Summary: It's been a while since Sam came home intact, and yet the past still seemed to haunt Noah.
Date: March 2026
Quote: "He had missed signs before the hospital stay, but he wouldn’t miss them again."
TW: Hints at an eating disorder or another mental illness.
WAKING UP EARLY IN THE morning wasn’t something Noah normally did. But the summer heat was beginning to creep up on the country, and the afternoons were slowly getting uncomfortable. Walks had been a part of his routine for a long time, he could barely start the day without them, and he wouldn’t give them up just because of the heat.
Luckily, he managed to wake at nine without an alarm. He shared the bedroom with Sam, and he hated the thought of waking the other up early more than the thought of improperly starting his day. The air outside was beginning to smell nicer, ever since springtime came around the field that surrounded their flat bloomed beautifully with clusters of purple dead-nettles. Usually, he would take a walk around the neighbourhood until he felt the need to return home, but he decided that, with such a nice morning, it wouldn’t hurt to take the bus and go to the nature reserve nearby. The one with the big, clear like, nearby the woods. The reserve had so many trails that a person could walk nearly a full day without ever going over the same path twice. His aunt used to take him to a similar one all the time back when he was a kid.
Before he left for the bus, he spared Sam one last look. The man was still curled up halfway underneath a thin blanket, his hand grasping his pillow. Noah hesitated, wondered if he should wait for the other to wake up so they could go to the reserve together. Though he knew that Sam got sick if he spent too much time under the sun, and he wasn’t sure if it was a good decision to invite the man to a long walk anyways. Instead, he promised himself that he wouldn’t stay away for too long. He wanted to spend the weekend with Sam.
It was nearing twelve when he got back to the flat, slightly sweaty and incredibly hungry. Standing outside, he checked his phone for a message, though he was met with nothing, which meant that Sam was probably still asleep. They could have a nice breakfast together, he could wait for that despite the pangs of hunger racing through his stomach.
As he put his key in the lock for the entrance door he thought about the thick strawberry yoghurt he had recently bought. It was Sam’s favourite, because it wasn’t overly sweet, and the chunks were neither too hard nor too soft. Which meant that it quickly became Noah’s favourite too. He took a deep breath when the mechanical door opened with a twist of his wrist. The thing was that, whenever he entered the ground floor of their flat, something would happen to him. The past would come back, his body would be on autopilot. It was, in a way, like being momentarily stuck in a time loop, repeating the same horrible moment over and over again no matter how hard he tried to stay in the present.
He closed his eyes while stepping over the threshold and tried to keep thinking about the strawberry yoghurt and the upcoming summer with Sam. For a short moment everything looked normal once he opened his eyes. A pile of newspapers laid on top of the postal lockers, there was an old children’s bike with a removal notice leaning against the stairwell. He made his way to the stairs. Then, things slowly began to fall away. The elevator went first, followed by the lockers, at last the walls crumbled away into a deep, red pit. All he could see were the steps in front of him.
There was nothing he could do to fight it. As he walked up the stairs, he couldn’t help but feel like his movements were not quite his own. He could hear a noise, muffled words he couldn’t quite make out. Right at the beginning of the first floor, he was made to stop. That was where it had happened. There was a woman in a blue coat. The coat was all he could really pay attention to, thin and flowy. She was the only one moving. There were other people — her kids — but they were more like a presence. He knew that they sat on the steps without having to see them. Her husband was beside her. Noah had seen all of them in the elevator before.
The man was speaking on the phone, rushed and afraid, though his mouth barely moved. A wave of adrenaline soared through him, beginning in his toes and buzzing faintly in his head. There was a body on the floor, the woman was pumping its chest, trying to keep it from dying. Noah knew who it belonged to, but no matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get closer — he was helpless. The man stopped talking on the phone, and only then was Noah allowed to close his eyes again.
When he opened them, he was on the second floor.
❃ ❃ ❃
“I could call Ma and ask her if we’d be welcome for dinner?” Sam suggested, sitting down on the chair opposite of Noah, placing down two glasses of water on the table between them.
“You could,” he hummed, sliding one of the glasses towards himself. The other hadn't mentioned food in a while. Sam never asked what they were going to eat, or if they could go to a restaurant some time, and he certainly never mentioned dinner while they were still having lunch. “You should, your ma always makes the best meals when it’s hot out.”
