Nice to meet you, I am Andrej.

[Sundance]

Your writing and storytelling is spectacular as always. The channeling of pure and unbridled emotion went to a whole new level with these Chapters. It takes a real courage to delve inwards, face the vivid images from memory and a true talent to convey it to the reader. The raw honesty of it all pierces deep into one’s soul and takes you to another realm of emotional consciousness that transcends the mere physical. I’m speechless. It’s truly special!

 

[bankai-shikai]

So guys, thank you very much for your wonderfull messages and comments. I am very happy to say, that I finished this story with the next and last chapter. Even though it is a simple 12-Chapter story, it inspired me to rewrite it from scratch and write a book. A dear friend from the site even encouraged me to post it on Kindle, so I could reach even a greater audience. So enjoy...

----

Chapter 12


So, in a perfect world, this is where our relationship begins and the old dynamics end. In a perfect world, this is where we come out to the world and start living our lives as a normal gay couple. But the world is not perfect. It is still good, just not how I imagined we were going to end up.

After two blissful months—weeks where everything fell into place like a dream stitched together by the heat of skin, whispered jokes, and late-night cigarettes—on the 23rd of August, my mother got a phone call. It was from my uncle in Switzerland. An invitation, she called it. An opportunity. The words sounded cold and clean when she spoke them, like something wrapped in plastic. They didn't match the mess in my chest.

He offered us the chance to start fresh. A new chapter of our lives, as she kept repeating over the next few days, her eyes bright with a hope I hadn’t seen in years. I knew what she meant—Switzerland was stability. It was education, jobs, a system that worked, clean streets and rules that made sense. It was everything we had dreamed of when the winters were too long and the paychecks too short. And still, the only thing I could think about was him.

I was devastated. Torn down the middle. There was no word soft enough to describe that particular kind of ache: the grief that comes not from what’s happened, but from what is about to. A grief shaped like a countdown, ticking away every shared night, every look, every moment where his fingers slipped into mine beneath the blanket of something unspoken. It was the kind of ache that made me feel selfish, stupid, adolescent. But it was real.

Andrej and I had just started to feel… comfortable. Not out loud, not in public, not even in words—but in the way his leg brushed against mine when we sat on the grass. In the way he waited for me after training. In the way he pressed his lips to my shoulder as if to say I’m still here, even when neither of us said it. I wasn’t ready to lose that. I wasn’t ready to lose him.

I told him the day after I found out. We were in my room, the curtains drawn against the August sun, the sheets tangled from another lazy, perfect morning. My family was gone for the day, which meant we had the whole place to ourselves. The fan hummed in the corner, lazily pushing warm air around. I had been quiet all morning, and he must have noticed. I didn’t kiss him the way I usually did. I didn’t trace my fingers over the ridges of his stomach or pull him back to bed when he tried to get up. I just lay there, my chest tight, watching the ceiling.

It wasn’t dramatic. There were no tears, no trembling voices. I simply turned my face toward him, my cheek still pressed to the pillow, and said, “We’re moving to Switzerland.”

He blinked at me, confused for a second. He sat up on one elbow, watching me carefully, as if waiting for the punchline.

“Like… permanently?” he asked, his voice still soft with sleep.

I nodded. “End of the month. My uncle got my mom a job. Said I could finish school there. Said it’s time we get out.”

He didn’t say anything for a while. Just sat up fully and ran a hand through his hair. The silence stretched, but not in the way I feared. It wasn’t angry or cold. It was just… thinking.

Finally, he said, “Well, fuck. That’s… good for you.”

“Good?” I asked, a little sharper than I meant to.

He shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, you’ll do great. You’re meant for more than this place.”

“That’s not the point.”

“I know,” he said, and he did. He reached for my hand then and gave it a quick squeeze. “But still. You’d be crazy not to go.”

That’s when I realized—he wasn’t going to fight it. He wasn’t going to beg or cry or throw himself into some grand declaration. That wasn’t Andrej. And honestly, it wasn’t me either. We were both too proud for that. Too cautious. Too tied to the version of ourselves we had created to survive.

But there was something else in the way he looked at me that day. A softness. A kind of understanding. Maybe even a kind of love—quiet, hidden, but there.

“I’m not sure what to do,” I said, almost in a whisper.

“You do,” he replied. “You’re just scared.”

He lay back down then, pulled me toward him, and kissed the spot just beneath my ear.

“We still have time,” he murmured. “Let’s not waste it.”

And we didn’t.

I didn’t reply. I couldn’t. I wrapped my arms around him and held on. The weight of what he said lingered longer than I expected. I was living. But it already felt like a kind of dying too.


—


One afternoon, we played video games in his room for almost three hours straight, both of us pretending it was just another summer day. He kept making dumb jokes, nudging me with his elbow when I lost a round, swearing dramatically when he did. I laughed until my stomach hurt. But there was something heavy in the air, even in the joy. As if we were trying too hard to bottle it up. As if we both knew it was almost over.

We started planning a camping trip without really calling it a “goodbye.” Fruška Gora was close enough to reach by bus, familiar enough to feel like home, but distant enough to pretend it was a real escape.

We packed light. A tent, two sleeping bags, a few snacks and a bottle of Rakija Andrej stole from his parent’s place.

The ride there was quiet, except for the hum of the engine and the occasional burst of folk music from the driver’s radio. We sat side by side, sharing a pair of headphones. My head leaned on the window, watching the trees grow denser the further we went, my heart beating like it knew this was the last time.

The woods smelled like pine and earth and sun-baked bark. We walked for almost forty minutes before finding a clearing. It was flat and dry, surrounded by tall trees and just far enough from any trail that no one would bother us.

The tent went up awkwardly. We argued over the poles, laughed at how badly we were doing, and then finally gave up and lay back on the grass, staring at the pale evening sky.

That night, we drank slowly. Not to get drunk. Just to soften the edges.

He played music on his small radio—old Serbian rock songs we both knew by heart. We hummed along, voices low. The fire we built crackled between us, throwing sparks into the dark.

We didn’t talk much.

But when we lay down, shoulder to shoulder, our sleeping bags zipped together, the silence between us wasn’t empty.

He touched my hand first.

There was no rush. No hunger. Just a kind of slowness. A kind of reverence.

It felt different this time—less like a secret, more like a memory we were creating.

We kissed for a long time. His fingers brushed the back of my neck, the side of my face, my jaw. Every part of me felt like it was glowing. When our foreheads pressed together, we both exhaled at the same time.

Later, when we made love, it wasn’t wild. It wasn’t desperate.

It was deliberate.

There was no fear. No noise.

Only skin, breath, heartbeat.

He held my face in his hands at one point, looking at me like he was trying to memorize it.

And I let him.

And I memorized him too. The way his lashes cast shadows. The curve of his shoulder. The scar near his ribs I had never asked about.

When we were done, we lay tangled in the half-light of the tent, the sounds of the forest folding in around us. Our legs stayed intertwined. Neither of us moved. Andrej whispered something then. I didn’t catch all of it. Something about how he’d never felt more alive and more afraid at the same time.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know how.

The sun rose slowly, coloring the fabric of our tent gold and blue.

He kissed the back of my shoulder before getting up to start packing.

And just like that, the magic broke.

We hiked back in silence to Stražilovo, waiting in silence for the bus that never came. Then we walked in silence to Sremski Karlovci in hope that another bus comes. It did eventuallz.

I watched him the whole time.

I memorized his back. His walk. The way he pushed branches out of my path.

I didn’t cry. Not then.

But when the bus pulled into Novi Sad, and we stepped off into the brightness of morning, something in me buckled. I fought as hell not to show emotion, don’t ask me why. I can’t explain it to this day. We gave each other a bro’s handshake and half a hug on the busy streets in front of the old railway station. And then we parted ways, like we were gonna meet the day after tomorrow.

The next time I saw Andrej was eight months later. In those first weeks after I moved, we clung to the remnants of what we had built—late-night texts, brief calls, scattered photos exchanged without context. But distance doesn’t only stretch geography; it redefines habits, interrupts language, reshapes memory. Between my adjustment to life in Switzerland, navigating a new school system, and collecting the endless paperwork needed for my medical school immatriculation, our contact, once so vital, grew increasingly irregular. Then, as quietly as it had begun, it faded. We never argued. We just... stopped.

When I returned to Serbia for the holidays that year, we saw each other. And yes, we slept together again. It was desperate, hurried, too full of nostalgia to be tender. We mistook urgency for intimacy. We wanted, perhaps, to bridge those missing months with skin, breath, friction—but the distance had settled in deeper than we realized. There was a moment afterward, lying beside him in silence, when I understood something had shifted irreversibly. I don’t remember which one of us fell asleep first, but when I woke, the room felt empty even with him in it.

The following summer, I visited again. The rhythm of our lives had already begun to diverge, and our conversations now carried the texture of old photographs—familiar, but slightly faded. One evening, sitting outside with a beer in hand, he told me, almost offhandedly, that he had met someone. Her name was Ivana. I had braced myself for this moment countless times in my mind, imagining all the possible responses I might have—jealousy, grief, a sense of betrayal. But when he said her name, none of those things arrived. Instead, there was only a strange, unexpected peace.

Ivana was kind. Warm. The sort of person you want to succeed, even if it hurts a little to admit it. I met her once, briefly, at a mutual friend’s gathering. She greeted me like someone who had heard about me many times before—without suspicion, without judgment. There was no bitterness in me that evening, only quiet recognition: the chapter Andrej and I had shared had truly ended.

That’s the woman he married. The mother of his son. She is the family he built for himself, and I am quietly grateful that he found something lasting in this world.

And somehow, from the ashes of whatever we once were, something unexpected grew. A friendship. Not one of convenience or nostalgia, but one rooted in a deeper understanding that can only come from shared history. We don’t talk every day, but we talk often enough. He calls when something reminds him of our youth—our old gym, a place we used to eat, a song we used to blast in his car. I message him when I stumble across a photograph, or when someone from the past reappears briefly in my mind.

We see each other maybe two, three times a year. There is no ritual to it, no need for planning. Just a quiet mutual knowing that time hasn’t erased the significance of what we were to each other. Strangely, we never revisited the sexual part of our relationship. It no longer felt necessary. That door closed softly and stayed shut—not from fear or discomfort, but because something else had begun. A door that opened into something even rarer.


—


There is something haunting about a first love that doesn’t vanish but instead reshapes itself into something gentler over time. Most teenagers imagine their first love as a single, brilliant arc—rising fast, burning brightly, and then disappearing as quickly as it arrived. Ours wasn’t like that. It didn’t explode and vanish. It smoldered. It changed shape. And what remained was more complex than romance, more enduring than sex. What remained was presence.

The truth is, we weren’t just lovers. We were mirrors to each other. Andrej showed me things I didn’t want to admit about myself—the intensity of my longing, the emotional violence of being young and closeted in a place that had no room for softness between men. He unearthed my shadows. And in doing so, he gave me the tools to see them clearly. There were nights when I hated him, when I hated myself more. And still, I craved him. Still, I returned.

In many ways, I lived through him. His confidence was something I borrowed, a temporary identity I slipped into like a borrowed jacket. Being close to him gave me access to a version of myself I wasn’t ready to own. The one who touched another boy in secret, who kissed in back rooms and abandoned buildings, who learned how much power could be hidden in silence. But it also broke something in me. It fractured my certainty. It shook my illusions of control. And it left me staring into the mirror asking questions I wasn’t ready to answer: Who am I when I’m not chasing him? Who do I become when I finally stop hiding?

Leaving Serbia wasn’t just about opportunity. It was a rupture. A severing of the world I had known and the person I had built within it. Switzerland gave me structure, ambition, language, and education—but it also gave me distance. The kind of distance you need to finally look at your past without flinching. I learned what it meant to build a life from scratch. To stand on my own. And in the quiet of those early years, when I lay awake in cold apartments, adjusting to a culture that prized precision over emotion, it was Andrej’s voice I remembered. The sound of him laughing in my bed. The heat of his body in the dark. And I cried more times than I care to admit.

But I grew. Slowly, unevenly, but undeniably. I found pieces of myself scattered across two countries, in languages that belonged to both me and not me. I learned that longing is not shameful, that softness is not weakness. I stopped trying to define myself in binary terms. I stopped pretending that my worth depended on being understood. I began to embrace nuance—the fluidity of attraction, the complexity of intimacy, the strange, aching tenderness of a bond that refused to die even after desire faded.

Andrej’s marriage didn’t kill something in me. It crystallized it. When he introduced me to Ivana, when I held their baby boy for the first time, I understood the fullness of what we had meant to each other. We were not a mistake. We were not a detour. We were the storm that softened the ground, made it fertile. Without us, perhaps neither of us would have had the courage to build the lives we have now. I like to think I taught him something too—not just about sex or secrecy, but about loyalty, about intensity, about what it means to truly see another person and still choose to stay.

And no, we never went back to being lovers. We never needed to. There is a kind of intimacy that outlives the body. There is a kind of love that doesn’t demand performance. I still think of him when I hear certain songs, when I pass by young men on the tram whispering too close to one another, when I watch the sun set through old European windows. He lives in my muscle memory. In my instincts. In the man I became.

Because he broke me. And in doing so, he cleared space for something else. For someone else. For the me I was always meant to become.

Today, I can say his name without pain. I can laugh about our stupid inside jokes, the whispered moments, the cigarette breaks where silence said more than words ever could. I can remember the sting of our final fight, the rawness of that goodbye, without needing to rewrite the ending. Because we did not fail each other. We simply outgrew the version of ourselves that loved in secret.

