Chapter 30: Chapter 30
The alley wall was cool and gritty against Jake’s forehead. Ethan’s cigarette smoke coiled in the sodium-lit haze, a ghost of the last coherent thought either of them would have for hours. Getting home was a pilgrimage of stumbles and near-falls, a silent negotiation with gravity that left them panting in the elevator. Inside the apartment, the door barely closed before Ethan was on him.
This time, there was no tenderness, no questioning gaze. It was a collision.
Ethan pushed Jake face-first against the door, the wood hard and unyielding. His hand fumbled with Jake’s belt, tearing the button fly open with a rough tug. “Don’t move,” Ethan slurred, his voice thick and close to Jake’s ear. He spat into his palm, a wet, crude sound, and slicked himself. The preparation was brutal, minimal. He pushed Jake’s jeans and boxers down just past his thighs, trapping his legs.
The first thrust was a punch of pure sensation, a white-hot tear of friction and stretch. Jake cried out, the sound muffled against the door. Ethan’s body was a heavy, sweating wall behind him, pinning him. He set a relentless, grinding rhythm, each drive deeper than the last, fueled by a bottomless well of liquor and self-loathing. His fingers dug into Jake’s hips, sure to leave bruises.
“You feel that?” Ethan grunted, his breath hot and sour. “You feel how fucking ruined we are?”
Jake could only nod, his glasses skewed, his world reduced to the slam of Ethan’s pelvis against his ass, the burn of the stretch, the dizzying spiral of pleasure-pain that emanated from his core. It was punishment and absolution in each ragged stroke.
Ethan came with a guttural shout, his body locking, pulsing deep inside. The wet heat was the only warmth in the cold, hollow ritual. He stayed there, buried, for a long minute, his forehead resting between Jake’s shoulder blades. Then he pulled out, stumbled back, and sank onto the floor without a word.
Jake slid down the door to join him. They passed out there, in the entryway, still half-dressed, surrounded by the ghosts of all their worse ideas.
The morning was a new dimension of sickness. Jake woke to a vile, metallic taste and a skull that felt actively crushed. His lower body ached with a specific, throbbing memory. Ethan was already in the bathroom, heaving dryly. Jake crawled to the kitchen and drank water from the tap, his hands shaking so badly the water splashed his chin. The apartment was a museum of their decay.
Ethan emerged, pale as paper, his beard damp. He looked at Jake, his eyes dead. “I can still feel it. The quiet. It’s louder.”
“I know.”
“We didn’t go far enough.”
They hadn’t. The calculations were clear in the sour air. The previous nights had been skirmishes. Today required total surrender.
They started drinking at three in the afternoon, sitting on the floor of the living room with a bottle of vodka and a carton of warm orange juice. They drank not to feel good, but to cease feeling altogether. The first glasses were medicinal, swallowed with winces. The second went down easier. By the third, the room had developed a gentle, undulating sway.
They arrived at The Grotto just as the early crowd was filtering in. The bouncer took one look at their glazed, determined faces and waved them through. They beelined for the bar.
“Double whiskeys,” Ethan said, his words already slurring at the edges. “And leave the bottle.”
This drunkenness was different. It came on not as a warm wave but as a sudden, profound subtraction. First, it stole the sharp edges from the world. Then it muffled the music, turning the pounding bass into a distant, fuzzy heartbeat. Then it began to erase time itself.
Jake watched his own hand reach for his glass. The movement seemed to happen in one frame, then his fingers were around it, then the liquid was in his mouth. The moments in between were gone, deleted. Ethan was speaking, his mouth moving, but the sounds arrived late and stretched, like taffy. “…can’t feel my fucking face, man.”
“I can’t feel my legs,” Jake heard himself say, amazed. He looked down. His legs were there, attached, but they seemed like distant, ungovernable provinces.
They moved to the dance floor, a sea of blurring colors. Jake’s body was both heavy and untethered. He lifted an arm and it seemed to float upward of its own accord, drifting on the thick, soupy air. The strobe lights fractured everything into disjointed, frozen images: a stranger’s grinning teeth, the sweat on Ethan’s brow, a glint of bottle glass. There was no rhythm to his movements, just a slow, blissful drowning.
