Chapter 22: Chapter 22
The silence in the bedroom was a physical weight. Jake stared at the water stain on the ceiling he’d memorized during quieter moments, Ethan’s familiar scent now buried under sweat and foreign perfume. Mia stumbled back from the bathroom, her dress only half pulled down. “I’m so fucking thirsty,” she announced to no one, her voice raspy.
Chloe rolled off the bed, naked and unselfconscious. “There’s gotta be booze here. You got booze, right?” She didn’t wait for an answer, padding out to the living room. The refrigerator door opened with a suck of sound, a wash of white light spilling down the hall.
Ethan finally moved. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, his back to Jake, a solid, silent shape in the dark. He stood, walked to his dresser, and pulled on a pair of grey sweatpants. The gesture was so mundane, so utterly divorced from the last hour, that it felt like a slap.
“Here we go!” Chloe’s voice echoed. She returned clutching a half-empty bottle of cheap whiskey and a nearly full handle of citrus vodka. “No mixers. We’re doing this pure.”
Mia took the vodka, unscrewed the cap, and took a long, gulping pull. She winced, shuddered, and passed it to Chloe. Chloe drank, then offered the whiskey bottle toward the bed. Ethan took it. He didn’t drink. He just held it, his fingers tight around the neck.
His eyes met Jake’s over Chloe’s shoulder. In the dim light, they were hollow. “Jake,” he said, his voice rough.
Jake understood. He pushed himself up, his body feeling used and strangely heavy. He took the whiskey bottle from Ethan’s hand. Their fingers brushed. Ethan’s were cold. Jake tipped the bottle back. The whiskey was fire, a punishing cleanse. It burned away the taste of Mia, the smell of Chloe, for one searing second.
“Your turn, big guy,” Chloe said, taking the bottle from Jake and shoving it against Ethan’s chest.
Ethan drank. He drank deeply, his throat working. When he lowered the bottle, he wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, his eyes glistening. “Again,” he said, his voice flat.
The bottle began to circulate. Chloe sat on the floor, her back against the bed. Mia joined her, folding her legs under her. It wasn’t a party. It was a wake. Each swallow was a deliberate act of erosion, blurring the sharp, terrible edges of what they’d just done.
Jake slid down to the floor beside Ethan, their shoulders touching. The contact was electric and necessary. Chloe talked, her words slurring into a meaningless stream about a vacation in Miami, a friend who was a DJ. Mia interjected with loud, pointless laughter. Jake and Ethan said nothing. They just drank.
The whiskey vanished. The vodka level sank. The room began to tilt on a different axis, a slower, thicker spin. The shame in Jake’s gut diluted, mixing with the alcohol into a numb, buzzing paste. He watched Chloe’s mouth move, the glitter from her top dusted on her collarbone. He took the vodka handle from Mia and drank directly from it, the citrus burn now familiar, almost friendly.
“You guys are fucking quiet,” Chloe said, pointing a wobbly finger at them. “We just had the hottest fucking four-way and you’re sitting there like… like sad puppies.” She giggled, but it was edged with something mean.
Ethan took the bottle from Jake. “Not sad,” he said, the words thick. “Just thinking.”
“’Bout what?” Mia asked, crawling closer to him on her knees. She put a hand on his thigh.
Ethan looked down at her hand, then at Jake. A current passed between them, charged with alcohol and a shared, desperate understanding. The women were a problem to be solved. A consequence to be obliterated. The earlier animal heat was gone, replaced by a different kind of need—a need to reclaim the space, the night, each other.
“’Bout how you’re still dressed,” Ethan said to Mia, his voice dropping into a low, performative growl. It was the voice he used in the club, not the one he used reading in bed.
Mia’s eyes lit up with drunk recognition. “So fix it.”
Ethan didn’t move. He looked at Jake. “You fix it.”
The command hung in the boozy air. Jake’s mind, slow and submerged, understood. This was a test. A penance. A way back. He pushed himself onto his knees, the world swaying. He reached for the hem of Mia’s short black dress. She raised her arms, a childlike gesture. He pulled it up and over her head. She wasn’t wearing a bra. Her small breasts were pale in the gloom.
