands before speaking. “I could not stay away anymore. I keep thinking about what happened. About what I did. About what I did not do. And I cannot sleep. Not when I know you are hurting. Not when I know George is gone.”

The pain flared again in Max’s chest at the mention of George’s disappearance. He sank onto the couch, and Kimi sat across from him like a hesitant child waiting for punishment.

Max rubbed his eyes. “Everything feels like it is falling apart. I cannot reach him. I cannot breathe without thinking about him. And I am the one who ruined it. I am the one who let everything rot.” His voice shook. “I did this. I betrayed him. How am I supposed to live with that.”

Kimi swallowed hard. He looked at Max with an expression full of conflict. “You made mistakes. Big ones. I will not lie for you. But you loved him once. And you loved him deeply. I know that. I saw it.”

Max laughed bitterly at that. “And look where it got us. I cheated on him with the same people who ruined my life years ago. I did the same thing Charles and Carlos did to me. I became my own nightmare. I became the kind of man George never deserved.”

Kimi clenched his fists. “I should have protected him. I should have told him the truth sooner. I should have stopped you. I did not because I wanted favor, attention, success. And because I thought everything would somehow work itself out. I was stupid. I was selfish. And when he looked at me in that hallway and asked why, I had nothing to give him except the truth that I was weak.”

Max stared at him, eyes red. “You were his brother. The only family member he truly trusted. And I ruined that for you too.”

“No,” Kimi whispered fiercely. “I ruined that with my own actions. Not you. He trusted me and I betrayed that trust because I thought staying quiet would hurt less than telling him the truth. But the truth always comes. And when it does, it breaks everything in its path.”

Max covered his face with both hands. “You should hate me. Everyone should hate me. George’s father already hit me. His mother cried. I deserve it.”

Kimi leaned forward, his voice softer. “I do not hate you. I hate what you did. I hate what I did. But hate will not bring George back.” His eyes trembled. “I regret everything, Max. Every silence I gave. Every lie of omission. Every time I looked away because it was easier.”

Max lowered his hands and looked at him. “Do you think he will come back.”

Kimi hesitated. His voice cracked. “I think he loved you enough to give you thirty days of memories before he left. That means something. But love cannot survive alone. It needs to be protected. You did not protect it. I did not protect it. And he finally learned to protect himself instead.”

Max leaned back on the couch, tears sliding down his cheeks. “I am terrified. It feels like the more I think about him, the more I remember how much he gave me. How much he held me together. And now he is gone and I am falling apart. I want him back. I want him back so badly it hurts.”

Kimi’s voice softened into something almost fragile. “I want him back too. I want to see him smile again. I want him to feel safe again. But wanting does not undo the things we did.”

Silence settled between them. Heavy. Thick. Full of remorse.

Finally Kimi stood and placed a hand on Max’s shoulder. “We both regret different parts of the same story. But regret will not find him. Love might. Effort might. Change might. But regret alone will only drown you.”

Max nodded slowly, brokenly. “I know.”

Kimi looked at him with eyes full of apology. “If you find him, tell him I am sorry. Truly sorry. He deserves a world that does not hurt him.”

Max swallowed. “I will. If I ever get the chance.”

Kimi nodded once and walked to the door. Before leaving, he paused. “Max, you loved him once. You can love him again. But this time, do it right.”

When the door closed, Max let himself collapse forward, head in his hands, tears dripping onto the floor.

The apartment was empty again.
But the regret lingered, heavy and suffocating, curling around him like a ghost he had invited in.

>>

Day 28 began with an unfamiliar stillness. The sky outside the apartment was the color of cold ash and Max woke to the silence with an ache in his throat that felt older than grief. He went through the motions again, making breakfast he could not eat and packing a lunchbox that felt like a mockery of what their mornings once were. As he walked to the front door, something on the floor caught his eye. A sealed envelope with his name written in a handwriting he recognized instantly. Kimi’s.

Max picked it up slowly, as if the paper itself might break. Inside was a single sheet, folded neatly. He opened it with shaking hands and read the words that would sit in his chest like a stone.

“I am resigning effective in twenty four hours. I know this may cause trouble, but it is the only thing I can do to begin redeeming myself. I cannot work for you while carrying the weight of what I did. I will continue my studies and I will search for G until I can look him in the eye again. Maybe this is too little. Maybe it is too late. But I must try. Thank you for everything, Max.”

The letter slipped from Max’s fingers and drifted to the floor like something dying. He stood there for a moment, unable to breathe. Then he grabbed his coat and rushed to the office, the world outside becoming a blur of passing shapes and city noise that rang in his ears like distant thunder.

When he arrived, he went straight to Kimi’s desk. Empty. The drawers were open, the small personal items gone, the space stripped clean as if a ghost had brushed through the room and swept memory away. Panic clenched around Max’s lungs as he found Kimi in the hallway, quietly speaking to HR, handing over his badge.

“Kimi,” Max said, and the boy turned toward him with eyes that were tired and red but strangely peaceful. “Why are you leaving. You do not have to do this.”

Kimi shook his head. “I do. It is the only thing that feels right.”

Max took a step forward. “Running away does not fix anything. It does not fix what happened. It does not bring him back.”

“I know,” Kimi replied softly. “But staying here feels worse. I cannot sit at that desk and pretend everything is normal when every clock tick reminds me of what I helped destroy.”

Max swallowed, trying to steady his voice. “You are still so young, Kimi. You do not have to burden yourself with this level of guilt.”

