Cane23

@LittleBuddhaTW I've been so happy to see you posted your new story. Someday Out of the Blue is one of the best stories I read (I read it, actually, on another site first and then came here to post Review). Characters, plots...everything is amazing. Mental health tag has made me think for a second, am I ready for a hard topic now... Nevertheless, knowing your writing style, I'm sure you'll find the best way out for your protagonists! All the best, Cane

The longest day! 🌞🌞🌞

I liked that parody as kid! Not sure how impressed would be now...

I agree that Rory's reaction is not very dignified, still, let's not forget one thing - he doesn't know what we know! 😉

From Rory's pov it is Kieran who is thinking with his dick and jeopardize both their relationship and mission. I know it's frustrating, but Kieran was fast jumping to conclusions so many times before so...as you said, Kieran will learn from this a lot! Trust should never be taken for granted!

Legend has it @kbois wrote all the stories for the last year competition! 😜

My thoughts exactly!!! Hormones might push Rory to the extreme but, even without that, from his pov Kieran's behavior really looks suspicious. Add the court gossip and... voilà, there's drama! But, let aside nonexistent triangle, a really beautiful relationship is developing between Kieran and Garran. Garran is becoming a big brother Kieran never had. Kieran's father was cruel dictator. For Kieran, Desmond was a 'weak' priest boy and Craft was more servant than the teacher. When the things calm down and truth comes out; this brotherly bond will mean a lot to both Kieran and Garran. The kind of Rory and Desmond were making before shit started.

This is interesting... What if we strip away pain, betrayal, power, guilt, and even complicity, if we put aside all the ways Nick and Bobby could or should have worked - we’re left not with what’s easiest or healthiest, but with what is most elemental. Looking through that lens, we can say - Adrian is the love of Nick’s life! So, even if Nick couldn't stay, even if Adrian hurt him, even if it was Bobby who gave him softness and care - Nick didn’t just love Adrian, he was shaped by him. We can argue Adrian destroyed Nick’s idealism, or cracked open his darker self, or lured him into the very power games he swore to resist. But we could also say Adrian saw him first. Before Bobby. Before the masks solidified. Finally, Nick loves Bobby, but Adrian is the love of his life. Not because he should be or he deserves to be. But because he always was. Saudade...this beautiful scene between Rafel and Nick is not a movement in the Symphony, it is fado! Rafael is important because he helps Nick stay in the world. Before Rafael, literature was Nick’s refuge and his disguise. It allowed him to feel without exposure, to confess without consequence. Books gave him language for pain but also gave him a way to evade his own. In that sense, literature was Nick’s most elegant form of escapism - a controlled space where he could grieve, love, and remember without having to risk being seen in real time. Rafael disrupts that, not by replacing literature but by restoring its purpose. August - the dog. Octavius Augustus - the first Emperor of Rome. He didn’t call himself king, didn’t seize power. He became power by playing the part of modesty. This is exactly Adrian’s pathology - he performs virtue, curates intimacy, builds an empire around himself through charm, wit, and control while denying (even to himself) that he craves to be adored, obeyed, indispensable. Like Augustus, Adrian never said aloud, I want to rule your world, he simply ensured that he did. So, when August the dog appears to Adrian - gentle, faithful, lingering after the death of his former owner, it’s as if the ghost of the empire Adrian built (and destroyed) is returning to him in an innocent form. Also, August is the month of transformation (Christian holiday Transfiguration is in August) - the arch between the heat of summer and the decay of autumn. This is Adrian’s August moment: a transition from domination to surrender; from the illusion of control to the embrace of grief. A dog, unlike lovers or followers or patients, cannot be manipulated through charm or fear. August’s affection is unconditional, his gaze unflinching, his presence unavoidable. He doesn’t leave when Adrian says something cruel. He doesn’t escalate or withdraw. He simply stays. In that sense, August is the first companion Adrian cannot destroy. Finally, if we look down that beach, who do we see? Man with the dog. Is it Adrian...or, maybe, Richard? If Adrian reaches that place not as exile, not as punishment, but as a way to sit with what is true then he is not becoming Richard the neighbor. He is becoming Richard the Self - the stable, quiet center of the psyche that Adrian had never touched before. We thought Richard was just a side character, but maybe, he was a mirror of Adrian’s potential all along. And who knows, maybe this transformed, “Richard-like” Adrian could become an adviser to other lost souls. But it would not be in the way he once would have done it - with charisma, persuasion, cleverness, or domination. It would be in the way Richard did it: by being present, not performing; by listening deeply, not diagnosing; by asking questions, not giving answers; by embodying a kind of quiet authority, born not of superiority, but of survival.