Really, he tried not to categorize time as before Sam’s hospital stay and after Sam’s hospital stay. But he couldn’t help it when the differences were so striking. Before, it was I could ask Ma if we’d be welcome, now it was I could ask Ma if we’d be welcome for dinner.
“Do you reckon we could ask her to make something, or would it be too late?” Sam thought out loud, taking a big bite out of his sandwich, struggling to get everything in his mouth. Noah hadn’t known how much of a messy eater the man could be. “I think a salad would be nice, refreshing, and maybe if Pa’s going to the store he could bring some wine with him.”
“Can’t hurt to ask,” Noah shrugged. “If you really want it.”
One thing about After was that things could be confusing sometimes. For a while, the other man hadn’t been alright, and now it seemed like he was trying really hard to be, or at least to appear like he was. It made Noah nervous, of course he wanted his boyfriend to be happy, but he didn’t want Sam to just be pretending. It wasn’t something they could easily have a conversation about, though. What kind of dickhead would say are you really hungry, do you really want that? Or do you just want me to think that you want it? The man probably wouldn’t answer truthfully. It didn’t truly matter, Sam needed to eat at least breakfast, lunch and dinner, whether he wanted to or not. Noah just wished that he could know how well his boyfriend was doing, how much of his excitement was real.
They slowly made their ways through their sandwiches without much talk. Back in spring, they had cleaned up the balcony and placed down a nice layer of fake grass. They had also bought a foldable table that they could attach to the railing, along with two secondhand wooden chairs. Since then, lunches and dinners on the balcony were a regular thing whenever the weather allowed it. It was nice how lazy they could be together after the hospital, spending entire weekends without wandering away from the flat. Before, Sam had always felt like his free days were wasted if he didn’t go somewhere. Now they only parted for work. The hospital stay had lasted six weeks, and Noah had only been able to visit once or twice a week, and they never had any privacy. That was probably the biggest reason behind the change. In the comfort of their own flat, there weren’t any other sickly patients, no concerned family members or watchful nurses.
“I’ll call Ma now,” Sam hummed when they finished eating, standing and picking up their plates. “If not, we could go out, I’ve been wanting to get something at that new friettent.”
Noah smiled and stood up as well. “You do that, schat, I’m sure we’d be welcome.”
❃ ❃ ❃
Noah had only seen Sam’s parents once while their son was away, which was in part his own fault. He had been invited to the house many times over the weeks, but he had always refused. It would have felt strange, to be in his boyfriend’s childhood home while the man wasn’t there with him.
When they arrived, Sam’s ma was already busy with making broccoli salad and chili. His pa was out in the backyard, setting up the swimming pool. Sam chuckled at the sight of the man, trying to get a pipe into one of the polyester sides. “Ma, hasn’t he seen the news? It’s raining tomorrow.”
“Oh, he’ll keep on doing what he does,” Jo laughs. “It’s nice to see you again, Noah.”
“I’ts my pleasure,” he blushed, a little ashamed for having neglected to come over.
This got him a knock against his side and an eyeroll from his boyfriend. Many times, he had been told to stop being so polite to Jo, who basically viewed him as a part of the family. Jo smiled at him before turning around to continue dicing an onion. She didn’t even need to ask for help before her son was at her side to keep an eye on the rice, since the pan was a tad bit too small and had a habit of overboiling. The kitchen smelled overwhelmingly of paprika and oil. He watched the scene for a bit, in awe of the way Sam’s shoulders moved as he grabbed a carrot at his mam’s request. He was not yet used to seeing the man cook. Since the hospital, he kept away from conversations and tasks surrounding food, and Noah never felt like pressuring him too much. Food came up sometimes: the occasional craving or offer to go to the store to buy an ingredient they needed. He kept quiet, because it was an improvement in comparison to Before, when Sam didn’t mention food at all, even if he was asked what he wanted for dinner, or if he needed anything from the store. Back then, Sam went to the supermarket or a fast food restaurant secretly, hoping that his purchases wouldn't be noticed. There was shame in his behaviour, something Noah could never really understand.
“Could you talk to Pa, maybe convince him that the pool isn’t the best idea?” the other asked, noticing Noah lingering by the door to the kitchen. “Because we all know he isn’t going to clean it up when the rain turns it all yellow and slimy.”
