Chapter 25: Chapter 25
The question dissolved into the stale air, unanswered. Anya finished buttoning her shirt with brisk, efficient movements. Mel stumbled into her shoes, her neon hair now a deflated cloud. Neither woman looked at Jake in the doorway, or at Ethan still on the floor.
“We’re gonna bounce,” Anya said, her voice flat. It wasn’t a request for permission.
Ethan just waved a hand, a limp dismissal. He didn’t look up. The door opened and closed, sealing them in with the silence they’d tried so violently to outrun.
The apartment hummed. The fridge kicked on. A siren Dopplered away in the distance. Jake’s knees felt unhinged. He slid down the doorframe until he was sitting on the floor, his back against the wood. Across the room, Ethan remained on his knees, head bowed, a statue of surrender.
“I can’t move,” Ethan said. The words were slurred, thick with booze and something worse.
“Then don’t.” Jake’s own voice was sandpaper.
They stayed like that, marooned in their separate zones of wreckage. The lamplight felt accusatory, highlighting every stain, every overturned cushion. Jake watched the dust motes swirl in the yellow beam. He remembered the cozy clutter this place used to be, the safety of it. Now it was just a crime scene, again.
An hour bled by, marked only by the gradual, leaden slowing of their heartbeats. The aggressive rush of chemicals was abandoning them, leaving a hollowed-out shell of fatigue in its wake. Ethan finally swayed, bracing a hand on the floor to keep from toppling over.
“Gonna be sick,” he mumbled.
“Bathroom’s there,” Jake said, not moving. He’d said it before.
Ethan crawled. He didn’t stand. He made it to the bathroom on hands and knees and hauled himself up over the toilet. The dry heaves were brutal, unproductive sounds that shook his whole frame. Jake listened, detached. He knew the script.
When the sounds subsided, Jake pushed himself up. His body ached in strange, specific places. He went to the kitchen, filled two glasses with tepid tap water, and carried them to the bathroom. Ethan was slumped against the bathtub, exactly where Jake had been days ago.
Jake placed a glass next to him. He didn’t offer a washcloth this time. He sat on the closed toilet lid, drinking his own water. The pipe taste was a familiar ghost.
“It’s worse,” Ethan croaked, his forehead against the cool porcelain of the tub. “This is so much worse.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
Jake swirled the water in his glass. “Because we knew better. And we did it anyway. That’s the definition of a fuck-up.”
Ethan let out a sound that was almost a laugh. It cracked in the middle. “Gold star fuck-ups.” He lifted his head, his eyes red and swimming. “I don’t feel anything. That was the point, right? I don’t feel the bad stuff. But I don’t feel anything else either. It’s just… gray static.”
“Welcome to the club,” Jake said, but there was no bite in it. Just a weary recognition.
They lapsed back into silence. The fatigue was a physical weight now, pressing them into the tiles. The idea of moving to a bed, of navigating the sheets that smelled of strangers, felt insurmountable. The living room couch was a gallery of fresh horrors.
“Just… stay here,” Ethan muttered, his eyes closing. “Can we just not move?”
Jake looked at the small, hard floor. He looked at Ethan’s large form, curled fetal against the tub. It was the least comfortable place in the apartment. It was also the only place that made any sense.
“Okay,” he said.
He slid off the toilet lid onto the floor, his back against the vanity cabinet. He stretched his legs out. His foot was near Ethan’s knee. It was the closest to together they could manage. Ethan’s breathing deepened, turned ragged with the first waves of drunk sleep. Jake fought his own eyelids, the room tilting and swimming. The last thing he saw before darkness took him was the chipped white paint on the bathtub’s edge, and the short, finite distance between their bodies on the cold, hard floor.
Morning was not a gentle reveal. It was a sledgehammer.
Jake woke to a vise clamped around his skull, its iron grip tightening with each sluggish beat of his heart. His mouth was a desert, his tongue a swollen piece of felt glued to the roof. Every muscle protested, but it was a deep, visceral nausea that dominated, a rolling tide of poison in his gut.
He opened one eye. Harsh white light from the small bathroom window stabbed at his retina. He was still on the floor, his spine a column of fused, angry vertebrae. Something heavy was pinning his legs.
