Chapter 66: Chapter 66
The paperwork could no longer wait. It sat between them on the cleaned kitchen table, a stark white accusation. Sam’s pen tapped a staccato rhythm against the woodgrain. Arthur stared at a water stain on the ceiling, as if the answer lay in its amorphous shape. The silence was a physical thing, swollen with all the words they’d drank to avoid.
“Question four,” Sam said, his voice gravelly from the hangover and disuse. “‘Describe your support network.’” He let out a short, humorless laugh. “Do traumatized uncles and a sister who communicates exclusively in botanical Latin count?”
“Put down Leo and Alex,” Arthur said, not looking away from the stain. “They showed up. However fucked up it was, they showed up.” He finally lowered his gaze, meeting Sam’s. “That’s the model we’ve got. Messy people trying. Write that.”
Sam’s pen stopped tapping. He wrote something down, the scratch of the nib loud in the quiet. They worked in fits and starts, the process like digging at frozen earth. They argued over the semantics of ‘stability.’ They drank gallons of water. They ordered pizza and ate it straight from the box, grease spotting the form’s edges. It felt, for moments, like progress.
The key turned in the front door just after midnight. The sound was wrong—clumsy, metallic, scraping. It was followed by a muffled giggle, a thud, and the sound of retching. Sam and Arthur froze, a shared, weary look passing between them. Sofia. They’d forgotten she was out.
The hallway light blazed on, revealing a scene of damp dishevelment. Sofia, now 22, was propped against the wall, her sequined top askew, mascara smudged into raccoon circles under her eyes. A tall, lanky man with shaggy blond hair was hunched over their potted fern, vomiting profusely onto the soil. The acidic, sweet-sour stench of vodka and stomach contents filled the air.
“Oops,” Sofia slurred, waving a dismissive hand. “Markus missed. S’okay. Plants need food, right?” She giggled again, then her face paled. She clapped a hand over her mouth, stumbling towards the bathroom. The sound of more vomiting echoed down the hall.
The man, Markus, straightened up, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. He offered a bleary, apologetic smile. “Deeply, profoundly sorry about your… fern.” His words were thick, syrup-slow. “She said you were cool. You seem cool.”
Arthur stood, his expression flat. “Bathroom’s down there. Clean yourself up.” He gestured vaguely, then looked at Sam. “I’ll get the bleach.”
An hour later, the hall was sanitized, the soiled fern banished to the fire escape. Sofia had emerged from the bathroom, washed and changed into sweatpants, a brittle, drunken energy still buzzing around her. Markus, damp-haired and sheepish, sat on the edge of the living room sofa, nursing a glass of water.
“You should go,” Sam said, his tone leaving no room for debate.
“He can’t go,” Sofia protested, swaying slightly. “It’s raining. He’s nice. He’s from Denmark.” She said this as if it explained everything. She flopped onto the sofa next to Markus, her hand landing on his thigh. “We’re having fun.”
Markus looked at Sam and Arthur, his eyes glazed. “I can… I can sleep on floor. Very small. Like a mouse.”
Arthur pinched the bridge of his nose. The foster application seemed like a relic from a different, more sensible universe. “Fine. The floor. One blanket. You’re gone at sunrise.”
But Sofia had other plans. Her hands were on Markus’s face, pulling him into a sloppy, open-mouthed kiss. It was all tongue and wet noise. Markus, after a moment of stunned paralysis, reciprocated with a drunk’s enthusiasm. His hand slid up under her baggy t-shirt.
“For god’s sake, not in here,” Arthur snapped.
Sofia broke the kiss, her eyes challenging. “My room, then.” She hauled Markus up, and they stumbled down the hallway, a four-legged creature of pure id, collapsing through her doorway. It slammed shut.
Sam and Arthur stood in the living room, listening. There was laughter, then the heavy thump of bodies on a bed. Then silence, followed by the low, unmistakable murmur of drunken arousal. Sam exhaled, a long, slow release of breath. He walked to the hall, hesitated outside Sofia’s door, and then turned the lock from the outside with a soft, definitive click. A small measure of control. He pocketed the key.
Back in their own room, the sounds were muffled but perceptible. The rhythmic creak of bedsprings. A low male groan. Sofia’s higher, gasping laugh. Arthur got into bed, staring at the ceiling. “She’s exorcising something,” he said quietly.
