**ALEX’S POV**
*Afternoon / Early Evening*
I had the laptop open on the kitchen table, camera centered, posture automatically straight the way it always became the second my parents’ faces appeared on screen.
“You look tired,” my mother said first, squinting slightly.
“Are you sleeping enough?”
“I’m fine,” I answered.
The same answer I had given for years.
“Just a busy week at work.”
My father nodded from his usual seat on the couch behind her.
The living room of my childhood home looked exactly the same as it always had — neat, quiet, carefully controlled.
No clutter.
No evidence that anyone in that house had ever raised their voice or made a mess or wanted something they weren’t supposed to want.
“How is the apartment?” my father asked.
“Still sharing with that… roommate?”
He always paused before the word, like it might be contagious.
“Yeah.
Still sharing.”
“And everything is… appropriate?” my mother added.
The question was soft, but the meaning underneath it was not.
Appropriate.
Decent.
Within the rules I had grown up with.
“Everything’s fine.”
On the other side of the call they accepted the answer the way they always did — with the quiet assumption that I was still the same careful son who never stepped outside the lines they had drawn.
They had no idea that the roommate in question had spent the previous night on her knees making peace signs for a camera while I called her things that would have given both of them a collective stroke.
I felt a ridiculous urge to laugh and swallowed it.
“We’re glad you’re focusing on work,” my father continued.
“Stable path.
Good.
No distractions.”
“No distractions,” I repeated, because that was the expected line.
My mother smiled the small, pleased smile she used when she believed everything was still in order.
“Have you met anyone nice?
Someone… suitable?”
The question landed differently than it used to.
A month ago I would have given the automatic polite deflection.
Now the first image that rose in my mind was Lilith in the kitchen that morning, hair messy, wearing one of my shirts, telling me to take care of myself before work with a softness she still pretended wasn’t there.
“Not really,” I said.
“Just focusing on the job.”
They both looked satisfied.
The conversation moved on to safer ground — a cousin’s new baby, the neighbor’s loud dog, the weather.
I answered when required, nodded at the right moments, and kept the version of myself they recognized firmly in place.
But under the surface the other version kept shifting.
The man who had once been terrified of even looking at a girl in her underwear now lived with someone who walked around in exactly that and worse.
The man who had been taught that desire was a private weakness now had an entire private folder of videos that would make his parents disown him on the spot. Read the latest chapters at g.com.
The man who had agreed to “roommates with benefits, no strings” was starting to notice how often he looked forward to the sound of her key in the door.
I glanced past the laptop screen toward the empty apartment.
Lilith was still out with her friends.
The place felt too quiet without her moving around in it.
“Alex?” my mother’s voice pulled me back.
“You seem distracted.”
“Sorry.
Just thinking about a project deadline.”
She accepted that too.
Deadlines were safe.
Work was safe.
Everything that kept me inside the old boundaries was safe.
We talked for another ten minutes.
When the call finally ended I closed the laptop and sat in the sudden silence of the kitchen, staring at my own reflection in the dark screen.
The son they still believed in was polite, controlled, and carefully alone.
The man sitting in the chair had spent the morning kissing the same woman he had called his whore the night before, then watched her leave for work with a faint limp she refused to complain about.
He had a pact that said nothing was supposed to mean anything, and a growing suspicion that the pact was already lying to both of them.
I stood up, put the laptop away, and started making a simple dinner for two even though Lilith hadn’t said when she would be home.
Old habits from the strict house still told me to keep everything clean and separate.
Newer habits — the ones formed in the dark with her — kept pulling in the opposite direction.
I set two plates on the table anyway.
Just in case.