Encore. (MXM)

What was it with people and their compulsive little romance with the past?

They swore the good old days had been gold, and yet while they were standing inside them, they treated them as background noise, as a corridor they had to cross to reach something better lit.

It’s that line from a comedy show, the one that hit harder than it had any right to. I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.

That was the sick joke. People did know. Somewhere behind the rush, behind the errands and the petty resentments, behind the long hours they pretended they could not survive without, something in them recognized the weight of the moment. Not enough to hold it. Not enough to honor it. Just enough to feel haunted later.

They were always in a hurry to arrive. They told themselves next week would be easier, next month calmer. After this deadline, after this breakup, after this season of exhaustion, life would finally open its hands and offer something clean.

They negotiated with time as if it were a debt collector. Take these days from me, just get me to the part where I can breathe.

Then they got there, and they did not breathe. They just found a new reason to run.

Pain got handled casually too, packaged in language that made it feel collectible. You’ll laugh about this someday, they said, as if suffering only gained value once it sat safely behind glass.

As if the only way to survive a moment was to promise yourself a future where it turned into a funny story instead of what it really was, a bruise. Distance became comfort. They called it wisdom. Sometimes it was avoidance with better lighting.

So why the nostalgia? Why the endless return?

Maybe because memory was the only place people felt brave enough to be present. The past could not demand anything from them. It could not embarrass them, disappoint them, or refuse to change. It stayed obedient. It stayed edited.

They could crop out the parts that made them look small, color-grade the sorrow until it felt poetic, turn ordinary days into legend simply because they were no longer capable of hurting them.

Real life did not come with a soundtrack. It came with fluorescent lights and unread messages and a mind that kept asking for more. People treated moments like spectacles, waiting for them to perform, waiting for the party to be loud enough, the love obvious enough, the success to feel like fireworks, the danger to make the blood remember it was alive. They sat there and stared at the hour as if it owed them something.

Maybe that was the core of it, the quiet confusion nobody admitted.

Were you meant to feel happiness from within, a pulse that did not depend on circumstance. Or were you meant to stand in the world like an audience, expecting the moment to spit joy into your mouth and call it living. Which one was real? Which one was the reflection? Which one was the object?

Because if the moment passed and nothing stayed behind in you, then what exactly had you done with it?

And if you kept moving forward only to miss what you abandoned, then maybe nostalgia was not love at all.

Maybe it was just the echo of a life you were too distracted to inhabit the first time.

That had been the constant state of Cole Hartman.

No one really knew what he had been made of. Not because he had been secretive in a theatrical sense, not because some grand revelation had been waiting behind his eyes. There had been no twist to uncover, no hidden trauma begging to be exposed. Cole Hartman had not been a mystery built to be solved. He had been an enigma that existed without intention.

When people called him complex, they usually meant it lazily, the way they labeled things they did not want to sit with for too long.

Cole’s complexity did not sparkle. It did not charm. It did not invite curiosity so much as it resisted it. He had been difficult to understand because understanding implied continuity, and Cole had very little of that inside him.

His thoughts did not move forward in neat lines. His emotions did not arrive with names attached. They flickered, registered, then disappeared, like static brushed off a sleeve.

A psychiatrist would have circled him in red ink, not out of alarm, but fascination. The kind they brought up in lectures, stripped of humanity and reduced to variables.

They would have asked what sequence of events could have produced that level of detachment. What kind of life resulted in someone so functional and so hollow at the same time. They would have debated whether emptiness was a symptom or a structure, whether the void was something that happened to him or something he learned to live inside.

Cole would not have attended those lectures, even if invited. Not because he feared the conclusions, but because he did not believe they would have arrived at anything useful.

He did not feel broken. He felt finished. As if whatever had been meant to take shape in him already had, and this had simply been what remained after the sculpting stopped.

Money existed around him. Power. Access. A life constructed with precision and intent. None of it landed. None of it echoed. His days passed through him without resistance, light through tinted glass. He experienced things the way one experienced weather through a window. Acknowledged. Observed. Rarely absorbed.

It was not sadness. It was not grief. It was not even despair. Those required depth, and Cole existed in something flatter, quieter, more dangerous. A sustained absence of urgency. A life lived without the expectation of impact.

So when you met Cole Hartman, you did not look for the wound. You looked for the vacancy. You looked for the places where something should have accumulated and did not. You looked at the man with everything arranged around him and nothing arranged within.

