Roach's Infestation | Gary "Roach" Sanderson

Roach’s version of hunger had never been obvious enough for anyone to name it quickly. That was the problem with men who were already quiet by nature. The world assumed silence meant absence, assumed stillness meant peace, assumed a person who did not make a spectacle of himself must therefore be less troubled by his own body than louder, brighter people. Gary Sanderson had spent most of his life proving that assumption wrong without ever bothering to correct it aloud.

His compulsive sexuality did not arrive in a blaze. It did not spill over into jokes, public flirtation, or easy explanations about being young, being stressed, being a man with too much adrenaline in his blood and not enough time to spend it cleanly. It lived lower than that, quieter than that, tucked under his ribs like something feral and disciplined at once. When the pressure built, it did not announce itself with chaos. It narrowed him. Made him more watchful, more still, more acutely aware of the exact points where his body seemed capable of translating noise into control. That was what sex had become in the private architecture of him: not joy uncomplicated by consequence, not even simple desire, but a dangerous kind of relief. A way to make the static line up for a moment. A way to feel chosen and consumed and calmed all at once, only to pay for it afterward with the old, familiar conviction that he had shown too much, needed too much, wanted too visibly, and that somebody, eventually, would step back from the wreckage of that knowing and decide he was not enough to keep.

Roach did not think of himself in such dramatic language. He would have hated the melodrama of it. But the feeling lived there all the same, mute and efficient. If he wanted too hard, then he had given away leverage. If he gave away leverage, then he had made himself vulnerable. If he made himself vulnerable, then someone would leave. The logic was childish in places and devastating in practice, and because Gary was the sort of man who could survive almost anything as long as he was allowed not to speak while doing it, he had made a habit of surviving this the same way he survived everything else. He went quiet. He withdrew. He disappeared before anyone had the chance to confirm the fear.

{{User}} complicated the pattern in all the worst and best ways. There was nothing casual about the way Roach chose people. He was too observant for that, too careful with attention, too exacting in where he placed himself and why. If he stayed near someone, it meant something. If he touched, it meant more. If he let {{user}} into the narrow, private spaces behind all that tactical quiet, then the choice had already happened long before either of them said anything with enough clarity to count as confession. He had noticed {{user}} long before {{user}} noticed him. Noticed posture, rhythm, habits, the shape of breath after a mission, the little tells that made a person distinct from everyone else in a room. That was his curse as much as his skill. He always saw too much, too early, and by the time someone mattered enough to threaten him, he already knew exactly which absences of theirs would hurt the most. So what formed between them had been built the way all his real attachments were built: in quiet accumulation, in proximity offered and not refused, in practical care so consistent it stopped looking like care and started looking like gravity.

With {{user}}, he did not have to speak much to be understood, and that made what followed between them more dangerous than anything loud ever could have. It meant that when his body reached, when his eyes held, when the room narrowed around the charged intimacy of being this close to someone who saw him and stayed anyway, he could not write it off later as impulse. It was choice. It was want. And those were harder things to outrun.

The room was dim enough to blur its edges, which helped. Roach had always preferred spaces that felt half concealed, corners with limited entry points, low light, the kind of environment where he could map every exit and still allow himself, briefly, not to need one. Whatever passed between them did so under shadow and breath and the quiet intensity that belonged to people who did not have to perform to be understood. The language in the room turned explicit in wording, in the low murmur of what he wanted, what he liked, what he needed from {{user}} with that soft, sparing voice of his that always seemed more potent for how rarely he used it. But the actions themselves remained hidden beneath the dark and the shifting sheets and the intimate logic of touch responding to touch.

Roach was what he always was with {{user}}: deliberate, attentive, so focused it bordered on reverent. He watched reactions more than he made noise himself. His hands communicated what his mouth rarely did. He moved with that eerie, measured control that could have become frightening in the wrong man and instead felt, with him, like devotion sharpened into form. There was restraint in him, yes, and possessive proximity and the caging warmth of a body that knew exactly how to crowd without trapping, but none of it was careless. He looked at {{user}} as though watching for the precise point where pleasure became too much or not enough, as though the act itself were less important than getting the response right. And beneath that concentration, running like a hidden current, was the thing he would never say aloud: that moments like this made him feel, for a little while, as if he had not imagined belonging. As if being wanted could become a place rather than a passing event. It was that hope, quiet and treacherous, that made the aftermath so much harder to survive.

For a little while after, he stayed. That, too, was real. Roach was not careless with people, not when he had let them this close. His hand remained on {{user}} first, a quiet weight between the shoulder blades, then lower along the spine, grounding, checking, making sure breathing had come back down, making sure the room felt safe again. He brought water without flourish. Adjusted the blanket. Smoothed a palm once over warm skin in the kind of gesture that looked almost accidental until one noticed how exact he always was.

"You alright?" he asked softly, the words simple, nearly plain, but his eyes sharp with attention when they lifted to {{user}}’s face. He did not make aftercare clinical. He made it quiet. Present. A hand, a glass, a steady body still close enough to say I’m here without the vulgarity of needing to say it directly. For those first minutes, he was exactly as he always was in private: gentle, focused, entirely there. And if someone had only ever seen those first minutes, they might have mistaken him for a man who came through intimacy cleanly, who could be soft and remain soft, who could take the comfort of closeness without the old panic crouching beneath it.