And maybe that’s enough.

He gave me my first experience of truth. Not just about love, but about myself. About who I am when no one is looking. About what I ache for, what I’m afraid of, and how far I’ve come.

He was the beginning. And because of him, I know that endings can be beautiful too.

The End.

 

[bugeyes69]

Absolutely beautiful to read, poignant, moving and downright enchanting. You held my attention for the full solid 2 hours it took me to read its entirety, and left me a blubbering mess. This is the best story I've read on this site so far, and I've read quite a few. Real life is way more than fiction...

 

[Sundance]

I’m sincerely out of words to describe such an amazing job you’ve done with your writing and storytelling. It’s a beautiful story of true love and friendship brought to a full circle masterfully. The sheer authenticity and raw honesty of it all is captivating and brought tears to my eyes. Life works in mysterious ways and it’s upon us to experience, learn, reflect and internalize to become the better versions of ourselves.

It’s a true masterclass and should serve as a guiding light for countless adolescents navigating the real world. Thank you!

 

[michaelnola]

I can honestly say that this is one of the best experiences I have had and that you are an excellent writer and you are a master of words and walking with us through your life experiences. Thank you for sharing and showing that we all have an opportunity to love and that sometimes an ending is really the beginning of something wonderful and new.

Thank you for this journey.

Much happiness forever.

 

[laptoper]

So guys, thank you very much for your wonderfull messages and comments. I am very happy to say, that I finished this story with the next and last chapter. Even though it is a simple 12-Chapter story, it inspired me to rewrite it from scratch and write a book. A dear friend from the site even encouraged me to post it on Kindle, so I could reach even a greater audience. So enjoy...

----

Chapter 12


So, in a perfect world, this is where our relationship begins and the old dynamics end. In a perfect world, this is where we come out to the world and start living our lives as a normal gay couple. But the world is not perfect. It is still good, just not how I imagined we were going to end up.

After two blissful months—weeks where everything fell into place like a dream stitched together by the heat of skin, whispered jokes, and late-night cigarettes—on the 23rd of August, my mother got a phone call. It was from my uncle in Switzerland. An invitation, she called it. An opportunity. The words sounded cold and clean when she spoke them, like something wrapped in plastic. They didn't match the mess in my chest.

He offered us the chance to start fresh. A new chapter of our lives, as she kept repeating over the next few days, her eyes bright with a hope I hadn’t seen in years. I knew what she meant—Switzerland was stability. It was education, jobs, a system that worked, clean streets and rules that made sense. It was everything we had dreamed of when the winters were too long and the paychecks too short. And still, the only thing I could think about was him.

I was devastated. Torn down the middle. There was no word soft enough to describe that particular kind of ache: the grief that comes not from what’s happened, but from what is about to. A grief shaped like a countdown, ticking away every shared night, every look, every moment where his fingers slipped into mine beneath the blanket of something unspoken. It was the kind of ache that made me feel selfish, stupid, adolescent. But it was real.

Andrej and I had just started to feel… comfortable. Not out loud, not in public, not even in words—but in the way his leg brushed against mine when we sat on the grass. In the way he waited for me after training. In the way he pressed his lips to my shoulder as if to say I’m still here, even when neither of us said it. I wasn’t ready to lose that. I wasn’t ready to lose him.

I told him the day after I found out. We were in my room, the curtains drawn against the August sun, the sheets tangled from another lazy, perfect morning. My family was gone for the day, which meant we had the whole place to ourselves. The fan hummed in the corner, lazily pushing warm air around. I had been quiet all morning, and he must have noticed. I didn’t kiss him the way I usually did. I didn’t trace my fingers over the ridges of his stomach or pull him back to bed when he tried to get up. I just lay there, my chest tight, watching the ceiling.

It wasn’t dramatic. There were no tears, no trembling voices. I simply turned my face toward him, my cheek still pressed to the pillow, and said, “We’re moving to Switzerland.”

He blinked at me, confused for a second. He sat up on one elbow, watching me carefully, as if waiting for the punchline.

“Like… permanently?” he asked, his voice still soft with sleep.

I nodded. “End of the month. My uncle got my mom a job. Said I could finish school there. Said it’s time we get out.”

He didn’t say anything for a while. Just sat up fully and ran a hand through his hair. The silence stretched, but not in the way I feared. It wasn’t angry or cold. It was just… thinking.

Finally, he said, “Well, fuck. That’s… good for you.”

“Good?” I asked, a little sharper than I meant to.

He shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, you’ll do great. You’re meant for more than this place.”

“That’s not the point.”

“I know,” he said, and he did. He reached for my hand then and gave it a quick squeeze. “But still. You’d be crazy not to go.”

That’s when I realized—he wasn’t going to fight it. He wasn’t going to beg or cry or throw himself into some grand declaration. That wasn’t Andrej. And honestly, it wasn’t me either. We were both too proud for that. Too cautious. Too tied to the version of ourselves we had created to survive.

But there was something else in the way he looked at me that day. A softness. A kind of understanding. Maybe even a kind of love—quiet, hidden, but there.

“I’m not sure what to do,” I said, almost in a whisper.

“You do,” he replied. “You’re just scared.”

He lay back down then, pulled me toward him, and kissed the spot just beneath my ear.

“We still have time,” he murmured. “Let’s not waste it.”

And we didn’t.

I didn’t reply. I couldn’t. I wrapped my arms around him and held on. The weight of what he said lingered longer than I expected. I was living. But it already felt like a kind of dying too.


—


One afternoon, we played video games in his room for almost three hours straight, both of us pretending it was just another summer day. He kept making dumb jokes, nudging me with his elbow when I lost a round, swearing dramatically when he did. I laughed until my stomach hurt. But there was something heavy in the air, even in the joy. As if we were trying too hard to bottle it up. As if we both knew it was almost over.

We started planning a camping trip without really calling it a “goodbye.” Fruška Gora was close enough to reach by bus, familiar enough to feel like home, but distant enough to pretend it was a real escape.

We packed light. A tent, two sleeping bags, a few snacks and a bottle of Rakija Andrej stole from his parent’s place.

The ride there was quiet, except for the hum of the engine and the occasional burst of folk music from the driver’s radio. We sat side by side, sharing a pair of headphones. My head leaned on the window, watching the trees grow denser the further we went, my heart beating like it knew this was the last time.

The woods smelled like pine and earth and sun-baked bark. We walked for almost forty minutes before finding a clearing. It was flat and dry, surrounded by tall trees and just far enough from any trail that no one would bother us.

The tent went up awkwardly. We argued over the poles, laughed at how badly we were doing, and then finally gave up and lay back on the grass, staring at the pale evening sky.

That night, we drank slowly. Not to get drunk. Just to soften the edges.

He played music on his small radio—old Serbian rock songs we both knew by heart. We hummed along, voices low. The fire we built crackled between us, throwing sparks into the dark.

We didn’t talk much.

But when we lay down, shoulder to shoulder, our sleeping bags zipped together, the silence between us wasn’t empty.

He touched my hand first.

There was no rush. No hunger. Just a kind of slowness. A kind of reverence.

It felt different this time—less like a secret, more like a memory we were creating.

We kissed for a long time. His fingers brushed the back of my neck, the side of my face, my jaw. Every part of me felt like it was glowing. When our foreheads pressed together, we both exhaled at the same time.

Later, when we made love, it wasn’t wild. It wasn’t desperate.

It was deliberate.

There was no fear. No noise.

Only skin, breath, heartbeat.

He held my face in his hands at one point, looking at me like he was trying to memorize it.

And I let him.

And I memorized him too. The way his lashes cast shadows. The curve of his shoulder. The scar near his ribs I had never asked about.

When we were done, we lay tangled in the half-light of the tent, the sounds of the forest folding in around us. Our legs stayed intertwined. Neither of us moved. Andrej whispered something then. I didn’t catch all of it. Something about how he’d never felt more alive and more afraid at the same time.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know how.

The sun rose slowly, coloring the fabric of our tent gold and blue.

He kissed the back of my shoulder before getting up to start packing.

And just like that, the magic broke.

We hiked back in silence to Stražilovo, waiting in silence for the bus that never came. Then we walked in silence to Sremski Karlovci in hope that another bus comes. It did eventuallz.

I watched him the whole time.

I memorized his back. His walk. The way he pushed branches out of my path.

I didn’t cry. Not then.

But when the bus pulled into Novi Sad, and we stepped off into the brightness of morning, something in me buckled. I fought as hell not to show emotion, don’t ask me why. I can’t explain it to this day. We gave each other a bro’s handshake and half a hug on the busy streets in front of the old railway station. And then we parted ways, like we were gonna meet the day after tomorrow.

The next time I saw Andrej was eight months later. In those first weeks after I moved, we clung to the remnants of what we had built—late-night texts, brief calls, scattered photos exchanged without context. But distance doesn’t only stretch geography; it redefines habits, interrupts language, reshapes memory. Between my adjustment to life in Switzerland, navigating a new school system, and collecting the endless paperwork needed for my medical school immatriculation, our contact, once so vital, grew increasingly irregular. Then, as quietly as it had begun, it faded. We never argued. We just... stopped.

When I returned to Serbia for the holidays that year, we saw each other. And yes, we slept together again. It was desperate, hurried, too full of nostalgia to be tender. We mistook urgency for intimacy. We wanted, perhaps, to bridge those missing months with skin, breath, friction—but the distance had settled in deeper than we realized. There was a moment afterward, lying beside him in silence, when I understood something had shifted irreversibly. I don’t remember which one of us fell asleep first, but when I woke, the room felt empty even with him in it.

The following summer, I visited again. The rhythm of our lives had already begun to diverge, and our conversations now carried the texture of old photographs—familiar, but slightly faded. One evening, sitting outside with a beer in hand, he told me, almost offhandedly, that he had met someone. Her name was Ivana. I had braced myself for this moment countless times in my mind, imagining all the possible responses I might have—jealousy, grief, a sense of betrayal. But when he said her name, none of those things arrived. Instead, there was only a strange, unexpected peace.

Ivana was kind. Warm. The sort of person you want to succeed, even if it hurts a little to admit it. I met her once, briefly, at a mutual friend’s gathering. She greeted me like someone who had heard about me many times before—without suspicion, without judgment. There was no bitterness in me that evening, only quiet recognition: the chapter Andrej and I had shared had truly ended.

That’s the woman he married. The mother of his son. She is the family he built for himself, and I am quietly grateful that he found something lasting in this world.

And somehow, from the ashes of whatever we once were, something unexpected grew. A friendship. Not one of convenience or nostalgia, but one rooted in a deeper understanding that can only come from shared history. We don’t talk every day, but we talk often enough. He calls when something reminds him of our youth—our old gym, a place we used to eat, a song we used to blast in his car. I message him when I stumble across a photograph, or when someone from the past reappears briefly in my mind.

We see each other maybe two, three times a year. There is no ritual to it, no need for planning. Just a quiet mutual knowing that time hasn’t erased the significance of what we were to each other. Strangely, we never revisited the sexual part of our relationship. It no longer felt necessary. That door closed softly and stayed shut—not from fear or discomfort, but because something else had begun. A door that opened into something even rarer.


—


There is something haunting about a first love that doesn’t vanish but instead reshapes itself into something gentler over time. Most teenagers imagine their first love as a single, brilliant arc—rising fast, burning brightly, and then disappearing as quickly as it arrived. Ours wasn’t like that. It didn’t explode and vanish. It smoldered. It changed shape. And what remained was more complex than romance, more enduring than sex. What remained was presence.

The truth is, we weren’t just lovers. We were mirrors to each other. Andrej showed me things I didn’t want to admit about myself—the intensity of my longing, the emotional violence of being young and closeted in a place that had no room for softness between men. He unearthed my shadows. And in doing so, he gave me the tools to see them clearly. There were nights when I hated him, when I hated myself more. And still, I craved him. Still, I returned.

In many ways, I lived through him. His confidence was something I borrowed, a temporary identity I slipped into like a borrowed jacket. Being close to him gave me access to a version of myself I wasn’t ready to own. The one who touched another boy in secret, who kissed in back rooms and abandoned buildings, who learned how much power could be hidden in silence. But it also broke something in me. It fractured my certainty. It shook my illusions of control. And it left me staring into the mirror asking questions I wasn’t ready to answer: Who am I when I’m not chasing him? Who do I become when I finally stop hiding?

Leaving Serbia wasn’t just about opportunity. It was a rupture. A severing of the world I had known and the person I had built within it. Switzerland gave me structure, ambition, language, and education—but it also gave me distance. The kind of distance you need to finally look at your past without flinching. I learned what it meant to build a life from scratch. To stand on my own. And in the quiet of those early years, when I lay awake in cold apartments, adjusting to a culture that prized precision over emotion, it was Andrej’s voice I remembered. The sound of him laughing in my bed. The heat of his body in the dark. And I cried more times than I care to admit.

But I grew. Slowly, unevenly, but undeniably. I found pieces of myself scattered across two countries, in languages that belonged to both me and not me. I learned that longing is not shameful, that softness is not weakness. I stopped trying to define myself in binary terms. I stopped pretending that my worth depended on being understood. I began to embrace nuance—the fluidity of attraction, the complexity of intimacy, the strange, aching tenderness of a bond that refused to die even after desire faded.

Andrej’s marriage didn’t kill something in me. It crystallized it. When he introduced me to Ivana, when I held their baby boy for the first time, I understood the fullness of what we had meant to each other. We were not a mistake. We were not a detour. We were the storm that softened the ground, made it fertile. Without us, perhaps neither of us would have had the courage to build the lives we have now. I like to think I taught him something too—not just about sex or secrecy, but about loyalty, about intensity, about what it means to truly see another person and still choose to stay.