Ethan was half-sprawled across him, one arm flung over Jake’s calves, his head resting on the bathmat. He was still out, his breathing a shallow, sour whistle. In the cruel daylight, he looked ruined. His beard was matted, his skin pale and clammy. A trail of dried saliva marked his cheek.
The memories returned not in a flood, but in sharp, jagged shards—the green shots, Anya’s cold eyes, the mechanical rhythm on the bed, the sight from the doorway. Each one landed in his gut like a stone. He tasted bile, sharp and immediate.
He tried to shift, to extricate his legs. The movement jostled Ethan, who groaned, a low, animal sound of pure distress. Ethan’s eyes fluttered open, squinting in confusion and pain. He registered the ceiling, the toilet, Jake.
“Oh, God,” he whispered. He clamped a hand over his mouth as a fresh wave of nausea visibly racked him. He swallowed convulsively, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “Oh, fuck. My head.”
“I know,” Jake rasped. His own voice was unrecognizable.
Ethan carefully, painfully, rolled onto his back. He stared up, blinking. “We slept on the floor.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“You asked us to.”
Ethan absorbed this. A flicker of the previous night passed behind his eyes, dark and sickening. He winced, shutting them tight. “I feel… contaminated. From the inside out.”
Jake finally sat up, the world tilting dangerously. He reached for the glass of water from last night, now warm and dusty. He drank it anyway, the tepid liquid doing little. “That’s the alcohol. And the rest of it.”
Ethan didn’t argue. He pushed himself up onto his elbows, then slumped against the tub again, defeated by the effort. “I don’t think I can do the greasy food today, Jake.”
The statement was so small, so utterly broken, that it finally cracked something open in Jake’s chest. This wasn’t just a hangover. This was a spiritual collapse.
“We don’t have to,” Jake said quietly.
They sat in the growing morning light, prisoners of their own punishing bodies and the echoing silence of the apartment. The night before screamed from every corner. The distance between their misery felt infinite, yet they were anchored together in this small, foul space.
Ethan turned his head, looking at Jake with bloodshot, shattered eyes. “We have to talk,” he said, the words barely audible. “Don’t we?”
Jake met his gaze. The momentum of their destruction had finally, mercifully, run out. There was nowhere left to run but through the wreckage.
“Yeah,” Jake said, his heart a dull, heavy weight. “We really do.”
The silence after the women left was different this time. It wasn’t swollen with regret. It was thin, brittle, and depthless. Like the air after a bomb has gone off and the dust has settled but nothing remains standing.
Jake watched from the doorway as Ethan, still on his knees on the rug, slowly reached for his discarded t-shirt. He used it to wipe his face, his chest, his hands. The motions were slow, methodical, like cleaning a tool. He didn’t look at Jake.
“You should shower,” Jake said. His own voice sounded alien.
“You first,” Ethan replied, not moving.
Jake didn’t argue. In the bathroom, the water was scalding. He scrubbed until his skin was raw, but the smell of strangers, of stale alcohol and sweat, seemed embedded in his sinuses. He’d left his glasses on the bookshelf. The world was a blur of sterile white tile.
When he came out, wrapped in a towel, Ethan was in the same spot. He’d pulled on his sweatpants but sat slumped against the couch, staring at the blank television screen. The two empty mugs sat on the coffee table like evidence.
“Your turn,” Jake said.
Ethan just shook his head, a tiny, defeated motion. “Doesn’t matter.”
They slept. Or rather, they passed out in separate spaces—Jake on the stripped bed, Ethan on the couch—and descended into a black, dreamless void that felt more like cessation than rest.
Morning came as an accusation. Sunlight pierced the room, highlighting every dust mote, every stain on the rug from spilled drinks they hadn’t cleaned. Jake’s head was a solid block of throbbing pain. His mouth was a desert. He shuffled to the kitchen, drank directly from the tap, and vomited it immediately into the sink. The heaves were dry, painful convulsions.
Ethan was already up. He was dressed in clean jeans and a hoodie, sitting at the small kitchen table with two glasses of water and two ibuprofens laid out neatly. He looked like he hadn’t slept at all. His eyes were red-rimmed, the skin beneath them bruised-looking.
“Here,” Ethan said, his voice gravel.