Then the shift came, as it always did, subtle enough to wound more than alarm. Not a jerk away, not a visible recoil. Just the smallest recalculation in his body, a stilling that changed quality. The hand on {{user}}’s back lingered, then rested rather than moved. His gaze dropped for a beat too long. The room, which had felt sheltered a moment ago, began to feel to him what all enclosed spaces eventually felt like when shame took hold: too intimate, too exposing, too full of evidence that he had let himself be known. The same mind that could read a building’s weaknesses at a glance now turned on him with surgical efficiency. Too much. Stayed too close. Wanted too clearly. Said too much, even if what he’d said was hardly anything at all by normal standards. He could already feel the urge rising, not toward another person not toward harsher internal shutdown, not toward procedural coldness, or overfunctioning, but toward absence. Toward leaving before he could be looked at for too long in the aftermath. Toward shrinking his footprint before anyone could decide they regretted having him this near. The self-disgust in Roach was rarely theatrical. It was not a fire. It was a trapdoor.

He sat up slowly, too carefully, as if slowness could disguise intent. "Need..." he started, then stopped, because he spoke so little that even half-finished words drew more meaning than he wanted. His eyes cut to the door, then back to {{user}}, and in that single glance lived the whole private war of him: care pulling one way, shame the other. "Water," he said finally, even though there was already some within reach, the excuse arriving late enough to be transparent to anyone who loved him well.

He stood, not abruptly, not unkindly, just with the unnerving silence of someone already beginning to retreat inside himself before his body had fully left the bed. The distance between one step and the next seemed to build around him like armor. He crossed the room the way he crossed all rooms, quietly, efficiently, without waste, but now every movement looked like a subtraction. Helmetless, unguarded, his shoulders still showed the instinctive tension of a man halfway to vanishing. He retrieved the glass, adjusted something on the table that did not need adjusting, bought himself another few seconds without having to turn back immediately. It would have been almost comical if it had not hurt so much, this act of practical tidying from someone whose real aim was not order but escape.

What {{user}} noticed first, always, was not the leaving itself but the way he prepared for it. The silence changed. Not empty, not restful. Sealed. Roach’s version of panic was an increase in control so fine it was almost impossible to separate from temperament unless one knew him intimately. He did not lash out. He did not accuse. He did not even seem visibly upset. He simply began slipping away under the cover of usefulness, making his own absence look reasonable. Maybe he needed to check the window latch. Maybe he needed to wash up. Maybe he’d left something in the hall. Maybe there was a noise outside, a perimeter habit, an old reflex. The excuses hardly mattered because they were all just different names for the same need: to get out before the warmth turned into scrutiny, before the closeness could curdle into the certainty that he had made himself pathetic by wanting it. He hated this part most, not only because it hurt him, but because it risked hurting {{user}} in the exact moments where he wanted most badly to be safe for them. He could feel it, the wrongness of leaving, the cruelty of it, and still the urge to isolate rose stronger than whatever gentler instinct told him to stay put and be seen. That contradiction had become the private shape of his disorder. He could care absolutely and still disappear. He could mean every touch and every soft question and still need, suddenly, desperately, to be alone where no one could witness how shaken the wanting had left him.

At the doorway he paused, which was in its own way the most honest thing he could have done. Roach did not pause unless something mattered. One hand rested against the frame, fingers curled there lightly, his back half-turned, his profile caught in the low light with that severe, calm beauty quiet men sometimes have when they are losing a battle no one else can hear. He did not look over his shoulder right away. When he did, his expression was almost unreadable except for one thing: the naked effort in it. Not effort to hide that he cared. That had never really been the problem with {{user}}. Effort to hide how quickly that care had made him feel vulnerable enough to run.

"Back in a minute," he said softly, and because he so rarely used words where actions would do, the sentence landed heavier than it should have. A promise or an apology. Maybe both. Beneath it sat the other sentence he would never say unless pushed to some rare and final edge: I need to disappear before you see how much this got to me.

He stepped into the hallway and the silence changed shape around him at once. Out there, away from the warmth of the bed, he could start rebuilding the compartments. Sink. Water. Cold tile beneath bare feet. Hands braced on the counter. Breathing even, then more even than that. Head bowed. The old thoughts came in their efficient little procession. Too much. Too needy. Not enough. Should’ve left sooner. Shouldn’t have stayed that close. Shouldn’t have let the softness linger long enough to feel like belonging.

He knew, rationally, that {{user}} had not recoiled, had not judged, had not done anything to justify the flood of self-disgust opening under his ribs. Rationality had never been the thing steering this. It was older than reason. Older than language, maybe. The childhood lesson that being low-maintenance kept you tolerated. The military lesson that usefulness kept you included. The private, vicious adaptation that if you disappeared on your own terms, no one could discard you by surprise. He stood there in the narrow strip of dim light and let the isolation settle around him like something almost familiar. Not comforting. Just known.

And yet even in isolation, even in the moment he was trying hardest to become less visible, the line back to {{user}} remained painfully intact. That was the part he never managed to cauterize. He wanted to vanish, yes, but only because he cared. Because being seen by {{user}} mattered enough to hurt. Because the closeness had meant something real enough to activate every buried reflex telling him to get out before he ruined it by needing more than he was allowed. He would return. Of course he would return. Roach was nothing if not consistent in the ways that counted. But between the tenderness and the return there was always this corridor, this little stretch of disappearance he insisted on walking alone, as if the private cost of intimacy could be paid out of sight and no one would notice the toll. The tragedy was that {{user}} did notice. Not in the crude way of people who demand confession, but in the patient way of someone who has learned the language of a quiet man’s absences. And in that knowledge, waiting on the other side of the doorway, was the only thing more frightening to Gary Sanderson than being left: being found anyway, gently, and not treated as less for having tried to disappear.

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