“Aren’t we all?” Sam replied, lying stiffly beside him.
The sounds from down the hall grew more distinct. They could hear the wet, slapping rhythm of skin on skin, unadorned by music or subtlety. Markus was saying something, his voice a guttural, accented rumble. “Yes, there, just like that, you fucking take it.”
Sofia’s response was a sharp, high cry, swallowed by what sounded like a pillow. The headboard began knocking against the wall with a mechanical, relentless tempo. Thump. Thump. Thump.
Sam felt a sick, familiar heat in his gut. It wasn’t arousal. It was recognition. The obliterating, noisy fuck. The using of a body to silence the brain. He’d written its instruction manual in his twenties. Hearing it now, through the wall, performed by the girl they’d pulled from the wreckage of their own history, felt like a violation and a mirror.
“Jesus,” Arthur muttered, rolling onto his side, putting his back to the wall.
The pace from next door increased, the knocking becoming frantic, percussive. Markus was grunting now, a sharp, animalistic “uh, uh, uh,” with each thrust. Sofia cried out again, a raw, shredded sound that might have been pain or pleasure or pure release. It ended with a final, shuddering crash of the headboard and a long, groaned exhalation from the man. Then silence, deep and total.
The quiet that followed was heavier than the noise. It pressed on the house. Sam imagined the two drunken strangers, collapsed in a tangle of damp sheets, the void rushing back in. He thought of the cold, sticky feel of the living room rug against his back, the taste of bourbon and bile. The hollow echo afterward. He reached out in the dark, found Arthur’s hand, and laced their fingers together. Their grip was tight, an anchor in the shared, understanding dark.
Down the hall, in the sudden quiet, Sofia lay staring at the foreign ceiling stain above her bed. Markus, already snoring lightly, was a heavy, warm weight beside her, his smell a mix of vomit, cheap cologne, and sex. The frantic energy that had possessed her was gone, leaving a cavernous emptiness in its place. She carefully extricated herself, stepping over the pile of his clothes. In the dim light from the streetlamp, she saw the key was missing from her door. A sharp, clear pang of shame lanced through the alcoholic fog. She heard the faint, steady murmur of voices from Sam and Arthur’s room. Not angry. Just talking. The solidity of it made her want to weep. She crawled back into the bed, as far from the sleeping stranger as she could, and waited for the punishing dawn.
He filled her glass again. The vodka was cheap and warm, tasting of nail polish remover and synthetic lemon. It didn’t matter. Nothing in the pulsating, strobing dark of the club mattered except the obliterating thump of the bass and the sweat-slick press of bodies. Sofia, at twenty-two, moved with a liquid looseness that came from five poorly-mixed drinks. Her world had narrowed to color and sound and the handsome, blurry face of the man whose hands were on her hips.
“You’re fucking gorgeous,” he shouted into the space between her ear and shoulder. His breath was sour with beer.
“You’re fucking loud!” she shouted back, laughing, a sound she couldn’t even hear. He grinned. His name was Jake, or maybe it was Jack. His hands slid down to cradle her ass, pulling her against the hard line of his erection through his jeans. She ground against him, a rhythmless, pleasurable friction. The room tilted on a gentle axis.
Later, much later, they stumbled out into the needle-sharp cold of the early morning. The silence was a physical shock. The nausea, held at bay by motion and noise, rose instantly. Sofia leaned against a grimy brick wall, the world swooning. Jake—it was Jake, he’d shown a card—braced his hands on his knees, dry-heaving.
“Fuck,” he groaned.
“My flat’s close,” she managed, spitting bile. It wasn’t a decision; it was the only possible next step in the physics of their evening. Walking was a precarious negotiation. They weaved, supporting each other’s staggering weight, a four-legged creature of pure sickness and intent. The city lights smeared into halos. Every few steps, one of them would halt, swallow convulsively, and they would stand still like mourners until the wave passed.
Somehow, she got her key in the door. The hallway of the flat she shared with Sam and Arthur was preternaturally still and dark. “Shhh,” she slurred, finger to her lips, though Jake hadn’t spoken. They kicked off their shoes, the thumps obscenely loud. Her room was a cave of laundry and incense ash. They fell onto the bed in a tangle, the springs groaning.