Kimi laughed bitterly. “I am old enough to know betrayal when I commit it. I stood by your side and watched George crumble. I let you cheat. I let myself be impressed by your success and I forgot the person who called me his brother. If I do not walk away now, I will never forgive myself.”

Max lowered his gaze. “I wish I could change everything. I would take it all back if I could.”

Kimi stepped forward and placed a gentle hand on Max’s arm. “I believe you. Maybe believing you is part of my problem. But I still do. I think you loved him. I think you still do. And that is why I am leaving. I cannot be the shadow standing between you and the man you want back. I cannot be the reminder of your worst mistake.”

Max’s voice cracked. “You do not have to search for him. That is my responsibility.”

“But it is mine too,” Kimi answered quietly. “He was my brother. Even if we were not blood. Even if I failed him. I want to be someone he could trust again. Someone he could look at without remembering betrayal. And I want to find him before the world hurts him more than we already have.”

Max felt something in him collapse, like a pillar inside his chest finally giving in to weight it could no longer hold. “Kimi,” he whispered. “I never wanted you to feel this pain.”

Kimi offered a small, sad smile. “You did not mean to hurt me. But hurt happens anyway. That is life. And now we face it.” He took a breath. “Maybe if I find him, I can tell him in person that I am sorry. Not because I want forgiveness, but because he deserves to hear the truth from the person who failed him most.”

Max nodded slowly, defeat settling around him like fog. “If you find him before I do, tell him I love him,” he said in a voice barely audible.

Kimi’s eyes softened. “I will. If he lets me speak at all.”

There was a moment of silence between them, not hostile, not bitter, but heavy with the kind of grief that follows people for years. Kimi picked up his bag and slung it over his shoulder. Before leaving, he hesitated at the door.

“You always say I remind you of a younger version of yourself,” he said quietly. “But I want to be better than the version of you who hurt George. I want to grow into someone he would be proud to call brother again.”

Max nodded, unable to form a response as tears finally escaped his eyes.

Kimi gave one last bow of the head. “Take care of yourself, Max. And if you get the chance, take care of him properly this time.”

Then he walked away, disappearing down the hall with steps that echoed like a farewell.

Max remained still in the corridor long after Kimi disappeared, the resignation letter crumpled in his hand. The building around him continued its usual rhythm, phones ringing, papers shuffling, people speaking. But for him, everything had grown quiet, as if the world itself was holding its breath.

He had driven away the man he loved, and now even the boy who once idolized him was leaving in search of redemption.

The empire he built was beginning to collapse, and for the first time, Max realized he was standing alone in the ruins.

Chapter Text

Day 29 arrived like the soft thud of a closing door. Max woke before the sun, unable to breathe, unable to think, unable to do anything except stare at the empty side of the bed that once held the warmth he had wasted. The apartment felt colder than usual, as if the absence itself was becoming a living thing that walked beside him, breathed with him, whispered into his ear that tomorrow everything would end. He lay there for a long moment before forcing himself up and beginning the morning ritual he now performed out of desperation rather than discipline.

He made breakfast and placed George’s framed photo across from him at the table. It was a picture taken on their honeymoon, with George smiling into the camera while holding Max’s arm. Max touched the edge of the frame gently, his fingers trembling. “Good morning, G,” he whispered, pretending for just a moment that George might whisper back. “I made your favourite toast again. I know you used to say it tasted better when I burned it.”

The photo remained silent, but Max smiled through the ache because silence was all he had left.

At lunch, he sat in his office staring at the lunchbox he had made himself, but he could not eat it without placing the photo again beside him. The other employees looked at him with a mixture of pity and discomfort, but no one dared speak to him. Not even Charles or Carlos. They had finally learned silence too. Max opened the lunchbox and took a small bite, tears sliding down his cheeks at the memory of George waking early to prepare it with a quiet hum, the way he used to tuck a folded note inside for Max to find. Max whispered to the photo, “I do not deserve you. I know that now. I should have known it then.”

He pressed the frame lightly to his forehead, as if trying to absorb whatever memory remained inside it.

Dinner was no different. The apartment felt hollow, like a body without its soul. Max cooked a simple meal and placed the plate in front of George’s picture. He sat across from it, holding a fork he never used, just staring. “I would give anything to hear your voice right now,” he said softly. “Even if you were angry. Even if you hated me.”

After cleaning the dishes, he went to the balcony where the air was cool and carried a faint scent of the night. He placed the photo carefully on the table, then reached out and held it against his chest as he played their favorite playlist. He stepped into the empty space where George used to stand, and he swayed slowly, clutching the frame as if it were a fragile heart. The city lights blurred in his vision as he whispered, “Dance with me, G. Please. Just for one more night.”

He closed his eyes and imagined George’s fingers interlocked with his, George’s forehead resting against his shoulder, George’s quiet laughter filling the balcony.

But when he opened his eyes, he was alone again.

As he lay down that night, hugging the photo to his chest, dread clawed at his ribs. Tomorrow, the contract would end. Tomorrow, the divorce he once thought he wanted would become real. Tomorrow, he would lose George in a way even death could not replicate, because this loss was chosen, shaped by his own hands.

He reached for his phone, needing to send one more voice message, one more apology, one more desperate plea. But before he could record anything, a notification lit up the screen.

A message from George.

Max’s heart leapt and broke in the same second.

“Hi Max, tomorrow someone will come with the official paper of our divorce.”