And no, we never went back to being lovers. We never needed to. There is a kind of intimacy that outlives the body. There is a kind of love that doesn’t demand performance. I still think of him when I hear certain songs, when I pass by young men on the tram whispering too close to one another, when I watch the sun set through old European windows. He lives in my muscle memory. In my instincts. In the man I became.

Because he broke me. And in doing so, he cleared space for something else. For someone else. For the me I was always meant to become.

Today, I can say his name without pain. I can laugh about our stupid inside jokes, the whispered moments, the cigarette breaks where silence said more than words ever could. I can remember the sting of our final fight, the rawness of that goodbye, without needing to rewrite the ending. Because we did not fail each other. We simply outgrew the version of ourselves that loved in secret.

And maybe that’s enough.

He gave me my first experience of truth. Not just about love, but about myself. About who I am when no one is looking. About what I ache for, what I’m afraid of, and how far I’ve come.

He was the beginning. And because of him, I know that endings can be beautiful too.

The End.

Wow! That was an amazing and unexpected journey. Thanks so much.
I need to go find some more tissues.

 

[befreakytomebabe]

Chapter 5


You have to understand, this had been happening for months. This ridiculous game between us—pseudo-flirting, teasing, laughing—had become a part of our routine, a rhythm so familiar that it felt like breathing. It was driving me insane.

I was seriously starting to fall in love with him. It bothered me, because I never expected something like this could happen. I fantasized about the two of us being together, holding hands, living life like my mom and dad used to—not exactly the same life of course, but you get the jist.

It felt impossible. I have never seen such a life. Not on TV, definitely not in Serbia.

Even though it sounded and looked depressing, that did not stop me from dreaming about it.

I had other friends, coincidentally ones from school, and the dynamics of these friendships were absolute opposites when I compered them to the one I had with Andrej. Suddenly, he stopped coming to my place to hang out with Stevan. I was the one he came to visit. He was still friendly with him of course, but Stevan himself was occupied with his life, his flings and his other relationships. I barely saw him home.

End of March marked the time to start training outside, so our time was spent training at the home gym my father made for me. He did not speak much about sports, or MMA alltogether, but I know he approved. We always had a very silent relationship that made me wonder if he even wanted to become a father. Now I know that he did, but that he had a complicated relationship with his father as well. Today, with 33 years, I appreciate our silences.

My form was becoming exceptional. Even my body dismorphia was under control. I actually liked how MMA was making me look. Andrej took oftenly part in this admiration and showered me with compliments, which felt great, since they were coming from him. But still, he was driving me insane.

Actually, if I were honest, it had officially driven me insane in June, some 8 months after we started hanging out. We spent almost every day together, even when we weren’t training or at the gym. It wasn’t just about the fights, the workouts, or the adrenaline of competition. It was something else, something unspoken yet impossible to ignore. On the days we didn’t see each other, we spent the time talking on the telephone. In 2008, we had cellophones, but the credit limit was very present, and the landline offered hours of talking, seemingly without any cost.

By mid-June, school was over, and the humid weight of summer settled over Novi Sad. One evening, Andrej invited me over, casually mentioning that he’d gotten a new guitar he wanted to show off. I knew the invitation meant more than just music. It meant an entire evening, almost certainly a sleepover, a night stretched long with conversation and the kind of teasing that had started to feel sharper lately.

He lived quite close to me, some 15 minutes away if you took the bus. He had a large home, with three floors. On the first floor lived his grandparents, on the second his mom and dad, and on the third was his room, as well as the room of his younger brother. They had a large garden which was a work of art. His father worked in construction, so he had build 2m walls around the garden, creating a quiet and intimate enviroment. They had a small pavillion on the left side with a small fontaine beside it. Across the whole place outside were strung wires with grape vines which concieved the view from above. The summer in such a place was a thing of beauty. In the far back was a small guest house. Andrej told me once, that his uncle used to live there, but didn’t elaborate on that, so I never asked.

His parents knew me, and I liked them very much, especially his mother. We made a connection when I told her that I was going to the Karlovačka Gimnazija, where she explained that it was her lifelong wish to attend that school. But back in the day, the school cost too much, and her parents couldn’t handle it financially.

The day passed in a blur. We sprawled across his couch, watching YouTube conspiracy theories late into the night, our laughter mixing with the hum of the fan oscillating in the corner.

We were laying side by side. He had his father make him a special table with wheels which enabled him to bring his computer to his bed. He used to play games from his bed, which was unimaginable at the time. I was so jealous of him at the time because of it.

That day he was wearing a white undershirt, sleevless of course. From time to time, I sneaked a peak at the sweat pearls forming on his face, neck, chest and arms. His arms were becoming more and more accentuated if you can believe it. I lived for those moments, as they were my favorite thing on his body. Our friendship even enabled me to step over the boundaries from time to time—so I used those moments to touch him. Looking at him lying beside me in his bed made me touch his biceps. Almost instinctivly, without breaking eye contact with the screen, he reaised his arm and flexed for me during the touch. I gave it a silent nod of confirmation, validating the gains that he was showing me. Looking at those moments retrospectively from today’s perspective, I understand that they defined my sexuality and what I liked seeing on a man.

When it grew late, we moved to the guest house in his yard—he wanted to play the guitar some more without disturbing his parents. The small space smelled like warm wood and dust, the air thick from a day of trapped summer heat.

“I snuck some beers in,” he grinned, dragging six cold bottles from his backpack. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but I took one anyway. The first few sips felt bitter, foreign. After half a bottle, the room started feeling smaller, my thoughts slower, heavier. I needed air.

I stepped outside, the coolness of the night pressing against my skin like a steadying hand. The grass beneath my bare feet was damp, its dewy chill seeping into my skin, grounding me in the moment. The air smelled of earth—rich, damp, alive—with the faintest hint of something floral carried on the breeze. Overhead, grapevines stretched on thin strings, their broad leaves rustling softly, casting shifting patterns of shadow and light under the dim glow of a distant streetlamp. A small stone fountain gurgled in the corner of the yard, its water spilling in a delicate cascade, the rhythmic trickling blending with the occasional chirp of a lone cricket. The quiet wasn’t empty; it was full—of movement, of texture, of the kind of peace that only came with the depth of night.

A light pressure on my shoulder startled me. Andrej.

“Lightweight…” he teased, stepping beside me.

I huffed. “I just needed some air.”

We sat on the warm concrete floor in front of the closed doors, the night pressing around us. We talked about upcoming MMA competitions, about training, but somehow, inevitably, the conversation circled back to that night at my house—the night we officially met. His voice turned teasing, playful, nudging at something just beneath the surface.

He bumped his knee against mine. “You were unsociable as hell that night.”

“I was not.”

He laughed, shaking his head. “You totally were.”

I shoved him lightly, but he used the movement to his advantage, suddenly twisting and knocking me onto the floor. He was on me in seconds, pinning me down, grinning like a predator.

“Not so tough now, huh?”

I struggled, but it was pointless. His hands dug into my sides, fingers relentless. Then he started tickling me. I gasped, squirmed, the laughter forced from my throat, but then—then it changed. My body reacted before my mind could catch up. My breath hitched, the heat flooding me immediate and humiliating.

Andrej stilled.

The weight of him settled on my hips, his gaze flicking down before snapping back to my face. He knew. I saw it in the way his expression shifted, in the way his lips parted slightly, surprise flickering across his features.

“Petar,” he said, his voice low, unreadable.

Embarrassment surged up like fire. “I haven’t blown a load in a couple of days, okay?” I blurted, desperate to cut through the tension.

His brows lifted, then—slowly—his grin returned, lazy, knowing. “That’s your excuse?”

I scowled. “Fuck off.”

He didn’t move. His weight was still heavy on me, the warmth of his body pressing into mine in a way that made my stomach twist. That moment where he was sitting on my hard dick was stretched out in my mind. Then, as casually as if he were suggesting grabbing a snack, he said, “We should jerk off together.”

I froze.

”What?”

He tilted his head, waiting, unbothered. My pulse pounded against my ribs, and I had no idea what to say. No idea what this meant. But something in the way he said it—so sure, so easy—made it feel inevitable.

Somehow, we ended up on one of the twin beds, side by side in the dark. My breathing was shallow, my hands trembling slightly as I pushed down my shorts. The rustle of fabric was deafening in the quiet. In that split of a second, I found myself naked beside my best freind, himself naked as well. Then, from beside me, the unmistakable shift of movement.

He exhaled slowly. “Fuck.”

I turned my head, and—

Jesus.

His cock was big, thick in his grip. He stroked himself lazily, his breathing growing heavier. My stomach flipped, but I forced myself to move, to do the same. The room felt smaller, the air thicker. The only sounds were the slick movement of our hands and our ragged breaths.

Then, before I could second-guess myself, I reached out.

My fingers wrapped around him, the heat of his skin shocking against my palm. He inhaled sharply, hips jerking slightly into my touch. My chest tightened at the sound, at the way he tensed beneath me.

“Shit,” he muttered, his voice rough.

I kept going, emboldened by the way his breath hitched, by the way his muscles locked under my touch. He was coming undone beneath my hand, and I had done that. It gave me a rush—the power of it, the confidence. I tightened my grip, stroking with a slow, deliberate rhythm, savoring the way he twitched, the way his thighs trembled slightly. His head tipped back against the pillow, lips parted, chest rising and falling in uneven waves. When his orgasm started coming, it ripped through him, his whole body seizing with it.

His body jerked, and then he started ejaculating—hard, fast, his breath shattering around it. I barely had time to register it before he was swearing, sitting up. He whispered to himself saying ”Holy fucking shit,” or something similar. I no longer listened. The room was so dark I barely saw the cum on his perfectly defined chest and abs.

"How about you?" he asked, but I shook my head, still dazed, still trying to understand what the hell had just happened. He left for the bathroom, and I followed, watching from the doorway as he rinsed himself off, the linen sheet I’d grabbed clutched in my hands.

We joked about it, somehow. It was light, easy, as if it hadn’t just changed everything.

We went to bed after that, lying apart but close enough that I could hear the steady rhythm of his breath.

---

I woke to the sound of a text alert. Groggy, I blinked, my eyes adjusting to the soft morning light filtering through the window. Andrej stirred beside me, sitting up, the sheets slipping from his bare torso. His back was broad, the muscles shifting as he rubbed his face, exhaling slowly “Shit,” he muttered, his voice rough.

“Everything okay?” I murmured.

He checked his phone, then sighed. “My dad needs me on-site. Someone called in sick.”

I watched him silently, my stomach tightening as he swung his legs over the side of the bed. The moment felt fragile, unreal, like something I’d imagined rather than lived. He stood, stretched, and dressed quickly, moving with the easy confidence of someone entirely unbothered by the fact he was sleeping naked beside his best friend.

“You can stay if you want,” he said casually, pulling on his shirt. “Sleep in. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

Stay? Sleep in? Fat chance. I needed to run away. I needed to scream.

As soon as he had left, I took my things and walked home.

You are a WRITER!!! i am enjoying this story..the attention to little details. I loved reading this

Immersive enough to make you understand, descriptive enough to let us see through your eyes.

I know this wasn't easy to write this well, without rushing to climaxes like some cheap stories on webtoon, lightreader, wattpad etc.

This had a beautiful build up. Chef's kiss Bankai-Shikai

Ngl, your intellect; in your ability to write is such a turn on for me. We should have a convo sometime ‍

 

[befreakytomebabe]

So guys, thank you very much for your wonderfull messages and comments. I am very happy to say, that I finished this story with the next and last chapter. Even though it is a simple 12-Chapter story, it inspired me to rewrite it from scratch and write a book. A dear friend from the site even encouraged me to post it on Kindle, so I could reach even a greater audience. So enjoy...

----

Chapter 12


So, in a perfect world, this is where our relationship begins and the old dynamics end. In a perfect world, this is where we come out to the world and start living our lives as a normal gay couple. But the world is not perfect. It is still good, just not how I imagined we were going to end up.

After two blissful months—weeks where everything fell into place like a dream stitched together by the heat of skin, whispered jokes, and late-night cigarettes—on the 23rd of August, my mother got a phone call. It was from my uncle in Switzerland. An invitation, she called it. An opportunity. The words sounded cold and clean when she spoke them, like something wrapped in plastic. They didn't match the mess in my chest.

He offered us the chance to start fresh. A new chapter of our lives, as she kept repeating over the next few days, her eyes bright with a hope I hadn’t seen in years. I knew what she meant—Switzerland was stability. It was education, jobs, a system that worked, clean streets and rules that made sense. It was everything we had dreamed of when the winters were too long and the paychecks too short. And still, the only thing I could think about was him.

I was devastated. Torn down the middle. There was no word soft enough to describe that particular kind of ache: the grief that comes not from what’s happened, but from what is about to. A grief shaped like a countdown, ticking away every shared night, every look, every moment where his fingers slipped into mine beneath the blanket of something unspoken. It was the kind of ache that made me feel selfish, stupid, adolescent. But it was real.

Andrej and I had just started to feel… comfortable. Not out loud, not in public, not even in words—but in the way his leg brushed against mine when we sat on the grass. In the way he waited for me after training. In the way he pressed his lips to my shoulder as if to say I’m still here, even when neither of us said it. I wasn’t ready to lose that. I wasn’t ready to lose him.