There was no preamble, no tenderness. It was a collision of urgent, drunk need. He kissed her, his tongue shoving thick and clumsy into her mouth. She tasted vodka, cigarettes, and the metallic tang of impending vomit. His hands groped under her dress, wrenching her tights and underwear down around her thighs. She fumbled with his belt, her fingers numb and useless. He finally swatted her hands away and undid it himself, shoving his jeans and boxers down to his knees.
He was hard, a crude, insistent pressure against her belly. She was wet, a slippery, automatic response divorced from any real desire. “Condom,” she mumbled into his neck.
“Fuck. Yeah.” He patted his discarded jeans, retrieved his wallet, ripped a foil packet open with his teeth. She watched, head spinning, as he rolled it on. The latex smell was briefly, nauseatingly sharp. Then he was on her, between her legs, his weight driving the air from her lungs. He guided himself with one hand, pushing bluntly against her. It hurt for a second, a dry, tearing ache, before the alcohol-numb and her own slickness opened for him.
He slid inside in one rough, complete stroke. “Oh shit,” he grunted.
Sofia gasped, a sharp intake that wasn’t pleasure but acknowledgment. He began to move, a fast, shallow, piston-like rhythm. The bedframe knocked a frantic, rhythmic complaint against the wall. His breathing was ragged in her ear, hot and damp. Her own body felt distant, a vessel being used. She wrapped her legs around his waist, heels digging into his ass, trying to find a angle that felt like something. He bit her shoulder, not playfully, and his thrusts became harder, more erratic.
“You feel so fucking tight,” he panted. “Take it, take my cock.”
She moaned, a sound she manufactured to fill the space, to participate in the script. Her nausea rolled in her gut with each drive of his hips. The smell of their sweat, of sex and cheap beer, filled the small room. She could hear the wet, rhythmic slap of their bodies coming together, a vulgar, intimate percussion.
He came quickly, with a strangled, guttural cry, his body stiffening atop her. She felt the condom swell inside her, a vague, foreign pulse. He collapsed, his dead weight crushing her, his face in her hair. He was asleep, or unconscious, within seconds.
Sofia lay pinned, staring at the ceiling. The nausea crested, overwhelming. She shoved at him, hard. He rolled off with a groan, already snoring. She stumbled to her feet, her tights and underwear a hobble around her ankles, and barely made it to the small ensuite bathroom before she vomited violently into the toilet. She retched until her stomach was empty and her eyes streamed. She sat on the cold tiles, resting her forehead on the porcelain rim. From the bedroom, the stranger’s snore was a steady, grinding saw.
In the living room, under the single lamp Sam had left on, the paperwork was no longer a passive object. It was a country they were finally, grimly, mapping. They had moved past the personal history questions. They were in the thick of the situational assessments, the hypotheticals.
How would you manage a child’s night terrors?
Sam’s pen hovered. “We’d sit with them,” he said, his voice low in the quiet. “In the dark. Not try to talk them out of it. Just be there until the awful pictures faded.”
Arthur nodded, writing. Provide quiet, physical presence. Validate the fear as real, without reinforcing the fantasy.
What is your philosophy on discipline?
“We don’t hit,” Arthur said flatly, a line drawn in bedrock.
“No,” Sam agreed. “But it’s more than that. It’s about the ledger, isn’t it? The inevitable fucking ledger.” He leaned back, the leather couch sighing. “They’ll do something. Break something. Lie. And we’ll have to find a consequence that doesn’t feel like revenge. That doesn’t just balance a sheet, but… teaches the accounting.”
Arthur looked at him, a slow understanding dawning. “So we teach them the math. Honestly. This happened, so this follows. Not because we’re angry, but because that’s how the equations work.”
Sam let out a long breath. “Yeah. That’s it.”
They wrote in silence for a while, the scratch of pen on paper the only sound. Then, from down the hall, a new noise filtered in. The distinct, rhythmic knock of a bedframe against a wall. It was unmistakeable, followed by the muffled, male grunt of culmination, then silence.
Sam and Arthur froze. Their eyes met across the coffee table. A complex blankness passed between them—a swirl of concern for Sofia, of intrusive memory, of the sheer, awkward reality of shared walls and separate, private lives.
Arthur finally broke the gaze, looking back at the form. “She’s twenty-two.”
“I know.”
Another sound: the shuddering, unmistakable retch of vomiting from the bathroom. Then water running.