The words landed like a blade. Max felt his breath collapse. He typed back instantly, fingers shaking, sending message after message, dozens of them, hundreds even, all spilling from every corner of his soul. Apologies. Begging. Memories. Promises. Confessions. “Please come home.” “Please let me see you.” “Please let me fix this.” “I love you.” “I cannot breathe without you.” “Please, G. Please.”

Most of the messages remained unread.

Then, after nearly an hour of frantic hope, another notification appeared.

One message.
One line.
One final cut.

“I love you, Max.”

Max stared at the words, unable to speak, unable to cry, unable to move. It was the sentence he had wanted to hear for weeks. It was the sentence he thought he no longer deserved. It was the sentence that felt like a goodbye disguised as mercy.

He pressed the phone to his heart and whispered into the dark, “I love you too, G. I always did. I always will. Even if it is too late.”

And for the first time in his life, Max Verstappen cried himself to sleep not out of anger, or fear, or loneliness, but out of the devastating truth that loving someone does not guarantee you get to keep them.

>>

⸻

Day 30 arrived with the kind of heavy silence that feels like the world is holding its breath. Max woke before dawn, unable to sleep, unable to understand how time could continue moving when he felt so suspended between hope and despair. He sat by the window with George’s photograph resting on his knee, stroking the frame with a shaking thumb as if touch alone could summon George back. Every second felt too fast. Every breath felt borrowed. He dreaded the knock on the door the way a condemned man dreads the echo of footsteps approaching his cell.

When the knock finally came, it was almost gentle. But Max felt it strike him like a blow.

He walked to the door slowly, as if his legs no longer remembered how to function. When he opened it, he froze. Standing there was Alex, eyes red and swollen, holding a folder to his chest. Beside him stood a young man Max did not recognize, dressed in a dark suit, his expression composed but somber.

The stranger stepped forward first. “Good morning,” he said quietly. “My name is Lando. I am a lawyer. I was asked to deliver something today.”

But Max did not listen. His eyes went straight to Alex, and then his entire body crumpled. He dropped to his knees on the doorstep and grabbed Alex’s hand in both of his, gripping it with a desperation that made Alex choke.

“Please,” Max begged, the words spilling out like shattered glass. “Alex, I do not want this anymore. I do not want the divorce. Please, please, tell him to come home. I will do anything. I will change. I cannot lose him. Please, Alex, I cannot, I cannot.”

Alex’s face broke instantly. Tears rushed to his eyes and he knelt down in front of Max, holding his shaking shoulders. “Max,” he whispered, “please stand up. Come inside. Please.”

But Max clung to Alex’s sleeves like a drowning man clinging to a piece of driftwood. “Tell him, Alex. Tell him I love him. Tell him to come back. I will tear up the contract. I do not want freedom. I want him. Please, Alex, please.”

Alex swallowed hard, his voice trembling beyond repair. “Max, you need to sit down. There is something you need to see.”

Lando quietly closed the door behind them as Alex guided Max to the sofa, his hand firm and comforting but shaking with grief. Max sat, trembling, still crying, still whispering, “Please, Alex, not this. Not today.”

Alex opened the folder with painful slowness, as if delaying the inevitable might save Max from the truth. He pulled out a single document and placed it gently on Max’s lap.

Max stared at it. Stared at the official seal. Stared at the name printed in black ink.

George William Russell.

His breath caught.

Death Certificate.

His breath died.

Date of death: Day 27 of the contract.

For a moment the world simply stopped. Sound vanished. Light vanished. Max could not feel his hands or his legs or his own heartbeat. His mouth opened, but no sound came out. His eyes widened in disbelief, in horror, in a pain so massive it swallowed every other emotion whole.

“No,” Max finally whispered. “No. No. No, this is not real. This is not real, Alex. This is sick. This is wrong. Take it back.” He shoved the certificate away violently and stumbled backward on the sofa. “George is alive. He sent me a message yesterday. He said he loves me. He said it, Alex, he said it. Look.” His hands shook as he opened his phone and shoved the screen toward Alex. “Look. He messaged me.”

Lando lowered his gaze. Alex broke.

“Max,” Alex whispered, tears sliding down his cheeks. “I am so sorry.”

“Tell me this is a joke,” Max begged, his voice cracking into pieces. “Please, Alex. Please. Tell me he is alive. Tell me anything else.”

Alex wiped his face and forced himself to speak, though each word seemed to tear him apart.

“The day the contract was made,” he said slowly, “was the day George found out he had Hanahaki disease. The fictional one, yes, but it was real for him. The flowers were already growing in his lungs. He had been hiding it for months.” Alex took a trembling breath. “The day you went to get the divorce papers. We went to a specialist. They told him the petals had already rooted too deeply. He did not have long.”

Max’s face twisted in horror. “No. No, he was fine. He danced. He cooked. He laughed.”

“That was love,” Alex whispered. “That was him fighting to give you thirty days of memories before he died.”

Max covered his ears. “Stop. Stop talking. I cannot hear this. He was getting better. He smiled. He kissed me.”

Alex shook his head. “He was dying, Max. And he hid it. He wanted you to remember him as someone alive, not someone coughing blood and petals. He wanted to complete the contract so you would have closure rather than guilt.”

Max screamed, a sound raw enough to tear skin.

Alex reached into the folder again and pulled out George’s phone, now shattered at the edges, the screen dark. His fingers shook as he held it out.

“After the funeral,” Alex said, voice breaking, “I took his phone so I could fulfill his last request. He told me to message you about the divorce papers on the final day. I did that yesterday.”

Max stared at him, wide eyed, horrified, silent.

