Chapter 3: Beers and Blurred Lines
The phone’s screen went dark, then lit up again with an incoming call. Cane’s name. Jessica watched it vibrate against the rumpled sheet, a tiny, insistent earthquake. She let it go to voicemail.
Thirty seconds later, a new text: I’m outside. You’re clearly awake. I have beer. Let me in or I start singing show tunes.
A hysterical laugh caught in her throat. Outside. He was outside her apartment, right now, while she lay here smelling of sex and shame. She scrambled out of bed, her legs unsteady. She yanked on a pair of sweatpants and a fresh, baggy t-shirt, frantically running her hands through her tangled curls. She couldn’t let him in. She absolutely had to let him in. The conflict was a live wire in her chest.
She peeked through the blinds. He was leaning against the wall of the hallway, a six-pack dangling from one hand, looking at his phone. He was just… Cane. Her friend. The reality of him, solid and normal, clashed violently with the graphic phantom who’d just wrecked her in this room.
She unlocked the deadbolt.
The door swung open and there he was, his warm brown eyes crinkling at the corners. “Took you long enough. You look like hell.”
“Charming as ever,” she said, her voice thankfully steady. She stepped back to let him in.
He moved past her, and the space in her tiny foyer immediately shrank. He smelled like the night air and his stupid, familiar cologne. He set the beer on her cluttered kitchen counter, his t-shirt pulling across the muscles of his back. Her mouth went dry.
“Place is a disaster, Jess.” He gestured at the boxes, the laundry mound on her thrift-store couch. “You’ve lived here six months.”
“It’s an organized chaos,” she retorted, crossing her arms over her chest. “You’re just neurotically tidy.”
He grinned, that easy, charming smile that usually put her at ease. Now it felt like a spotlight. He cracked open two bottles, handing her one. Their fingers brushed. A jolt, sharp and electric, shot up her arm. She fumbled the bottle, sloshing beer onto her sweatpants.
“Clumsy today,” he noted, his gaze lingering on her for a beat too long. He took a long swallow. “So. You wanna tell me why you sprinted out of my place like a bat out of hell earlier?”
She took a gulp of beer, the bitter cold a welcome shock. “I told you. I remembered a deadline. Client stuff.”
“Bullshit.” He leaned against the counter, studying her. “You get all flustered and your freckles disappear when you lie. They’re gone right now.”
“My freckles do not disappear,” she said, but she could feel the heat flooding her cheeks.
He just raised an eyebrow, a silent challenge. The air between them thickened. The memory of the dream, of her own hands, was a scream in her head. She drank more beer, desperate for the blurring effect.
They migrated to the living room. She cleared a stack of laundry from the couch, and he sank into the worn cushions with a sigh, stretching his arm across the back. She sat at the far end, tucking her legs beneath her, putting as much of the shabby couch between them as possible.
They talked. About nothing. About everything. The beer did its work, loosening the knot of tension in her shoulders, smoothing the sharp edges of her panic. He made her laugh with a story about a client who tried to lift weights in designer loafers. She told him about her nightmare client, and for a while, it was almost normal. Almost.
Then he stood. “Gotta piss.”
He walked down her short hallway to the bathroom. She heard the door click shut. A moment of silence, then the distinct, cascading sound of him urinating. It was loud, unabashed, profoundly intimate. She squeezed her eyes shut, the sound weaving into her fantasy from before—a different kind of vulnerability, a mundane animal function that felt, in her current state, wildly erotic. Her face burned. She drained her second bottle.
When he returned, he didn’t resume his spot. He sat closer, the couch dipping under his weight, his thigh a mere inch from hers. The casual contact was a brand.
“You’re being weird, Jess,” he said, his voice lower, softer.
“I’m always weird.”
“Not like this.” He turned his head to look at her. The lamplight caught the amber in his eyes.
The lamplight caught the amber in his eyes. That simple observation felt dangerously intimate, a cataloging of details she had no business memorizing. "You looked at me today like you'd seen a ghost," he said, his voice quiet in the cluttered room.
"I didn't," she lied, her own voice thin.
"At my place. When you barged in." He didn't smile. "Your face went completely white. Then red. You haven't made proper eye contact since."
The beer bottle was slick in her hand. She set it on the floor with a definitive clink. "I told you, I had work."
"Stop it." The command was soft, but it had edges. He shifted, turning his body fully toward her, and the warmth of him was an invasion. "Just tell me. Did I do something? Did I say something wrong?"
The directness of his question was a gut-punch. Her pulse hammered in her throat, a frantic bird against her skin. All the overheated images from her bedroom—the phantom weight of him, the sound of her own voice begging—crashed against this raw concern in his eyes.
He thought he’d hurt her. The genuine worry on his face was worse than any teasing.
“No,” she said, the word coming out too fast. “God, no, Cane. You didn’t do anything wrong.” She forced her hands to unclench in her lap, willed herself to meet his gaze. “It was me. I was just… embarrassed.”
“Embarrassed?” He leaned back slightly, but his focus never wavered. “Why?”
A nervous laugh escaped her, brittle and sharp. “Because I basically broke into your bathroom. It was a total violation of bro-code, or whatever.” She grabbed her beer again, just for something to do. “I felt like such an idiot. My brain short-circuited. So I ran. It’s my specialty.”
She watched him process this, his expression softening from concern to a gentle amusement. The tightness in her chest unclenched a fraction. She had told a truth, just not the whole, devastating truth.
“Jess,” he sighed, a warm, forgiving sound. “You’ve seen me puke off a balcony. You held my hair back. A little accidental walk-in isn’t exactly a capital offense.”
“It was rude,” she insisted, clinging to the safer, simpler shame.
“It was funny,” he corrected, a slow smile returning. He nudged her thigh with his knee. “You’re allowed to be a human disaster. I’d be disappointed if you weren’t.”
The contact sent a fresh current through her, but his words were a balm. She had reassured him. The invisible line between them, pulled so taut it threatened to snap, slackened back into something familiar. The moment hung there, balanced between the old ease and the new, terrifying awareness.
Then his smile turned a degree sharper, his eyes dropping to her mouth for a fleeting instant. “So, just to be clear,” he said, his voice dipping into a playful, lower register. “My virtue remains intact? You didn’t see anything… scarring?”
The air evaporated from her lungs. The bathroom. The water on his skin. The perfect, accidental view. Her whole body flushed, a traitorous wave of heat that had nothing to do with embarrassment. She could feel the blush spreading down her neck, a tell as glaring as a flare.
She opened her mouth, but no sound came out. Her nervous laugh finally broke free, sounding utterly unhinged even to her own ears.