Chloe watched, her eyes heavy-lidded. “Yeah,” she slurred. “That’s better.”
But Ethan’s attention was on Chloe. “You’re overdressed too.” Chloe, eager, peeled off her torn sequined top, then wiggled out of her panties. Now they were all naked again, but the context had shattered. This wasn’t mutual passion. It was a drunken, directive salvage operation.
Ethan nudged Jake. “Go on.”
Jake leaned in and kissed Mia. Her mouth was slack, yielding. He tasted vodka and teeth. His hand groped her breast, his fingers pinching her nipple roughly. She moaned into his mouth, a sound that seemed more about the alcohol than his touch. To his side, he heard Ethan move, the rustle of fabric, Chloe’s sharp intake of breath.
Ethan had Chloe turned around, bent over the side of the mattress. He was behind her, not kissing her, just looking. His sweatpants were pushed down. He spat into his hand, slicked himself, and pushed into her from behind in one brutal, unceremonious thrust. Chloe yelped, her fingers clutching the comforter.
“Fuck her,” Ethan said to Jake, his voice strained as he began to move, his hips slapping against Chloe’s ass. “Don’t just kiss her. Fuck her.”
Jake broke the kiss. He pushed Mia onto her back on the carpet. He was hard again, a mechanical response fueled by whiskey and a deep, gnawing need to obey, to connect, to fuck this whole night into submission. He positioned himself between her legs. He was dry. She was dry.
“Spit,” Jake mumbled.
Mia turned her head and spat a small, pathetic amount into her own hand. She reached between them, smearing it on him. It wasn’t enough. He pushed into her anyway. The tight, uncomfortable drag made them both gasp. It was a raw, grating feeling. He started to move, a stiff, punishing rhythm.
The room filled with the sounds of it. The wet slap of Ethan taking Chloe doggystyle. The dry, sticking friction of Jake’s cock moving in Mia. Grunts. The occasional sharp cry. The women’s noises began to sound performative, empty. Jake kept his eyes open, watching Ethan. Ethan’s face was a mask of concentration, his jaw clenched, his gaze fixed on some point on the wall. He was fucking with a grim, relentless determination.
Jake matched his pace. This wasn’t pleasure. It was excavation. Each thrust was an attempt to bury the memory of the first time, to overwrite it with something uglier, something they controlled. Mia’s legs wrapped around his back, her heels digging into his ass. Her eyes were closed. She was somewhere else. Jake was somewhere else too. He was in the buzzing void of the alcohol, in the sharp sting of the carpet on his knees, in the synchronized, brutal pounding of two bodies moving in a broken rhythm with two others.
Chloe came first, with a shriek that sounded more surprised than ecstatic. Ethan kept going, his movements becoming faster, more erratic. He finally groaned, a deep, shuddering sound, and slammed into her one last time, his body going rigid before he collapsed forward, his weight driving her into the mattress.
Jake felt Mia tense beneath him. “Oh god, oh fuck,” she chanted, her body clamping around him in a series of tight, fluttering pulses. It triggered his own release, a weak, draining spill that felt less like climax and more like a system failure. He slumped onto her, the smell of carpet and sex and her cheap perfume filling his nostrils.
For a long minute, the only sound was their ragged, collective breathing. The air was stale, poisoned. Ethan rolled off Chloe, pulling his sweatpants up. He stood, wavered, and stumbled out of the room. Jake heard the bathroom door shut, then the sound of retching.
Chloe and Mia lay where they were, spent and sticky. Mia pushed weakly at Jake’s shoulder. “Get off. You’re heavy.”
He rolled onto the carpet, staring up at the ceiling. The water stain swam in his vision. The vodka handle was within arm’s reach. He fumbled for it, sat up, and took another long, burning drink. The liquid sloshed in his empty stomach, a nuclear warmth spreading through his core.