I told him the day after I found out. We were in my room, the curtains drawn against the August sun, the sheets tangled from another lazy, perfect morning. My family was gone for the day, which meant we had the whole place to ourselves. The fan hummed in the corner, lazily pushing warm air around. I had been quiet all morning, and he must have noticed. I didn’t kiss him the way I usually did. I didn’t trace my fingers over the ridges of his stomach or pull him back to bed when he tried to get up. I just lay there, my chest tight, watching the ceiling.

It wasn’t dramatic. There were no tears, no trembling voices. I simply turned my face toward him, my cheek still pressed to the pillow, and said, “We’re moving to Switzerland.”

He blinked at me, confused for a second. He sat up on one elbow, watching me carefully, as if waiting for the punchline.

“Like… permanently?” he asked, his voice still soft with sleep.

I nodded. “End of the month. My uncle got my mom a job. Said I could finish school there. Said it’s time we get out.”

He didn’t say anything for a while. Just sat up fully and ran a hand through his hair. The silence stretched, but not in the way I feared. It wasn’t angry or cold. It was just… thinking.

Finally, he said, “Well, fuck. That’s… good for you.”

“Good?” I asked, a little sharper than I meant to.

He shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, you’ll do great. You’re meant for more than this place.”

“That’s not the point.”

“I know,” he said, and he did. He reached for my hand then and gave it a quick squeeze. “But still. You’d be crazy not to go.”

That’s when I realized—he wasn’t going to fight it. He wasn’t going to beg or cry or throw himself into some grand declaration. That wasn’t Andrej. And honestly, it wasn’t me either. We were both too proud for that. Too cautious. Too tied to the version of ourselves we had created to survive.

But there was something else in the way he looked at me that day. A softness. A kind of understanding. Maybe even a kind of love—quiet, hidden, but there.

“I’m not sure what to do,” I said, almost in a whisper.

“You do,” he replied. “You’re just scared.”

He lay back down then, pulled me toward him, and kissed the spot just beneath my ear.

“We still have time,” he murmured. “Let’s not waste it.”

And we didn’t.

I didn’t reply. I couldn’t. I wrapped my arms around him and held on. The weight of what he said lingered longer than I expected. I was living. But it already felt like a kind of dying too.


—


One afternoon, we played video games in his room for almost three hours straight, both of us pretending it was just another summer day. He kept making dumb jokes, nudging me with his elbow when I lost a round, swearing dramatically when he did. I laughed until my stomach hurt. But there was something heavy in the air, even in the joy. As if we were trying too hard to bottle it up. As if we both knew it was almost over.

We started planning a camping trip without really calling it a “goodbye.” Fruška Gora was close enough to reach by bus, familiar enough to feel like home, but distant enough to pretend it was a real escape.

We packed light. A tent, two sleeping bags, a few snacks and a bottle of Rakija Andrej stole from his parent’s place.

The ride there was quiet, except for the hum of the engine and the occasional burst of folk music from the driver’s radio. We sat side by side, sharing a pair of headphones. My head leaned on the window, watching the trees grow denser the further we went, my heart beating like it knew this was the last time.

The woods smelled like pine and earth and sun-baked bark. We walked for almost forty minutes before finding a clearing. It was flat and dry, surrounded by tall trees and just far enough from any trail that no one would bother us.

The tent went up awkwardly. We argued over the poles, laughed at how badly we were doing, and then finally gave up and lay back on the grass, staring at the pale evening sky.

That night, we drank slowly. Not to get drunk. Just to soften the edges.

He played music on his small radio—old Serbian rock songs we both knew by heart. We hummed along, voices low. The fire we built crackled between us, throwing sparks into the dark.

We didn’t talk much.

But when we lay down, shoulder to shoulder, our sleeping bags zipped together, the silence between us wasn’t empty.

He touched my hand first.

There was no rush. No hunger. Just a kind of slowness. A kind of reverence.

It felt different this time—less like a secret, more like a memory we were creating.

We kissed for a long time. His fingers brushed the back of my neck, the side of my face, my jaw. Every part of me felt like it was glowing. When our foreheads pressed together, we both exhaled at the same time.

Later, when we made love, it wasn’t wild. It wasn’t desperate.

It was deliberate.

There was no fear. No noise.

Only skin, breath, heartbeat.

He held my face in his hands at one point, looking at me like he was trying to memorize it.

And I let him.

And I memorized him too. The way his lashes cast shadows. The curve of his shoulder. The scar near his ribs I had never asked about.

When we were done, we lay tangled in the half-light of the tent, the sounds of the forest folding in around us. Our legs stayed intertwined. Neither of us moved. Andrej whispered something then. I didn’t catch all of it. Something about how he’d never felt more alive and more afraid at the same time.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know how.

The sun rose slowly, coloring the fabric of our tent gold and blue.

He kissed the back of my shoulder before getting up to start packing.

And just like that, the magic broke.

We hiked back in silence to Stražilovo, waiting in silence for the bus that never came. Then we walked in silence to Sremski Karlovci in hope that another bus comes. It did eventuallz.

I watched him the whole time.

I memorized his back. His walk. The way he pushed branches out of my path.

I didn’t cry. Not then.

But when the bus pulled into Novi Sad, and we stepped off into the brightness of morning, something in me buckled. I fought as hell not to show emotion, don’t ask me why. I can’t explain it to this day. We gave each other a bro’s handshake and half a hug on the busy streets in front of the old railway station. And then we parted ways, like we were gonna meet the day after tomorrow.

The next time I saw Andrej was eight months later. In those first weeks after I moved, we clung to the remnants of what we had built—late-night texts, brief calls, scattered photos exchanged without context. But distance doesn’t only stretch geography; it redefines habits, interrupts language, reshapes memory. Between my adjustment to life in Switzerland, navigating a new school system, and collecting the endless paperwork needed for my medical school immatriculation, our contact, once so vital, grew increasingly irregular. Then, as quietly as it had begun, it faded. We never argued. We just... stopped.

When I returned to Serbia for the holidays that year, we saw each other. And yes, we slept together again. It was desperate, hurried, too full of nostalgia to be tender. We mistook urgency for intimacy. We wanted, perhaps, to bridge those missing months with skin, breath, friction—but the distance had settled in deeper than we realized. There was a moment afterward, lying beside him in silence, when I understood something had shifted irreversibly. I don’t remember which one of us fell asleep first, but when I woke, the room felt empty even with him in it.

The following summer, I visited again. The rhythm of our lives had already begun to diverge, and our conversations now carried the texture of old photographs—familiar, but slightly faded. One evening, sitting outside with a beer in hand, he told me, almost offhandedly, that he had met someone. Her name was Ivana. I had braced myself for this moment countless times in my mind, imagining all the possible responses I might have—jealousy, grief, a sense of betrayal. But when he said her name, none of those things arrived. Instead, there was only a strange, unexpected peace.

Ivana was kind. Warm. The sort of person you want to succeed, even if it hurts a little to admit it. I met her once, briefly, at a mutual friend’s gathering. She greeted me like someone who had heard about me many times before—without suspicion, without judgment. There was no bitterness in me that evening, only quiet recognition: the chapter Andrej and I had shared had truly ended.

That’s the woman he married. The mother of his son. She is the family he built for himself, and I am quietly grateful that he found something lasting in this world.

And somehow, from the ashes of whatever we once were, something unexpected grew. A friendship. Not one of convenience or nostalgia, but one rooted in a deeper understanding that can only come from shared history. We don’t talk every day, but we talk often enough. He calls when something reminds him of our youth—our old gym, a place we used to eat, a song we used to blast in his car. I message him when I stumble across a photograph, or when someone from the past reappears briefly in my mind.

We see each other maybe two, three times a year. There is no ritual to it, no need for planning. Just a quiet mutual knowing that time hasn’t erased the significance of what we were to each other. Strangely, we never revisited the sexual part of our relationship. It no longer felt necessary. That door closed softly and stayed shut—not from fear or discomfort, but because something else had begun. A door that opened into something even rarer.


—


There is something haunting about a first love that doesn’t vanish but instead reshapes itself into something gentler over time. Most teenagers imagine their first love as a single, brilliant arc—rising fast, burning brightly, and then disappearing as quickly as it arrived. Ours wasn’t like that. It didn’t explode and vanish. It smoldered. It changed shape. And what remained was more complex than romance, more enduring than sex. What remained was presence.

The truth is, we weren’t just lovers. We were mirrors to each other. Andrej showed me things I didn’t want to admit about myself—the intensity of my longing, the emotional violence of being young and closeted in a place that had no room for softness between men. He unearthed my shadows. And in doing so, he gave me the tools to see them clearly. There were nights when I hated him, when I hated myself more. And still, I craved him. Still, I returned.

In many ways, I lived through him. His confidence was something I borrowed, a temporary identity I slipped into like a borrowed jacket. Being close to him gave me access to a version of myself I wasn’t ready to own. The one who touched another boy in secret, who kissed in back rooms and abandoned buildings, who learned how much power could be hidden in silence. But it also broke something in me. It fractured my certainty. It shook my illusions of control. And it left me staring into the mirror asking questions I wasn’t ready to answer: Who am I when I’m not chasing him? Who do I become when I finally stop hiding?

Leaving Serbia wasn’t just about opportunity. It was a rupture. A severing of the world I had known and the person I had built within it. Switzerland gave me structure, ambition, language, and education—but it also gave me distance. The kind of distance you need to finally look at your past without flinching. I learned what it meant to build a life from scratch. To stand on my own. And in the quiet of those early years, when I lay awake in cold apartments, adjusting to a culture that prized precision over emotion, it was Andrej’s voice I remembered. The sound of him laughing in my bed. The heat of his body in the dark. And I cried more times than I care to admit.

But I grew. Slowly, unevenly, but undeniably. I found pieces of myself scattered across two countries, in languages that belonged to both me and not me. I learned that longing is not shameful, that softness is not weakness. I stopped trying to define myself in binary terms. I stopped pretending that my worth depended on being understood. I began to embrace nuance—the fluidity of attraction, the complexity of intimacy, the strange, aching tenderness of a bond that refused to die even after desire faded.

Andrej’s marriage didn’t kill something in me. It crystallized it. When he introduced me to Ivana, when I held their baby boy for the first time, I understood the fullness of what we had meant to each other. We were not a mistake. We were not a detour. We were the storm that softened the ground, made it fertile. Without us, perhaps neither of us would have had the courage to build the lives we have now. I like to think I taught him something too—not just about sex or secrecy, but about loyalty, about intensity, about what it means to truly see another person and still choose to stay.

And no, we never went back to being lovers. We never needed to. There is a kind of intimacy that outlives the body. There is a kind of love that doesn’t demand performance. I still think of him when I hear certain songs, when I pass by young men on the tram whispering too close to one another, when I watch the sun set through old European windows. He lives in my muscle memory. In my instincts. In the man I became.

Because he broke me. And in doing so, he cleared space for something else. For someone else. For the me I was always meant to become.

Today, I can say his name without pain. I can laugh about our stupid inside jokes, the whispered moments, the cigarette breaks where silence said more than words ever could. I can remember the sting of our final fight, the rawness of that goodbye, without needing to rewrite the ending. Because we did not fail each other. We simply outgrew the version of ourselves that loved in secret.

And maybe that’s enough.

He gave me my first experience of truth. Not just about love, but about myself. About who I am when no one is looking. About what I ache for, what I’m afraid of, and how far I’ve come.

He was the beginning. And because of him, I know that endings can be beautiful too.

The End.

That's how this ending should make people feel

 

[letterbox]

So guys, thank you very much for your wonderfull messages and comments. I am very happy to say, that I finished this story with the next and last chapter. Even though it is a simple 12-Chapter story, it inspired me to rewrite it from scratch and write a book. A dear friend from the site even encouraged me to post it on Kindle, so I could reach even a greater audience. So enjoy...

----

Chapter 12


So, in a perfect world, this is where our relationship begins and the old dynamics end. In a perfect world, this is where we come out to the world and start living our lives as a normal gay couple. But the world is not perfect. It is still good, just not how I imagined we were going to end up.

After two blissful months—weeks where everything fell into place like a dream stitched together by the heat of skin, whispered jokes, and late-night cigarettes—on the 23rd of August, my mother got a phone call. It was from my uncle in Switzerland. An invitation, she called it. An opportunity. The words sounded cold and clean when she spoke them, like something wrapped in plastic. They didn't match the mess in my chest.

He offered us the chance to start fresh. A new chapter of our lives, as she kept repeating over the next few days, her eyes bright with a hope I hadn’t seen in years. I knew what she meant—Switzerland was stability. It was education, jobs, a system that worked, clean streets and rules that made sense. It was everything we had dreamed of when the winters were too long and the paychecks too short. And still, the only thing I could think about was him.

I was devastated. Torn down the middle. There was no word soft enough to describe that particular kind of ache: the grief that comes not from what’s happened, but from what is about to. A grief shaped like a countdown, ticking away every shared night, every look, every moment where his fingers slipped into mine beneath the blanket of something unspoken. It was the kind of ache that made me feel selfish, stupid, adolescent. But it was real.

Andrej and I had just started to feel… comfortable. Not out loud, not in public, not even in words—but in the way his leg brushed against mine when we sat on the grass. In the way he waited for me after training. In the way he pressed his lips to my shoulder as if to say I’m still here, even when neither of us said it. I wasn’t ready to lose that. I wasn’t ready to lose him.