Alex continued, crying harder. “I was about to turn off his phone forever when your messages came through. Dozens of them. Hundreds. All begging for him to come home. All saying you loved him. I listened to your voice messages, Max. I cried for you. And I remembered George’s last words. He kept saying he loved you. Until he could not breathe anymore. Until the flowers filled everything.”

Max let out a broken sob.

“So,” Alex whispered, “I replied with one final line from his phone. Because he would have wanted you to hear it.”

I love you, Max.

The words that had felt like salvation last night now felt like a blade.

Max clutched the death certificate, screaming and crying so loudly that even Lando looked away. His whole body shook violently, grief ripping him apart in real time. He gasped for air, but it would not come. He clawed at his own chest, as if trying to tear out the truth.

A divorce paper would have been better than a death certificate.

“No,” he sobbed. “George. Please. I did not get to say goodbye. I did not get to hold him. I did not tell him enough. I did not love him right.” His voice cracked into a whisper. “Bring him back. Please. I will do anything. Please.”

Alex moved toward him, but before he could catch him, Max’s eyes rolled back. His body swayed once, twice, and then collapsed onto the floor with a dull thud.

The grief had finally taken him under.

Max Verstappen fainted, unconscious, shattered, as the world around him continued its merciless march forward without the man he had loved too late.

Chapter Text

Max woke to the faint sound of murmured voices, the kind spoken by people who do not want to startle a wounded animal. His eyes opened slowly. His vision blurred, the ceiling swimming into place. For a moment he did not understand why he was lying on the floor, why his chest felt like it had been ripped open from the inside. Then he saw Alex sitting beside him, trembling, and Lando standing stiffly near the coffee table with a folder in his hands.

Max pushed himself upright, panic immediately flooding him again. “Where is George,” he whispered. His voice was hoarse as if he had swallowed fire. “Where is he. I want George. Bring him here.”

Alex looked devastated. “Max, please sit. You fainted. You have been out for almost an hour.”

Max shook his head. “I want George. Tell him to come home. This is not real. None of this is real.”

Lando stepped forward slowly, his expression gentle but unyielding. “Max, I am sorry. Truly sorry. But it is real. He passed on day twenty seven.” He opened the folder and placed several documents on the table. “These are the medical reports from the specialist who treated him.”

Max stared at the papers without touching them, as if they were poisonous. Lando slid one closer.

“This was taken on the day the contract began,” Lando said softly. “The imaging shows the flowers already wrapped around his lungs. The later reports show the progression… they show that he was not able to breathe properly for the last two days of his life.”

Alex closed his eyes, wiping his tears.

Max finally picked up one sheet. His hands shook violently. The black and white image of lungs invaded by petal shapes stared back at him like a nightmare. His heart stuttered. The room seemed to tilt.

“No,” he whispered. “No, he looked fine. He stood beside me. He cooked. He laughed. He danced. He kissed me.” His voice cracked. “He danced with me.”

Lando sat down across from him, his tone respectful. “He did it because he wanted it to be perfect for you. He hid everything. His therapist confirmed that he insisted on acting normal until the final moment. He even said that if Max ever knew the truth, he would blame himself forever.”

Max felt like a knife had been driven through his chest.

Lando continued, “George assigned me two years ago as the executor of his will. He finalized everything shortly after the diagnosis. And he gave very clear instructions.”

Alex sniffed and held Max’s shoulder carefully, as if he feared Max might collapse again.

“Max,” Lando said gently, “you inherit fifty percent of all his assets. Property, savings, royalties. Everything.”

Max stared blankly. “I do not want anything. I want him.”

Lando nodded sadly. “The other fifty percent goes to Kimi. George wrote a letter explaining that Kimi deserves to build a new life after everything.”

Max flinched at the sound of Kimi’s name, remembering the betrayal, the lies, the secrets. But he also remembered the image of Kimi begging George for forgiveness during their confrontation weeks ago. Confusion swirled inside his grief.

“We already contacted Kimi,” Alex said quietly. “He is coming here.”

They waited. The minutes were slow and suffocating. Max sat without moving, his hands gripping the photo frame of his wedding picture as if it were the only thing tethering him to the world. Alex sat beside him with his head in his hands. Lando waited in patient silence, understanding that grief has its own weather.

Then the front door opened.

Kimi stepped inside, his backpack falling off his shoulder. His eyes scanned the room and landed on Max’s hollow, lifeless stare. Something in Kimi broke instantly. He walked forward slowly, as if approaching a grave.

“Kimi,” Lando said softly, “please sit. There is something you need to hear.”

Kimi’s face was pale. “Alex called and said something happened to George. But he did not say what.” His voice wavered. “Where is he. Why are you all crying. Where is George.”

Max’s jaw clenched. He could not speak. He could not breathe. The pain was too sharp.

Alex swallowed. “Kimi. George passed away.”

The words hit the room like a collapse.

Kimi froze. His eyes widened, then he let out a choked sound, a sound so raw it made Max flinch. “No,” Kimi said, shaking his head violently. “No, he did not.”

Alex reached out, but Kimi backed away. “You are lying. All of you. You are lying. George cannot die. He cannot leave me too. He cannot.”

Lando placed the medical file in front of him. “Kimi, these are the reports. He was diagnosed before the contract began.”

Kimi stared at the papers. He did not touch them. His breath quickened. Tears gathered, thick and heavy.

“No,” he whispered. “No, he was sick and I did not know. He was dying and I was joking with him over phone calls to hide your sins from him. He was dying and I yelled at him. Oh God.”

His voice broke completely.

Then he collapsed to his knees.