LOL, I could understand a bit of Lyn's annoyance with Alexander...seems like too perfect to be truth. Reminded me of ladies commenting Chris Hemsworth at The Graham Norton Show.

The moment forces both characters to acknowledge what has long been disavowed - that their hostility masks desire, that their fights are rituals of intimacy, that neither of them has gotten over the past. Especially Lyn as the question above fractures his self-narrative: Alexander is an asshole. I hate him. I’m into Brad. Period. There is some special intimacy in the scene when Lyn undress Alexander and iron his shirt. The whole scene tells us this isn’t just about attraction. These are two lonely men trying to remember how to belong - to someone, to a moment, to the selves they used to be. Domestic choreography as emotional language, because they afraid to say it. Lyn tells himself it’s aesthetic perfectionism. But what it really is - is care. He’s grooming Alexander for others but also for himself. They are 'playing home' but it's not performance. I'm confused by Brad. His mask is the most intriguing one as he is sending so many contradictory messages. He’s organizing a wedding. He knows the social dynamics. But he chooses to put his emotionally repressed ex-nerd best friend and his enigmatic, cool, sexually teasing ex-rival in the same room. Does he want them together, does he want power control over them, or he is just oblivious? Golden boy likes to gossip?!? Brad's decision to gossip about Alexander signals insecurity. Perfect people don’t gossip - jealous people do. @Laura S. Fox, scratch a little bit Brad's mask for us, I'm really curious what's beneath it! 😉 If you don't give him some human personality, I'll lose any sympathy for the character. I'm already thinking Lyn and Alexander should run away together. I'm wondering...was Alexander the one who knew where Lyn was all the time?

But it is funny that they have sex in a Vince's car in the middle of the swamp, beside the biggest house (with thousand rooms) in the count! Ok, I understand the logic...catch the moment!

Guys, the Review I've published has been the most difficult one to write (and it is the Review nr. 121). Thanks Lord, I did my homework with earlier comments so, there was enough material to do it. Anyway, enough with silence, let the applause begin! 👏👏👏

“Unfortunately there can be no doubt that man is, on the whole, less good than he imagines himself or wants to be. Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is. At all counts, it forms an unconscious snag, thwarting our most well-meant intentions.” - Carl Jung This story doesn’t just tell a tale, it contemplates one. In many ways, it reads like a literary essay written in flesh and feeling, unfolding slowly through the lives of three deeply entangled characters: Nick, Bobby, and Adrian. Love, shame, betrayal, longing, it’s all there. But beneath the emotional realism is something even deeper: a quiet, haunting meditation on Jungian themes. @CasualWanderer82's secret receipt is here - three individuals, haunted by their own demons, caught in a net of toxic relationships. Oh, @CasualWanderer82 bring the new dimension to the term 'toxic relationship'...read and find out how! The story feels like an exploration of the shadow self - that hidden, often repressed part of our psyche. Each character carries a burden they try to bury, and the drama between them isn’t just interpersonal - it’s psychological. They act out old patterns, echo traumas they inherited, and repeat roles they can’t escape. The choices they make aren’t always rational, but they’re deeply human, shaped by wounds that go deeper than words. Throughout the story, the ocean plays a powerful symbolic role. For Jung, the ocean often represents the collective unconscious—vast, mysterious, full of forgotten truths. The sea becomes a place where characters confront themselves or let go. It’s where memory returns, where desire dissolves, and where silence speaks. The mood is cinematic and poetic—like a European film from another time. It doesn’t rush. It lingers in glances, pauses, bedsheets, and half-spoken words. Settled in Tarkovsky's landscape, with Bergman's psychological depth, interrupted with few Tarantino's shocking scenes and Hitchcock's final word, this story will leave you breathless. In the end, this is not a story about answers. It’s about seeing. Seeing the shadow, seeing the damage, seeing the love that maybe came too late. It’s quiet. It’s aching. It stays with you. This story doesn't shout, it whispers Jung and sometimes, that’s louder than anything else. This story screams silence! Finally, a note to the readers. @CasualWanderer82 is not writing a “tasteful” psychological drama. He's writing something braver: a poetic, morally ambiguous, erotically charged story where moments of stark physicality rip through beautiful language the way trauma and desire rip through people. If everyone’s comfortable, the writing probably isn’t doing enough.

