Chapter 36: Chapter 36
The morning was a brutal reconstruction project. Leo woke with a mouth full of stale gin and static, Alex a warm, heavy line against his back. Someone—Leroy, probably—was snoring a ragged symphony from the living room. The light cutting through the blinds felt personal and aggressive.
They disentangled themselves without a word. The silence wasn’t comfortable, but it was necessary. Leo pulled on his jeans from the damp pile, the denim stiff and unpleasant. Alex stared at the wall, fingers pressed to his temple.
In the living room, the aftermath looked like a peaceful crime scene. Emily was a blanket-lumped form on the armchair. Reed was sprawled on the floor, one arm flung over her eyes. Leroy occupied the entire sofa, mouth open.
“We need grease,” Leroy announced without opening his eyes, sensing their presence. “And aspirin. And a priest.”
The diner was a quiet confession booth of clinking plates and weak coffee. They ate breakfast sandwiches in a focused, medicinal silence. Every crunch of toast was too loud. Emily kept her sunglasses on indoors. Reed methodically dissected her home fries, moving them from one side of the plate to the other.
Alex sat beside Leo, their knees not touching. He stared into his coffee cup as if reading leaves, his earlier openness sealed tight behind a wall of palpable hangover shame. The easy intimacy of the night before had evaporated with the gin, leaving something complicated and raw in its place.
“So,” Emily said finally, pushing her plate away. The sound of the ceramic scraping made Leo flinch. “That happened.”
“Many things happened,” Reed corrected, her voice hoarse. “Sequentially. And then all at once.”
Leroy waved a limp hand. “Can we not? My brain is currently the consistency of undercooked oatmeal. I can’t process narrative.”
But the narrative was processing them. It was in the way Leo caught Alex watching him when he thought Leo wasn’t looking, a quick, hot glance followed by immediate retreat. It was in the thick silence that settled over the table, heavier than the smell of old grease. The river had been a crisis. The sex had been a detonation. Now they were in the debris field, and nobody had a map.
“I have to open the shop,” Alex said abruptly, standing up. The chair legs shrieked against the tile. He wouldn’t meet anyone’s eyes. “I’m… yeah.”
He left money on the table and walked out. The bell over the diner door jingled with a cruel, cheerful finality.
Leo felt the departure like a drop in barometric pressure. The space beside him was just empty air now, but it felt significant.
“Well,” Reed sighed, swirling the dregs of her coffee. “That’s going to be fun to navigate.”
Leroy groaned, laying his forehead on the cool Formica. “Can we navigate to a bar? The therapeutic kind. I need a reset. A hard reboot.”
Emily peeled off her sunglasses, revealing puffy, tired eyes. “It’s not even noon, Leroy.”
“Exactly. The damage is done. We can either sit here marinating in the existential dread, or we can… proceed. Professionally.”
Leo knew it was a terrible idea. His stomach was still a tender, queasy basin. The thought of more alcohol made his saliva glands ache in protest. But the alternative—going home alone to his quiet apartment, to the echoing memory of Alex’s skin against his, to the phantom smell of river water and regret—was infinitely worse.
“The Otter opens at four,” he heard himself say. His voice sounded foreign.
Reed raised an eyebrow. “A siege strategy. I can respect it.”
Emily just shrugged, a gesture of total surrender. “What the hell. My dignity’s in the shop for repairs anyway.”
The Tipsy Otter at 4:07 PM was a different creature. The air was clean, smelling of lemon-scented cleaner and fresh keg lines. The afternoon sun sliced through the front windows, illuminating dancing dust motes and exposing scuffs on the hardwood floor that the nighttime glow usually hid. Sam, the daytime bartender, nodded at them as they filed in, his expression neutral.
“Rough one?” he asked, polishing a pint glass.
“You have no idea,” Leroy said, already sliding onto a barstool. “We need a foundation. Something sturdy. Four shots of your well tequila. And four IPA chasers.”
Sam didn’t blink. He just set about building the liners.
This wasn’t the playful, exploratory drinking of a Friday night. This was a mission. The first tequila shots were a punishment, thrown back with tight, pained faces, chased immediately with bitter, cold beer to smother the fire. It was a chemical intervention, a deliberate blurring of the sharp edges left over from the morning.