He sobbed so hard his whole body shook, his hands clawing at the floor, his forehead pressing against the carpet as if he wanted the earth to swallow him.

“George,” he cried, almost screaming. “I am sorry. Please forgive me. Please. I did not protect you. I did not save you. I let Max hurt you. I let myself hurt you. I am so sorry, George. I am so sorry. Please come back. Please.”

Max stared at Kimi, his own tears falling silently. He had never seen someone look so shattered. Kimi cried with the kind of grief that comes from both love and guilt, the kind that destroys you.

Alex knelt beside him, placing a hand on his back. “Kimi, George loved you. He wanted you to live a good life after this. He trusted you. He forgave you long before he died.”

Kimi sobbed harder, almost losing his breath. “But I did not forgive myself.”

Max finally spoke, his voice hollow. “We both failed him.”

Kimi lifted his face, streaked with tears, eyes red and broken.

Max whispered, “And now he is gone.”

The room fell into a suffocating silence except for the sound of two men crying for the same person, the same love, the same unforgivable loss.

Chapter Text

The sky was gray when they arrived at the cemetery, the kind of gray that feels heavy enough to press against the ribs. The air smelled like wet stone and old flowers. Max walked ahead of Alex and Kimi without speaking, almost stumbling with every uneven patch of ground, his fingers trembling around the bouquet he held. They had chosen white peonies, the flowers George once said looked like soft clouds if clouds could bruise.

The cemetery was quiet. Only the distant sound of crows broke the stillness. Max’s breath hitched when he finally saw the new tombstone, the one with George’s name engraved into the polished surface.

George William Russell
Beloved son, beloved brother, beloved husband

Max sank to his knees before his body fully understood what he was doing. His palms pressed against the cold earth as if he could warm it. His breath left him in a shattered whisper.

“George,” he said. “G. My George.”

He crawled forward and pressed his forehead against the stone. His breath fogged the surface. His hands trembled uncontrollably as he touched the engraved letters, tracing them over and over, memorizing them like a prayer.

“You are really here,” he whispered. “This is really you. This is all I have left.”

He kissed the stone once. Then again. Then again, more desperate each time, as if he could force warmth back into it. As if he could call George home with enough devotion.

Alex stood several steps behind him, tears streaming silently. Kimi had covered his face with both hands, shoulders shaking with grief he could not contain.

Max pressed his lips to the stone one more time, then pulled back and spoke to it softly.

“G, please wake up. Please. I will take you home. I will carry you like I always did. I will take you to the balcony and we can dance. I will change everything. I will fix everything.” His voice broke into a sob. “Just come back. Please come back.”

His hands clutched the grass so tightly he ripped some from the soil.

“I am sorry,” he cried. “I am so sorry for cheating, for lying, for giving you reasons to think you were not enough. You were everything. You were more than everything. I did not deserve you, but you still stayed. You still smiled. You still loved me.”

Kimi fell to his knees beside him, crying so hard he could barely breathe.

“George,” Kimi sobbed, “I am sorry too. I did not protect you. I should have been there. I should have told Max the truth. I should have chosen you above everything. I failed you. Please forgive me.”

Max leaned forward again and kissed the tombstone, pressing his lips against the name like a vow.

“I miss you,” Max whispered. “I miss you so much that I cannot breathe. I miss you so much that every heartbeat hurts. I thought divorce was what I wanted. But it was never freedom. It was running away from myself. You were my home. You were the only person who ever made me feel whole.”

The wind rustled the leaves above them, a soft sound like someone sighing.

Max lifted his face slightly. “G, I am scared. I do not know how to live without you. I do not know how to breathe without your name in the air. I do not know how to wake up without your forehead beside me.”

His tears dropped onto the stone, sliding down its smooth surface like rain.

He placed the bouquet carefully at the base of the tomb, smoothing the petals with shaking fingers.

“I will never forgive myself,” he whispered. “But I will love you until I take my last breath. And I will make sure the world remembers your name. I will carry your love in my chest until it tears me apart.”

Max rested his forehead against the stone again and stayed there, motionless, as if hoping the earth would open and let him lie beside George.

Kimi and Alex stood behind him, silent, broken, letting Max talk to the grave as long as he needed. The cemetery felt like it was holding its breath, as if even the world did not dare interrupt a husband mourning the man he lost too soon.

And Max continued to kiss the tomb, whispering George’s name between sobs, begging the universe for just one more moment, one more morning, one more chance.

But the stone stayed cold.

And love, once so warm, now lived only in memory.

>>

That night the apartment felt unbearably hollow, as if the walls themselves had been taught grief. Max sat on the couch without turning on the lights. He held one of George’s sweaters, the navy one that still carried the faint scent of vanilla lotion and clean cotton. He pressed it to his face, breathing in until his lungs ached. It was the only way he could trick himself into believing George might still be somewhere near, just out of sight.

A soft knock echoed from the front door. Max did not move at first. His body felt carved from stone. Only when the knock sounded again, more hesitant, did he finally pull himself up and shuffle toward it.

When he opened the door he saw Alex standing there, his face pale, his eyes red. In his hands he carried a medium sized wooden box. He held it carefully, like something sacred.

Max stared at it without understanding. His voice came out as a whisper.

“What is that.”

Alex swallowed hard. “Max… this is from George.”

Max felt something inside his chest collapse. His breath stuttered. “What do you mean.”

Alex stepped inside slowly. He closed the door behind him. His movements were gentle, as if afraid to startle someone who was already too close to breaking. He walked to the living room and set the box on the coffee table.