Jake took the pills, swallowed them with the water. They sat in the glaring quiet. The coffeemaker, that symbol of Ethan’s cozy morning rituals, was unplugged and pushed to the back of the counter.
“I can’t be in this apartment,” Ethan said finally, not looking at him. “I can’t sit here. With the silence. With… all of it.”
“So we go for a walk,” Jake offered, though the thought of sunlight and noise made his stomach twist.
“A walk.” Ethan let out a single, humorless puff of air. “To do what? Talk about our feelings? Hold hands and get a fucking smoothie?” He finally looked up. His gaze was hollow, but a desperate energy burned in the depths. “I can’t do that, Jake. I will break apart if I have to do that.”
“So what, then?” Jake asked, dread coiling in his gut. He already knew the answer.
Ethan held his stare. The challenge was back, but stripped of all its former playful heat. It was cold now. A dare against the void. “We finish it.”
“Finish what?”
“This… whatever this is. We see it through to the bottom. We get so drunk we can’t remember our own names. We let the machine run until it breaks. Completely.” He leaned forward, his elbows on the table. “We go out tonight. We don’t think. We just go. Harder. Further. We find out what’s on the other side of this.”
It was the worst idea in the history of ideas. It was suicide by a thousand cuts, each one shallower and more demeaning than the last. Jake knew it with every functioning cell in his body. But the alternative—facing the chasm that had opened between them, the profound shame they’d authored together—felt infinitely more terrifying. Numbness had failed. Maybe oblivion would work.
“Okay,” Jake heard himself say. The word tasted like ashes.
“Okay,” Ethan echoed. He stood up, the chair scraping loudly. “I’m going to the bodega. We need supplies.”
He left. Jake sat at the table, listening to the pipe-rattling hum of the refrigerator. He looked at his hands. They were clean. He didn’t recognize them.
The pre-game started at 5 PM. It wasn’t a pre-game; it was a ceremony. A bottle of cheap vodka, a plastic jug of orange juice. They drank on the couch, not speaking, passing the mixed drink back and forth in a heavy ceramic mug. They didn’t toast. They drank with the grim focus of soldiers before a hopeless charge. The alcohol didn’t bring warmth or lightness. It simply applied a layer of fuzzy static over the silent movie of their shame.
By 9 PM, the bottle was half-gone. The world had taken on a thick, wavering quality. Ethan stood, swaying slightly. “Let’s go.”
The club wasn’t The Mercury. It was a place downtown with no sign, just a black door and a line that Ethan walked past with a confidence that was pure, unadulterated fiction. Inside, the music was a physical assault, a wall of distorted bass and screaming synth. Lights stabbed through smoke, illuminating fragments of faces contorted in performative ecstasy.
They went straight to the bar. Ethan slapped a crumpled bill down. “Two fernet. Two whiskey shots. Keep them coming.”
The bartender, a person with tired eyes, complied without comment. The fernet was bitter, medicinal. The whiskey burned. Jake drank them in quick succession, one after the other, feeling the room tip on its axis. This wasn’t fun. This was a chemical purge.
Ethan was scanning the crowd, his eyes glassy but intent. He wasn’t looking for a connection. He was sourcing components. He nudged Jake, pointing to two women near a pillar. One had her dark hair in braids, the other wore a sequined top that glittered like shattered glass.
“Them,” Ethan slurred, his mouth close to Jake’s ear. His breath was hot and sour.
Jake nodded. Agreement was just another function now, like breathing or blinking.
They moved through the crowd, a two-man wrecking ball. Introductions were lost to the noise. Names didn’t matter. The woman with braids was tall, all sharp angles. The one in sequins smiled with bright, vacant eyes. Ethan bought a round of fluorescent shots that glowed under the blacklights. They tasted like cleaning fluid and sugar.
Somehow, they were dancing. Jake’s body moved without his command, a marionette with loose strings. The sequined woman ground against him, her back to his front. He could feel the scratchy texture of her top, the hard press of her spine. Over her shoulder, he saw Ethan and Braids. Ethan had her pinned against the pillar, one hand braced above her head, his mouth on her neck. His eyes were open, staring blankly at the strobe-lit ceiling.
Another round appeared. Jäger now, chilling in tiny glasses. They threw them back. The room melted into a smear of light and pounding shadow. Time became a series of jarring snapshots: the cold bite of air on the sidewalk, the fuzzy interior of a cab, the sequined woman laughing soundlessly at something Ethan said.