The second round was vodka, chilled and clean. This went down easier. The tension in Leo’s shoulders began to loosen, not into relaxation, but into a malleable numbness. The world developed a soft, forgiving focus.
“So you and Alex,” Emily said, not a question but a statement dropped into the new quiet. She traced a pattern in the condensation on her glass.
Leo took a long pull of beer. “There is no me and Alex.”
“There was last night,” Reed pointed out. “Quite audibly.”
“That was the gin. And the river. And the… everything.”
“Bullshit,” Leroy said, swirling his vodka. “That was the thing underneath all the other things. The gin just turned off the alarms.”
The third round was whiskey, ordered by Leroy as a “corrective measure.” By now, the careful, medicinal drinking had metastasized. The goal was no longer a buzz, but an obliteration. Leo could feel it happening in stages. First, the warm blanket. Then, the pleasant detachment. Now, the room was developing a slow, oceanic sway. Sam’s face behind the bar swam in and out of focus.
They moved to a booth. The vinyl seat felt cool and sticky against Leo’s forearms. He couldn’t tell if his own skin was clammy or if the booth was. Time started to jump-cut. Leroy was telling a story about a disastrous camping trip, his words slurry and expansive, his hands carving giant shapes in the air. Emily was laughing, a sharp, loud sound that seemed to come from far away. Reed was texting furiously, then abandoning her phone on the table as if it had offended her.
Leo’s own thoughts were like eels, slippery and impossible to catch. One moment he was replaying the feeling of Alex’s hands on him, the next he was back in the cold, relentless pull of the river. The two sensations began to merge, a confusing loop of panic and want.
He stood up, the motion sending a tidal wave through his inner ear. The floor tilted. “Gonna get another,” he mumbled, though his glass was still half-full of amber liquid.
At the bar, Sam gave him a measured look. “You good, Leo?”
“Peachy.” The word came out thick. “Just… keep them coming.”
He returned with a fresh round of something dark and sweet. The first sip tasted like syrup and burned like regret. He drank it down. The noise of the bar—the growing crowd, the jukebox now playing a pulsing synth-pop song—washed over him in a wave, drowning out the internal noise.
This was the peak. The glorious, weightless summit. He was untouchable. The problems with Alex, the gnawing anxiety about work, the sheer, exhausting weight of being a person—it was all background static, charming and meaningless. He was a balloon tethered loosely to the earth. He laughed at something, he wasn’t sure what, and the sound of his own laughter was delightful.
Then came the tipping point.
It wasn’t a fall, but a gradual, inexorable slide down the other side. The pleasant sway became a nauseating roll. The warm blanket became a sweaty, confining straitjacket. The colors in the bar—the neon sign, the bright label on his bottle—smudged and ran together like a wet painting.
Reed’s face swam into view, her features concerned. “Leo. Your eyes are… very vacant.”
“M’fine,” he slurred. His tongue was a slab of meat in his mouth. “Jus’ hot.”
He tried to stand, to go to the bathroom, to splash water on his face. The connection between his brain and his legs had been severed. He listed sideways, his shoulder thumping into the wall of the booth. The impact felt distant, a rumor from another room.
“Okay, expedition over,” he heard Emily say, her voice cutting through the fog. “We need to extract him.”
Hands were on him, under his arms. Leroy and Reed hauled him up. The floor rushed up to meet him, then receded. The journey to the door was a montage of disjointed sensations: the crush of bodies, a blast of cool evening air that did nothing to clear his head, the gritty texture of brick against his palm as he braced himself.
He was on the sidewalk. The city lights streaked and bled like watercolors. He leaned over, hands on his knees, swallowing hard against the rising tide in his throat.
“Don’t you dare,” Reed commanded. “Not on my shoes. Breathe.”
He breathed. The world pinwheeled. He could hear Emily trying to hail a ride, her voice sharp with urgency. Leroy was patting his back, a rhythmic, pointless gesture.
Inside his skull, the glorious noise had been replaced by a single, ringing truth, clear and terrible in the clarity of absolute poisoning. He had run as hard as he could, first into the river, then into Alex, and now into a bottle. And he was still right here, on a cracked Portland sidewalk, more lost than when he started. The momentum had run out, leaving only the dizzying, hollow freefall.
