Chapter 1: Riverbank Confessions
The riverbank wasn’t a place for picnics. It was a jagged scar where the city bled its rust. Juan’s boots crunched on gravel streaked with chemical rainbows, the sour tang of sulphur and wet metal coating his tongue. He found Cerina already there, a silhouette against the throbbing orange lights of the cooling towers. She was methodically cracking the caps off two brown bottles with her teeth, the sound a sharp, definitive pop-pop in the industrial hum.
She handed him one without looking. He took it, his fingers brushing hers, callus on callus. They sank down onto the damp gravel, backs against a concrete piling still warm from the day’s unseen processes. Their thighs pressed together, a solid line of warmth in the creeping chill. It wasn’t desire. It was ballast.
For a long time, they just drank, watching the toxic sheen on the water ripple with the heartbeat of the distant pumps.
“Guzmán’s hand on my shoulder today,” Juan murmured, the words escaping like steam from a valve. “After I fixed the line on reactor four. It was… it stayed. A second too long. His thumb was right here.” He tapped his own collarbone, just above the faded blue cotton of his work shirt.
Cerina took a swallow, her throat working. She let out a laugh, short and hollow as a dropped drum. “At least you don’t fuck corpses.”
She said it like a fact, like noting the price of sirloin. Juan didn’t flinch. He was used to the cleaver-edge of her. He tilted his bottle, watching bubbles race to the rim. “There are worse things.”
“Are there?” She turned her head, her profile sharp against the neon bleed. “A corpse is simple. It doesn’t expect you to feel anything back. It doesn’t get clumsy with its hands. It just… is. Final.” She took another swig, this one deep and protracted, the muscles in her jaw tight. It wasn’t a drink; it was a drowning, a scream swallowed whole.
Juan understood the economy of unsaid things. He nudged her boot with his. “Bad day at the shop?”
“The usual.” She picked at the label on her bottle. “Old Man Riggs brought in a grass-fed heifer. Beautiful thing. Huge, liquid eyes. You could see the whole damn field in them. I had her haltered, calm as Sunday. One clean shot.” Cerina’s voice went flat, technical. “But then, after the bolt, in that last second before the light goes out… there’s a look. It’s not fear. It’s… recognition. Like she finally sees the shape of the whole world, and the shape is me, covered in blood and sawdust. And then it’s gone.”
She fell silent. The pipe above them gurgled, vomiting a stream of ochre water that splattered into the slick mud.
“I chased that feeling,” she said, quieter now. “After my shift. Went home, tried to… you know. Get there. Thought about the look, the bolt, the hot blood on my apron. Nothing. Just… friction. A numb ghost of a thing.” She finally looked at him, her eyes reflecting the factory glow, empty of everything but a raw, weary honesty. “Sometimes I think I’m built wrong. Like my wiring’s reversed. The things that should bring feeling just turn the lights off.”
Juan stared at the poisoned river. He thought of Guzmán’s laugh, the way it boomed across the control room. The solid, reassuring weight of his hand. The confusing, electric jolt it sent down his spine, a jolt he’d spent the rest of his shift trying to drown out with the roar of the centrifuges. He drank to wash that feeling away. He came here, to Cerina, to drink some more. The gay, as he never called it, was a low-grade fever he was constantly sweating out.
“You’re not built wrong,” he said, his voice gravel. “The world is. We’re working in its broken places. My lungs are full of shit that isn’t air. Your hands are full of death that isn’t yours. Of course we can’t feel right.”
Cerina leaned her head against his shoulder. It was a rare gesture. Usually, they just sat, parallel lines of exhaustion.
“I want to scream,” she whispered into the denim of his jacket. “So loud it cracks the windows at the plant. So loud it makes the cows in the freezer sit up. But I open my mouth and… nothing comes out. Just more of this quiet.”
He put his arm around her, pulling her tight into the bulk of him. He was strong from moving drums, from wrestling uncooperative pipes. He could feel the fierce, wiry tension in her frame. “So we drink the quiet,” he said.
“Yeah.”
They finished the beers in a companionable silence that was louder than the machinery. Juan’s mind circled back to the pressure of Guzmán’s thumb. He felt a stupid, dangerous warmth at the memory, immediately followed by a wave of self-disgust. He fished in his pocket, pulled out his wallet, creased and smudged with chemical residue. From behind a faded grocery receipt, he slipped a small photograph.
He didn’t hand it to Cerina. He just held it in his palm, angled so the ambient light caught it. A picture of his mother, taken years ago in a backyard that was now a parking lot.
“I keep it for the love,” he said, answering a question she hadn’t asked. “The big, shapeless one. The one that doesn’t have a… a person attached to it. Just this… ache. This need to point it at something. I look at her face and I can almost remember what it’s supposed to feel like. Simple. Clean.”
