Chapter 19: Chapter 19
And for now, that was all. The numb recognition sat between them like a sixth, silent guest.
Then Alex’s stomach made a sound, a deep, liquid gurgle that seemed to echo off the walls. His eyes widened. He clapped a hand over his mouth and scrambled on all fours toward the hallway, not making it to the bathroom but instead pitching forward onto the floorboards just outside the door. The retches were harsh, dry things, his body attempting to offer up a sacrifice that was no longer there. It was just noise and strain.
“You’re gonna pull a muscle,” Leroy observed dully from his nest.
“Or a soul,” Emily murmured, pulling her sweater down from over her head. Her hair was staticky and wild. She looked at Leo. “You got any more of those crackers?”
“They’re gone,” Leo said. “We ate the paste.”
Reed stood up, her joints popping. She walked to the kitchen with the deliberate care of a bomb disposal expert. She opened the fridge. The light spilled out, illuminating her tired face. “There’s a lime,” she announced. “And something in a tub that has aspirations of being cheese.”
“Pass the lime,” Leroy said.
She tossed it underhand. It rolled across the floor and hit his knee. He picked it up, stared at it, then sank his teeth into the rind. His whole face contorted. “Christ. That’s… that’s a sensation.” He kept chewing, the sourness a violent anchor in the sea of wrong.
A different, more insistent need was threading its way through Leo’s nausea. It was a low, physical thrum, a stubborn animal signal his body was broadcasting beneath the sickness. It felt less like desire and more like a faulty pressure valve, a demand for a different kind of release. He saw Alex, still shuddering on the floor, and felt a surge of something ugly and empathetic. They were all just bags of malfunctioning systems.
Without a word, Leo pushed himself up and went back into the bathroom. He didn’t lock the door. The concept of privacy felt absurd, a formality they’d incinerated hours ago. He leaned against the sink, catching his own hollow-eyed reflection in the dark mirror. His hand moved to his belt, movements rough and pragmatic.
It was a joyless, mechanical exercise. He thought of nothing, or rather, he thought of everything—the cracked tile, Reed’s cold fury, the silent phone—all of it blurring into a static hum. It was over quickly, a brief, tense shudder that felt like another form of vomiting. He zipped his jeans, the sound loud in the small room. He felt emptier. He splashed water on his face, the shock of it meaningless.
When he came out, Alex was on his back in the hallway, an arm thrown over his eyes. But his other hand was moving, a frantic, jittery motion under the tent of his shirt. His breath hitched in tiny, desperate gasps. He was chasing a feeling, any feeling, that wasn’t this bottomless internal cold. It was a sad and lonely struggle, and he stifled a choked-off sound into his elbow when it was over, his body going slack with a defeat that had nothing to do with pleasure.
Emily watched him from the living room, her expression unreadable. Then she shifted, turning onto her stomach on the rug. She buried her face in the crook of her arm, her body tensing in a single, focused wave. Her shoulders tightened, then released. She let out a long, slow breath, her fingers unclenching from the rug’s fibers. It was efficient, a task completed.
Leroy hadn’t moved, but his eyes were closed. His hand was inside his waistband, motionless. After a moment, he grimaced. “Nope,” he announced to the ceiling. “System offline. Too much lime. Aborting mission.” He withdrew his hand, wiping it on his jeans with a look of profound disgust.
Reed was still in the kitchen, her back to the room. She braced her hands on the countertop, head hanging low. Her shoulders were rigid. Then, with a sharp, frustrated movement, she yanked at the waistband of her leggings, her hand dipping down. It was quick and angry, a furious transaction. She bit down on her own lip, hard, until she tasted copper. A sharp tremor ran through her, and then it was done. She straightened up, adjusted her clothes, and turned around, her face a perfect, wiped blank.
The apartment was silent again, save for the ragged symphony of their breathing. The air felt used, thick with a new layer of salt and spent biology. They had excavated themselves down to the raw, wiring of their nerves, and found nothing there but need and its unsatisfactory conclusion.
Leo walked back to his spot and slid down the wall. Dawn was a faint, grey suggestion at the edges of the window blinds. The streetlights were still on.
“So,” Emily said, her voice raspy. “That happened.”
“Yep,” Leroy said.
Alex began to cry again, soft and hopeless, his earlier release having granted him no peace, only a clearer path to the sadness.
Reed walked over and sat beside Leo, not touching him. She picked up the empty plastic bag he’d tied earlier, turning it over in her hands. “We should probably talk about the band thing,” she said. “Later.”