This was not a story about what he was hiding.

The hotel room opened in stillness.

It had been built to look expensive without confessing where it was. Walls in obedient neutrals. Glass that refused intimacy, tinted enough to turn the outside world into a suggestion. Furniture placed as if a stylist had stood here with a ruler and a deadline, every line clean, every surface determined to leave no fingerprints behind. A space designed for short stays and quick forgetting, the kind of place that swallowed names the second the door clicked shut.

Cole Hartman lay across the bed on his back, one arm dropped at his side as if it had lost interest in being useful, the other lifted just enough to keep a cigarette balanced between his fingers.

Smoke rose in a slow column, unhurried, curling and thinning until it disappeared into the air before it could become anything memorable. His gaze held to the ceiling with a steadiness that did not look restful. There was no searching in it, no drifting. It had the flat patience of someone waiting for a signal that never arrived.

Anyone trying to read thought behind his eyes would have come away with nothing and blamed themselves for it. Not because his mind was empty, but because it refused to leave tracks. Something sparked, registered, then slipped away before it could be named. It did not gather into the narrative. It did not build toward conclusion. It moved through him and out again, leaving the same clean surface it found.

He encouraged that, sometimes. Opacity had served him better than honesty ever had. Let people assume there was nothing to extract, nothing to interpret, nothing to want. Most of them complied.

The few who insisted stayed trapped in the same loop, circling the same sparse clues, mistaking their persistence for progress. Cole noticed patterns the way others noticed faces, and he noticed them early. If someone thought they were being clever around him, they arrived late to a room that had already been cleared.

Silence lasted long enough to become a pressure on the body. Breath started to feel audible. The small noises of skin against sheets announced themselves. Even the lamp’s soft glow seemed too deliberate, too curated, as if warmth had been chosen as an aesthetic instead of an act.

Then the frame widened.

Caden lay beside him, close enough to imply intimacy, far enough to deny responsibility for it. He was propped against the headboard with practiced ease, legs crossed loosely at the ankle, a book open in his hands.

He read as if he was waiting for something else to happen. His eyes moved, but his mind didn’t register anything. His attention stayed split, half on the page, half on the air in the room, as if he had learned to keep one part of himself always listening.

The bedside lamp fell across his profile and made him look softer than he was, smoothing him into something almost tender. The light offered a domestic lie, a picture of two men sharing a bed, quiet and unhurried, the kind of image that could pass for familiarity if you looked quickly and wanted to believe in it.

Familiarity required presence, and this room had been built to survive without it.

Caden did not reach for Cole. Cole did not turn toward Caden. Their bodies stayed in parallel, existing side by side without ever intersecting, and the bed was wide enough to make that distance feel intentional.

Smoke curled upward, caught the lamp’s glow for a second, then vanished. A page turned with the quiet confidence of routine. Somewhere beyond the glass, a city kept moving, offering noise, lights, and distractions to anyone who needed proof they were alive. None of it entered here. The room held itself apart, sealed in expensive air.

Cole broke the quiet without moving.

“How’s your wife?”

Caden paused in a way that did not belong to surprise. It belonged to irritation rehearsed over time. He closed the book halfway and let it rest on his stomach, fingers tightening around the spine as if the object could anchor him against the question.

“Why do you always have to ask that?” he said. “Every now and then, like clockwork.”

Cole exhaled smoke toward the ceiling. It thinned before it reached anything solid, the way most things did around him.

“No reason in particular,” he said. “Just checking on her. How is Violet doing? Does she sense anything?”

A sound left Caden that might have become laughter in a different life. Here it came out quiet and bitter, clipped off the second it existed.

“As long as her shopping cart is empty because she already bought everything inside it,” he said, voice low, sharpened at the edges, “and as long as she can get her nails done, show up at the country club, and swing a new designer bag around like a badge of honor, she doesn’t really care what I do with my life.”

Cole turned his head just enough to glance at him, as if he were checking an angle, not a person.

“You’d be surprised what women notice,” he said. “Details add up. You smell different. You don’t smoke, and I smoke around you all the time. Doesn’t she notice that?”

Caden’s laugh came again, smaller, darker, more tired than amused.

“We don’t sleep in the same room anymore, Cole.”

Cole made a quiet sound that did not qualify as interest, only acknowledgement.

