Chapter 1: Waking Up to the Unknown
The first thing Ethan became aware of was a weight on his chest, warm and solid and all wrong. The second thing was the light, a brutal, horizontal blade of sun cutting through a gap in the blinds and directly into his left eyeball. He groaned, the sound scraping against the dry desert of his throat.
He groaned, the sound scraping against the dry desert of his throat. Last night was a blur of neon lights, loud music, and the sharp, clean burn of tequila.
Last night was a blur of neon lights, loud music, and the sharp, clean burn of tequila. The third round had been a mistake. The fourth had been a declaration of war against common sense. Everything after that was just… gone.
He tried to move his arm, which was pinned, and a cascade of dark, silken hair spilled over his wrist. The scent was familiar—vanilla and citrus, cut through with the faint, expensive smell of her perfume. Maya’s perfume.
His brain, sluggish and throbbing in time with his pulse, failed to compute. Maya was his friend. Maya was the one who helped him stock his home bar, who debated the merits of gin versus vodka with the intensity of a philosopher, who always stole the olive from his martini. Maya was not… this.
This was a naked leg hooked over his. This was the soft, even puff of her breath against his collarbone. This was a scene from a completely different movie than the one they usually starred in.
He squeezed his eyes shut, then opened them. The room refused to change. His bedroom, a sanctuary of muted greys and blues, was in a state of peaceful disaster. A lamp was tilted on its side. Two cocktail glasses, their rims crusted with salt, sat precariously on the nightstand beside an empty bottle of Don Julio. A single, strappy black heel lay on its side near the door, pointing accusingly at the bed like a compass needle.
“Oh, no,” he whispered, the words cracking.
The body on his chest shifted. Maya made a small, sleepy sound, nuzzling unconsciously into him. Her hand, which had been resting on his sternum, slid down to his stomach. Every muscle in Ethan’s body went rigid.
Awareness came to her in stages. He felt it happen. The comfortable sigh first. Then a slight stiffening of her fingers against his skin. The inhalation that hitched, then stopped altogether.
Her head lifted slowly. Her striking green eyes, usually so sharp and full of wit, were wide with a dawning, horrified clarity. They flickered from his face, down to where their bodies were tangled under the single sheet, and back up again. Her complexion, normally a warm olive, paled.
“Ethan,” she said. Her voice was morning-rough, but the tone was pure, unadulterated panic.
“Maya,” he replied, his own voice a dry croak.
“Why are you…?” she began, then yanked her hand back from his stomach as if she’d been burned. She scrambled backward, pulling the sheet with her in a frantic rustle of cotton, wrapping it around herself like a shield. This left Ethan abruptly, completely exposed to the cool morning air. He grabbed a pillow and placed it on his lap, which felt absurd and juvenile.
They stared at each other from opposite sides of the wrecked bed. Her curls were a magnificent disaster. His t-shirt was on her side of the floor. His boxers were… he had no idea.
“What did we do?” she whispered, the question hanging in the dusty sunbeams.
“I don’t know,” he said, running a hand through his own hopeless hair. “The last thing I remember is you explaining the socioeconomic implications of craft cocktail pricing to that poor guy from the bank.”
A faint, ghost of a smile touched her lips before sheer terror wiped it away. “And you were making us those… what did you call them?”
“Blackout Palomas,” he groaned, letting his head fall back against the headboard with a soft thud. “The name was a prophecy.”
They sat in a thick, suffocating silence. The normal ease between them was gone, replaced by a canyon of things unsaid and unremembered. He searched her face, looking for clues—regret, anger, anything—but found only a mirror of his own confusion.
He cleared his throat. “Are you… okay?”
“I’m not sure,” she said, her gaze fixed on a point on the wall behind him. “I feel like I should be conducting a forensic inventory, but I’m too afraid to move.”
“Yeah. Don’t. The crime scene is intact.”
This time, she did smile, just a little. It was a crack in the ice. Then her eyes met his, and the crack sealed over. “This is so messed up, Ethan. We’re… we’re friends.”
“The best,” he said, and he meant it. The word felt inadequate now, like trying to describe a hurricane as ‘breezy.’
“So this…” she gestured vaguely between them, at the bed, at the entire situation, “…was just a tequila-fueled anomaly. A glitch.”
“A catastrophic system failure,” he agreed quickly, maybe too quickly. A part of his brain, the part not screaming in panic, was quietly replaying the sensation of her skin against his. It had felt, in those first confused seconds, shockingly right.
Before either of them could say another word—before they could awkwardly navigate who got the shower first or formulate a plan to never speak of this again—a loud, rhythmic knocking shattered the delicate silence.
Bang. Bang-bang-bang.
They froze, eyes locked in a new, shared dread.