He turned and Ethan was right there, his face huge and close. Ethan’s eyes were two dark, swimming pools, his pupils blown wide. He grinned, a slow, sloppy landslide of a smile. “You’re spinning,” he declared, as if discovering a profound truth.
“You’re upside down,” Jake countered, and it might have been true. The world had lost its reliable orientation.
They stumbled back to the bar, holding onto each other not for affection but for basic structural support. Ethan’s hand missed the bartop twice before landing on it with a slap. “More!” he bellowed, the word dissolving into a cough.
The next drink tasted of nothing. It was just a cool liquid passing into the void of his body. Jake’s thoughts, what few remained, were simple, heavy objects. Glass. Brown. Ethan. Fall. He tried to remember his own last name and found only a pleasant, empty buzz where that information should be.
He needed to piss. The journey to the bathroom was an epic voyage. The floor rolled beneath his feet like the deck of a ship in a storm. He weaved through the crowd, people seeming to warp around him, their faces smears of color and shadow. The bathroom tiles were aggressively white, humming under the fluorescent lights. He braced himself against the wall, fumbling, his coordination utterly gone. He missed the urinal entirely, a hot stream hitting the floor and splashing back onto his shoe. He didn’t care. The relief was a distant, abstract concept.
Finding Ethan again was a minor miracle. He was where Jake had left him, but now his head was resting on his arms on the bar. Jake collapsed onto the stool beside him, the room executing a slow, nauseating cartwheel. He focused on the familiar slope of Ethan’s back, the red curl of hair against his neck. An anchor.
Ethan lifted his head. He turned. His gaze took a full three seconds to lock onto Jake’s eyes. When it did, the blankness was absolute. There was no mischief, no pain, no challenge. It was the hollowed-out look from the alley, perfected. He had achieved the nothingness he’d chased.
“Home,” Ethan said, the word a dull, spent bullet.
Somehow, they made it to the street. The cold air was a physical shock, a slap that did nothing to revive them, only made the inner void more apparent. They leaned into one another, a four-legged beast with a broken spine, and moved toward the promise of a dark room. The city lights bled into long, shimmering streaks, like rain on a window. Every step was a negotiation with collapse.
They didn’t speak in the cab. They didn’t speak in the elevator. The silence wasn’t fraught anymore. It was total, a vacuum. They had finally, truly, drunk themselves past feeling.
Inside the apartment, the door clicked shut. Ethan turned. He looked at Jake, his expression unreadable in the gloom. He took two shaky steps forward, gripped the front of Jake’s shirt, and kissed him. It was a dry, listless pressing of lips, devoid of passion or anger. It was the next logical action in a sequence that had long since lost its meaning.
“Bed,” Ethan muttered against his mouth.
They shed their clothes in a silent, clumsy pile on the bedroom floor. The sex, when it came, was a bleak, functional exercise. Ethan pushed Jake onto the mattress and rolled on top of him. He was hard, a biological fact disconnected from emotion. He spat into his hand again, the sound obscenely loud in the quiet room, and guided himself into Jake with a practiced, grim efficiency.
There was no fire, no connection, no whispered words. There was only the rhythmic, slapping sound of skin on skin, the creak of the bed, and Ethan’s ragged, empty breathing. Jake stared at the ceiling, feeling the mechanical friction, a sensation happening to a body that no longer felt like his own. He touched himself to get it over with, his own climax a brief, shallow shudder that felt like a minor electrical fault.
Ethan finished soon after, with a quiet grunt, and rolled off. They lay side by side in the dark, not touching, two voids lying parallel in the infinite, silent black. The most drunk they had ever been. They had found the other side of the fire.
There was nothing there at all.
The taxi was a blur of nausea and strobe-light afterimages. Ethan mumbled an address, his words slurring into the vinyl seat. Jake watched the city smear past the window, a liquid painting of neon and shadow, his skull throbbing in time with the arrhythmic thump of bass still echoing in his bones. He focused on the cracked leather of the headrest, counting each breath, each one a conscious effort against the rising tide of poison in his gut.