George’s name was carved into the lid. The sight of it made Max’s legs weak, and he sank onto the couch.

Alex sat beside him, but not too close. “He prepared this,” Alex said quietly. “Before the disease became too painful. He wrote letters for you.”

Max stared at the box as if it were a ghost. His fingers reached for the lid, then stopped halfway. His hand trembled uncontrollably. “Letters,” he whispered. “Why would he write letters when he could have just stayed. Why would he leave me.”

Alex’s voice broke. “Max, he did not want to leave. He fought it as long as he could. You saw how healthy he pretended to be. He wanted your last memories with him to be warm. He wanted you to remember him as someone who laughed with you, not someone dying.”

Max pressed both hands against his face. “I did not even notice. I did not notice anything. I was so selfish.”

Alex looked at him with a mix of sorrow and anger. “George loved you so much he tried to rewrite his own ending. He thought if he could give you thirty days of softness, maybe you would remember him without bitterness.”

Max lowered his hands and looked again at the box. His voice cracked. “Can I open it.”

Alex nodded. “It is yours. It was always meant for you.”

Max touched the lid with a trembling fingertip. The wood was smooth, warm from Alex’s hands. He lifted it slowly. Inside were several envelopes tied neatly with a ribbon. Some thick, some thin. Each one had his name written carefully on the front.

Max.

Just Max.

His vision blurred instantly.

Alex spoke again, barely above a breath. “There are letters for the days he knew he would not live to see. There are letters for your birthday. For anniversaries. For the nights he knew you would come home to an empty bed. He wrote until his lungs could not handle the strain anymore.”

Max let out a broken sound, something between a gasp and a sob. He picked up the first letter, the one on top, and held it against his forehead.

“Why did he go alone,” Max whispered. “Why did he not let me help him. Why did he protect me from everything except myself.”

Alex placed a hand on Max’s shoulder. “Because he loved you. In a way that was bigger than fear. Bigger than anger. Bigger than death. He wanted you to be able to move on. He did not want you chained to guilt.”

Max shook his head violently. “I cannot move on. I do not want to move on. He was my home.”

Alex’s voice softened. “Then read his words. Let him speak to you one last time.”

Max opened the first envelope with shaking fingers. Inside was a letter written in George’s tidy handwriting. He did not read it yet. He only pressed it to his chest and let the grief crush him.

Alex watched him silently, knowing there was nothing left to say.

The room filled with the sound of Max’s quiet crying, the painful kind that comes when someone realizes love has become memory, and memory has become all that remains.

And beside him, the box of letters waited patiently, each envelope carrying a piece of George’s heart, preserved for the man he loved until the very end.

Chapter Text

Letter One
To Max

Max, my beloved calamity,

If you are reading this, it means I have already lost the right to stand before you with my trembling hands, it means I have surrendered my voice to ink because the living breath has left me, and it means the world has punished me in the only way I feared. I write this letter not to accuse you, not to absolve you, but because my soul has become too swollen with words that would have drowned me if I tried to carry them any longer.

I want to begin with a truth so painful that even now, as I imagine placing these words into your hands, I feel my heart twist. You hurt me, Max. You wounded me with a gentleness so deceptive that I did not even feel the blade pierce until I saw myself bleeding. The day you stood before me and spoke of divorce with that cold, matter-of-fact tone, as if our years together were nothing but an inconvenient chapter you wished to turn from, something collapsed in me. I looked at you, at the face I once believed incapable of inflicting deliberate cruelty upon me, and I realized how naïve I had been to imagine that love guarantees protection.

It was not only the word divorce that destroyed me. It was the indifference in your voice, the subtle relief in your shoulders, the way you spoke of falling out of love as if love were a piece of clothing that had simply torn and needed replacing. And I, foolish as ever, stood there trying to rearrange the shards of myself into something presentable, something unbothered, while inside me a great silent scream rose like an ocean storm.

I must confess something further, something you perhaps already suspect. I saw the notifications on your phone that night. I saw the messages from Carlos asking if freedom was finally arriving. I saw the group chat with Charles, the mocking warmth between you three. I saw the conversations that revealed to me I had been living with a man who shared his body and thrill with others while returning home to me as if nothing were amiss. And I, stunned and already half broken, stood there reading the evidence of your betrayals with a calmness that frightened even me.

I remember thinking that perhaps I deserved it, that perhaps I had failed to remain exciting, that perhaps my steadiness, my softness, my attempts to build a home for us were nothing but burdens you felt obligated to carry. You wanted thrill, you wanted danger, you wanted to feel alive in ways I could no longer provide. And yet, even as the truth glared back at me from the screen, even as every message felt like a spear through a heart already tired of beating, I felt something far more humiliating rise within me.

Love.

Hopeless, stubborn, undying love.

There are men in this world who possess pride, who would have thrown your things out of the house and spat at the cruelty of fate. But I am not such a man. I am weak where it matters most. I love you with a sickness that mocks dignity. Even when I saw the proof of your infidelity, even when I felt the cold shadow of your growing disinterest, I still loved you with the desperation of a man clinging to a rope already burning his hands. It is humiliating to admit this. It is humiliating to have lived it. But if my letters are to mean anything, they must be honest.

Do I forgive you? No. Forgiveness is too pure a thing to be given prematurely, and I am not saintly enough to pretend my heart did not fracture under your words and actions. There are wounds that never close, Max, and yours were carved with precision.

Yet I love you. I love you in the way a drowning man loves the last gasp of air that fills his chest before the water drags him under. I love you in the way the condemned love the last sunrise they know they will ever see. My love for you is irrational, cruel, unbalanced, and utterly beyond my control.