The shaking against him became a quiet, wet sound. Alex was crying. Leo stayed inside him, motionless, unsure if his touch was wound or solace. He withdrew slowly, the chill air a shock on his damp skin. Alex didn’t turn, just hitched his sweatpants up, his back still a tense wall.
“Don’t,” Alex said, the word ragged.
He walked out of the alley without looking back, leaving Leo to fasten his jeans with numb fingers in the stinking dark. The drunk had curdled. Leo stumbled onto the sidewalk, the streetlights starbursts in his vision. He needed water. He needed to not be alone. His phone was dead.
The bell above the door of the all-night diner clanged like an alarm. The fluorescent lights were a sonic assault. He saw her immediately, a shock of familiar color in a vinyl booth. Emily. She was pushing a wedge of greasy pie around a plate, a cup of coffee steaming beside her. She looked up, her eyes widening at his disheveled state.
“Rough night?” she asked, her voice soft with a concern he couldn’t bear.
He slid into the booth opposite her. The vinyl sighed under his weight. “You could say that.”
He didn’t elaborate. She didn’t press. She pushed the coffee toward him. He drank it black, the bitterness a grounding force. They sat in a silence that was different from the one with Alex; this one was padded with years of friendship, a space where words could wait. Her knee bumped his under the table, a steadying point of contact.
“Reed went home. Headache,” Emily said, tracing the rim of her cup. “I couldn’t face my apartment yet. Too quiet.”
“Yeah.”
“You smell like a bar floor. And other things.”
“Yeah.”
She studied him, her gaze catching the red scrape on his knuckle from the alley brick. A faint understanding dawned in her eyes, shadowed with her own unspoken mess. She didn’t mention Alex’s name. It hovered there anyway.
“Come on,” she said finally, tossing some cash on the Formica. “My place is closer. You need aspirin that isn’t from a bathroom floor.” Her apartment was a curated chaos of plants and bold art, usually a comfort. Tonight it felt like a museum of a life he wasn’t living. She handed him a glass of water and two pills, which he swallowed obediently. The quiet here was different, expectant. The memory of the alley was a film on his skin. He could still feel the brick grit, hear that choked sound Alex made. He needed it gone.
“Talk or distract?” Emily asked, leaning against her kitchen counter, arms folded.
“Distract,” Leo said, his voice rough. “Please.”
She nodded slowly. She walked over to him, placed her hands on his shoulders, and turned him to face her. Her touch was firm, not tentative. “Okay. But this stays here. This is just tonight. This is just us being… lost.”
She kissed him. It was nothing like the desperate, punishing clashes with Alex. This was exploratory, sober despite the alcohol in their systems, a question asked with lips and tongue. Leo answered, pulling her against him. Her body was softer, familiar in a different way. They undressed without haste, clothes piling on her brightly colored rug. He saw the faint tan lines on her skin, the scatter of freckles across her collarbones. It was real, and simple, and he clung to that simplicity.
He touched her breast, his thumb circling her nipple until it tightened. She arched into his hand with a low sigh. “That’s good,” she whispered, guiding his other hand between her legs. She was already wet. Her fingers closed over his, showing him the pressure she liked. “Just like that.”
They moved to her bed. The sheets smelled like her lavender detergent. He kissed down her stomach, his stubble dragging against her soft skin. When he put his mouth on her, she cried out, her hands fisting in his hair. He licked and sucked, learning her rhythms, drowning his thoughts in her taste and her gasped instructions. “Yes, right there, don’t stop, Leo, don’t you fucking stop.” Her thighs trembled against his ears. She came with a sharp, shuddering cry, her hips lifting off the mattress.
Before the pulses had fully faded, she was pushing him onto his back, straddling him. She reached for a condom on her nightstand, rolled it onto him with efficient hands. She sank down onto his cock in one smooth, slow motion, her head falling back. “Fuck,” she breathed, her internal muscles fluttering around him as she adjusted.
She began to move, a deep, rolling grind that made him see stars. He gripped her hips, the soft flesh yielding under his fingers. The pace was relentless, building a friction that was pure sensation, a brilliant fire that burned away memory. He watched her face, her eyes shut tight, her lips parted. She was with him, but somewhere else too, exorcising her own ghosts.
“Harder,” she gasped, slamming down onto him. “I want to feel it tomorrow.”