Cerina looked at the photo, then at his face. She saw the yearning there, plain as the sweat line on his hard hat. She saw the lie he was telling himself about where that love wanted to go. She knew because she told herself different versions of the same lie.
“It’s not in there, Juan,” she said softly, tapping the photo. “That feeling you want. It’s out here.” She gestured vaguely at the ruined river, the groaning pipes, the whole ugly, breathing wound of a landscape. “It’s mixed in with all the poison. You can’t have one without the other.”
A particularly violent shudder ran through the nearest pipe, a deep hydraulic cough. A spray of warm, chemical mist settled over them like a bitter dew. They didn’t move.
Juan tucked the photo away, the gesture final. He stood up, offering her a hand. She took it, and he pulled her to her feet in one smooth motion. They stood for a moment, two shadows merged into one against the industrial glare.
“Tomorrow?” she asked, brushing grit from the seat of her jeans.
“Tomorrow,” he nodded. Same time, same poison.
They walked back toward the chain-link fence, their separate paths leading to the same kind of solitude. He would go to his empty apartment, shower until the plant smell was a ghost on his skin, and try not to dream of a hand on his shoulder. She would go to hers, stare at the white-tiled walls that reminded her of the cold room, and chase a feeling that was always just out of reach, hiding behind the last look in a dying animal’s eye.
The riverbank swallowed their footprints, one by one, as the pipes wept their endless, contaminated tears.
The riverbank swallowed their footprints, one by one, as the pipes wept their endless, contaminated tears.
The next day, the idea found them separately, a grim solution hovering in the chemical haze of the plant and the blood-mist of the shop. For Juan, it crystallized during his lunch break, watching Guzmán’s animated hands describe a football play—a raw, confusing want twisting in his gut that he immediately decided to cauterize. For Cerina, it struck while she hosed down the marble, the relentless slap of water on fat failing, as always, to quiet the static in her nerves. They arrived at the riverbank by unspoken agreement, the two fresh six-packs between them a heavier, more purposeful offering.
“We should just do it,” Cerina said, not looking at him, cracking a bottle open with her thumb.
Juan swallowed, the beer tasting of aluminum and resolve. “Yeah. Probably.”
It wasn’t desire. It was a tactical maneuver against their own silent geometries, a desperate ploy written in a script they’d both read but never followed. Maybe skin could explain what words kept failing to translate. Maybe the sheer, awkward reality of it would shock their systems into a new alignment.
Maybe the sheer, awkward reality of it would shock their systems into a new alignment.
They abandoned the riverbank’s weep, crunching up a slope of loose, grey pebbles toward a slightly drier patch of scrub grass, a silent procession. The industrial hum felt farther away up here, replaced by the sound of their own labored breathing. Juan stopped, Cerina beside him, the city’s wound spread out below them. He stared at his shoes for a long moment, then fumbled in the inner pocket of his jacket. His fingers closed around the square, foil-wrapped packet. He pulled it out. The foil was faded, crinkled like an old candy wrapper, one corner slightly torn. He pinched it between his thumb and forefinger, holding it up like a relic. It was ancient, and obviously dry.
Cerina stared at it, then at his face. A snort escaped her, but it died in her throat, becoming something else. “Jesus, Juan. How long has that been in there?”
“Awhile,” he muttered, his ears burning. He rolled the packet between his fingers. The foil made a faint, papery sound.
“It’s probably dust by now,” she said, her voice flat. “Crumble to bits.”
He didn’t answer. The object in his hand seemed absurd, a tragic punchline. It was supposed to be a bridge, not a monument to everything that hadn’t happened. The love he carried, big and shapeless, suddenly had a weight and a texture: it was this dry, useless thing in his palm. Cerina watched him, saw the defeat settle in the slump of his shoulders. The screaming quiet between them thickened, swollen with the understanding that this, too, was just another kind of corpse.
The screaming quiet between them thickened, swollen with the understanding that this, too, was just another kind of corpse.
Juan let the foil packet fall into the dirt.
“Fuck it,” Cerina whispered, her voice ragged. “We’re not drunk enough for any of this.”
“Not even close,” Juan agreed, the words a dry confession.
In a synchronized, weary motion, they both turned to their respective bags. Cerina pulled a bottle of cheap vodka from her canvas sack, the liquid sloshing like a promise. Juan produced a pint of bourbon from his stained backpack, the amber glass catching the sickly light. No glasses, no ceremony. They twisted the caps off, the simultaneous crack of breaking seals a louder truth than anything they’d said.