“Interesting,” he said. “So why are you still married?”

Caden’s gaze lifted to the ceiling, mirroring Cole’s earlier posture. His voice flattened, turning practical.

“Because it’s convenient. It works. Because it’s a good cover in this society.”

Cole let the answer sit there. Smoke drifted between them and dissolved as if the air refused to hold it.

“You’d think,” he said, almost absently, “that in a time like this, a civilized time, it wouldn’t still be necessary. You’d think being a gay man wouldn’t require a woman standing in front of you like a shield. And yet.”

Caden clicked his tongue, sharp and final, the sound of a door being closed without ceremony.

“There is no use talking to you about anything,” he said. “The second you get that post-sex clarity, you start spewing nonsense. Can’t you just enjoy the quiet for a bit without interrupting it with your stupid remarks?”

He opened the book again as if the motion could reset the room. A page turned.

Cole did not respond. His gaze returned to the ceiling, cigarette balanced loosely between his fingers, as if the conversation had slipped off him without leaving a mark.

The quiet returned, thinner than before, and sharper, and newly conscious of itself.

Cole crushed the cigarette into the ashtray on the nightstand with the heel of two fingers. The ember died fast, a small red eye closing. Ash clung to his skin and he rubbed it off with his thumb like it had offended him by existing.

He sat up and stood. The robe slid off his shoulders and sank to the carpet in a quiet heap. For a second he remained there, fully bare in the lamplight, body rendered in warm gold that made even vacancy look expensive. The room did not react. Neither did he. Exposure carried no heat for him, no charge, just a brief interval between fabrics.

He looked for his shirt without hurry. Chair. Dresser. The edge of the bed. His eyes moved through space.

Caden’s voice came from behind him, casual on the surface and careful underneath. “Leaving already?”

Cole found the shirt, shook it once, and let it settle in his hands. “I’m bored.”

He dressed with a kind of ritual efficiency that refused to become intimate. Briefs first. Pants next. The belt threaded through the loops with a soft rasp, buckle clicking shut like a decision. Then the button-up. He slid his arms into the sleeves, rolled his shoulders, and began fastening the buttons from the middle, each one closing a little more of him off from the room.

Caden shifted against the headboard. The book lay open but forgotten, resting on his stomach like a prop that no longer knew its cue.

“When will I see you again?” The question carried distance dressed up as civility.

Cole kept buttoning. His gaze stayed forward, angled toward the glass that refused to show a real city. “Whenever you feel like you need a release,” he said. “Let me know. I’ll do the same.”

Caden exhaled. It came out long and controlled, the sound of a man swallowing the part of himself that still tried to negotiate. His face tightened at the mouth, then smoothed again into something acceptable. Cole had never sold him devotion. Caden had kept buying anyway, one quiet night at a time.

Cole gathered his belongings from the nightstand and the chair. Phone. Wallet. Keys. The small inventory of a life that moved easily through locked doors. He did not glance back for a closing look. He did not let the moment gather weight around his ankles.

He left.

The latch clicked, clean and final, and the room returned to its expensive silence as if it had been trained to erase people.

As Cole exited the hotel, the night met him with that polished, indifferent chill cities wore when they wanted to feel untouchable. The entrance lights bled onto the pavement in a sterile spill, turning the glass doors behind him into a bright rectangle that kept trying to pull him back into the story he had just left upstairs.

He paused on the step.

His eyes moved first, slow and precise, scanning the frontage, the curb, the idle silhouettes of people pretending they were only waiting for rides. The doorman. A couple with their heads close together. A man smoking too near the flower planters, phone held low like he was hiding from someone or hoping to be found. Cole’s gaze slid over them all, measuring angles, distances, exits. Searching, without the courtesy of looking like he was searching.

He descended the steps and started walking.

The parking lot sat beyond the spill of the hotel lights, darker, flatter, full of cars arranged like they were trying not to admit they belonged to anyone. Cole headed toward his, and his stride refused comfort. He did not stroll. He did not let the walk become a transition. His pace picked up, faster than normal, purposeful in the way people moved when they were trying to catch something before it disappeared or outrun something before it caught them.

His shoulders stayed level, his hands kept empty at his sides, his posture controlled enough to pass for calm. The speed told the truth his face did not. He looked again, once, over the lot, over the shadows between vehicles, over the edges where the light died.

As if he expected a figure to step forward.

As if he needed it.