“Later,” Leo agreed. The word felt like a promise, or a threat. Outside, a single bird began to chirp, a lonely, persistent sound in the grey pre-light.
They were still there.
The silence that followed was a living thing, thick with the smell of spent bodies and sour breath. Leo stared at the water stain on the ceiling, its shape now familiar as a constellation. His own release had been a brief, sharp static burst behind his eyes, leaving a sticky discomfort in his boxers and a deeper hollow in his chest.
“I think my insides are made of lead,” Alex murmured from his corner. His voice was shredded. He’d zipped his jeans back up, but his hand still rested limply on his stomach, as if holding himself together. A single, fat tear rolled from the corner of his eye into his hairline. He didn’t wipe it.
From under her sweater, Emily let out a long, shuddering sigh. She emerged, hair staticky and stuck to her damp forehead. “Well, that was a fucking journey to nowhere.” She shifted, wincing at the wet feeling between her legs. “Now I just feel sticky and sad.”
“Accurate,” Leroy grunted. He was sitting up now, back against the couch, looking pale and hollowed out. He’d used an old napkin from the coffee table to clean himself up, and it sat, crumpled and shameful, beside his thigh. “A comprehensive failure on all fronts.”
Reed hadn’t moved from her spot against the wall. Her eyes were closed, but the tense line of her shoulders had eased a fraction. The furious, pragmatic act had burned off a layer of her anger, leaving a weary resignation. “I need a shower that doesn’t exist,” she said, to no one.
Another cramp, low and hot, twisted through Leo’s gut. It was a different urgency now. He knew what it meant. He swallowed against a fresh rise of saliva. “Round two,” he croaked, pushing himself up. The room tilted.
He didn’t make it to the bathroom. He stumbled to the kitchen sink, gripping the cold stainless steel rim as his body convulsed. This time it wasn’t dry. A bitter, thin gruel of cracker paste and stomach acid shot from his mouth, splattering against the metal. The sound was violent, ugly. He heaved until his vision sparked, strings of saliva connecting his lips to the basin.
The others watched, too wrecked to even offer false comfort. It was just a fact now, like the time or the temperature. Alex turned his face away, his own throat working. Leroy just nodded slowly, as if Leo had confirmed a bleak hypothesis.
When it was over, Leo spat, the taste corrosive. He ran the faucet, the water loud in the quiet, washing the evidence down the drain. He didn’t look back at the room. He just leaned there, his weight on his arms, spent.
“I can still taste the cheap gin,” Emily said. “It’s in my sinuses. It’s in my soul.” She pulled her knees up, resting her chin on them. “I’d kill for a toothbrush. I’d commit actual murder.”
“I’d be your accomplice,” Alex whispered. His tear had dried. He looked blank, emptied out. The frantic energy from before was gone, replaced by a catatonic misery. His hand crept back to his zipper, not with intent, but absently, a nervous tic against the fabric.
“Don’t,” Reed said, her eyes still closed. “It’s just a feedback loop. You won’t find anything in there.”
Alex’s hand stopped. He let it fall to the floor with a soft thud. “Where is it, then?”
No one had an answer. The question hung in the toxic air. Leroy leaned his head back, staring at the ceiling. A strange, detached calm had settled over him. The mechanical act had somehow quieted the worst of the nausea, leaving him in a fuzzy, numb limbo. He felt divorced from his own skin.
He didn’t think about his ex this time. He didn’t think at all. His hand moved again, inside his waistband, with the dull rhythm of a metronome. It was just motion. A way to pass the infinite seconds. His breath hitched, steadied. There was no build, no release, just a slow, grinding friction that went nowhere and meant nothing. He stopped after a minute, his expression unchanged.
Emily watched him from across the room, her own body humming with a returning, nagging ache. The first had been a failed escape. This was simpler. A scratch for an itch. She hooked her thumbs into the sides of her leggings and underwear, shoving them down just past her hips. The air was cool on her skin.
She didn’t hide. She just closed her eyes and focused on the point of contact, her fingers moving in small, firm circles. She bit her lower lip, chasing not pleasure but a specific, obliterating focus. Her back arched slightly off the floor, a tight coil seeking a trigger. It came suddenly, a short, sharp clench that made her gasp—a hiccup of sensation in the void. Then it was gone. She went limp, pulling her clothes back up. “Nope,” she breathed out. “Still here.”
Leo turned from the sink, catching the tail end of it. He felt nothing. No judgment, no arousal. It was just another bodily function, like puking. His own earlier stickiness was drying, uncomfortable. He walked back to his spot, his legs unsteady. He sat heavily, the floor hard and unforgiving.