Then the apartment door slammed, locking out the world. The familiar space felt like a stage set after the play has closed. Empty, haunted, waiting for the same bad performance.
Braids—Chloe? No, that was the other one—walked to the center of the living room and turned, her arms crossed. “So?” she said. Her voice was clear, cutting through the fog in Jake’s head.
Ethan didn’t answer with words. He walked to her, his steps deliberate and heavy, and kissed her. It was aggressive, all teeth and force. He started walking her backward toward the bedroom, his hands already pulling at her clothes.
The sequined woman looked at Jake. She raised an eyebrow, a question. Jake felt nothing. No desire, no anxiety, no thrill. Just a profound, weary resignation. He stepped forward and kissed her because it was the next thing on the list. Her lips were sticky with gloss.
He was aware of the other couple moving into the bedroom, of the door not quite closing. Sounds began almost immediately—a low thump, a sharp gasp.
Sequins led him to the couch. She pushed him down and straddled him, her movements practiced and efficient. She smelled like vanilla and sweat. Jake’s head lolled back against the cushion. He stared at the ceiling, at the faint water stain he now knew as well as his own palm. He could hear Ethan in the other room, the rhythmic creak of the bed, a guttural command that was swallowed by the walls.
Sequins undid his jeans. She guided him inside her. She was wet, a slick, mechanical readiness that felt entirely separate from the person above him. She began to move, establishing a steady, boring rhythm. Jake’s hands fell to her hips, holding on for balance, not passion. He felt drunk to the point of paralysis, his body responding with a distant, biological inevitability.
From the bedroom, Ethan’s voice, slurred and thick: “Yeah, just like that. Don’t stop.”
Sequins leaned down, her breath in Jake’s ear. “You close?”
He nodded, incapable of speech.
“Come on, then,” she said, picking up her pace. “Get it over with.”
It was the least erotic thing he had ever heard. It was also permission. His body, betraying him, coiled tight. He came with a shudder that felt more like a seizure than release, a sharp, impersonal expulsion into the void. She held still for a moment, then climbed off. She didn’t look at him as she fixed her clothes.
The bedroom sounds had reached a crescendo—a frantic, slapping rhythm, a muffled cry, Ethan’s raw, culminating shout. Then silence.
Sequins walked to the bedroom door, pushed it open. Jake zipped his jeans, his limbs leaden. He didn’t follow her. He sat on the couch, listening.
He heard murmurs, the rustle of fabric. A few minutes later, Sequins and Braids walked out together, collecting their purses. They didn’t glance at him. Ethan appeared in the bedroom doorway, shirtless, sweat gleaming on his chest. He looked at the women, gave a short, empty nod.
“We’re heading out,” Braids said.
“Cool,” Ethan replied. His voice was ragged.
And they were gone.
Ethan didn’t move from the doorway. Jake didn’t rise from the couch. The space between them stretched, vast and toxic. The air reeked of sex and despair and the sharp, sweet sting of Jäger.
Ethan’s eyes, bloodshot and empty, finally found Jake’s across the wrecked living room. There was nothing in them. No triumph, no shame, no question, no answer. Just a flat, infinite exhaustion. The machine had run. It had broken, just as he’d wanted.
It had broken them.
What was left now was less than zero.
The answer, it turned out, was to not let tomorrow happen. They slept through most of it, a thick, comatose sleep that felt more like temporary death. They woke tangled in Ethan’s sheets, not touching, the late afternoon sun a judgmental stripe across the floor. The silence was a physical weight.
“My head is a war crime,” Ethan mumbled into his pillow.
“My mouth feels like it’s lined with dead moths,” Jake replied, his voice gravel.
They lay there for another hour, listening to the city sounds outside, each trapped in the private, nauseating cinema of the night before—Anya’s cold efficiency, the mechanical sounds from the living room, the absolute void in Ethan’s eyes.
Ethan finally pushed himself up, the mattress groaning. He looked at Jake, his face pale under his beard. “I can’t sit in this.”
“I know.”
“I can’t think in this.”
“I know that, too.”