Sam closed his eyes for a second. “We should…”
“We shouldn’t,” Arthur said softly, but firmly. “Unless she calls for help. She’s an adult. She gets to have her own messy nights.” He tapped the paper with his pen. “This is ours.”
They returned to the questions, the sounds from the hallway a stark underscore to their own deliberate quiet. Describe your support network. Arthur began listing names: Leo, Alex, Emily, Reed. Sam added a few old friends from art school, his gruff but loyal studio manager. It was a stronger list than he’d anticipated.
The knocking started again, tentative at first, then firm.
Both men looked up. It wasn’t coming from Sofia’s room. It was the front door.
Sam stood, his body stiff from sitting. He padded to the door and looked through the peephole. A young man, maybe nineteen, shivering in a thin jacket, stood shifting from foot to foot. Sam opened the door a crack, the chain engaged.
“Yeah?”
“Uh, sorry. Is… is Sofia here? She texted me the address but my phone died.” He looked past Sam, hopeful, sheepish.
Sam stared at him. This was a different one. From before the club. The night was layering itself in Sofia’s life with a chaotic, youthful carelessness. He felt a surge of something protective and deeply weary. “She’s asleep,” Sam said, his voice leaving no room. “Try tomorrow.”
He closed the door. The knock didn’t come again. He heard the kid’s footsteps recede down the hall. When he returned to the couch, Arthur had written a final line on a separate sheet, an addendum to the support network question.
We provide a stable, if unconventional, home. The doors are locked, but they are open. The mornings here are often quiet, and sometimes someone is hungover. But the coffee is always made, and no one is ever turned away.
Sam read it. He didn’t smile, but the tight coil in his chest eased, just a fraction. In the hall, Sofia’s bathroom door opened and closed. A stranger snored in her bed. Out in the city, a rejected boy walked toward a dead phone and a cold bus stop. And in the pool of lamplight, two men meticulously, fearfully, hopefully, built a case for their capacity to care for a broken child, while the fractured adult one they’d already taken in slept off her mistakes behind a thin wall. The paperwork was almost complete. The night was almost over. None of them were clean.
The paperwork could no longer wait. It sat between them on the refurbished library table, a crisp, white accusation. Sam’s pen tapped a staccato rhythm on the wood. Arthur stared at the question about ‘family support systems’ until the words blurred into a gray smear. The silence wasn’t companionable; it was dense, a wall they’d built together over weeks of avoidance.
“We could say we have a robust network,” Sam said, the lie sounding flimsy even to his own ears. “Leo, Alex, Emily. That’s a network, right?”
“A network of shared trauma,” Arthur replied, not looking up. “That’s not what they’re asking. They’re asking if we have someone to call when it all goes to shit.” He finally met Sam’s gaze. “We are the ones everyone calls.”
The truth of it filled the room, colder than the autumn air seeping through the old window frames. They were the stable ones, the repaired ones, and the isolation of that role was suddenly terrifying. The foster child they imagined was a phantom of need, a bottomless well that would drink their hard-won stability dry. Sam pushed back from the table, the chair legs shrieking. “I can’t breathe in here.”
He grabbed his jacket and was gone, the door clicking shut with a terrible finality. Arthur didn’t follow. He listened to Sam’s footsteps fade down the street. He looked at the form, at his own clenched fist. He had built homes for other people his entire adult life. The prospect of building a real one, with its intangible, terrifying wiring of love and fear, felt like being asked to construct a cathedral with his bare, trembling hands.
Across town, the bass was a physical thing, a throbbing pressure in the chest that made thinking obsolete. Sofia preferred it that way. The lights stuttered and strobed, carving the dancing crowd into jerking, anonymous fragments. She was 22, and the smell of spilled vodka and cheap perfume was the smell of freedom, a potent antidote to the quiet, weighty conversations that now filled the flat. Her fathers’ silent anxiety was a fog, and she needed to outrun it.
She met his eyes over the rim of her third, possibly fourth, plastic cup of something sweet and toxic. He was broad in the shoulders, with a smile that was all white teeth in the strobe-light flash. His name was Kian, or maybe Cian. It didn’t matter. His hand was warm and heavy on the small of her back as they danced, his breath hot and beer-scented against her neck. The music swallowed words. Communication was reduced to the press of bodies, the agreeable friction of his jeans against her thigh, the shared, sloshing laughter as they stumbled together towards the bar for another round.