Alex was crying again, silent tears tracing new paths through the old ones. His hand was inside his open jeans, moving with a desperate, lost speed. He was chasing the ghost of the feeling he couldn’t find before, his face a mask of frustrated agony. “Come on,” he whispered to himself, a pathetic plea. “Come on, come on.”
It was a sad, lonely sight. Reed opened her eyes and watched him, her own earlier fury now just a dull pity. She saw the tremble in his wrist, the way his whole body was tense with futile effort.
He shuddered, a full-body spasm that had nothing to do with release. A small, wet sound escaped him. He went still, his hand stopping. A faint, damp patch bloomed on the front of his boxers. He hadn’t even fully taken himself out. He just let his head drop back against the wall with a dull thud, his breath escaping in a ragged sigh of utter defeat. “Nothing,” he said to the ceiling. “It’s all just nothing.”
The words seemed to finalize something. The night had peeled them down to their rawest, most animal selves, and found nothing triumphant there. Only need, and the failure to meet it. The digital clock on the microwave flipped to 3:04. The dark outside the window was absolute, a solid thing.
Leo looked around at the ruins of his friends, of his apartment, of the evening. The cracked bathroom tile didn’t matter. The band didn’t matter. The job didn’t matter. All that was left was this: five people, separately marooned in their own failing bodies, waiting for the sun to rise or the world to end, whichever came first.
He leaned his head back against the wall. He didn’t close his eyes. He just watched the water stain, and waited.
And for now, that was all. The numb recognition held them for maybe three minutes. Then Alex’s stomach staged a violent, gurgling coup.
He scrambled up, hand clamped over his mouth, and made a stumbling dash for the hallway. He didn’t make it. The retch was a wet, explosive sound, splattering against the floorboards just outside the bathroom door. He sank to his knees in it, shoulders heaving with dry, wrenching heaves that seemed to pull from his toes.
“Oh, come on,” Leroy groaned, turning his face away. “The one clean runway.”
Leo didn’t move. He just watched Alex tremble in the dim light, a pitiful silhouette. The smell, a sweet-rotten punch of wine and bile, reached him a second later. It was the final vulgar layer. Emily pulled her sweater back down over her face, a makeshift gas mask.
“I’m sorry,” Alex whimpered into the mess. “I’m so sorry.”
“Just be sorry quietly,” Reed said. Her voice was a monotone. She stood up, moving with a careful, oceanic slowness, and stepped over to the kitchen. She grabbed the roll of paper towels and a half-empty bottle of all-purpose cleaner from under the sink. She didn’t take them to Alex. She placed them on the floor beside him with a soft thump. “Here.”
The act was neither kind nor cruel. It was logistical. Alex stared at the supplies, then up at her. He looked broken. He peeled off his soiled shirt, using it to clumsily scoop the worst of the vomit. The clean-up was a silent, miserable pantomime.
Leo felt a sympathetic lurch in his own gut. The earlier, mechanical release had left him raw but unresolved. A different tension was coiling now, low and insistent, a bodily echo of the night’s relentless spiral. He watched Reed’s back as she returned to her spot, the line of her spine rigid.
His hand drifted to his own waistband, not in pursuit of pleasure, but in a grim acknowledgment of the persistent thrum. It was an itch in the core of him, a need to feel something else, even if it was just a fleeting, empty convulsion. He undid his button and zip, the sound obscenely loud in the quiet.
He didn’t hide. He just leaned his head back against the wall, staring at the water stain Leroy had been fixated on. His touch was rough, almost punitive. He thought of the diner pie, the impossible cherry sweetness, and then of Ben’s laugh at The Tipsy Otter last week, warm and full. The images blurred and wouldn’t stick. It was just friction and a mounting, detached urgency.
Across the room, Emily watched from her sweater cave. The commotion had stirred something similar in her, a physical reckoning. She slipped her hand inside her leggings, seeking a sharp, clarifying sensation to cut through the swamp of her head. She bit her lip, focusing on the pressure, building it quickly and without artistry, chasing a chemical snap that would momentarily silence the noise.
Leroy, smelling the fresh puke, felt a final, rebellious surge in his own body. “Ah, hell,” he muttered to himself. He fumbled with his jeans, his movements sluggish. This was pure biology, a last-ditch reset command. He pictured the rugby pitch, the crush of bodies, anything solid and real. A low grunt escaped him as he finished, a brief, shuddering release that left him feeling scraped out and ancient.