He thrust up, meeting her, the bedframe knocking a steady rhythm against the wall. It was loud, sweaty, and profoundly functional. He felt his orgasm gathering, a tight coil in his gut. “Em, I’m close.”
“Come,” she commanded, riding him faster. “Come inside me.”
It hit him like a system shock, a raw, draining release that left him gasping. She clenched around him, milking it, until she collapsed forward onto his chest, her sweat slick between them. They lay there, a tangled heap of spent breath.
In the silence that followed, the reality of it trickled back in. The lavender sheets. Emily’s familiar weight. The condom, a stark reminder of a boundary that had just been erased. She pushed herself up, looked down at him, her expression unreadable. She peeled off the condom, tied it, and tossed it toward the wastebasket. She missed.
Neither of them moved to pick it up. It lay there on the floor, a small, shameful monument to the night. She rolled off him and stared at the ceiling. Leo’s mind, finally clear of liquor and lust, was now horrifyingly vacant. He had chased the feeling of being nowhere, and he had found it. Here, in his best friend’s bed, all he felt was a vast, echoing absence. The chaos he’d tried to outrun had finally, quietly, caught up.
Alex’s shoulders shook, but whether from laughter or something else, Leo couldn’t tell in the dark. They disentangled themselves, clothing damp and sullied with alley filth, and walked the remaining blocks to Alex’s apartment in a silence so complete it felt like its own language. Sleep, when it came, was a form of unconsciousness, black and without dreams.
The next afternoon arrived as a punishment. Leo woke on Alex’s floor, his mouth glued shut, a single, vicious point of pain burning behind his left eye. The memories of the previous night arrived not as a flood, but in sharp, stabbing still-images: the murky shot glasses, the feel of brick against his raw knuckles, Alex’s choked cry echoing off the dumpster. He heard retching from the bathroom. It went on for a long time.
They didn’t discuss it. They moved through the apartment like ghosts, swallowing aspirin with gulps of flat seltzer. A text from Emily glowed on Leo’s screen: Otter. 8pm. We are burning the memory of that river water out of our systems. It felt less like an invitation and more like a summons to a required debriefing.
By 9:30 that night, the mission was clear and unanimously embraced: obliteration. The four of them—Leo, Alex, Emily, and Reed—occupied their usual booth, but the atmosphere was different, charged with a collective need to outrun the preceding days. They skipped the beer entirely. They started with tequila, salt-lick-slam-lemon, the ritual performed with grim efficiency. Then whiskey shots, lined up like soldiers. Then something clear and oily the bartender called “Swampwater.”
Leo felt the drunk hit him not as a gentle wave but as a sudden elevator drop. The background music in The Tipsy Otter, usually a thrumming bassline, became a physical entity, a pulse he could feel in his molars. The colored lights from the jukebox smeared across his vision like wet oil paint. When he reached for his fresh drink, his hand traveled a great, slow distance, fingers closing with exaggerated care around the cool glass.
“My face is numb,” Emily announced, her words slurring into a single, mushy sentence. “Like, professionally numb.” She poked her own cheek with a dull thud. Reed, usually so composed, let out a snort of laughter that was utterly inelegant. She was leaning heavily against the wall, her sharp eyes now soft and unfocused.
Alex was the quietest, drinking with a steady, ominous pace. His eyes were glassy, fixed on nothing. He’d look at Leo sometimes, a long, blank stare that held the echo of the alley, of the river, of everything they hadn’t said. Then he’d blink, as if resetting, and drain his glass.
“I can’t feel my legs,” Leo said, the statement coming out with a wonder he didn’t feel. It was true. From the waist down, he was just a vague, warm support system.
“That’s because you pissed yourself,” Reed said, deadpan.
He looked down in genuine, slow-motion panic. He hadn’t. “Fuck you.”
“Prove it,” she challenged, a lazy smirk on her lips.
The conversation became elliptical, nonsensical, looping back on itself. They ordered a round of “Flatliners”—151 proof rum with a drop of Tabasco. It tasted like industrial cleaner and regret. After it, the world lost its cohesive borders. Leo watched as Emily attempted to explain the plot of a film she’d seen, but she lost the thread halfway through, her mouth moving around forgotten nouns. Reed just nodded, her chin dipping toward her chest before she jerked it back up.