If I could cut it out from my chest I would, but instead it blooms there with a violence that has consumed me from the inside.

I do not forgive you, Max, but I love you. And perhaps that is the greatest tragedy of my life.

Yours, in pain and in loyalty that borders on madness,
George

Chapter Text

Letter Two
To Max

Max, my only beloved misfortune,

I write this letter with hands that tremble not only from illness but from the unbearable shame of what I have done. If you are holding this second letter, it means the truth of my condition has finally reached you, and the deception I maintained in the name of love has been shattered. I cannot hide behind silence anymore. I owe you what little honesty I have left.

Max, I am ill. I have been ill for longer than you will ever fully comprehend. It began as a small ache, a tightness in my chest that I blamed on exhaustion or anxiety, but soon it grew into something monstrous, something that fed on my deepest affections and turned my love for you into a disease that consumed me from the inside. Every doctor I saw offered the same conclusion, the same cruel diagnosis spoken with calm professionalism while my world crumbled: my lungs had begun to bloom with something that should never bloom inside a human body.

They asked me if I had someone I loved. I whispered your name.

I am sorry, Max. I am sorry that my love for you became an illness so violent it stole the breath from my lungs. I am sorry that every time I thought of you, every time I remembered your laughter or the curve of your smile, something inside me tightened painfully. I am sorry that I chose to hide it from you. I did not want you to look at me as if I were already half gone. I wanted you to see me as I had been, not as I was becoming.

But I must speak of the contract, for that guilt weighs heaviest on me.

I know you must feel betrayed, confused, perhaps even manipulated, and you would not be wrong to feel any of it. The contract was not born from cruelty, nor revenge, nor any desire to trap you into emotional debt. It was born from desperation, from the knowledge that I would soon leave you whether I wanted to or not, and from the fear that you would collapse without someone to steady you.

You see, Max, I could not bear the thought of leaving you in a world where you did not know how to live without me. You never learned how to cook because I cooked for you. You never learned how to buy groceries because I always insisted on going. You did not know how to vacuum properly, how to fold laundry, how to handle the small domestic rituals that make a home feel lived in. You depended on me in ways I once found endearing but later feared would destroy you.

So I made the contract. I made you shop, and cook, and clean, and manage the apartment not because I wanted to control you, but because I wanted to teach you how to survive after me. I wanted you to know that you could stand without my hands guiding you.

And yes, Max, I must confess something shameful. Not everything in the contract was created for your benefit. Some parts were for me. Some parts were the selfish desires of a dying man who could not bear the thought of leaving this world without being held by the person he loved most.

The dancing, Max. The movie nights. The skincare rituals. The moments where you carried me to bed. Those were not lessons. They were indulgences. They were the last fragments of happiness I could steal before my time ran out. They were my desperate attempts to etch the warmth of your touch into my memory so that I could take it with me into the dark.

I knew you did not love me the way you once did. I felt the distance every morning when your lips touched my forehead with the hesitation of someone fulfilling a duty rather than expressing affection. I knew your heart was drifting, pulled by other temptations, other people, other desires. But I asked for those moments anyway. I asked because I was weak, because the illness had already hollowed me, because I wanted to feel loved even if it was through an agreement and not through your willing heart.

I am sorry, Max. I am sorry for the burden, for the deception, for the contract crafted from both love and desperation. But I need you to know that the days you spent learning, cooking, cleaning, living, were the only days I felt I could leave without destroying you entirely.

You may resent me for this. You may resent everything. But please remember one thing.

I did not write this contract to control your life.

I wrote it so that when mine ended, yours would not fall apart.

Yours, still loving you with every breath I could spare,
George

Chapter Text

Letter Three
To Max

Max, my torment, my solace, my sorrow,

As I write this third letter, the night feels unbearably long. The air in my room is thin and tastes of metal, and every attempt to draw breath feels like dragging broken glass into my chest. The doctors warn me gently, as if softness could dull the truth, but I already know. I have felt death approaching for days now, not as a terror, but as a cold familiarity pressing its hand against my spine. And in some twisted way that only suffering can produce, I have begun to pray for its arrival.

Max, the illness has grown cruel. It blooms and twists inside me like a vine that feeds on pain. Some mornings, I cough until I see red; some nights, I lie awake unable to scream because the act of screaming would steal the little breath I have left. There are moments when I clutch the sheets and stare at the ceiling, whispering to the shadows that if the reaper exists, if he walks quietly through the world, then I am ready for him. I long for the end not because I wish to leave you, but because my body has become a cage, and every hour inside it feels like a punishment I can no longer endure.

Do not be frightened by this confession. Even in my desperation, I am not afraid of dying. What terrifies me is the thought that I might die while you still believe I hold anger in my heart.

Max, I forgive you.

I forgive you for the betrayal, for the nights you turned your face away from me, for the moments when another name lived on your lips. I forgive you not because I am holy nor because suffering has purified me, but because love refuses to die in me even as my body does. I have no strength left to hate. I have no breath left to curse. All I have is this stubborn, aching love that refuses to loosen its grip even when everything else breaks.

When I close my eyes, I still see your face as you were when we first met. Your eyes swollen from crying. Your breath shaking. The boy who had been wounded by others and yet still looked at the world with the hope of someone who wanted to be loved. I loved that boy then. I love the man he became now. And even if you shattered me, even if your choices carved deep wounds into me, I cannot carry resentment into death. I set it down here, in this letter, because I want my last thoughts of you to be gentle.