Cerina tilted her head back and took a long, ruthless pull, her throat working. She gasped, the heat blooming behind her sternum. Juan matched her, the bourbon burning a path of false courage down to his gut. They lowered the bottles, eyes watering, and looked at each other.
This was their real communion.
“To not feeling it,” she croaked, offering her bottle.
He clinked his against it. “To not feeling a goddamn thing.”
They drank again, deeper this time. The liquor was a scratch on the lens, softening the sharp edges of the rusted world. Cerina felt a different warmth unfurl, one that didn’t scare her. Juan watched the lines of her face blur, and for a second, the shape of his love felt less like a targeting beacon and more like a diffuse, bearable glow. It was a lie, but it was a better lie. The hum of the plant began to sound like music, or maybe just static they could finally ignore. They drank until the bottles felt lighter in their hands, until the gravel seemed to yield beneath them, until the corpse of the moment was buried under a sweet, familiar numbness.
The vodka and bourbon mixed into a cheap, warm fog behind their eyes. Cerina giggled, a sound so rare it startled them both. "Your face is crooked," she slurred, poking his cheek.
"My face is fine. Your face is… shiny."
"Everything's shiny." She waved her bottle at the toxic shimmer on the water. "Even the cancer puddles look pretty."
Juan leaned back, the gravel shifting under his weight. The world had softened into a bearable blur. Cerina slumped against him, her head finding the hollow of his shoulder like it was made to fit there. He looked down at the top of her head, at the dark strands of hair escaping her braid.
"You know what's stupid?" she mumbled into his jacket.
"Everything."
"Specifically," she said, tilting her head up. Her nose brushed his jaw. "We're terrified of a feeling. One decent feeling. It's the one thing the plant didn't put in the air. We have to make it ourselves and we're fucking terrible at it."
Her breath was warm and smelled of juniper and regret. Juan's mind, slow with drink, fixated on the simple physics of her mouth being so close. The shapeless love had a shape now, and it was this: her weight against him, the point of contact where her temple met his neck.
"Maybe we're overthinking it," he heard himself say.
"Always."
He dipped his head. It wasn't a dramatic gesture. It was an experiment, a slight adjustment of angle. His lips brushed hers—a question.
She went very still for half a heartbeat. Then she answered.
The kiss was not world-ending. It was not a solution. It was chapped lips and the taste of cheap bourbon and a faint hint of the peppermint gum she chewed at work. It was awkward and a little sloppy and their noses bumped. Cerina made a small, surprised sound in the back of her throat, and then she laughed, a real laugh, right into his mouth.
He laughed too, the vibration mingling. They kissed again, and this time it was less clumsy. It was warm, and alive, and for ten seconds there was no riverbank, no plant, no cold room. There was just the shared heat of breath, the solid press of another person meeting you exactly where you were, without expectation.
They broke apart, breathing a little harder. Cerina’s eyes were wide, but the usual hollow look was gone, replaced by a sparkling, astonished clarity. A grin spread across Juan’s face, so unfamiliar it felt like using a new muscle.
"Huh," she said.
"Yeah."
It was fun. It was validating. Not as a prelude to anything else, but as its own complete, perfect thing. A feeling they had made themselves, right here in the broken place. They didn't speak. They just sat there in the humming dark, shoulders touching, looking out at the neon-bleeding water with new eyes.
They just sat there in the humming dark, shoulders touching, looking out at the neon-bleeding water with new eyes. The laughter from their kiss still hung between them, a fragile bubble in the toxic air. Juan turned his head, his gaze dropping to her profile outlined against the factory lights. He noticed the light peach fuzz on her upper lip, glinting softly in the dim glow. A sudden, unbidden heat surged through him, and he got hard.
Cerina felt the shift in his posture, the tension coiling in his thigh pressed against hers. She didn’t speak; her eyes met his, wide and dark with a weird eagerness. In one fluid, unthinking motion, she climbed onto him, her knees digging into the gravel on either side of his hips. Her hands fumbled with his belt, then his zipper, the metallic rasp loud in the quiet. Juan helped, his own fingers clumsy as they pushed his jeans down over his hips.
Cerina positioned herself above him, her breath coming in short, sharp pants. She tried to insert his penis into her, but it was awkward. He was half-angled wrong; she was too dry. They both gasped, a shared sound of frustration and pain. "Wait," Juan muttered, but Cerina shook her head, her jaw set. "Just—" she hissed, adjusting her hips, pressing down again. A sharp sting made her flinch, but she didn’t stop. The industrial hum seemed to amplify, drowning out their ragged breathing. This wasn’t passion; it was a grim, mechanical attempt to breach their own solitude. It hurt, and for a second, Cerina wondered if this was the feeling she’d been chasing—the clean, sharp edge of something real.