Alex stood, swaying like a sapling in a strong wind. “Air,” he muttered. “Need air.” He listed toward the back hallway, where the restrooms and the emergency exit were.
Reed watched him go, her hazy gaze tracking his unsteady path. A minute later, she slid from the booth. “Gonna make sure he doesn’t drown in a toilet.” Her walk was a careful, straight line, a study in concentrated willpower against the chaos of the alcohol.
Leo and Emily sat in a companionable, sloshing silence. The noise of the bar was now a distant ocean roar. Leo’s head felt too heavy for his neck. He let it rest against the cool vinyl of the booth. Time slipped. He didn’t know if it was two minutes or twenty before he realized neither Alex nor Reed had returned.
The back hallway was narrow and poorly lit, smelling of pine disinfectant and stale cigarettes. The music was muffled here. He saw them almost immediately. They were not by the bathrooms. They were in the shallow alcove by the chained emergency door, a pocket of near-darkness.
Reed had Alex pinned against the wall, her body pressed flush against his. One of her hands was tangled in his hair, pulling his head back. The other was under his shirt, moving in a slow, deliberate rub over his chest. They were kissing, but it wasn’t romantic. It was a clash, all teeth and wet, frantic noise. Alex’s hands were on her hips, gripping the fabric of her dress, rucking it up.
Leo froze, the drunk sensation crystallizing into a sharp, sobering spike of something ugly. He should leave. He couldn’t move.
Reed broke the kiss, breathing hard. “You’re a fucking mess,” she whispered, her voice rough, not unkind.
“I know,” Alex choked out, his head thumping back against the wall. “Just… do something.”
She dropped to her knees. The sound of Alex’s zipper was obscenely loud in the hallway. She didn’t hesitate. She took his soft cock into her mouth, her hands cupping him, working him with a brutal, experienced urgency. Alex groaned, a shattered sound, his eyes clenched shut. His fingers flexed in her hair, not guiding, just holding on. Leo watched, transfixed, as Reed worked him with a focused, almost clinical dedication. She used her tongue, her lips, the flat of her hand on his balls, until Alex was fully hard in her mouth, his body tensing.
“Stop,” Alex gasped, pulling her up by her shoulders. His eyes were wild. “Not like this. I want to fuck you.”
Reed searched his face. She gave a single, sharp nod. She turned around, bracing her forearms high against the wall, pushing her ass back toward him. The dark fabric of her dress was a pool around her waist. Alex yanked her panties down to her knees. He spat into his hand, a crude, wet sound, and slicked himself. He was not gentle. He drove into her with one sharp, deep thrust that made Reed gasp, her head bowing between her shoulders.
He fucked her with a hard, steady rhythm, each impact a muted thud of flesh against flesh. Reed pushed back into him, meeting each stroke. Her composure was gone, replaced by a raw, grunting exertion. “Yeah,” she hissed, “like that. Fucking use it.”
Alex’s face was a mask of pained concentration, his movements driven by something far beyond pleasure. This was punishment, or exorcism, or both. His hands gripped her hips hard enough to leave marks. The air reeked of sex and sweat and spilled liquor. It was over quickly. Alex shuddered, his entire body locking as he came inside her with a stifled, animal noise. Reed followed, a low moan escaping her as she rubbed herself frantically against him, her own climax sharp and sudden.
They stayed like that, slumped and panting, for a handful of seconds. Then Reed straightened, pulling her dress down, her movements regaining their usual precise control even in the drunkenness. Alex fumbled with his jeans, his back to the hallway, to Leo.
Leo stepped back, silent, into the shadows of the main bar before they could turn. The roar of sound hit him again, disorienting and false. He walked back to the booth, each step a negotiation with a tilting floor. Emily was half-asleep, her head cradled in her arms.
He sat down. His drink was still there, the ice melted into a watery dilution. He picked it up and drank it all, the warm, weak liquid doing nothing. The images played behind his eyes on a relentless loop: the river, the alley brick, Reed’s dress pooling at her waist. They were all just trying to feel something else. Anything else.
Alex and Reed returned separately, moments apart. Reed’s lipstick was smeared. Alex wouldn’t meet anyone’s eyes. No one spoke of it. The drinking was done. The momentum of the night was spent, crashed against the rocks of what had just happened. They called a ride, a silent, nauseous caravan heading into the deep, uncertain dark.