They stumbled into the apartment, a pocket of stale air that felt both suffocating and safe. Ethan didn’t turn on the lights. The ambient glow from the streetlamp outside painted the familiar chaos in monochrome, transforming the cozy clutter into a landscape of jagged, unfamiliar shapes. The couch loomed. The rug seemed to yawn.
“Just sleep,” Ethan repeated, a hollow mantra. He sank to his knees on the rug, then rolled onto his side, facing the dark space under the couch. His breathing was already heavy, ragged.
Jake stood over him, swaying. The room tilted on a gentle, persistent axis. He saw the broad line of Ethan’s back, the curl of his body, vulnerable and surrendered. The memory of their touch on this same rug hours before was a distant, theoretical thing, separated from him by an ocean of spirits. He wanted to reach for it. He wanted to obliterate it.
“Ethan.” The name was glue in his mouth.
A grunt. Not quite acknowledgment.
Jake lowered himself, the descent unsteady. He lay down behind Ethan, not spooning, just aligning his body with the other man’s curve, a parallel line in the darkness. The heat coming off Ethan was immense, a furnace. Jake pressed his forehead between Ethan’s shoulder blades. He inhaled the sour scent of sweat and bar, and beneath it, the undeniable signature of skin he knew.
Ethan’s hand found his in the dark. Their fingers laced, a tight, almost painful clutch. No words. The silence was a third presence, swelling to fill the room, pressing down on them with the weight of everything unsaid. It was asking the questions they’d spent all night drinking to drown out.
What are we doing?
What comes after the burning?
Who are we without the wreckage?
Jake felt the questions in the tension of Ethan’s back, in the frantic pulse in his wrist. The alcohol was a faulty insulator. The feelings, sharp and serrated, were leaching through.
Ethan suddenly rolled over. His face was inches away in the gloom, eyes wide and gleaming with a desperate, unfocused intensity. His breath hit Jake’s lips, hot and sour.
“I can still feel it,” Ethan whispered, his voice cracking. “In my head. It’s so fucking loud.”
“I know.”
“Make it stop. Just for tonight. One more time. Make it all go quiet.”
He didn’t wait for an answer. His mouth crashed against Jake’s, a clumsy, starving collision. This kiss wasn’t like the one before. It was devoid of that searching tenderness. It was a weapon, a blunt instrument aimed at consciousness. Ethan clawed at Jake’s shirt, yanking it up, his hands rough and impatient.
They wrestled with clothes in the dark, a frantic, graceless struggle. Fabric tore. A button pinged across the floorboards. There was no tenderness, only a savage need to feel skin, to affirm a physical reality that could momentarily eclipse the mental storm. Ethan shoved Jake onto his back, his weight pinning him to the rug. He spat into his own palm, the sound crude and wet in the quiet room.
“Gonna fuck you,” Ethan growled, more to himself than to Jake. “Gonna fuck you so hard you forget your own name.”
He guided himself, his erection jabbing against Jake’s thigh. He was not gentle, not careful. He pushed Jake’s legs apart with a knee, positioned himself, and drove in.
The penetration was a brutal, dry burn, a searing line of fire that forced a choked gasp from Jake’s throat. His body clenched, resisting, every muscle going rigid with shock. Ethan didn’t pause. He shoved deeper, a relentless, single-minded invasion, burying himself to the root with a guttural groan.
“Fuck,” Jake hissed, his fingers scrabbling against the rug fibers. “Jesus, Ethan.”
“Quiet,” Ethan panted, already moving, setting a punishing, mechanical rhythm. Each thrust was a brutal piston stroke, designed for obliteration, not pleasure. The burn began to mutate, tempered by the sheer, overwhelming fullness, by the animal heat of the body covering his. It was pain and presence, fused together.