Ethan emerged from the bathroom, pale, his beard damp. He walked straight to the vodka, took it from Jake, and drank. He drank until he gagged, then swallowed hard. He passed it to Chloe, who was now sitting up. She drank. Mia drank.
They drank more. And more.
The bottle passed in a silent, relentless ceremony. The women put their clothes on, but made no move to leave. They sat on the floor, legs intertwined with Jake and Ethan’s, a grotesque parody of intimacy. The conversation started again, loose and sloppy. Mia talked about her cat. Chloe confessed she’d stolen the sequined top. The words meant nothing, just noise to fill the hollowed-out space.
Jake’s head lolled back against the bedframe. The room was melting. Ethan’s hand found his on the carpet, their fingers interlacing, a tight, desperate clutch. It was the most honest thing that had happened in hours.
“We should do shots,” Chloe mumbled, her head dropping onto Mia’s shoulder.
“Nothing left,” Ethan said, his voice a gravelly whisper. He didn’t let go of Jake’s hand.
“There’s… there’s cooking wine…” Jake heard himself say, the words slurring into a laugh that held no humor.
Ethan looked at him. In the devastated landscape of his face, Jake saw a reflection of his own ruin, and something else—a shared, surviving thread. They had done this. They had let it in. And they were still here, anchored together in the dizzying, toxic dark.
The vodka was gone. The whiskey was gone. The night was a black, endless hole.
”Down the hall,” Ethan said, his voice a ragged thing. He didn’t look at Jake. Jake stared at the ceiling, feeling the wet patch on his stomach cool and tighten his skin. Mia stumbled out, closing the bedroom door behind her with a too-loud click.
The silence then was absolute, and terrible. Chloe lay beside Jake, her breathing already deepening toward sleep. Ethan sat on the edge of the bed, his broad back a tense curve in the dim light. The red digital numbers of the clock on the nightstand read 2:17 AM. The party sounds from the street below were fading.
“Well,” Ethan said to the wall. The word hung there, empty.
Jake’s mind was a blank, white field. He felt scraped raw inside, hollowed out. The vodka and tequila had receded, leaving behind a chemical-edged clarity that illuminated every terrible detail. The rip in Chloe’s sequined top. The smudge of Mia’s eyeliner on his pillowcase. The stark, unfamiliar outline of two other bodies in their bed.
“I need a drink,” Ethan said, standing abruptly. He walked out, naked, without a backward glance.
Jake listened to him rummage in the kitchen. The clink of a bottle. The glug of liquid. A long, heavy silence. Then, Ethan returned, holding a nearly full bottle of amber whiskey and two tumblers by their rims in one hand. He set them on the nightstand with a thunk.
“Here,” he said, pouring three fingers into each glass. He handed one to Jake. Their fingers brushed. Jake flinched.
Ethan didn’t sit. He remained standing, looking down at the two sleeping women, then at Jake. He raised his glass. “To new experiences,” he said, his tone flat, devoid of its usual warmth. He downed the whiskey in one savage gulp.
Jake stared at the liquid. He could smell its woody, sharp scent. It promised numbness, a fog to blanket the screaming silence in his head. He brought it to his lips and drank. It burned a path of obliterating fire down his throat, settling in his gut like a coal.
“Another,” Ethan said, not a question. He refilled both glasses.
The bathroom door opened, and Mia wandered back in, listless. “What’s that?” she slurred, pointing at the bottle.
“Medicine,” Ethan said, pouring a third glass and handing it to her. She took it and sat on the floor, her back against the bed, drinking it like water.
Chloe stirred, smacking her lips. “I’m parched.”
Ethan wordlessly poured a fourth measure into the last tumbler. He nudged her shoulder. She propped herself up on an elbow, took the glass, and finished it. “Whiskey. Nice. Got a beer or something? This is heavy.”
“Kitchen fridge,” Ethan said. “Help yourself.”
Chloe shuffled out. They heard the fridge door open and close. She returned with four cold bottles of a local IPA, clutched to her chest. She passed them around. The crisp, bitter beer mixed unpleasantly with the whiskey residue on Jake’s tongue, but he drank. He drank to avoid speaking. He drank to avoid thinking.