Alex, wiping the floor with bleached paper towels, was crying again, soft hopeless tears. The rhythm of his shoulders matched the rhythm of his other hand, moving desperately in his lap as he knelt in the aftermath of his own sickness. It was a bid for any shred of control, a pathetic attempt to prove his body could still produce something other than misery. It was quick, joyless, and followed by a deeper wave of shame.
Reed remained still, a statue. But her breath hitched. She saw them all in her peripheral vision—Leo’s tilted head, the shift of Emily’s arm, Leroy’s tense stillness. A furious, hot pulse answered in her own blood, a traitorous response. She slipped her hand under the back of her waistband, fingers pressing hard against herself. She came in a sharp, silent spasm, her face contorting in the dark not with pleasure but with a furious, defiant release. It felt like punching a wall.
For a moment, the only sound was Alex’s ragged breathing as he tied off the plastic bag of soiled towels. Then Leo let out a long, trembling exhale. He zipped his jeans. The room felt charged with a spent, metallic energy, like the air after a lightning strike.
“Well,” Leo said, his voice hoarse. “That was a thing that happened.”
Emily emerged from her sweater. Her cheeks were flushed. “Yep.”
“We’re monsters,” Alex whispered, still kneeling.
“We’re people who had a really, really bad night,” Reed corrected, but her voice lacked its usual conviction. She felt hollowed out.
Leroy let his head thump back against the couch. “I need a shower. I need a baptism. I need a new soul.”
“The shower’s broken,” Leo said absently, referencing the drip he’d never fixed. “It just mists angrily.”
A weak chuckle moved through them, a phantom pain. They lapsed back into silence, but it was different now. A frontier had been crossed. All pretenses, all layers, were gone. They were just five animals in a den, exhausted and laid bare.
Leo looked at the cracked bathroom tile, visible from where he sat. He’d leave it. A monument to all of this. He looked at his friends—really looked at them, in their ruined, honest states.
“When the sun comes up,” he said slowly, “I’m making coffee. The terrible, burnt kind. And we’re going to drink it.”
“And then what?” Emily asked, her voice small.
“And then we’ll figure it out.”
And for now, that was all. The numb calm held them in a suspended, breathless quiet. Then Alex moved.
He uncurled from his fetal position, the motion fluid and strangely deliberate. His eyes, red-rimmed and glassy, fixed on Leo with a terrifying intensity. He didn’t speak. He just crawled across the five feet of stained carpet separating them, his movements predatory and slow.
Leo watched him come, his own mind a blank wall of static. He didn’t retreat. When Alex’s hands, hot and shaky, gripped the front of his shirt, Leo simply exhaled. It wasn’t a kiss. It was a collision of teeth and sour breath, a desperate grappling for anchor points. Alex tasted of bile and regret.
“Just… feel something else,” Alex muttered against his mouth, the words slurred and thick. His hands were already yanking at Leo’s belt, fingers fumbling. It was a directive, not a request.
Leo complied. A raw, mechanical need overrode every other signal. He shoved Alex back onto the rug, the force bruising. Fabric ripped. It was not lovemaking. It was a clumsy, furious attempt to outrun the crashing emptiness inside them both, a physical scream. The room smelled of sweat and stale alcohol and despair.
Alex gasped, his head arching back. His fingers dug into Leo’s shoulders hard enough to leave crescents. “Don’t stop,” he choked out. “Don’t you fucking stop.”
Leo didn’t. His rhythm was jagged, driven by a pulse that felt like panic. The world narrowed to heat, pressure, and the hammering of his own heart. Alex’s legs hooked around him, pulling him deeper, a wordless demand for obliteration.
Then Alex’s body tensed differently. A guttural, wet click sounded in his throat. His eyes flew open, wide with a new, immediate horror. His stomach convulsed.
He turned his head just in time. A hot, thin stream of acrid yellow liquid shot from his mouth, spattering the rug next to Leo’s knee. The smell was eye-watering, a sharp, vinegar punch in the close air. Alex gagged, his whole body seizing with the involuntary contraction.
Leo froze. For one second, the visceral disgust cut through the frenzy. He stared at the glistening mess inches away.
Alex’s hand slapped against his back, nails biting. “I said don’t stop!” he rasped, the words mangled by the aftertaste. His face was pale, tears of strain leaking from the corners of his eyes. It was a plea from the edge of a cliff.
A switch flipped. Leo drove forward again, harder. The grotesque reality of it—the smell, the wet sound of Alex’s breathing, the chill of the vomit-soaked air on his sweat-slicked skin—fueled a darker, more determined rhythm. It was a rebellion. Against the sickness, against the night, against their own crumbling selves.
Alex moaned, a broken sound of relief and ruin. He didn’t let go.