Ethan’s face was buried in Jake’s neck, his breaths coming in hot, ragged gusts. “Is it quiet?” he mumbled, his voice thick and broken. “Tell me it’s quiet now.”
Jake couldn’t speak. He hooked his legs around Ethan’s waist, anchoring him, pulling him deeper with each jarring impact. The physical overwhelm was a white noise machine, drowning out the ghosts. He could feel nothing but the slam of their bodies, the sweat-slick slide of skin on skin, the raw, animal reality of being filled.
“Harder,” Jake gritted out, his own voice unfamiliar.
Ethan obeyed, his rhythm fragmenting into something frantic, uncontrolled. The bedframe of his body slammed into Jake, over and over. Jake reached between them, fisting his own cock, stroking in time with Ethan’s thrusts. The dual sensation was too much, a feedback loop of raw sensation.
“I’m gonna…” Ethan’s warning was a shattered whisper.
“Do it,” Jake gasped. “Come inside me. Mark it. Make it yours.”
The permission, filthy and absolute, was the final trigger. Ethan’s body seized, a violent tremor wracking through him. A ragged, broken cry was torn from his chest as he came, his release a hot, pulsing flood deep within Jake. The feeling of that intimate surrender, of being claimed so utterly, shattered Jake’s own control. His orgasm ripped through him, a silent, convulsive wave, spilling over his own fist and stomach.
Collapse was total. Ethan’s full, dead weight dropped onto him, crushing the air from his lungs. They were a single, sweating, spent creature in the dark. Ethan’s softening cock slipped out, followed by a slow, wet trickle. The smell of sex and salt and spent violence filled the air between them.
Time became something thick and formless. Jake stared at the ceiling, feeling the sharp ache spread through his hips, the dull throb in his skull. The quiet Ethan sought had arrived, but it was a spent, hollow quiet, the silence after a landslide.
Eventually, Ethan shifted, rolling onto his back beside him. Their shoulders touched. The streetlight cast a pale bar across Ethan’s chest, rising and falling.
“That wasn’t…” Ethan began, his voice hoarse. He didn’t finish.
“I know,” Jake said.
It was a familiar aftermath, yet profoundly different. The numbness they’d achieved was not the absence of feeling, but the exhaustion from feeling too much, too violently. The chaos had been externalized, made flesh, and now it lay pooled on the rug between them.
The following day passed in a thick, hungover haze. They ordered food they barely touched. They drank water and swallowed painkillers, moving through the apartment like ghosts. The silence was back, but it was no longer screaming. It was convalescing. They tiptoed around it, around each other, the memory of the night before a fresh bruise they were both afraid to press.
By evening, the ache in Jake’s body had softened to a deep, persistent reminder. The emotional hangover, however, was just settling in. The questions the silence had asked were now echoing in the empty spaces of the room. Ethan paced, a caged, restless energy replacing his usual languid confidence. He’d try to start a sentence, then stop, running a hand through his messy curls.
“We should…” he started, looking out the window. “I don’t know. Do something.”
“Like what?” Jake asked from the couch, his voice flat.
“Not this.” Ethan gestured vaguely at the room, at themselves. “Anything but this. I can’t… I can’t sit with it, Jake. I can’t sit here and think about what we’ve been doing. What I’ve been doing.”
The chasm of sober reflection was opening before them, and it was terrifying. The fragile, real thing they’d brushed against on the rug was buried under too much wreckage to examine. The path of least resistance, the one etched deep into their nervous systems, beckoned.
“One more time,” Jake heard himself say. The words tasted like ash, but also like relief. “Let’s go out. Let’s go until we can’t stand. Until we can’t remember.”
Ethan looked at him, his green eyes wide with a mixture of shame and desperate gratitude. “Yeah?”
“Yeah. The last time. A proper funeral.”
They didn’t go to a club. They went to a dive bar that smelled of bleach and stale beer, a place with no pretensions, where drinking was a functional, solitary act. They started with whiskey, doubles, consumed with grim efficiency. They didn’t talk. They drank. They moved to another bar, a brighter, more anonymous chain place with too many TVs. They switched to vodka, chilled shots that went down like icy needles.