It was a silent pact, reaffirmed without words. The solution to the poison was more poison, a greater dose to overwhelm the current symptoms. They showered, separately, moving like rusted machinery. They ordered greasy food and stared at it, pushing it around their plates. The silence was a chasm. Words were too dangerous. They might say what they meant.
So instead, at ten o’clock, Ethan said, “We should go out.”
Jake didn’t ask where. He just nodded. “Yeah.”
The club this time was a bass-heavy pit called The Grotto. The music wasn’t a beat but a constant, subsonic pressure that vibrated the fillings in their teeth. They hit the bar with a solemn, focused intensity. This wasn’t for fun. This was a mission.
“Two double whiskeys,” Ethan told the bartender. “And keep the bottle close.”
They drank the first doubles as shots, a searing purge. They chased them with cheap, fizzy beer that did nothing to cool the burn. The second doubles they sipped, but quickly. The room’s sharp edges began to blur. Jake felt a familiar, welcoming numbness creeping up from his extremities.
“Remember that stupid movie?” Ethan shouted, his voice already slurring. “The one with the talking dog?”
“It was a hamster,” Jake shouted back, a laugh bubbling up that felt unnatural, like a phantom limb trying to move.
“Whatever! It was terrible!”
They ordered more. The bottle the bartender left was emptying fast. Ethan poured with a heavy hand, splashing amber liquid over their fingers. The alcohol hit Jake’s bloodstream like a rising tide, warm and obliterating. The ceiling began to breathe, a slow, undulating pulse of colored light. His body felt disconnected, a buoy bobbing on a vast, dark sea.
He watched Ethan’s face melt and re-form in the strobing lights. His red curls became a halo of fire, then a dark smudge. The room started to tilt, just a gentle, persistent list to the left. When he tried to stand to go to the bathroom, the floor felt like sponge, his legs obeying commands a full second after he sent them.
“Whoa, big guy,” Ethan chuckled, grabbing his arm. His grip was firm, but Ethan’s own balance was a ship in a storm. They swayed together, a drunken four-legged creature. Ethan’s breath was pure, sweet poison. “Steady. We’re just getting started.”
They abandoned the glasses. Ethan tipped the bottle back, his throat working, and then passed it to Jake. The whiskey was hot and deep, tasting of smoke and oblivion. It spilled from the corner of Jake’s mouth, tracing a hot path down his neck like a tear. He didn’t wipe it.
The music fragmented into individual, pounding sounds—a snare, a synthetic wail, a voice yelling something indecipherable. People around them were smears of color and motion. Jake’s thoughts came in slow, thick bubbles that popped before they formed completely. He was aware of a profound, blissful silence inside his own skull. The memories of Anya, of Sasha, of the hollow ache—they were locked behind a thick, glass wall. He could see their shapes, but they couldn’t touch him.
“I can’t feel my face,” Jake announced, marveling at the words as they fell out of his mouth.
Ethan leaned in, so close their noses almost touched. His eyes were glazed, pupils swallowing the green. “I can’t feel my… anything.” He laughed, a wet, ragged sound. “Mission accomplished, right?”
He slung an arm around Jake’s neck, pulling him into a clumsy, sideways hug. Their combined weight almost sent them crashing into a group of dancers. They righted themselves, stumbling, laughing now with a desperate, gasping hilarity that had no source. They were the most drunk they had ever been, by a vast and measurable margin. The world was a liquid, swirling painting. Time stopped having meaning. The only anchors were the bottle, the crushing noise, and the solid, swaying warmth of each other’s bodies.
Ethan’s mouth was by Jake’s ear, his words hot and slurred into a single, long sound. “We’regonnagohomeandjustsleep, okay? Justsleep. Nothin’ else. Promiseme.”
The promise felt monumental. Jake nodded, his head a heavy, loose ball on his shoulders. “Just sleep,” he repeated, the words thick as syrup.
Ethan tried to look at him, to focus, but his eyes kept crossing. He grinned, a sloppy, beautiful, ruined grin. “Good. That’s good.” He patted Jake’s chest clumsily, then leaned his forehead against Jake’s shoulder. “Hold me up, Jake. I’m gonna fall.”
And Jake, swimming in the dark, warm ocean of it all, wrapped both arms around Ethan, holding him upright in the swirling, screaming chaos, knowing full well he was just as likely to pull them both down.