I told him the day after I found out. We were in my room, the curtains drawn against the August sun, the sheets tangled from another lazy, perfect morning. My family was gone for the day, which meant we had the whole place to ourselves. The fan hummed in the corner, lazily pushing warm air around. I had been quiet all morning, and he must have noticed. I didn’t kiss him the way I usually did. I didn’t trace my fingers over the ridges of his stomach or pull him back to bed when he tried to get up. I just lay there, my chest tight, watching the ceiling.

It wasn’t dramatic. There were no tears, no trembling voices. I simply turned my face toward him, my cheek still pressed to the pillow, and said, “We’re moving to Switzerland.”

He blinked at me, confused for a second. He sat up on one elbow, watching me carefully, as if waiting for the punchline.

“Like… permanently?” he asked, his voice still soft with sleep.

I nodded. “End of the month. My uncle got my mom a job. Said I could finish school there. Said it’s time we get out.”

He didn’t say anything for a while. Just sat up fully and ran a hand through his hair. The silence stretched, but not in the way I feared. It wasn’t angry or cold. It was just… thinking.

Finally, he said, “Well, fuck. That’s… good for you.”

“Good?” I asked, a little sharper than I meant to.

He shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, you’ll do great. You’re meant for more than this place.”

“That’s not the point.”

“I know,” he said, and he did. He reached for my hand then and gave it a quick squeeze. “But still. You’d be crazy not to go.”

That’s when I realized—he wasn’t going to fight it. He wasn’t going to beg or cry or throw himself into some grand declaration. That wasn’t Andrej. And honestly, it wasn’t me either. We were both too proud for that. Too cautious. Too tied to the version of ourselves we had created to survive.

But there was something else in the way he looked at me that day. A softness. A kind of understanding. Maybe even a kind of love—quiet, hidden, but there.

“I’m not sure what to do,” I said, almost in a whisper.

“You do,” he replied. “You’re just scared.”

He lay back down then, pulled me toward him, and kissed the spot just beneath my ear.

“We still have time,” he murmured. “Let’s not waste it.”

And we didn’t.

I didn’t reply. I couldn’t. I wrapped my arms around him and held on. The weight of what he said lingered longer than I expected. I was living. But it already felt like a kind of dying too.


—


One afternoon, we played video games in his room for almost three hours straight, both of us pretending it was just another summer day. He kept making dumb jokes, nudging me with his elbow when I lost a round, swearing dramatically when he did. I laughed until my stomach hurt. But there was something heavy in the air, even in the joy. As if we were trying too hard to bottle it up. As if we both knew it was almost over.

We started planning a camping trip without really calling it a “goodbye.” Fruška Gora was close enough to reach by bus, familiar enough to feel like home, but distant enough to pretend it was a real escape.

We packed light. A tent, two sleeping bags, a few snacks and a bottle of Rakija Andrej stole from his parent’s place.

The ride there was quiet, except for the hum of the engine and the occasional burst of folk music from the driver’s radio. We sat side by side, sharing a pair of headphones. My head leaned on the window, watching the trees grow denser the further we went, my heart beating like it knew this was the last time.

The woods smelled like pine and earth and sun-baked bark. We walked for almost forty minutes before finding a clearing. It was flat and dry, surrounded by tall trees and just far enough from any trail that no one would bother us.

The tent went up awkwardly. We argued over the poles, laughed at how badly we were doing, and then finally gave up and lay back on the grass, staring at the pale evening sky.

That night, we drank slowly. Not to get drunk. Just to soften the edges.

He played music on his small radio—old Serbian rock songs we both knew by heart. We hummed along, voices low. The fire we built crackled between us, throwing sparks into the dark.

We didn’t talk much.

But when we lay down, shoulder to shoulder, our sleeping bags zipped together, the silence between us wasn’t empty.

He touched my hand first.

There was no rush. No hunger. Just a kind of slowness. A kind of reverence.

It felt different this time—less like a secret, more like a memory we were creating.

We kissed for a long time. His fingers brushed the back of my neck, the side of my face, my jaw. Every part of me felt like it was glowing. When our foreheads pressed together, we both exhaled at the same time.

Later, when we made love, it wasn’t wild. It wasn’t desperate.

It was deliberate.

There was no fear. No noise.

Only skin, breath, heartbeat.

He held my face in his hands at one point, looking at me like he was trying to memorize it.

And I let him.

And I memorized him too. The way his lashes cast shadows. The curve of his shoulder. The scar near his ribs I had never asked about.

When we were done, we lay tangled in the half-light of the tent, the sounds of the forest folding in around us. Our legs stayed intertwined. Neither of us moved. Andrej whispered something then. I didn’t catch all of it. Something about how he’d never felt more alive and more afraid at the same time.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know how.

The sun rose slowly, coloring the fabric of our tent gold and blue.

He kissed the back of my shoulder before getting up to start packing.

And just like that, the magic broke.

We hiked back in silence to Stražilovo, waiting in silence for the bus that never came. Then we walked in silence to Sremski Karlovci in hope that another bus comes. It did eventuallz.

I watched him the whole time.

I memorized his back. His walk. The way he pushed branches out of my path.

I didn’t cry. Not then.

But when the bus pulled into Novi Sad, and we stepped off into the brightness of morning, something in me buckled. I fought as hell not to show emotion, don’t ask me why. I can’t explain it to this day. We gave each other a bro’s handshake and half a hug on the busy streets in front of the old railway station. And then we parted ways, like we were gonna meet the day after tomorrow.

The next time I saw Andrej was eight months later. In those first weeks after I moved, we clung to the remnants of what we had built—late-night texts, brief calls, scattered photos exchanged without context. But distance doesn’t only stretch geography; it redefines habits, interrupts language, reshapes memory. Between my adjustment to life in Switzerland, navigating a new school system, and collecting the endless paperwork needed for my medical school immatriculation, our contact, once so vital, grew increasingly irregular. Then, as quietly as it had begun, it faded. We never argued. We just... stopped.

When I returned to Serbia for the holidays that year, we saw each other. And yes, we slept together again. It was desperate, hurried, too full of nostalgia to be tender. We mistook urgency for intimacy. We wanted, perhaps, to bridge those missing months with skin, breath, friction—but the distance had settled in deeper than we realized. There was a moment afterward, lying beside him in silence, when I understood something had shifted irreversibly. I don’t remember which one of us fell asleep first, but when I woke, the room felt empty even with him in it.

The following summer, I visited again. The rhythm of our lives had already begun to diverge, and our conversations now carried the texture of old photographs—familiar, but slightly faded. One evening, sitting outside with a beer in hand, he told me, almost offhandedly, that he had met someone. Her name was Ivana. I had braced myself for this moment countless times in my mind, imagining all the possible responses I might have—jealousy, grief, a sense of betrayal. But when he said her name, none of those things arrived. Instead, there was only a strange, unexpected peace.

Ivana was kind. Warm. The sort of person you want to succeed, even if it hurts a little to admit it. I met her once, briefly, at a mutual friend’s gathering. She greeted me like someone who had heard about me many times before—without suspicion, without judgment. There was no bitterness in me that evening, only quiet recognition: the chapter Andrej and I had shared had truly ended.

That’s the woman he married. The mother of his son. She is the family he built for himself, and I am quietly grateful that he found something lasting in this world.

And somehow, from the ashes of whatever we once were, something unexpected grew. A friendship. Not one of convenience or nostalgia, but one rooted in a deeper understanding that can only come from shared history. We don’t talk every day, but we talk often enough. He calls when something reminds him of our youth—our old gym, a place we used to eat, a song we used to blast in his car. I message him when I stumble across a photograph, or when someone from the past reappears briefly in my mind.

We see each other maybe two, three times a year. There is no ritual to it, no need for planning. Just a quiet mutual knowing that time hasn’t erased the significance of what we were to each other. Strangely, we never revisited the sexual part of our relationship. It no longer felt necessary. That door closed softly and stayed shut—not from fear or discomfort, but because something else had begun. A door that opened into something even rarer.


—


There is something haunting about a first love that doesn’t vanish but instead reshapes itself into something gentler over time. Most teenagers imagine their first love as a single, brilliant arc—rising fast, burning brightly, and then disappearing as quickly as it arrived. Ours wasn’t like that. It didn’t explode and vanish. It smoldered. It changed shape. And what remained was more complex than romance, more enduring than sex. What remained was presence.

The truth is, we weren’t just lovers. We were mirrors to each other. Andrej showed me things I didn’t want to admit about myself—the intensity of my longing, the emotional violence of being young and closeted in a place that had no room for softness between men. He unearthed my shadows. And in doing so, he gave me the tools to see them clearly. There were nights when I hated him, when I hated myself more. And still, I craved him. Still, I returned.

In many ways, I lived through him. His confidence was something I borrowed, a temporary identity I slipped into like a borrowed jacket. Being close to him gave me access to a version of myself I wasn’t ready to own. The one who touched another boy in secret, who kissed in back rooms and abandoned buildings, who learned how much power could be hidden in silence. But it also broke something in me. It fractured my certainty. It shook my illusions of control. And it left me staring into the mirror asking questions I wasn’t ready to answer: Who am I when I’m not chasing him? Who do I become when I finally stop hiding?

Leaving Serbia wasn’t just about opportunity. It was a rupture. A severing of the world I had known and the person I had built within it. Switzerland gave me structure, ambition, language, and education—but it also gave me distance. The kind of distance you need to finally look at your past without flinching. I learned what it meant to build a life from scratch. To stand on my own. And in the quiet of those early years, when I lay awake in cold apartments, adjusting to a culture that prized precision over emotion, it was Andrej’s voice I remembered. The sound of him laughing in my bed. The heat of his body in the dark. And I cried more times than I care to admit.

But I grew. Slowly, unevenly, but undeniably. I found pieces of myself scattered across two countries, in languages that belonged to both me and not me. I learned that longing is not shameful, that softness is not weakness. I stopped trying to define myself in binary terms. I stopped pretending that my worth depended on being understood. I began to embrace nuance—the fluidity of attraction, the complexity of intimacy, the strange, aching tenderness of a bond that refused to die even after desire faded.

Andrej’s marriage didn’t kill something in me. It crystallized it. When he introduced me to Ivana, when I held their baby boy for the first time, I understood the fullness of what we had meant to each other. We were not a mistake. We were not a detour. We were the storm that softened the ground, made it fertile. Without us, perhaps neither of us would have had the courage to build the lives we have now. I like to think I taught him something too—not just about sex or secrecy, but about loyalty, about intensity, about what it means to truly see another person and still choose to stay.

And no, we never went back to being lovers. We never needed to. There is a kind of intimacy that outlives the body. There is a kind of love that doesn’t demand performance. I still think of him when I hear certain songs, when I pass by young men on the tram whispering too close to one another, when I watch the sun set through old European windows. He lives in my muscle memory. In my instincts. In the man I became.

Because he broke me. And in doing so, he cleared space for something else. For someone else. For the me I was always meant to become.

Today, I can say his name without pain. I can laugh about our stupid inside jokes, the whispered moments, the cigarette breaks where silence said more than words ever could. I can remember the sting of our final fight, the rawness of that goodbye, without needing to rewrite the ending. Because we did not fail each other. We simply outgrew the version of ourselves that loved in secret.

And maybe that’s enough.

He gave me my first experience of truth. Not just about love, but about myself. About who I am when no one is looking. About what I ache for, what I’m afraid of, and how far I’ve come.

He was the beginning. And because of him, I know that endings can be beautiful too.

The End.

Wow,what a story and what an ending. Honestly,i cried reading this last part. It was beautiful and i love the final massage. I have to say that,besides all pain and confusion this part of your life brought you,you were blessed cuz it happend to you. Not many gay kids have the opportunity to experience teenage love or intimacy,expecialy not in traditional countires. But,the story was great and i hope you find the right person who will love you and see you.

 

[bankai-shikai]

Wow,what a story and what an ending. Honestly,i cried reading this last part. It was beautiful and i love the final massage. I have to say that,besides all pain and confusion this part of your life brought you,you were blessed cuz it happend to you. Not many gay kids have the opportunity to experience teenage love or intimacy,expecialy not in traditional countires. But,the story was great and i hope you find the right person who will love you and see you.

Thank you so much for taking your time to read my story.
I am always very moved when I get comments and messages like this. Never have I ever imagined, that someone could react to something I experienced in this maner.

Take care, letterbox.

 

[Cumngorich]

Chapter 5


You have to understand, this had been happening for months. This ridiculous game between us—pseudo-flirting, teasing, laughing—had become a part of our routine, a rhythm so familiar that it felt like breathing. It was driving me insane.

I was seriously starting to fall in love with him. It bothered me, because I never expected something like this could happen. I fantasized about the two of us being together, holding hands, living life like my mom and dad used to—not exactly the same life of course, but you get the jist.

It felt impossible. I have never seen such a life. Not on TV, definitely not in Serbia.

Even though it sounded and looked depressing, that did not stop me from dreaming about it.

I had other friends, coincidentally ones from school, and the dynamics of these friendships were absolute opposites when I compered them to the one I had with Andrej. Suddenly, he stopped coming to my place to hang out with Stevan. I was the one he came to visit. He was still friendly with him of course, but Stevan himself was occupied with his life, his flings and his other relationships. I barely saw him home.

End of March marked the time to start training outside, so our time was spent training at the home gym my father made for me. He did not speak much about sports, or MMA alltogether, but I know he approved. We always had a very silent relationship that made me wonder if he even wanted to become a father. Now I know that he did, but that he had a complicated relationship with his father as well. Today, with 33 years, I appreciate our silences.

My form was becoming exceptional. Even my body dismorphia was under control. I actually liked how MMA was making me look. Andrej took oftenly part in this admiration and showered me with compliments, which felt great, since they were coming from him. But still, he was driving me insane.