My association with the LOTR were Frodo's words at the end of the novel - "We set out to save the Shire, Sam, and it has been saved, but not for me,". Nick says - “I think part of love, the real kind, is knowing when to leave before you destroy the things you treasure most.” ... “I didn’t leave you, Bobby. I left us.”

Why am I feeling like quoted here? A silence that speaks volumes... This story is a Symphony. The silence at the end of Mahler’s 9th is traditionally interpreted as death - but not in a theatrical or final sense. It is transcendence, a return to stillness after immense emotional turbulence. And just like Adrian’s final moments in the sea, Mahler's final bars don’t end so much as they dissolve...into ether, into memory, into something larger than self. In Mahler 9, the Adagio movement disintegrates until all that remains is a breath - then nothing. In the story, Adrian undresses physically, emotionally, spiritually. Each layer dropped is not shame but truth. This is musical phrasing in prose. The story becomes music, and music becomes the story. For Adrian, this silence is not physical death, it is the death of the false self, of the defensive self, of the mask. It is Mahlerian in the truest sense, not tragic but transcendental. The moment Adrian is held by the ocean, he becomes just one part of the world, not above it, not outside it. That is peace, not despair. Like Mahler, who so feared death, and yet composed something that made space for its acceptance, even its beauty. Abbado’s performance of Mahler’s 9th with Lucerne is especially pure one. What makes it devastating is not just Mahler’s score but that Abbado himself was dying when he conducted it. There’s a direct link between acceptance of mortality and awe-filled restraint in that final silence. At the end, nobody wants to start applause, nobody wants to disturb the sanctity of the moment. And here is the answer why are we (the readers) still so restrained with comments and analyses... Just as the conductor disappears at the final bow, @CasualWanderer82 does too. The prose vanishes into the sea. No applause. No explanation. Only the readers, like the listeners, left still, hushed, perhaps blinking back tears, not quite able to speak just yet. Because what you’ve done @CasualWanderer82, like Mahler, is not end a story. You’ve breathed into silence, and you’ve left us there. It’s beautiful. So, let us enjoy the silence, admiring your masterpiece @CasualWanderer82 before discussion emerges!

This line - What about me?!

There's one thing we didn't say about Adrian. In this chapter, he becomes his father in a tragically complete way. This isn’t just a resemblance or mimicry anymore. The transformation is total, and it is so devastating. Throughout the story, Adrian fights, masks, rationalizes, or projects his way out of that inheritance. But by this chapter, the trajectory is fulfilled: he doesn’t just echo his father - he inhabits him. Not just through behavior, but in essence. Before, Adrian could still pretend. His charisma, his intellect, his aesthetics, his power gave him the illusion of freedom. But now, the mask cracks. He’s not playing his father anymore - he is his father.

@J LeRoy you've made me read, reread and read again both the story and your comments. I don't know, am I more thankful or frustrated for putting my mind on a light speed mode! 🙂 So, Nick -a protector, savior, liar...or all together? If we read “protector” as someone who shields another from harm, Nick doesn’t do that. So, from that lens, the word protector seems dishonest. Nevertheless, how I see it - Nick’s form of saving or “protecting” Bobby was not about shielding him from pain but confronting him with it. He lets Bobby fall, not to abandon him, but to push him through something. Nick never protected Bobby in the soft, paternalistic sense, he rescued him from self-delusion, from emotional paralysis, from denial. And this required force, maybe even cruelty. Bobby would have told him to fuck off if Nick came gently, as some therapist or moral preacher. Nick shows Bobby his shadow - he doesn’t rescue him from the wolves, because the wolves are part of what Bobby must face. But what he does do is stay just close enough, quietly holding the life belt out of view. Nick orchestrates a moment of collapse that becomes Bobby's turning point. Vindictive or petty ...the same as questionable and monstrous - this is all said from the moral framework. Nick doesn’t poison Adrian to punish him, he does it after years of failed hope, spiritual exhaustion. It’s not revenge; it’s resignation, not cruelty but cracked mercy. Nick doesn’t enjoy this choice, he mourns it. Calling Nick petty ignores the gravity of the internal war Nick’s been waging for years. It also ignores how long Nick avoided making this decision. This was the last resort, not the first. This! Yes, Nick is a liar! Mostly lying himself, for years, as you said. Nick must believe he did it to protect Bobby. Because the alternative, that he gave up on a man he once loved and killed a version of him to save what was left of himself and the boy he failed to shield is intolerable. So, he builds the narrative: I was Bobby’s protector. I had to choose. It’s a rationalization, but not a hollow one. It feels like truth to him because it’s stitched from desperation and love. Finally, as we all agreed, Nick isn’t the hero. He’s also not a villain. He’s a failed idealist, who tried to save two people, maybe even love them both, and couldn’t.