The third bar was a mistake, a cavernous place with a sticky dance floor and pulsating pop music. They drank tequila here, sucking lime wedges that tasted of chemicals. Jake’s perception began to dissolve. Sounds separated from their sources—the shriek of laughter, the thud of a bass drop, the ice clattering in his own glass, all distinct, floating entities. His body felt both incredibly heavy and utterly detached, a buoy bobbing in a oily, dark sea.
He watched Ethan try to light a cigarette, his hand weaving, the flame missing the tip three times before catching. Ethan’s face in the brief flare was a mask of blank concentration, all his charisma and pain smoothed into a primitive focus on the simple task. It was the most drunk Jake had ever seen him. It was the most drunk he had ever been, by a vast and measurable margin.
The world wasn't blurry. It was fractured. He could see individual dust motes swimming in a beam of light, but couldn’t comprehend the table they were on. He heard the bartender ask, “Another?” as if the voice came from the far end of a long, copper pipe. His own voice, when he said “Yeah,” was a foreign instrument, its vibrations funny in his skull.
Time didn’t flow; it stuttered in frozen, disjointed frames. One moment he was leaning against the bar, the next he was in a bathroom that reeked of urinal cake, staring at his own blurred reflection in a metal sheet, wondering who the pale, slack-jawed man was. The journey back to their stools was an epic voyage across a tilting, booming continent.
Ethan was grinning at him, a wide, meaningless rictus. He said something. His lips moved, but the words were just shapes, lost in the roar. Ethan slung an arm around his neck, pulling him close. His breath was pure alcohol fumes, his body a furnace of unstable heat. He shouted directly into Jake’s ear, the vibration a physical intrusion.
“Home. Now. Gonna fuck you through the floor.”
The order landed in the syrup of Jake’s mind. It was a mission statement. A purpose. He nodded, the motion causing the room to swing violently. “Through the floor,” he echoed, the words sludge.
They didn’t call a taxi. They somehow summoned one through the occult interface of Ethan’s phone. The ride was a rollercoaster in the dark, every stop and start a fresh assault on Jake’s equilibrium. He clenched his jaw, focusing on the pinprick of red light from the taxi’s security camera, a tiny, steady beacon in the swirling nausea.
Stumbling into the apartment was like entering a decompression chamber after deep-sea diving. The sudden, immense quiet was a physical pressure on his eardrums. Ethan didn’t make it to the rug. He leaned against the wall by the door, his head lolling back, eyes closed. His chest heaved.
“Can’t,” he mumbled. “Too spinning.”
Jake slid down the opposite wall, the cool plaster against his cheek a minor relief. The room gyrated around a fixed point somewhere near the ceiling. He could hear his own heart, a slow, soggy drum in the dark. The mission—to fuck through the floor—seemed now like a complex theoretical problem, a dance they no longer remembered the steps to.
Ethan peeled himself from the wall, movements slow and deliberate as a deep-sea diver. He took two shuffling steps and collapsed forward, landing on his hands and knees on the fluffy rug. He stayed there, head hung, breathing heavily. Then he began to crawl.
He crawled across the rug toward Jake, a look of pure, drunken determination on his face. He reached Jake’s feet, then his legs. He didn’t stop. He crawled directly into Jake’s lap, a clumsy, warm weight, and collapsed against his chest. His face found the crook of Jake’s neck. He was shaking.
“Make it stop,” he whispered, a hot, wet plea against Jake’s skin. It wasn’t about sex anymore. It was a raw, unfiltered admission of terminal overwhelm.
Jake’s arms came up, encircling the solid, trembling mass of him. He held on as the room spun, as his own stomach churned. He held on as Ethan’s breathing hitched, as a single, hot tear tracked from Ethan’s temple onto his own collarbone.
They didn’t move. They sat propped against the wall in the dark apartment, a tangled monument to their own spectacular ruin, past the point of fucking, past the point of speech, clinging to each other as the world dissolved into a toxic, silent spin. The last defiant act was this: not letting go.