Actually, if I were honest, it had officially driven me insane in June, some 8 months after we started hanging out. We spent almost every day together, even when we weren’t training or at the gym. It wasn’t just about the fights, the workouts, or the adrenaline of competition. It was something else, something unspoken yet impossible to ignore. On the days we didn’t see each other, we spent the time talking on the telephone. In 2008, we had cellophones, but the credit limit was very present, and the landline offered hours of talking, seemingly without any cost.

By mid-June, school was over, and the humid weight of summer settled over Novi Sad. One evening, Andrej invited me over, casually mentioning that he’d gotten a new guitar he wanted to show off. I knew the invitation meant more than just music. It meant an entire evening, almost certainly a sleepover, a night stretched long with conversation and the kind of teasing that had started to feel sharper lately.

He lived quite close to me, some 15 minutes away if you took the bus. He had a large home, with three floors. On the first floor lived his grandparents, on the second his mom and dad, and on the third was his room, as well as the room of his younger brother. They had a large garden which was a work of art. His father worked in construction, so he had build 2m walls around the garden, creating a quiet and intimate enviroment. They had a small pavillion on the left side with a small fontaine beside it. Across the whole place outside were strung wires with grape vines which concieved the view from above. The summer in such a place was a thing of beauty. In the far back was a small guest house. Andrej told me once, that his uncle used to live there, but didn’t elaborate on that, so I never asked.

His parents knew me, and I liked them very much, especially his mother. We made a connection when I told her that I was going to the Karlovačka Gimnazija, where she explained that it was her lifelong wish to attend that school. But back in the day, the school cost too much, and her parents couldn’t handle it financially.

The day passed in a blur. We sprawled across his couch, watching YouTube conspiracy theories late into the night, our laughter mixing with the hum of the fan oscillating in the corner.

We were laying side by side. He had his father make him a special table with wheels which enabled him to bring his computer to his bed. He used to play games from his bed, which was unimaginable at the time. I was so jealous of him at the time because of it.

That day he was wearing a white undershirt, sleevless of course. From time to time, I sneaked a peak at the sweat pearls forming on his face, neck, chest and arms. His arms were becoming more and more accentuated if you can believe it. I lived for those moments, as they were my favorite thing on his body. Our friendship even enabled me to step over the boundaries from time to time—so I used those moments to touch him. Looking at him lying beside me in his bed made me touch his biceps. Almost instinctivly, without breaking eye contact with the screen, he reaised his arm and flexed for me during the touch. I gave it a silent nod of confirmation, validating the gains that he was showing me. Looking at those moments retrospectively from today’s perspective, I understand that they defined my sexuality and what I liked seeing on a man.

When it grew late, we moved to the guest house in his yard—he wanted to play the guitar some more without disturbing his parents. The small space smelled like warm wood and dust, the air thick from a day of trapped summer heat.

“I snuck some beers in,” he grinned, dragging six cold bottles from his backpack. I wasn’t much of a drinker, but I took one anyway. The first few sips felt bitter, foreign. After half a bottle, the room started feeling smaller, my thoughts slower, heavier. I needed air.

I stepped outside, the coolness of the night pressing against my skin like a steadying hand. The grass beneath my bare feet was damp, its dewy chill seeping into my skin, grounding me in the moment. The air smelled of earth—rich, damp, alive—with the faintest hint of something floral carried on the breeze. Overhead, grapevines stretched on thin strings, their broad leaves rustling softly, casting shifting patterns of shadow and light under the dim glow of a distant streetlamp. A small stone fountain gurgled in the corner of the yard, its water spilling in a delicate cascade, the rhythmic trickling blending with the occasional chirp of a lone cricket. The quiet wasn’t empty; it was full—of movement, of texture, of the kind of peace that only came with the depth of night.

A light pressure on my shoulder startled me. Andrej.

“Lightweight…” he teased, stepping beside me.

I huffed. “I just needed some air.”

We sat on the warm concrete floor in front of the closed doors, the night pressing around us. We talked about upcoming MMA competitions, about training, but somehow, inevitably, the conversation circled back to that night at my house—the night we officially met. His voice turned teasing, playful, nudging at something just beneath the surface.

He bumped his knee against mine. “You were unsociable as hell that night.”

“I was not.”

He laughed, shaking his head. “You totally were.”

I shoved him lightly, but he used the movement to his advantage, suddenly twisting and knocking me onto the floor. He was on me in seconds, pinning me down, grinning like a predator.

“Not so tough now, huh?”

I struggled, but it was pointless. His hands dug into my sides, fingers relentless. Then he started tickling me. I gasped, squirmed, the laughter forced from my throat, but then—then it changed. My body reacted before my mind could catch up. My breath hitched, the heat flooding me immediate and humiliating.

Andrej stilled.

The weight of him settled on my hips, his gaze flicking down before snapping back to my face. He knew. I saw it in the way his expression shifted, in the way his lips parted slightly, surprise flickering across his features.

“Petar,” he said, his voice low, unreadable.

Embarrassment surged up like fire. “I haven’t blown a load in a couple of days, okay?” I blurted, desperate to cut through the tension.

His brows lifted, then—slowly—his grin returned, lazy, knowing. “That’s your excuse?”

I scowled. “Fuck off.”

He didn’t move. His weight was still heavy on me, the warmth of his body pressing into mine in a way that made my stomach twist. That moment where he was sitting on my hard dick was stretched out in my mind. Then, as casually as if he were suggesting grabbing a snack, he said, “We should jerk off together.”

I froze.

”What?”

He tilted his head, waiting, unbothered. My pulse pounded against my ribs, and I had no idea what to say. No idea what this meant. But something in the way he said it—so sure, so easy—made it feel inevitable.

Somehow, we ended up on one of the twin beds, side by side in the dark. My breathing was shallow, my hands trembling slightly as I pushed down my shorts. The rustle of fabric was deafening in the quiet. In that split of a second, I found myself naked beside my best freind, himself naked as well. Then, from beside me, the unmistakable shift of movement.

He exhaled slowly. “Fuck.”

I turned my head, and—

Jesus.

His cock was big, thick in his grip. He stroked himself lazily, his breathing growing heavier. My stomach flipped, but I forced myself to move, to do the same. The room felt smaller, the air thicker. The only sounds were the slick movement of our hands and our ragged breaths.

Then, before I could second-guess myself, I reached out.

My fingers wrapped around him, the heat of his skin shocking against my palm. He inhaled sharply, hips jerking slightly into my touch. My chest tightened at the sound, at the way he tensed beneath me.

“Shit,” he muttered, his voice rough.

I kept going, emboldened by the way his breath hitched, by the way his muscles locked under my touch. He was coming undone beneath my hand, and I had done that. It gave me a rush—the power of it, the confidence. I tightened my grip, stroking with a slow, deliberate rhythm, savoring the way he twitched, the way his thighs trembled slightly. His head tipped back against the pillow, lips parted, chest rising and falling in uneven waves. When his orgasm started coming, it ripped through him, his whole body seizing with it.

His body jerked, and then he started ejaculating—hard, fast, his breath shattering around it. I barely had time to register it before he was swearing, sitting up. He whispered to himself saying ”Holy fucking shit,” or something similar. I no longer listened. The room was so dark I barely saw the cum on his perfectly defined chest and abs.

"How about you?" he asked, but I shook my head, still dazed, still trying to understand what the hell had just happened. He left for the bathroom, and I followed, watching from the doorway as he rinsed himself off, the linen sheet I’d grabbed clutched in my hands.

We joked about it, somehow. It was light, easy, as if it hadn’t just changed everything.

We went to bed after that, lying apart but close enough that I could hear the steady rhythm of his breath.

---

I woke to the sound of a text alert. Groggy, I blinked, my eyes adjusting to the soft morning light filtering through the window. Andrej stirred beside me, sitting up, the sheets slipping from his bare torso. His back was broad, the muscles shifting as he rubbed his face, exhaling slowly “Shit,” he muttered, his voice rough.

“Everything okay?” I murmured.

He checked his phone, then sighed. “My dad needs me on-site. Someone called in sick.”

I watched him silently, my stomach tightening as he swung his legs over the side of the bed. The moment felt fragile, unreal, like something I’d imagined rather than lived. He stood, stretched, and dressed quickly, moving with the easy confidence of someone entirely unbothered by the fact he was sleeping naked beside his best friend.

“You can stay if you want,” he said casually, pulling on his shirt. “Sleep in. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

Stay? Sleep in? Fat chance. I needed to run away. I needed to scream.

As soon as he had left, I took my things and walked home.

This is excellent. The way you allow the organic surroundings to incorporate the reader in your presence is remarkable.

 

[Cumngorich]

Chapter 6


It is almost inconceivable that it took me over a decade to put these experiences into writing. Scattered fragments of this story exist somewhere online, buried beneath the dust of time. Most of them were written in my native language, a relic of a younger self trying to make sense of things. So if you happen to be one of the rare souls who once stumbled upon those words, tell me. I wonder if they read any differently now.

Writing was something I had always imagined myself doing, ever since my time at Karlovačka Gimnazija. It makes perfect sense—bear with me—one of Serbia’s most renowned writers once walked the same halls, and much of the curriculum revolved around language, literature, and rhetoric. It was an environment that encouraged articulation, yet when the moment came, I found myself utterly incapable of putting my thoughts into words.

By then, I had already spent a year at the school. Serbian was my native tongue, English a necessity for admission, and despite never foreseeing a real need for it, I had begun learning German as well. Three languages lived within me, yet young Petar sat in his room for a week in absolute silence after that night with his best friend. That motherfucker.

Most of my time was spent crying. My parents weren’t home—they were in Italy, chasing business opportunities. Stevan… I hadn’t seen him for days. If it weren’t for Facebook, I might have been worried. But he posted regularly, so at least I knew he was alive. Thank God for my grandmother. She was there, a quiet but steady presence. Of course, I couldn't talk to her about the mess unraveling inside me, but she sat beside me, drinking her coffee in silence. That was all I needed.

Andrej never once wrote to me during that first week. He didn’t come by, didn’t call. His Facebook remained empty, a void of nothingness that gnawed at me. To this day, it remains the most agonizing experience I have ever had in relation to another person. And believe me, I’ve lived through some shit.

That summer marked the beginning of a new chapter, though I only recognized it in hindsight. Thank God for coping mechanisms—for the quiet ways we teach ourselves to survive. Photography became mine. There was an old camera lying around, so I started photographing the yard, my grandmother, the thick heat of summer itself.

A few months ago, I stumbled upon my old Blogspot page. One of the images of my backyard was still there, titled Endless Summer. That was the longest summer of my life, and every day after that night with Andrej felt exactly like that—endless.

Distraction came in the form of a masked party.

My friends at school recommended it—an unusual event hosted by a group of people in Belgrade, themed around Japanese culture, particularly anime. It was called Sakura. At first, I hesitated. I had only recently started watching Bleach and Death Note, dipping into that strange, exaggerated world of power struggles, moral ambiguity, and death gods. Something about them resonated with me in ways I couldn't fully articulate, perhaps the idea of reinvention, of hidden identities. But going to a party where people dressed in elaborate costumes, slipping in and out of characters, felt foreign to me.

Still, I went. Maybe because I wanted to see what it was like, or maybe because I wanted to disappear into something that wasn’t this.

The venue was a dimly lit club, transformed with paper lanterns, painted screens, and the artificial scent of cherry blossoms clinging to the air. The crowd was an explosion of color—people draped in kimonos, masked faces tilting close in hushed conversation, neon wigs bouncing as figures slipped through the space like specters from another world. It was disorienting, surreal, and yet, within minutes of arriving, I felt something I hadn’t in a long time: lightness.

I wasn’t sure how much I had to drink, only that it was enough to make the walls blur slightly, enough to make my body feel both weightless and heavy at the same time. The music thumped inside my chest, vibrating through the floor, and I let it carry me. It was easy to be anonymous here. My costume, a very simple version of a Neji Hyuga costume—became a shield. No one knew me, no one expected anything from me, and for the first time in months, I didn’t feel like I was dragging my own shadow behind me.

That was when Karolina found me.

I didn’t notice her at first. She noticed me. She was wearing a Ino Yamanaka costume from Naruto. She actually looked almost exactly like the charachter.

I had been standing at the bar, staring blankly at my half-empty glass, when she appeared beside me, her elbow nudging mine as if we were already friends. She was striking—short, platinum blonde hair framing sharp cheekbones, eyes that glinted with something mischievous even beneath her own mask.

“I never thought I would say this in real life, but your Neji might be even more socially awkward than the anime one. You look like you’re trying really hard to blend in,” she said, tilting her head.

I blinked at her, disoriented. “What?”

She grinned. “You’re standing alone at the bar, half-drunk, watching people like you’re narrating a novel in your head.”

I let out an awkward laugh. “Maybe I am.”

That made her laugh, too, a deep, rich sound. “Come on,” she said, grabbing my wrist. “You’re too serious, Neji. We’re going outside.”

I didn’t argue. Maybe it was the alcohol, or maybe it was just the fact that I wanted to be led somewhere—anywhere.

We stepped into the cold air, and I inhaled deeply, letting the night settle into my lungs. The streets of Belgrade stretched out before us, the city humming with life even at this hour. Neon signs flickered in the distance, their reflections shimmering on the damp pavement. Somewhere, a group of people laughed loudly, their voices echoing off the buildings. Everything felt alive, electric.

I turned to Karolina, who was watching me with an amused expression. I thought she had said something.