Mia, revived, climbed back onto the foot of the bed. “So that was fun,” she said, taking a long pull from her bottle. “You guys are, like, really good at that.”
Ethan made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. He was pouring more whiskey. The level in the bottle was sinking rapidly.
“Do you do that often?” Chloe asked, lying back down, sipping her beer. “Share, I mean.”
“No,” Jake and Ethan said in unison, too quickly. They glanced at each other, then away.
“First time for everything,” Mia giggled. She found the whiskey bottle and took a direct swig from it, wincing. “God, that’s rough. Tastes like regret.”
Jake felt a hysterical laugh claw at his throat. He drowned it with beer.
The drinking became a silent, desperate competition. Beer bottles emptied, clinking onto the floor. The whiskey bottle went around, its contents disappearing. Ethan fetched a second bottle from a cupboard, something cheaper and sharper. The room began to tilt on a new, more unstable axis.
Chloe started talking about her ex-boyfriend, her words slurry and loud. Mia hummed along to a song only she could hear. Ethan just drank, his eyes growing darker, more distant with each swallow.
Jake felt the alcohol pulling him under a second time, but this was different. This wasn’t the warm, buzzing cloak of the club. This was a cold, deep dive into murky water. His numbness began to crack, and something ugly and acidic seeped out.
“I should go,” Mia said abruptly, standing and swaying. She didn’t move.
“Yeah, us too,” Chloe said, not moving either.
No one moved. The only movement was the lifting of bottles, the swallowing.
Ethan finally spoke, his voice low and thick. “Why?”
Chloe blinked. “Why what?”
“Why did you… want to? With us?” He wasn’t looking at her. He was staring at a point on the wall.
Chloe shrugged, a slow, drunk motion. “I dunno. You looked… safe. And hot. It’s a good combo.” She laughed, a single barking sound. “Most big guys are either teddy bears or assholes. You two seemed like… both.”
The word ‘safe’ hung in the air, a sick joke. Jake looked at the rumpled sheets, the evidence of their unsafety.
Ethan poured the last of the second whiskey bottle into his glass. It spilled over the rim, darkening the wood of the nightstand. “We’re not,” he said, more to himself than anyone.
The drinking continued. The beer was gone. The whiskey was gone. Ethan, moving with a drunk’s exaggerated care, went back to the kitchen. He returned with a bottle of clear, unlabeled liquid. “Vodka,” he announced. “The serious stuff.”
He opened it and drank directly from the bottle, his throat working. He passed it to Chloe. She drank and coughed violently. Mia took it next, a smaller sip. Then it came to Jake.
He held the bottle. It felt cold and lethal. He could see the oily, viscous way the liquid coated the inside of the glass. This wasn’t drinking anymore. This was an erasure. He put the bottle to his lips and tilted it back. The vodka was pure, scorching oblivion. It burned away the last of his thoughts, leaving only a high, white noise.
He passed the bottle back to Ethan. Their eyes met over the neck of it. Ethan’s gaze was shattered, full of a pain Jake recognized because he felt it echoing in his own chest. It was the look from the club, but stripped bare now, all the wildness gone, leaving only wreckage.
Ethan took the bottle. He didn’t drink. He just held it, staring at Jake. “Jake,” he said. The name was a rough, broken thing.
“Don’t,” Jake whispered. His voice was sandpaper.
“I’m…” Ethan began, but the sentence died. He looked at Chloe, at Mia, at the bottle in his hand, finally back at Jake. His expression collapsed. He took a long, final pull from the vodka bottle, draining a quarter of it in one go. He gasped, his eyes watering.
He shoved the bottle into Chloe’s hands. “Finish it.”
Jake watched, detached, as the bottle went around again. The room was spinning slowly. Chloe’s voice became a drone. Mia slumped against the bedframe, her eyes closed. Jake’s own body felt leaden, too heavy to lift. He was sinking into the mattress, into a swamp of alcohol and dread.