“Ethan! Maya! I know you’re in there, you deviants!” The voice from the hallway was bright, loud, and unmistakably Coco’s. “I brought emergency bagels and a truly heroic amount of cream cheese! You have ten seconds to put on pants, or I’m coming in anyway!”
“Oh, god,” Maya breathed, her eyes wide with a fresh wave of horror.
“The door,” Ethan hissed. “Is it locked?”
“I don’t know! You check!”
“I can’t check, you have all the sheets!”
The knocking came again, more insistent. “Clock’s ticking, lovebirds! I’m dying out here, and this cream cheese is getting warm!”
With a shared, desperate look, they moved. Ethan lunged for a pair of sweatpants crumpled on the floor, hopping into them. Maya, still swaddled in the sheet, scooped up his discarded t-shirt and pulled it over her head. It fell to her thighs.
“Okay,” she whispered, her voice tight. “Okay. We’re decent. We’re friends who had a sleepover. A very, very platonic sleepover.”
“Right. Platonic,” Ethan said, just as the doorknob rattled.
They weren’t fast enough.
The door swung open, and Coco breezed in, a paper bag in one hand and a cardboard tray holding three coffees in the other. She was a vision of morning energy in a bright yellow sundress, her sunglasses pushed up into her blonde hair. She took in the scene in one comprehensive, devastating glance: the tilted lamp, the empty tequila bottle, the single shoe, the two of them standing several feet apart, flushed and wide-eyed, trying and failing to look casual.
A slow, delighted grin spread across Coco’s face.
“Well,” she said, her voice dropping to a conspiratorial purr as she kicked the door shut behind her. “Looks like someone’s ‘Blackout Paloma’ had a really happy ending.” She set the bag and coffee tray down on the dresser with a final-sounding thud, crossed her arms, and leaned back against it. “Start talking. And don’t leave anything out.”
Coco’s grin was a spotlight, freezing them in place. The smell of toasted bagels and rich coffee began to mix with the scent of tequila and regret.
Maya found her voice first. “It’s not what it looks like,” she said, but the words came out thin, transparent.
“Honey, it looks like a war zone in here,” Coco said, her eyes sweeping the room again, lingering on the single heel. “A fun, sexy war zone. Details. Now.”
Ethan’s mind was a blank, white screen. Every instinct screamed to deflect, to protect whatever was left of the easy space he and Maya had always shared. He could feel the heat of her standing a few feet away, a tense, silent pillar wrapped in his too-big t-shirt. The shape of her legs against the cotton was something he’d never noticed before, and now he couldn’t stop noticing.
“We drank,” Ethan said, shrugging, aiming for casual and landing somewhere near ‘strangled.’ “A lot. We came back here. We… don’t remember.”
“You don’t remember,” Coco repeated, her eyebrow arching into a perfect parabola of disbelief. “The two most control-freak, over-analyzing people I know, blacked out? Together?”
“It happens,” Maya muttered, finally moving to perch on the very edge of the rumpled bed, as if sitting any further into it would be an admission of guilt.
“To college freshmen, maybe.” Coco pushed off the dresser and picked up the coffee tray, handing them each a cup. The warm cardboard was a small anchor in the surreal morning. “So, you’re telling me you have zero data. No highlights reel? No bloopers? Nothing?”
Ethan took a grateful sip. The coffee was hot and bitter, cutting through the fuzzy film in his mouth. He glanced at Maya. She was staring into her own cup, her brows drawn together in that familiar expression of intense focus she usually reserved for quarterly reports. Seeing it here, now, in the wreckage of his bedroom, was profoundly disorienting.
A flash, then. Not a memory, but a sensation—the cool slide of her laugh against his ear, the weight of her head on his shoulder in the back of the ride-share. A feeling of rightness. He shoved it down.
“We’re adults,” Maya stated, lifting her chin. “It was a mistake. A one-time lapse in judgment. We’re going to have our coffee, get dressed, and go about our day. End of story.”
Coco looked from Maya’s defiant, flushed face to Ethan’s carefully neutral one. Her smirk softened, just a fraction. “Oh, you sweet, delusional children. It’s never the end of the story.” She took a bite of her bagel. “The silence in this room is louder than the music was last night. You’re both screaming inside your own heads. I can hear it.”
She was right. The quiet between them was a physical thing, thick and charged with everything unsaid. The question of what happened was almost secondary to the new, terrifying question of what happened now. Ethan felt the shape of their friendship, once as comfortable and defined as his favorite jacket, twist into something unfamiliar in his hands.
He had to break the tension. He had to get them back to solid ground, or at least make a run for it. He cleared his throat.
