Fractures.
The man under the mask.
Dearest Readers,
A version of this story was longlisted for a writing prize last year. It’s been sitting in a folder on my desktop for a while now, so I thought it was time to release it into the wild. Because, well, we all know a Hugo (or two)…
There is also a recording of this story, which is available at the end of the page, if you dare…
Enjoy.
Joey, TSC xx
Fractures.
Nighttime was when Hugo came out to play. The sun set, and so did the man he was during the day. Daylight was too honest. It highlighted the things he didn’t want to see. Dark circles under his eyes. Unwashed laundry heaped in the corner of his apartment. Unread texts from his mum.
But night had always been more forgiving. It blurred the edges. Smoothed over the questions. Let him put on the mask and become the character he’d created.
It began with the outfit. White shirt. Jeans. Sneakers. A hat covering his face just enough to seem mysterious. Unbothered. Hair loose. Cologne generous. Dior Sauvage. It was the scent that sealed the illusion. Women smelled him before they saw him. And when they did, they rarely looked past the surface. That was the point.
He was sharp, charming, always quick with a line. His British accent worked overtime, glossing over the cracks. He could say almost anything, and they’d laugh. It wasn’t about connection. It was about maintaining the illusion long enough to get what he wanted. Desire, he found, made people stupid.
Hugo didn’t feel much of anything. The last time he’d cried was in 2010, and he couldn’t remember why. Since then, he’d made it a habit to stay two steps ahead of any woman who got too close. They could want him, crave him, chase him. But they could never really know him. Never really have him.
How could they claim to know him when he didn’t even know himself? He moved through the world the way you move through a house in the dark. Careful not to look too closely, careful not to open certain doors that were better left closed.
Love? That was something people reached for when they couldn’t bear the silence inside their own chests. They dressed it up, gave it music, gave it meaning. But underneath it was always the same thing — the risk of being left holding more than you could carry.
Vulnerability wasn’t bravery. It wasn’t connection. It was exposure. It was standing without skin. And he had spent his whole life learning how to stay covered.
From a young age, he’d learned that feelings weren’t safe. His father, a stiff-upper-lip kind of man, once told him, ‘Toughen up. No one wants to hear a boy whinge.’ His mother, delicate and anxious, always seemed one emotional outburst away from breaking. Hugo learned to withhold. To keep things light, easy, charming. That’s what kept the house calm.
At school, vulnerability was ammunition. So, he stayed cool, became the funny one, the flirt. By the time he reached his twenties, it wasn’t an act anymore. It was his identity. He’d successfully become the man he’d always wanted to be. Cold. Avoidant. Detached.
He believed he was untouchable. You can’t break what you can’t reach.
Then came Josephine.
They met at a rooftop party. She was standing by herself, sipping a gin and tonic, staring at the skyline like she was bored of the view. And everyone else.
‘You look like you’re solving the world’s problems,’ he said, flashing the grin that always worked. He waited for her to smell him. To fawn over his blue eyes. To ask him where he was from.
She turned to him, brown eyes searing through him like a desert wind. ‘You look like you’re avoiding yours.’
He chuckled, then faltered. Most women played along. Josephine didn’t.
She had a kind of stillness that unnerved him. She didn’t try to charm or be charmed. She just was. Present, grounded, uninterested in performance.
‘You’re very pretty,’ she said after a pause, staring into his eyes. ‘But I can’t tell if there’s a person under all that or just… branding.’
He thought it was a game. The kind where he won in the end. Because he always won in the end.
They started seeing each other. Casually, at first. Drinks. Dinners. Then one night, they had sex that seemed too intimate. It started with the smallest thing. Her fingers brushing his wrist as she reached past him for her glass. A spark. Not the kind he usually chased. Something softer. Magnetic. Inevitable.
She was wearing a black slip dress with a low back and thin straps that invited disobedience. Her hair was loose. No makeup. Barefoot. Like she was daring him to see her without the costume. Without the mask.
They didn’t speak as he closed the distance. His mouth found hers in the hallway. Hungry. Desperate. She kissed him back just as fiercely, her nails curling into the back of his neck like she was anchoring him. His hands slid down her waist, over her hips, gripping her thighs as he pressed her against the wall. She gasped. Not theatrically, but like she meant it.
He kissed down her neck, tasting skin and warmth and the faint trace of something floral from her perfume. Her breath hitched as his tongue traced her collarbone. She tugged at his belt, fingers urgent.
He thought he had her then.
She pulled his shirt off over his head. He shoved her dress up around her waist. No finesse. Just need. Just desire. She wasn’t wearing anything underneath. That stopped him. Just for a second. He stared. Not just because of how she looked, but because of what it meant. The quiet confidence of it. The choice. She’d known what she wanted when she got dressed that night. She was in control, and it unnerved him.
His hands slid up her thighs, parting them. She tilted her chin like she was offering herself. He dropped to his knees in front of her, as if he were worshipping her. His mouth found the inside of her thigh, soft kisses trailing inward, tasting the sweat on her damp skin. She let out a low sound, threading her fingers into his hair, but didn’t pull. Didn’t guide. Just let him take his time.
He moved his tongue right up her centre. She writhed. Moaned. Opened her legs further. Held his head in place and pleaded with him not to stop. She was dripping wet. And he was impatient.