This!!! This is the crucial moment, the most controversial scene in the story! It is the moment when Nick, finally start the process of embracing his Shadow. To embrace the shadow means: facing your dark side (becoming aware of the parts of yourself you disown or fear); accepting without judgment and, finally, integrating the shadow: Finding a conscious place for those traits in your life. Why Nick does this - because what you repress controls you. Of course, confronting the Shadow can have positive as well as negative impacts. Facing denied, dark or painful traits can cause emotional distress or moral reckoning. Or, in Nick's own words: This is the Nick's ultimate try. This is the moment when he says it's all or nothing. This is the moment he says - I'm standing naked before you, it is the last thing I have, and I give it to you! He is no longer pretending to be the “good influence.” He’s meeting them in the dirt. Bobby, though shaken, allows himself to be exposed, even when punished. He feels more than Adrian. The fact that he looked into Nick (and Adrian noticed) means he’s drawn toward the truth. He wants to see, even at great cost. Adrian, in contrast, reacts with violence and control - he’s threatened by Bobby’s gaze, by Nick’s attention, by anything that punctures his mask. Sex, as usual for Adrian, becomes a tool of power or possession, not revelation. It's a moment where Nick is trying to integrate the triangle through an act that is erotic, sacrificial, and morally ambiguous - and only one of the three can bear the cost of truth. I was surprised with revelation that Adrian's stroke has been induced by poison delivered by Nick. It shows how strongly rooted Adrian's self-portrait was - so much that even body could not rebel against such monstrous psychological auto engineering without attack from the outside. It shows, simply, there was no other way. I don't know was it morally or not, but I see it as act of self-defense. As for the Nick leaving Bobby - was it really running away or giving a chance? That's the ultimate sacrifice - Nick saved Bobby from Adrian but, this was moment to save him from himself. Grief is not good enough foundation for a stable relationship. Grief can be very destructive; we've seen it in The Good Son. Time is the only good medicine for the grief. Finally, what will be with Adrian. I think, in order to reintegrate, he must have his own meeting with Richard and his own bath in the Ocean. Is he going to become one with the Ocean and join Lorenzo, or he is going to step out of the water, reborn - I leave it to the poetic imagination of @CasualWanderer82!

You're probably right but, that's my way of self-protection. If I allow myself to involve too much emotionally in @CasualWanderer82's story, he'll break me!

I'd like to believe that Nick's departure is moment when Bad Education becomes a Man Up game! "Professor Morrisey, you ever think," Caleb said, "that maybe disappearing for someone isn't weakness, but a different kind of presence?" Nick didn't answer. He just looked up, lips parted, words caught somewhere behind his teeth. Caleb took a step backward, then another. "Maybe love isn't about being seen. Maybe it's about being the one thing they can't stop feeling, even when you're gone."

I know who it is! It's @kbois!!! 😂🤣

I don't have to imagine, @CasualWanderer82 wrote it: "Some would argue losing yourself for someone else is the easiest path to destruction." Caleb tilted his head. "Or maybe it's the only honest one." Nick's voice sharpened, only slightly. "And what if you...become invisible in the process? What if you vanish completely?" Caleb was quiet, contemplative. "Then maybe that's still love. Tragic, but…love doesn't always need to be...seen. It just needs to be given." Nick looked at him long and hard. "Even if it hurts?" Caleb smiled, soft and crooked. "Especially if it hurts."

Before I leave you guys for a few hours, I'll answer this question (although I'm eagerly waiting @The Donling's authentic approach). If he really integrates, embrace his shadow, break his persona, exorcise his father... Adrian will deserve to be happy. It doesn't mean to get together with Nick and Bobby because I'm not sure they'll be able to trust him ever again. But let's leave @CasualWanderer82 surprise us in final chapter! 😉