The last thing he saw before his eyes closed was Ethan, still sitting upright on the edge of the bed, his head in his hands, the empty vodka bottle at his feet. The first gray light of dawn was bleeding around the edges of the blinds, illuminating the devastation of the room, the tangle of unfamiliar limbs, the space between them on the bed that had become a vast and uncrossable distance.
The silence that followed was thick and viscous, broken only by the sound of Mia stumbling down the hall and the click of the bathroom door. Chloe lay beside Jake, her breathing slowing, a slick patch of cooling sweat and spent desire between them. Ethan hadn’t moved, his body a tense line in the dim light.
Jake’s mind was a white-hot blank. He stared at the ceiling, feeling the unfamiliar ache of a woman’s body around his own, the ghost of a different grip, a different rhythm. The scent of the two girls was a foreign layer over Ethan’s familiar smell on the sheets, and the dissonance made his stomach clench.
“Well,” Chloe said to the ceiling, her voice raspy. “That was a thing.”
Ethan let out a breath that was almost a laugh, but it carried no humor. “Yeah.” He finally shifted, sitting up and swinging his legs over the side of the bed, his broad back to them. “I need a drink.”
The statement landed like a lifeline, a script for what came next when words failed. “Yeah,” Jake echoed, his own voice sounding raw. He extricated himself from the damp tangle of sheets and Chloe’s limp limbs, his body feeling used and strangely heavy. He found his boxers and pulled them on, the cotton abrasive against his oversensitive skin.
Mia returned from the bathroom, her makeup further smudged. “Your bathroom is tiny,” she announced, as if reporting vital intelligence.
Ethan was already in the kitchen, the harsh fluorescent light flooding the hallway. They followed, a somber, half-dressed procession. He pulled a nearly full bottle of cheap amber rum from a cabinet, the kind bought for mixing and forgotten. He set it on the counter with four mismatched glasses—a coffee mug, two tumblers, and a juice glass.
“Classy,” Chloe said, picking up the juice glass and inspecting it.
“It’s what I have,” Ethan said, his tone flat. He uncapped the bottle and poured generous, sloshing measures into each vessel, not bothering with ice or mix. The liquor smelled sharp and medicinal.
Ethan raised his mug. No one joined the gesture. He shrugged and took a long, punishing swallow, his throat working. Jake picked up a tumbler. The rum burned a path down his throat, hotter and meaner than the club vodka. It scorched the confusion momentarily, turning it into a simple, central heat.
Chloe and Mia drank theirs quickly, wincing but saying nothing. The air was stiff, charged with everything unsaid. The music from the club was a phantom echo in Jake’s ears.
“So,” Mia said, leaning against the counter. “You guys are, like, really together?”
Ethan poured himself another shot, his eyes on the stream of liquid. “We are.”
“Cool,” she said, as if filing the information away. She held out her glass. Ethan refilled it.
The second drink went down smoother. A false warmth began to spread in Jake’s chest, pushing back the cold claw of shame. He watched Ethan, who was avoiding his gaze, focusing instead on the bottle, on the girls, on the floor. The familiar curve of his beard, the red curls matted with sweat—he was a beacon in the room, and Jake felt utterly unmoored from him.
“This is good shit,” Chloe lied, topping up her own glass from the bottle before anyone else could. She drank, shuddered, and smiled a loose, drunken smile. “We should play a game.”
“No games,” Ethan said, but it lacked force. He was drinking to catch up, to match pace, his movements becoming looser.
“Truth or dare,” Mia insisted, her eyes glinting. “Come on. We’re all friends now.”
“We’re not friends,” Jake said, the words leaving his mouth before he could filter them. The rum had lit a small, blunt fire in him.
Chloe laughed, a sharp bark. “Okay, fair. Associates. Fuck-buddies. Whatever.” She pointed a wavering finger at Ethan. “Truth or dare. You first.”
Ethan rubbed his face, the scratch of his beard loud in the quiet kitchen. “Fine. Truth.”
“Did you like watching your boyfriend fuck me?”
The question hung in the fluorescent glare, ugly and direct. Ethan’s eyes flicked to Jake, finally, for a fractured second. They were dark, unreadable pools. “Yes,” he said, the word simple and devastating.