‘Can I?’ he asked. Looking up at her. Desperate to feel her around him. She nodded from above. Her face flushed.
He stood up. But it was her who guided him onto the mattress. Her legs wrapped around him, warm palms on his chest as she lowered herself onto him without breaking eye contact. They both gasped, like they’d been holding their breath since the moment they met. The rhythm started fast, desperate, but it slowed quickly.
She wouldn’t let him hide in it. Her lips on his neck. Her hands were on his face. His ribs. She touched him like she wanted to learn the texture of him, not just the shape. And that terrified him.
He gripped her hips, guiding her rhythm, but she didn’t need instruction. She rode him like she was writing her name across his skin, slow and deep, making him feel every inch of it. Branding him the way he had branded women over the years.
‘Fuck,’ he whispered, hands roaming her back, his jaw slack with disbelief.
‘Look at me,’ she said, grabbing his face with one hand. Her voice low, rough.
He did. And it wrecked him. Shattered him into a million pieces he never knew existed. There was no escape in her eyes. No distance. Just that unnerving stillness again. Watching him, taking him in, like she could see the man under the mask. The one he didn’t show anyone.
His pace faltered. She leaned forward, her chest brushing his, lips brushing his ear.
‘You feel too much for someone who pretends to feel nothing,’ she murmured. Licking from his ear down his neck.
The words hit like a blow. He flipped her then, her back to the mattress now, thrusting harder, trying to erase what she’d just said. He was in control. But it was there. Hanging between their bodies like a secret she already knew.
He kept thrusting into her. Put his hand on her breast and squeezed it. She was panting now. Scratching at his back. Digging her nails into him. He couldn’t look at her. Instead, he tried to focus on coming. On what he usually did when he fucked women. Stared at the wall or whatever was behind the bed. In Josephine’s case, it was a framed perfume ad. A Parisian woman skipping with a baguette and a bottle of wine, a dog on a leash. He focused on her blonde hair, on her figure. Removed himself so desperately from the moment happening in front of him that he imagined fucking the woman in the print.
He heard Josephine then. Her moaning. Groaning. Coming. It broke his dissociation with the Parisian woman. He looked at her writhing beneath him, and it shocked him how beautiful it was. Watching her like that. Her eyes half closed. Her fingernails digging into his forearms. Clinging to him. Her whole body moving like the tide as he plunged into her.
Then everything slowed. His body flooded with heat, his vision flared rainbow and Josephine…she looked like an angel. The brown of her eyes, piercing and golden. Her skin, glowing. The corners of her lips upturned so slightly that she could have been smirking or frowning. He wasn’t sure. It was what undid him. He thought about looking back at the Parisian woman. Almost pleaded with his brain to disconnect from whatever horror this was and just look. At. The. Damned. Parisian. Woman. But it was no use. His gaze was glued to Josephine. It was as if she had some sort of power over him. A magnetism. A spell. Witchcraft.
He felt it then. The approach. He had no control over his body. It felt as if his soul were leaving his body. Then he came. Loudly. It wasn’t the climax he usually curated. It was raw. Full-bodied. He buried his face in her neck, gasping her name, overwhelmed by the way her body held him, like she wasn’t afraid of the mess.
Afterward, they lay tangled in silence. Her breath steady. His uneven. He found himself saying things he didn’t mean just to keep her close.
‘You’re different…I feel safe with you.’ Lies that sounded like truth in the moment.
But Josephine didn’t melt like the others. She held her boundaries like they were sacred.
‘You say things that sound sincere, but your eyes are always somewhere else,’ she told him.
‘I’m here,’ he insisted.
‘No, you’re performing here. That’s different.’
He laughed. ‘You’re very intense, you know.’
‘And you’re very empty,’ she said flatly.
He didn’t text her the next day. Or the day after. He wanted her to miss him. To chase him. Like the others did. But she didn’t.
When he finally messaged her a week later, ‘Still thinking about the other night’, he got nothing in return.
At first, it didn’t hurt. He told himself she was just another girl who couldn’t handle him. That she was dramatic. Sensitive. Cold.
But then he saw her. Three weeks later, at a bar. Josephine in that black dress, her hair loose. Sitting close to a man with tattoos and soft eyes. They were laughing. Really laughing and she looked lit from within. Like someone who had nothing to prove.
Hugo stood frozen by the bar. The music drowned everything out except the pulsing ache in his chest. The memory of that night cascaded over him like cold rain. He shook his head, but the memories remained.
He left the bar without finishing his drink.
That night, he sat in the clothes he’d gone out in, scrolling through old photos. Her hand in his. Her head on his chest. Her voice in old voice notes, half-played. He thought about the boy he used to be. The one who cried easily. Who once told a girl in Year nine that he loved her and meant it. That boy had been shamed out of himself.
So, he built Hugo. This Hugo. A man made of smooth edges and curated detachment.
But Josephine hadn’t ghosted him because she couldn’t handle him. She’d ghosted him because she saw the cost of loving a man who didn’t know how to love himself and decided she didn’t want to pay it.
She didn’t abandon him. She protected herself. And for the first time, Hugo didn’t feel clever. Or wanted. Or untouchable. He just felt seen. And he wasn’t sure he liked who was looking back.
Audio version of Fractures available here:
Joey for The Spicy Chronicles, 2026.
Image: Pinterest
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