“Look,” he said, forcing a lopsided smile onto his face. “However it happened, at least we have a solid alibi for each other. And let’s be honest, if we were going to have a catastrophic friendship-ending event, it’s on brand that we wouldn’t even get the memories out of it. We probably spent the whole time responsibly discussing the ethical implications of forgetting.”
Ethan’s joke hung in the air, a deflating balloon. Maya didn’t laugh. She took a long, slow sip of her coffee, her eyes fixed on a water stain on his ceiling.
Coco, however, stopped chewing. She placed her bagel down on the crumpled paper bag, her playful smirk evaporating. She wiped her fingers meticulously on a napkin, her gaze shifting between them with a new, unsettling intensity.
“Yeah,” Coco said, her voice dropping its performative glee. “About that alibi.”
The change in her tone was instant, like a door slamming shut in a distant part of the house. Ethan felt a cold trickle of apprehension cut through his hangover.
“What about it?” Maya asked, her professional mask snapping into place, but Ethan could see the pulse fluttering at the base of her throat.
Coco let out a short, breathy sigh, as if steeling herself. “I wasn’t just bringing breakfast. I was doing damage control.” She leaned forward, bracing her hands on the dresser behind her. “After you two vanished from the bar, I stuck around. Justin was there, completely wasted, making an ass of himself.”
Ethan rubbed his temples. “Justin’s always an ass. That’s not news.”
“It is when he’s screaming about betrayal and shattered bonds,” Coco shot back. “He was looking for you, Ethan. Specifically. He was pissy and loud, saying you’d ‘stolen his shot’ and then just disappeared. He was talking about the woman in the red dress.”
The room seemed to tilt. The woman in red. The memory was a phantom limb—he could feel the ache of its absence, the vague shape of her defiance, but nothing concrete. Maya was staring at him now, her green eyes sharp, analytical. Assessing.
“I don’t… I don’t remember seeing Justin after we left the main floor,” Ethan said, the words feeling inadequate.
“You wouldn’t,” Coco said flatly. “Because according to a very belligerent Justin, you did see him. Out by the smoking area. He said he was talking to her—the woman in red—and you walked up, said something to her, and she left with you. He said you looked right at him and laughed.”
A silence, thick and cold, settled over the room. Ethan’s mind raced, scrambling through the blackout static. Nothing. No glimpse of Justin’s sneering face, no memory of a confrontation, no triumphant laugh. Just blank, empty space where a potentially explosive moment should have been.
“That doesn’t sound like me,” Ethan said, but it sounded weak, even to himself.
“It sounds exactly like drunk, competitive you,” Maya said quietly. She wasn’t accusing him. She was stating a fact, and that was worse.
“Okay, fine,” Ethan conceded, a knot of guilt tightening in his gut. “Maybe I was a dick. I’ll apologize. He’ll get over it.”
“That’s not the bombshell, Ethan.” Coco’s voice was almost a whisper. She pushed off the dresser and took a step toward them. “After his rant, Justin calmed down. Got weird and quiet. Then he told me something else. He said after you and Red left, he was so pissed he went back inside and straight to the bar. He ordered a double. And while he was there, he saw her. The woman in the red dress. She was alone, buying a water, maybe ten minutes after he’d just watched her leave with you.”
The air left Ethan’s lungs.
Maya slowly put her coffee cup down on the nightstand. The soft click was deafening.
“That’s impossible,” Ethan said, but the foundation of the morning was crumbling. If he hadn’t left with her… then what had happened in those lost hours? Who had he left with?
“Justin was trashed,” Coco continued, her eyes locked on his. “But he was sure. He described the dress, the way she moved. He said she looked upset. Agitated. And then she just melted back into the crowd.”
Maya stood up, the sheet falling away from where she’d been sitting. She wrapped her arms around herself. “So, let’s summarize. You have a confrontation with Justin over a woman you both wanted. You apparently leave with her. But you don’t. You somehow end up back here with me, with zero memory of how any of it happened. And the woman in question was seen alone, upset, shortly after.”
The logical, driven part of her was now fully in charge, piecing together the jagged edges of the night. It was a terrifying picture.
“What did we do?” Maya whispered, but this time the question was darker, weighted with a new kind of fear.
Coco’s bombshell wasn’t about gossip. It was a tripwire. It revealed the blackout wasn’t just a blank space; it was a black hole, and something ominous might be swirling at its center. The easy narrative of a simple, regrettable hookup was gone. Now, they were standing in the quiet aftermath of an unknown event, connected by a mystery that felt, suddenly, very dangerous.
Ethan looked at Maya, really looked at her—the fear in her eyes, the protective hunch of her shoulders. The comfortable friendship of an hour ago was a relic. Whatever they were now, they were in this together, anchored to a shared, gaping unknown.
He had to find out what happened. Before anyone else did.