“What?” I asked.

“You look like you just took your first breath in months.”

I exhaled a laugh, shaking my head. “Maybe I did.”

We talked for hours. About anime, about Death Note and Naruto, which she loved just as much as I did. We debated Light’s morality, whether L should have won, whether Near was a satisfying replacement. She was smart, quick-witted, and effortlessly funny. And for the first time in forever, I wasn’t thinking about anything else. Not Andrej. Not the mess in my head. Just this—the cold air, the city buzzing around us, the way my chest ached from laughing too hard.

I felt free.

We talked for hours, and I don’t remember much of what was said that night, only that it felt easy. That was the danger of Karolina—she made everything feel effortless. Before I knew it, we were leaving together, stumbling into the cold night air, her hand laced loosely in mine.

I won’t dwell on what we were. Not because she wasn’t significant, but because I never let myself believe that she truly was. We lasted six months. We had a lot of sex. And I wish I could say that it meant something more, that I fell in love with her, but the truth is, I was trying to outrun a feeling I wasn’t ready to face.

She was my first.

At the time, I told myself it was what I needed—to be with someone who didn’t ask questions, who didn’t demand anything from me except my presence. But the more I tried to convince myself that I was moving forward, the more I felt like I was standing still.

Six months later, I broke up with her over text.

I knew it was a cowardly thing to do, but I couldn’t bring myself to say the words out loud. I’m still in love with my best friend. I think I might be gay. I wrote them on the first of November 2008, while lying on the bed beside Stevan and watching television. The words looked so stark, so irreversible, even in writing. And once I sent them, I couldn’t take them back. My whole body shivered.

I don’t know what I expected—anger, heartbreak, maybe even relief—but all she said was, Okay.

It was the worst possible time to realize the truth about myself. Maybe that’s why I fought against it so hard. Even now, the question of labels makes me uncomfortable. The world thrives on categorization, on binary definitions. You are either this or you are that. Millennials, in particular, have an obsession with identity—everything must be named, sorted, understood. And yet, when it comes to myself, the words never seem to fit. If I had to define it, I’d say I’m bisexual. But back then? Back then, I was just lost.

Meanwhile, Andrej disappeared almost completely from my life.

After a couple of months he did try to start a conversation online, but I ignored him. Every message, every attempt to reconnect. If I responded, it would mean opening a door I had spent months trying to slam shut. And yet, his presence loomed over me. At training, he was there but not there. He came and went, irregularly, like a ghost haunting the edges of my vision. We barely spoke. If we ended up in the same room, it was as though an unspoken truce kept us from acknowledging the weight of what had happened.

Once while doing some shopping in the city, I met his mom on the street. She asked me why I wasn’t coming over. I made some excuse, like I’m busy, or something like that. She said that Andrej wasn’t doing well in school, we talked mostly about him. It was a strange thing.

Then, November arrived.

Stevan and I were celebrating our birthdays together, a joint tradition that felt almost obligatory at this point. The club was packed, the air thick with the scent of alcohol. You couldn’t even hear the music over the loud chatter of young teenagers.

I had started smoking. I wasn’t sure when it became a habit—whether it was boredom, stress, or just something to do with my hands—but it gave me an excuse to step away, to carve out a moment of solitude in the middle of the noise. Andrej was there. I saw him in the crowd of some 40 teenagers from two very different schools—that used to mean something back than. I would lie if I said that I was indifferent to his presence. Especially after the break up with Karolina. Especially because of the reason for the break up.

I slipped out the back of the club, the cold air biting against my skin as I lit up. The first inhale burned my throat, but the quiet was worth it.

His hands landed on my shoulders from behind, a firm squeeze that almost made me drop my cigarette. I knew that he would follow me.
I turned sharply, my pulse kicking up, and there he was—standing just close enough that I could smell the alcohol on his breath, the scent of his cologne underneath. He had changed. Not drastically, but just enough that it took me a moment to register the difference. He looked bigger. His frame had filled out—five, maybe ten kilos heavier than the last time I had really looked at him. Not fat, just solid, broader. The kind of weight that settled in his chest and shoulders, making him look stronger, more there somehow. His jaw was sharper too, the soft edges of boyhood chiseled away into something undeniably male.
And yet, his smirk was the same.

“I heard you broke up with your girlfriend,” he said, tilting his head, his voice laced with amusement.

I exhaled, bending down to pick up my cigarette. “Yeah. That news travels fast?”

“You could say that.” His smirk deepened. “Or, you know, I have my ways.”

I leaned against the wall, taking another drag. “Right. Spies, I assume.”

He let out a short laugh, stepping closer, so close that I could feel the residual heat from his body. “Of course. I keep tabs on all my favorite people.”

I scoffed, shaking my head. “Right. That’s why you ignored me for months.”

His expression flickered—just for a second—before the smirk returned. “I could say the same thing about you.”

I didn't have a good response to that, so I just kept smoking, letting the silence stretch. He watched me, his dark eyes flicking over my face before settling on the cigarette in my hand.

“You smoke now?”

I shrugged. “I guess.”

“Since when?”

“A few months.”

He wrinkled his nose, tilting his head. “Doesn’t suit you.”

I laughed dryly. “Yeah, well. Neither does getting ghosted.”

His grin widened. “Ghosted? That’s dramatic.”

I exhaled. “And you love drama.”

“That’s true,” he admitted, shoving his hands into his pockets. His posture was relaxed, but there was a quiet energy to him, like he was waiting for something.

A breeze drifted through the alley, ruffling his shirt slightly, and I couldn’t help but notice how it stretched across his chest. He had always been in good shape—years of training had made sure of that—but now, there was something different about the way he carried himself. Like he was aware of the space he took up.

He leaned in slightly, his voice dropping just a little. “So. How does it feel?”

I blinked. “How does what feel?”

“Being single.”

I scoffed. “I don’t know. Fine, I guess.”

He hummed, watching me closely. “No tragic heartbreak? No weeping in the rain, reciting poetry? Don’t they teach you those things at your school?”

I rolled my eyes. “Jesus, shut up.”

His grin widened. “Oh, come on. I was looking forward to some Shakespearean-level lamenting.”

I flicked my cigarette toward the ground, crushing it under my shoe. “Sorry to disappoint.” I tried to go inside, but he blocked me off.

He made a sound of mock disapproval. “You’re no fun anymore.”

“Oh, I’m no fun?” I raised an eyebrow. “You’re the one who disappeared off the face of the earth.”

His expression softened, just slightly. “I didn’t disappear. I was around, just busy”

He rubbed the back of his neck, shifting his weight. “You ignored me first.”
I glanced at him.

A pause. Then:

“I missed you, Petar.”

Something thick settled in my chest. I swallowed. “Yeah…”

His gaze flickered over my face again, searching. “I was starting to feel like I actually had a best friend.” His voice was softer now, almost hesitant. “But you just… left.”

I exhaled, my fingers twitching at my sides. The closeness between us was suddenly suffocating.

“You left too,” I said quietly.

He tilted his head, his expression unreadable. “I didn’t want to.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

The air between us thickened, dense with something unspoken. The club’s muffled bass pulsed behind us, but out here, it was just the two of us, suspended in the cool night. Andrej shifted his stance slightly, his shoulder brushing against mine. Even through the thin fabric of my shirt, I could feel him—warm, solid, impossibly close.
I turned my head to look at him, and for the first time in a long while, I allowed myself to really see him. He was still Andrej, still the boy who had driven me insane with his teasing, his careless charm, his way of making everything feel like it was exactly where it was supposed to be. But he wasn’t just a boy anymore. His face had sharpened, his jaw more defined, his shoulders broader, stronger. Even his posture was different—rooted, like he knew exactly what he was doing, where he was standing.

Yet, his eyes—those dark, unreadable eyes—held something I wasn’t used to. There was a weight behind them, something careful, restrained. He was watching me like he was trying to figure something out.

“What?” I asked, my voice quieter than I intended.

His lips curled, not quite a smirk, but close. “Nothing.”

“Bullshit.”

He huffed a laugh, glancing down before meeting my eyes again. “I was just thinking.”

“Be carefull,” I muttered.

“Shut up,” he said, nudging me lightly with his shoulder. “I was just thinking that I missed this.”

I swallowed, my pulse hammering. “What do you mean?”

“This.” He gestured vaguely between us. “You. Talking. Smoking in alleys like degenerates.”

I let out a breath of laughter. “Right. A real Hollywood moment.”

He hummed, eyes dropping briefly to my lips before flicking back up. “I mean it, though.”

I was about to respond—about to deflect, or joke, or say *something*—but then he reached out. His fingers brushed the side of my face, just barely, a tentative touch that sent a slow, searing heat down my spine.

I froze.

He didn’t move his hand away. Instead, his thumb skimmed the corner of my jaw, light, almost like he was testing something. My skin burned under the touch, but I didn’t pull back. I couldn’t.

And then, barely above a whisper, he said, “You’re still bad at hiding things.”

I blinked. “What?”

He tilted his head, his gaze unwavering. “I can tell when you’re lying.”

I exhaled sharply. “I—”

But the words died in my throat because he was moving closer, his hand shifting, his palm now fully cradling my jaw. His fingers were warm, steady, anchoring me in place. I should have moved. Should have stepped back, said something.

But I didn’t.

I stayed right where I was as he leaned in, slow, deliberate, his breath ghosting over my lips.

Then, finally, he kissed me.

Soft. Tentative. Just the faintest press of lips, like the beginning of something that hadn’t quite decided if it wanted to exist.

It was barely a touch. And yet…

I'm sure there are many enjoying reading this, but I wonder if they realize what they are really consuming. English is not your native language, yet you possess such mastery of it. The necessary nuances which breathe believability and draw the reader into becoming a character with you is all consuming. Truly masterful writing.

 

[bankai-shikai]

I'm sure there are many enjoying reading this, but I wonder if they realize what they are really consuming. English is not your native language, yet you possess such mastery of it. The necessary nuances which breathe believability and draw the reader into becoming a character with you is all consuming. Truly masterful writing.

Thank you so much for your kind words. I wouldn't go that far and accept the compliments, especially the 'masterful' ones, but I am glad that you like my writing.

 

[Cumngorich]

Normally, I would say no. But he practically doesn't exist on social media, so here is a picture of him two years from the moment the story ends. View attachment 169435761

OMG . . . He's gorgeous.

 

[Cumngorich]

So guys, thank you very much for your wonderfull messages and comments. I am very happy to say, that I finished this story with the next and last chapter. Even though it is a simple 12-Chapter story, it inspired me to rewrite it from scratch and write a book. A dear friend from the site even encouraged me to post it on Kindle, so I could reach even a greater audience. So enjoy...

----

Chapter 12


So, in a perfect world, this is where our relationship begins and the old dynamics end. In a perfect world, this is where we come out to the world and start living our lives as a normal gay couple. But the world is not perfect. It is still good, just not how I imagined we were going to end up.

After two blissful months—weeks where everything fell into place like a dream stitched together by the heat of skin, whispered jokes, and late-night cigarettes—on the 23rd of August, my mother got a phone call. It was from my uncle in Switzerland. An invitation, she called it. An opportunity. The words sounded cold and clean when she spoke them, like something wrapped in plastic. They didn't match the mess in my chest.

He offered us the chance to start fresh. A new chapter of our lives, as she kept repeating over the next few days, her eyes bright with a hope I hadn’t seen in years. I knew what she meant—Switzerland was stability. It was education, jobs, a system that worked, clean streets and rules that made sense. It was everything we had dreamed of when the winters were too long and the paychecks too short. And still, the only thing I could think about was him.

I was devastated. Torn down the middle. There was no word soft enough to describe that particular kind of ache: the grief that comes not from what’s happened, but from what is about to. A grief shaped like a countdown, ticking away every shared night, every look, every moment where his fingers slipped into mine beneath the blanket of something unspoken. It was the kind of ache that made me feel selfish, stupid, adolescent. But it was real.

Andrej and I had just started to feel… comfortable. Not out loud, not in public, not even in words—but in the way his leg brushed against mine when we sat on the grass. In the way he waited for me after training. In the way he pressed his lips to my shoulder as if to say I’m still here, even when neither of us said it. I wasn’t ready to lose that. I wasn’t ready to lose him.

I told him the day after I found out. We were in my room, the curtains drawn against the August sun, the sheets tangled from another lazy, perfect morning. My family was gone for the day, which meant we had the whole place to ourselves. The fan hummed in the corner, lazily pushing warm air around. I had been quiet all morning, and he must have noticed. I didn’t kiss him the way I usually did. I didn’t trace my fingers over the ridges of his stomach or pull him back to bed when he tried to get up. I just lay there, my chest tight, watching the ceiling.

It wasn’t dramatic. There were no tears, no trembling voices. I simply turned my face toward him, my cheek still pressed to the pillow, and said, “We’re moving to Switzerland.”

He blinked at me, confused for a second. He sat up on one elbow, watching me carefully, as if waiting for the punchline.

“Like… permanently?” he asked, his voice still soft with sleep.

I nodded. “End of the month. My uncle got my mom a job. Said I could finish school there. Said it’s time we get out.”

He didn’t say anything for a while. Just sat up fully and ran a hand through his hair. The silence stretched, but not in the way I feared. It wasn’t angry or cold. It was just… thinking.

Finally, he said, “Well, fuck. That’s… good for you.”

“Good?” I asked, a little sharper than I meant to.

He shrugged. “Yeah. I mean, you’ll do great. You’re meant for more than this place.”

“That’s not the point.”