But I must ask you something, Max, though I have no right to ask at all.

If there is another life beyond this one, if souls truly wander or return or find new forms, would you look for me there? In another world, untouched by betrayal, untouched by sickness, untouched by all the ruin that poisoned us here, would you want to try again? Would you reach for me not out of guilt, not out of duty, not out of loneliness, but out of love?

If there is a place where cursed lungs can breathe freely, where the past does not follow us like a shadow, where you are mine not through a contract or through desperation but through a simple, unbroken choice, would you stand beside me there?

I will not demand that you promise anything. I know the weight of my request. But if you feel even a fraction of what I felt for you, then perhaps somewhere far away from this world, under a gentler sky, we might meet again as we were meant to be.

If that world exists, Max, I will wait for you.

Yours until my last breath,
George

Chapter Text

Letter Four
To Max

Max,

I have no philosophy left in me tonight. No analysis, no confession, no recollection of memories that once brought warmth. I only have the truth of my suffering, and it is a truth so overwhelming that language shrinks before it. I cannot dress it in metaphors. I cannot make it beautiful. All I can do is write it as it is, the way a man drowning can only gasp the same word again and again as the water fills his lungs.

It hurt.
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Max, my love, my agony, my undoing. Every breath hurt. Every thought hurt. Every memory of you hurt more than the last. I wrote it again and again because I wanted you to understand the depth of it, the way pain had become my only companion in the final days. I wanted you to see what my words could no longer hold.

If love was the cause of this pain, then let this letter be the proof that I loved you unbearably.

Yours,
George

Chapter Text

Last Letter
For Max

Max,

This is the final page my hands will ever write to you. Everything inside me has been emptied out, except for one truth that neither illness nor betrayal nor God Himself could take from me.

I love you.
I love you.
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Max… my last breath will be shaped around this sentence.
Even in the silence that will follow my death, I will still be whispering it to you.

Eternally yours,
George

Chapter Text

It was raining when Max finished reading the last letter.
The ink had already blurred under his fingers, but his tears drowned whatever was left. He felt something vast and brutal collapse inside him, a soundless implosion of the soul. And then it rose out of him like a beast, a raw and terrible scream that tore his throat open. His body folded around the box of letters as if he were trying to crawl into the words themselves, into George’s handwriting, into the ghost of the man he had destroyed.

The sky answered him with thunder.

That was the moment something struck him like lightning.
George was afraid of thunderstorms. He always had been. Max remembered every shiver, every time George pressed against him during storms, every whispered plea not to leave him alone with the sound of the world cracking open.

Max staggered to his feet.

He grabbed a blanket.
He drove through the storm, half-blind, half-mad, the seat beside him soaked with rainwater and grief.
The graveyard gates were open, the rain pouring like punishment over the earth. Max ran, slipping over the drenched soil, until he reached the tomb.

He fell to his knees.

He lay the blanket gently over the cold stone that bore George’s name, smoothing the corner as if tucking him into bed.

“I am here, baby,” Max whispered, clinging to the tomb, forehead pressed against the wet marble. “I am here. Please don’t be afraid. I won’t leave you. Not even now. Not ever.”

The storm answered with another crack of thunder, but Max only held the tomb tighter.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he kept repeating, until his voice dissolved into the rain.

He stayed there the whole night.

When dawn finally came, Kimi found him collapsed against the tomb, soaked, shivering, lips blue, arms still holding the stone as if it were George himself. Kimi knelt beside him, gently prying Max’s fingers away.

“Max… come home. Please,” Kimi whispered, voice breaking.

Max did not resist. He had no strength left to fight.

Back home, George’s parents arrived soon after. His mother was crying before she even walked through the door. His father approached Max with the expression of a man who had aged ten years in a week.

He slapped Max hard across the face.

Max didn’t defend himself. He simply lowered his head and closed his eyes.

“You cannot die with him,” George’s father said through clenched teeth. “You cannot rot in this grief. If you loved my son, then you stand up. You become a man who is worthy of him. You live for him.”

George’s mother took Max’s face in her trembling hands.

“George would have forgiven you,” she whispered. “But he would never forgive you if you throw your life away now. You must become better. Not for us. For him.”

Something in Max finally broke.
And something else—quiet, small, fragile—was born in that broken place.

He realized he would live.
Not for himself.
But for George.

He would exist as the proof that George’s love had not been wasted.

That night, he stood on the balcony where they once danced together.
“I will change,” Max whispered into the wind. “I swear it. I’ll spend the rest of my life paying back every piece of kindness you ever gave me.”

He kept his promise.

>>

Two years later

The world knew a different Max Verstappen.

He had established the George Russell Foundation, dedicated to rescuing cats and funding shelters across the country. Every cat that found a home, every animal saved, felt like a small prayer sent upward to the boy who once held kittens with trembling hands and soft laughter.

Max visited the grave every Sunday.

He no longer brought guilt, only devotion.
He spoke to George as if he were still alive, telling him about the foundation, about the shelters, about Kimi now the youngest CEO in the state, about the cats named after Greek heroes.

And one evening, as he placed fresh white roses before the tomb, Max traced the carved letters of George’s name and smiled with a sorrow that had softened with time.

“Until we meet again, my love,” he whispered.

Then he stood there in the lingering twilight, the wind moving through the trees, the world calm around him.

He would wait.
Quietly.
Faithfully.

Until the grim reaper returned to reunite him with the only person he had ever truly loved.

The end—

“What is grief if not love persevering?”