Jo hummed, patting her son’s shoulder. “It won’t be you either, schat.”
“I’ll keep him company while you cook,” Noah shrugged. There was no way he was going to be able to keep Sam’s dad from setting up the pool. The man was stubborn, and not always the easiest to talk to. He was a good father, but it was clear that he didn’t really understand his son’s relationship with another man.
The backyard was just as neat as it had been when Noah last saw it. There wasn’t a single leaf sticking to the wooden deck that led to what was supposed to be a garden, but what Jo kept as an empty plot of fake grass so that the swimming pool and the garden set could be put up during the summer. Jeroen was wearing a t-shirt, which was dark from sweat at the back, and khaki shorts. For a moment, he wasn’t sure what he should say to the man. He had seen Jeroen since the hospital, but he had mainly spoken to Jo. He wondered if the elder was upset with him for some reason, since he used to be much chattier. Maybe Noah could have done something to help his boyfriend before he went to the hospital, or maybe he could have prevented Sam from getting bad enough to need to get admitted to the psych unit in the first place. And maybe Jeroen was the only person who could see that.
So he kept quiet on the deck and hoped that he could pretend to converse with the man before going back inside. He was startled when Jeroen spoke without even turning around.
“How’s it going, Noah? Haven’t seen you in a while.”
“Things are good,” he nodded, glancing back towards Jo and Sam. The dinner needed to go well, he knew, or else his boyfriend might get into a bad mood for a week, which might cause an even longer setback.
“Is Sam feeling alright today?” the older man turned his head to look at him. “No special reason for him wanting to come around suddenly?”
“Nothing that I know of, we were just…feeling cooped up, I guess.”
“Great, that’s great, jongen.”
The swimming pool was already halfway built up. Jeroen seemed to struggle with it, even though he had been assembling the same one ever since Sam was a teenager. “Do you need help?” he asked, forgetting about the rain.
“Sure, dank je,” Jeroen grinned, suddenly boyish, less tired. Noah remembered once, during a visit at the hospital, when Sam told him that his papa always looked sad to see him, wearing hospital-issued sweatpants and his favourite pajama t-shirt. “It’s good to have you two back here.”
❃ ❃ ❃
Whenever Noah flushed the toilet, he had the habit of facing it, just to make sure that everything made its way down like it was supposed to. And that’s exactly what he did when he used the toilet at Sam’s parents’ house after dinner.
The little things always brought him back to the past. The ground floor of their flat was his biggest enemy — he remembered when Sam once came home from therapy talking about things that triggered him and caused him to fall back, and he had wondered if that word could in any way apply to him, too — but sometimes bathrooms and restaurants also did the trick. It wasn’t a real problem until the hospital, or technically a little before it, when Sam nearly died in the stairwell of their flat. When they finally had to unpack the problem and attempt to fix it. During his relationship with the man, he had noticed things, and all of those tiny things managed to crash back into him whenever he was forced to think about the past.
A deep sense of nausea rose in his stomach as he looked at the toilet seat. It was perfectly white, definitely new, but as the bathroom began to float away from him he began to remember how it used to look: yellowed, nearly a decade old, surface cracks running across the sides. He couldn’t remember how long ago it happened, it could have been months before Sam got admitted, or right the week before. All he could remember was the rackety seat, the fact that he had gone to the bathroom after eating, after his boyfriend had already used it. His head ached, the room was no longer there, only the porcelain, and a small red droplet, slightly smeared around one edge, stark against the yellow.
The bathroom smelled of acid. Perhaps that had been the moment in which he figured out that something was wrong. Noah began to see their own bathroom, their shower, and how the tiles that surrounded the drain were discolored, faintly orangeish. No matter how hard he tried, he couldn’t get the stain out, it had seeped into the cracks, into the core of the tiles, and they couldn’t afford to remove that reminder of the past.
A knock sounded and brought him back. He stared at the clean toilet seat and pressed his fingers against his forehead in an attempt to rub the pain there away. It wasn’t worth it to relive all of those memories, and yet he couldn’t stop them from coming back to him. Noah opened the door, smiled as he allowed Sam in. Jeroen was washing the dishes, Jo was somewhere in the living room, neither of them saw Noah as he stood with his ear pressed against the bathroom door.
He had missed signs before the hospital stay, but he wouldn’t miss them again.