The rum churned in Jake’s gut. He poured more, the bottle clinking against his glass.
“My turn,” Mia chirped, oblivious to the tension she’d crystallized. “Jake. Truth or dare?”
“Truth.” His voice was a gravelly thing.
“Was it better with her or with me?”
Jake drank instead of answering, the liquor a punishment. He felt Chloe’s gaze on him, curious and predatory. “It was different,” he managed.
“Bullshit answer,” Chloe singsonged. “Drink again.”
He did. The room was developing a soft, swaying quality. The edges of the countertops blurred. Ethan was on his third or fourth pour, his posture slumping against the fridge.
The questions dissolved after that, the pretense of a game melting away under the relentless, straightforward assault of the rum. They just drank. They drank to fill the silence, to sand down the sharp, strange edges of the night, to postpone the moment when the girls would leave and they would be left alone with what they had done.
Chloe told a slurred story about an ex-boyfriend who owned a snake. Mia tried and failed to do a handstand against the kitchen wall. The laughter was too loud, hollow and ringing. Jake found himself staring at the red ceramic plate on the drying rack—the one from Ethan’s grandmother. It looked absurdly clean, domestic, and innocent amidst the wreckage.
“I’m so fucked up,” Ethan announced to no one in particular, a slow, wide grin spreading across his face. It wasn’t his usual smile. It was loose and unfocused, a mask of merriment that didn’t reach his eyes.
“You and me both, big guy,” Chloe said, sloshing her drink. She’d found the bottle again and was drinking directly from it now, a thin trickle of amber escaping the corner of her mouth.
The drinking lost all rhythm, all purpose beyond consumption. It was a contest with no winner, a race to numbness. Jake’s thoughts became slow, syrupy things. The sharp guilt blurred into a general, heavy sadness. The memory of Mia riding him, of Chloe’s hungry moans, played behind his eyes like a filmstrip from someone else’s life.
At some point, they migrated back to the living room, collapsing onto the couch and floor. The rum bottle, now half-empty, made the rounds. Mia lay on the rug, giggling at the texture of the carpet against her cheek. Chloe had her head in Ethan’s lap, and he was absentmindedly stroking her hair, his gaze fixed on a crack in the opposite wall.
Jake watched the hand moving through the blonde strands. A deep, sour jealousy, sudden and shocking, rose in his throat. He took another swig from the bottle he now held, the world tilting on its axis.
“I should call a cab,” Mia mumbled from the floor, making no move to do so.
“In a minute,” Chloe murmured, nuzzling against Ethan’s thigh.
The “minute” stretched. The bottle continued to circulate. Ethan’s speech became a thick, slow drawl. Jake’s tongue felt like a foreign object in his own mouth. The initial heat from the rum had settled into a deep, sickly warmth that pooled in his stomach and threatened to rise.
He remembered Ethan’s face as he came in Chloe’s mouth. The raw surrender in it. He remembered the feeling of being inside a woman, a sensation he hadn’t felt in years, so different from the tight, clutching heat he’d grown used to with Ethan. The comparison was a gut-punch.
“I think I’m gonna be sick,” Jake said suddenly, the words clear and cold amidst the drunken haze.
The statement seemed to break a spell. Chloe sat up. Mia groaned. Ethan blinked, focusing on Jake with visible effort. “Bathroom,” he slurred, pointing down the hall.
Jake stumbled to his feet, the room lurching violently. He made it to the hallway, the walls closing in, the pattern on the rug swimming. He pushed into the bathroom, locking the door behind him, and fell to his knees before the toilet.
The vomit was hot and acidic, a violent purge of rum, Thai food, and shame. He retched until his stomach was empty and his eyes streamed, the sour smell filling the small room. He slumped against the bathtub, spent, the cold porcelain a relief against his feverish cheek.
From the living room, he heard the low mumble of voices, then the sound of the front door opening and closing. A long silence. Then, heavy, uncertain footsteps coming down the hall toward him.