The world had developed a pleasing, liquid tilt. The nausea was a distant warning, a gentle rock of the floor that she rode like a wave. “You’re fucking gorgeous,” he shouted into her ear, his words slurring into one long sound.
“You’re fucking drunk!” she shouted back, grinning.
“So are you!” He pulled her closer, his hand slipping down to cup her ass through her dress. The possessiveness of it, the sheer unthinking claim, was electric. It required nothing from her but presence. It was the opposite of paperwork.
The cold night air outside the club hit them like a slap. The pleasant tilt became a violent sway. Sofia clutched a lamppost, the metal slick and freezing. Her stomach clenched. Kian—Cian—was beside her, one hand braced against the brick wall, his head bowed. “Oh, fuck,” he moaned. “Spinning.”
“Don’t you dare puke,” she giggled, the sound thin and strange in the sudden quiet of the street. “Not yet. My place. It’s close.”
The walk was a five-minute journey that stretched into a humiliating odyssey. They weaved, arm-in-arm for balance, their footsteps scraping and stumbling. Every car headlight was a lance through her eyes. The kebab shop they passed emitted a greasy smell that made her saliva pool dangerously. Kian burped, a wet, sour sound, and mumbled an apology. This was the consequence, visceral and immediate. This was feeling something, even if it was just the raw protest of her own body.
She fumbled with her keys at the door of the ground-floor flat, shushing his too-loud laughter. The interior was dark and still. Sam and Arthur were upstairs, asleep or pretending to be. The silence of the home felt judgmental. She led him to her bedroom, kicking dirty laundry aside.
They fell onto the bed in a tangle of limbs and damp coats. The sex was not intimacy; it was a biological event, a messy continuation of the night’s momentum. His mouth was on hers, tasting of beer and sick. He groped under her dress, his fingers clumsy as they hooked into the waistband of her underwear and yanked them down. She helped him, shoving his jeans over his hips, her own fingers fumbling with his belt.
He was hard, a thick, insistent pressure against her thigh. He didn’t ask. He spat into his own hand, a rough, pragmatic sound in the dark, and rubbed the wetness between her legs. It wasn’t enough. She was dry, tense from the alcohol and the walk and the sheer mechanical nature of it. He pushed into her anyway.
She gasped, a sharp intake of breath that was more shock than pleasure. It hurt, a blunt, stretching ache. “Fuck,” he grunted, his body heavy on top of hers. He began to move, a slow, grinding rhythm that felt less like connection and more like a task being completed. The bedsprings creaked a loud, rhythmic complaint. She turned her head to the side, her face pressed into the pillow, smelling her own shampoo and the alien sweat from his skin.
His thrusts became faster, more erratic. He fucked her with a single-minded intensity, his breath hot and ragged in her ear. “Yeah, take it,” he mumbled, words devoid of meaning, just vocalized exertion. She felt a distant, detached sensation, a building pressure that had nothing to do with him and everything to do with her own body’s confused response. She closed her eyes, focusing on that faint, internal spark, using the crude friction to chase it.
He came with a stifled groan, his whole body seizing, his cock pulsing deep inside her. He collapsed, his dead weight pinning her. After a moment, he rolled off, already breathing heavily towards sleep. Lying there, feeling the slick, uncomfortable leak between her legs, the nausea returned with a vengeance. It climbed her throat, acidic and urgent.
She stumbled to her en-suite bathroom, barely making it to the toilet before she vomited, a violent, shuddering evacuation of vodka, mixer, and shame. She knelt on the cold tiles, forehead against the porcelain, waiting for the spasms to stop. When they did, a hollow clarity took their place. She heard him snore from her bed.
She cleaned up. She didn’t look in the mirror. She pulled on an old t-shirt and cautiously slid back into bed, keeping to the very edge. The stranger’s scent, the smell of sex and the club, filled her space. The flat around her was silent. Her fathers were upstairs, probably facing their own form of terror, a quiet, bureaucratic one. She had chosen a louder, more physical terror, and it was currently snoring beside her. Dawn was still hours away. She lay rigid, staring at the ceiling, waiting for the room to stop spinning, trapped between the weight of the future in the rooms above her and the empty, present-tense mistake breathing heavily in her bed.