“I know,” he said, and he did. He reached for my hand then and gave it a quick squeeze. “But still. You’d be crazy not to go.”

That’s when I realized—he wasn’t going to fight it. He wasn’t going to beg or cry or throw himself into some grand declaration. That wasn’t Andrej. And honestly, it wasn’t me either. We were both too proud for that. Too cautious. Too tied to the version of ourselves we had created to survive.

But there was something else in the way he looked at me that day. A softness. A kind of understanding. Maybe even a kind of love—quiet, hidden, but there.

“I’m not sure what to do,” I said, almost in a whisper.

“You do,” he replied. “You’re just scared.”

He lay back down then, pulled me toward him, and kissed the spot just beneath my ear.

“We still have time,” he murmured. “Let’s not waste it.”

And we didn’t.

I didn’t reply. I couldn’t. I wrapped my arms around him and held on. The weight of what he said lingered longer than I expected. I was living. But it already felt like a kind of dying too.


—


One afternoon, we played video games in his room for almost three hours straight, both of us pretending it was just another summer day. He kept making dumb jokes, nudging me with his elbow when I lost a round, swearing dramatically when he did. I laughed until my stomach hurt. But there was something heavy in the air, even in the joy. As if we were trying too hard to bottle it up. As if we both knew it was almost over.

We started planning a camping trip without really calling it a “goodbye.” Fruška Gora was close enough to reach by bus, familiar enough to feel like home, but distant enough to pretend it was a real escape.

We packed light. A tent, two sleeping bags, a few snacks and a bottle of Rakija Andrej stole from his parent’s place.

The ride there was quiet, except for the hum of the engine and the occasional burst of folk music from the driver’s radio. We sat side by side, sharing a pair of headphones. My head leaned on the window, watching the trees grow denser the further we went, my heart beating like it knew this was the last time.

The woods smelled like pine and earth and sun-baked bark. We walked for almost forty minutes before finding a clearing. It was flat and dry, surrounded by tall trees and just far enough from any trail that no one would bother us.

The tent went up awkwardly. We argued over the poles, laughed at how badly we were doing, and then finally gave up and lay back on the grass, staring at the pale evening sky.

That night, we drank slowly. Not to get drunk. Just to soften the edges.

He played music on his small radio—old Serbian rock songs we both knew by heart. We hummed along, voices low. The fire we built crackled between us, throwing sparks into the dark.

We didn’t talk much.

But when we lay down, shoulder to shoulder, our sleeping bags zipped together, the silence between us wasn’t empty.

He touched my hand first.

There was no rush. No hunger. Just a kind of slowness. A kind of reverence.

It felt different this time—less like a secret, more like a memory we were creating.

We kissed for a long time. His fingers brushed the back of my neck, the side of my face, my jaw. Every part of me felt like it was glowing. When our foreheads pressed together, we both exhaled at the same time.

Later, when we made love, it wasn’t wild. It wasn’t desperate.

It was deliberate.

There was no fear. No noise.

Only skin, breath, heartbeat.

He held my face in his hands at one point, looking at me like he was trying to memorize it.

And I let him.

And I memorized him too. The way his lashes cast shadows. The curve of his shoulder. The scar near his ribs I had never asked about.

When we were done, we lay tangled in the half-light of the tent, the sounds of the forest folding in around us. Our legs stayed intertwined. Neither of us moved. Andrej whispered something then. I didn’t catch all of it. Something about how he’d never felt more alive and more afraid at the same time.

I didn’t answer. I didn’t know how.

The sun rose slowly, coloring the fabric of our tent gold and blue.

He kissed the back of my shoulder before getting up to start packing.

And just like that, the magic broke.

We hiked back in silence to Stražilovo, waiting in silence for the bus that never came. Then we walked in silence to Sremski Karlovci in hope that another bus comes. It did eventuallz.

I watched him the whole time.

I memorized his back. His walk. The way he pushed branches out of my path.

I didn’t cry. Not then.

But when the bus pulled into Novi Sad, and we stepped off into the brightness of morning, something in me buckled. I fought as hell not to show emotion, don’t ask me why. I can’t explain it to this day. We gave each other a bro’s handshake and half a hug on the busy streets in front of the old railway station. And then we parted ways, like we were gonna meet the day after tomorrow.

The next time I saw Andrej was eight months later. In those first weeks after I moved, we clung to the remnants of what we had built—late-night texts, brief calls, scattered photos exchanged without context. But distance doesn’t only stretch geography; it redefines habits, interrupts language, reshapes memory. Between my adjustment to life in Switzerland, navigating a new school system, and collecting the endless paperwork needed for my medical school immatriculation, our contact, once so vital, grew increasingly irregular. Then, as quietly as it had begun, it faded. We never argued. We just... stopped.

When I returned to Serbia for the holidays that year, we saw each other. And yes, we slept together again. It was desperate, hurried, too full of nostalgia to be tender. We mistook urgency for intimacy. We wanted, perhaps, to bridge those missing months with skin, breath, friction—but the distance had settled in deeper than we realized. There was a moment afterward, lying beside him in silence, when I understood something had shifted irreversibly. I don’t remember which one of us fell asleep first, but when I woke, the room felt empty even with him in it.

The following summer, I visited again. The rhythm of our lives had already begun to diverge, and our conversations now carried the texture of old photographs—familiar, but slightly faded. One evening, sitting outside with a beer in hand, he told me, almost offhandedly, that he had met someone. Her name was Ivana. I had braced myself for this moment countless times in my mind, imagining all the possible responses I might have—jealousy, grief, a sense of betrayal. But when he said her name, none of those things arrived. Instead, there was only a strange, unexpected peace.

Ivana was kind. Warm. The sort of person you want to succeed, even if it hurts a little to admit it. I met her once, briefly, at a mutual friend’s gathering. She greeted me like someone who had heard about me many times before—without suspicion, without judgment. There was no bitterness in me that evening, only quiet recognition: the chapter Andrej and I had shared had truly ended.

That’s the woman he married. The mother of his son. She is the family he built for himself, and I am quietly grateful that he found something lasting in this world.

And somehow, from the ashes of whatever we once were, something unexpected grew. A friendship. Not one of convenience or nostalgia, but one rooted in a deeper understanding that can only come from shared history. We don’t talk every day, but we talk often enough. He calls when something reminds him of our youth—our old gym, a place we used to eat, a song we used to blast in his car. I message him when I stumble across a photograph, or when someone from the past reappears briefly in my mind.

We see each other maybe two, three times a year. There is no ritual to it, no need for planning. Just a quiet mutual knowing that time hasn’t erased the significance of what we were to each other. Strangely, we never revisited the sexual part of our relationship. It no longer felt necessary. That door closed softly and stayed shut—not from fear or discomfort, but because something else had begun. A door that opened into something even rarer.


—


There is something haunting about a first love that doesn’t vanish but instead reshapes itself into something gentler over time. Most teenagers imagine their first love as a single, brilliant arc—rising fast, burning brightly, and then disappearing as quickly as it arrived. Ours wasn’t like that. It didn’t explode and vanish. It smoldered. It changed shape. And what remained was more complex than romance, more enduring than sex. What remained was presence.

The truth is, we weren’t just lovers. We were mirrors to each other. Andrej showed me things I didn’t want to admit about myself—the intensity of my longing, the emotional violence of being young and closeted in a place that had no room for softness between men. He unearthed my shadows. And in doing so, he gave me the tools to see them clearly. There were nights when I hated him, when I hated myself more. And still, I craved him. Still, I returned.

In many ways, I lived through him. His confidence was something I borrowed, a temporary identity I slipped into like a borrowed jacket. Being close to him gave me access to a version of myself I wasn’t ready to own. The one who touched another boy in secret, who kissed in back rooms and abandoned buildings, who learned how much power could be hidden in silence. But it also broke something in me. It fractured my certainty. It shook my illusions of control. And it left me staring into the mirror asking questions I wasn’t ready to answer: Who am I when I’m not chasing him? Who do I become when I finally stop hiding?

Leaving Serbia wasn’t just about opportunity. It was a rupture. A severing of the world I had known and the person I had built within it. Switzerland gave me structure, ambition, language, and education—but it also gave me distance. The kind of distance you need to finally look at your past without flinching. I learned what it meant to build a life from scratch. To stand on my own. And in the quiet of those early years, when I lay awake in cold apartments, adjusting to a culture that prized precision over emotion, it was Andrej’s voice I remembered. The sound of him laughing in my bed. The heat of his body in the dark. And I cried more times than I care to admit.

But I grew. Slowly, unevenly, but undeniably. I found pieces of myself scattered across two countries, in languages that belonged to both me and not me. I learned that longing is not shameful, that softness is not weakness. I stopped trying to define myself in binary terms. I stopped pretending that my worth depended on being understood. I began to embrace nuance—the fluidity of attraction, the complexity of intimacy, the strange, aching tenderness of a bond that refused to die even after desire faded.

Andrej’s marriage didn’t kill something in me. It crystallized it. When he introduced me to Ivana, when I held their baby boy for the first time, I understood the fullness of what we had meant to each other. We were not a mistake. We were not a detour. We were the storm that softened the ground, made it fertile. Without us, perhaps neither of us would have had the courage to build the lives we have now. I like to think I taught him something too—not just about sex or secrecy, but about loyalty, about intensity, about what it means to truly see another person and still choose to stay.

And no, we never went back to being lovers. We never needed to. There is a kind of intimacy that outlives the body. There is a kind of love that doesn’t demand performance. I still think of him when I hear certain songs, when I pass by young men on the tram whispering too close to one another, when I watch the sun set through old European windows. He lives in my muscle memory. In my instincts. In the man I became.

Because he broke me. And in doing so, he cleared space for something else. For someone else. For the me I was always meant to become.

Today, I can say his name without pain. I can laugh about our stupid inside jokes, the whispered moments, the cigarette breaks where silence said more than words ever could. I can remember the sting of our final fight, the rawness of that goodbye, without needing to rewrite the ending. Because we did not fail each other. We simply outgrew the version of ourselves that loved in secret.

And maybe that’s enough.

He gave me my first experience of truth. Not just about love, but about myself. About who I am when no one is looking. About what I ache for, what I’m afraid of, and how far I’ve come.

He was the beginning. And because of him, I know that endings can be beautiful too.

The End.

I know many readers are attempting to express to you the same thing, but are struggling, like I, for just the right words to do so. While I cannot deny it giving a fleeting erotic outlet, it is degrading to admit that when something else beautiful continues to linger in one's soul. I feel you are in me, and that is the beauty of your literary recollection. Thank you .

 

[evany.laws]

This broke me—I’m literally crying. Probably because I have tried to bury any memory of what it was like to meet guys for the first time in my hometown in Eastern Europe (or my adolescence in general).

Your writing is so polished I couldn’t stop reading. It feels like I lived through all of those events both as they happened and as a memory that you’re looking back on. Having been to Novi Sad I could even imagine the places you were writing about, and Banat is such a unique place to grow up in. You could write a Balkan version of “on earth we’re briefly gourgeous”. I’ll order 10 copies myself.

 

[AntHen78]

This story was captivating, heartbreaking and inspiring. I'm sad that's it's finished for I have been so drawn into the story. Thank you for sharing this part of your life. I'm glad that after everything, you and Andrej did have a happy ending; a lasting, beautiful friendship. As others have said, elements of your story have resonated with me quite deeply, and I wish you all the success with publishing this as a fully fledged work of literature.

 

[bankai-shikai]

This story was captivating, heartbreaking and inspiring. I'm sad that's it's finished for I have been so drawn into the story. Thank you for sharing this part of your life. I'm glad that after everything, you and Andrej did have a happy ending; a lasting, beautiful friendship. As others have said, elements of your story have resonated with me quite deeply, and I wish you all the success with publishing this as a fully fledged work of literature.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read it and share your impression.

 

[P99]

Life is so bizarre. Barely 24 hours ago, I was falling asleep on a long flight from Zimbabwe to the UK. At dawn, I woke up somewhere over Serbia, checking on the flight map, looking at all those town names below me somewhere. This dawn I read your story, figuring all the same towns I saw on my flight path, and you took me on a different flight, with your exquisite writing. Like others have written, your mastery of English is breath-taking, and yet more, your mastery of expression and storytelling, no matter which language, is even grander. I can only imagine the pain that must have forged such ability. You are an exceptional being - look after yourself in that land that values precision over emotion. Now whenever I'm in Zurich, and floating past the Werdinsel, I'll think of what a brilliant writer lives there. I hope your stories get turned into films one day.

My best wishes for you.

 

[bankai-shikai]

Life is so bizarre. Barely 24 hours ago, I was falling asleep on a long flight from Zimbabwe to the UK. At dawn, I woke up somewhere over Serbia, checking on the flight map, looking at all those town names below me somewhere. This dawn I read your story, figuring all the same towns I saw on my flight path, and you took me on a different flight, with your exquisite writing. Like others have written, your mastery of English is breath-taking, and yet more, your mastery of expression and storytelling, no matter which language, is even grander. I can only imagine the pain that must have forged such ability. You are an exceptional being - look after yourself in that land that values precision over emotion. Now whenever I'm in Zurich, and floating past the Werdinsel, I'll think of what a brilliant writer lives there. I hope your stories get turned into films one day.

My best wishes for you.

Messages like this touch me deeply, and let me tell you friend, it makes every single invested minute worthwhile. All these beautiful comments have inspired me in the last couple of weeks since I posted the last part of the story to rewrite the whole thing and add even more background information that concerns the story. To make it even more relatable and understandable.

Thank you very much.