Chapter 12: Brownie Night
The first thing I became aware of was the weight. A solid, warm line of heat along my back, an arm slung possessively over my ribs, a hand splayed flat against my sternum. The second thing was the light, a brutal, insistent slash of morning sun cutting through a gap in my curtains and landing directly on my face. The third thing was the memory, which arrived not as a coherent narrative, but as a series of vivid, pulsing images: Kaisen’s laugh, deeper and freer than I’d ever heard it. The textured ceiling of my living room as I lay on the rug, insisting it felt like popcorn. The sharp, chemical taste of the marker during our failed attempt to play a sobering game. His mouth, suddenly on mine, a collision that felt less like a kiss and more like a surrender.
And then, the rest. The feverish, clumsy shedding of clothes. The feeling of his skin, scorching under my palms.
I was naked. He was naked. We were in my bed, a tangled knot of limbs and sheets. My head throbbed with a dull, cottony ache, the high receding but leaving a sticky residue of disorientation in its wake.
“Oh, god,” I whispered into my pillow.
The arm around me tightened infinitesimally. His breathing, which had been deep and even, hitched. He was awake. Or now he was.
Neither of us moved. The silence stretched, thick and suffocating, punctuated only by the distant sound of traffic on the street below. I could feel every point of contact: his knees tucked behind mine, the rough hair of his thigh against my smooth skin, the steady, slow beat of his heart against my spine.
“Sage.” His voice was a rasp, morning-rough and laced with something that sounded like dread.
“Don’t,” I said, the word cracking. “Just… don’t say anything yet.”
I needed a minute. I needed a year. I needed to rewind time to before the party, to before the goddamn innocent-looking plate of brownies, to before I ever walked into that investigations firm and saw him leaning against a desk, looking like a storm cloud in an expensive suit.
But I couldn’t. This was now. The evidence was pressed against my backside, a firm, undeniable reminder of what we’d done. Again.
He shifted, and I felt him withdraw his arm. The loss of his heat was immediate, a cold shock. The mattress dipped as he sat up. I didn’t turn. I stared at the sunlight on my wall, focusing on a tiny crack in the plaster I’d been meaning to fix.
I heard him sigh, a heavy, defeated sound. Then the rustle of sheets, the soft thud of his feet on my floorboards. “Your bathroom?”
“Down the hall,” I managed.
He padded out, and I finally rolled over, clutching the sheet to my chest. The room smelled like us—sex, sweat, and the faint, sweet ghost of cannabis. My clothes were a trail of breadcrumbs leading from the bedroom door: his dress shirt, my lace panties, his belt coiled like a snake on the rug. My face burned.
When he returned, he’d pulled on his black trousers, but they were unsnapped, hanging low on his hips. His chest was bare, the defined muscles of his abdomen a stark map in the morning light. His blond hair was tousled, his blue eyes shadowed and wary. He looked like a fallen angel who’d had a very rough night.
He leaned against the doorframe, not coming closer. “We were out of our minds.”
“That’s the excuse?” I said, my sarcasm a feeble shield.
“It’s not an excuse. It’s a fact.” He ran a hand through his hair. “I didn’t know. About the brownies. You have to believe that.”
“I do,” I said, and I meant it. The stunned look on his face at the party had been genuine. “I didn’t know either. But we knew after. We knew when we left. We knew when we came in here.”
“And what did we know, Sage?” he asked, his voice dangerously soft. “Tell me what you think we knew.”
I flung the sheet aside and stood, not caring about my nakedness. Anger was easier than the churning vortex of other emotions. “We knew this was a catastrophic idea! You’re engaged. Engaged, Kaisen. To Jane. The woman with the perfect life and the wedding planner. And I’m… I’m your trainee. Your messed-up, overthinking trainee who you took to Florida and fucked in a beach house!” My voice was rising, trembling. “We knew this was the worst possible thing we could do. And we did it anyway. Twice.”
He pushed off the doorframe and crossed the room in two strides. He didn’t touch me, but he loomed, his presence overwhelming. “Don’t,” he growled. “Don’t reduce what happened in Florida to just that. And don’t you dare call yourself messed-up.”
“Why? It’s true! Look at this!” I gestured wildly between us. “This is a disaster. You’re stressed about your family, about a marriage you clearly don’t want. I’m… I’m a distraction. A mistake.”
His control snapped. His hands came up, cupping my face, forcing me to look at him. His eyes were blazing. “You are not a mistake. You are the only thing that has felt unequivocally right in a very long time. That’s the problem. That’s the whole, fucking problem.”
The raw confession hung in the air between us, more intoxicating than any drug. My anger evaporated, leaving me exposed. I could see the conflict tearing him apart, the guilt, the want, the sheer fucking misery of it.
My breath hitched. “Kaisen…”
His thumbs stroked my cheeks. “I can’t think straight when I’m near you. Last night… the high just ripped away every barrier. Every single one. I saw you laughing on that rug, your hair everywhere, and I wanted you so much it felt like a physical pain. I still want you. Right now, sober and hungover and knowing it’s the worst goddamn decision I could make, I want you.”
The words were a key turning in a lock deep inside me. All my overthinking, my carefully constructed walls, crumbled to dust. This was real. This was a terrible, beautiful, doomed reality.
I leaned into his touch. “So what do we do?”
He didn’t answer with words. His mouth came down on mine, but it wasn’t like the frantic, devouring kiss from the night before. This was slow. Deliberate. Sober. A kiss of grim acceptance. A kiss that tasted like regret and inevitability.
I kissed him back, my hands sliding up his bare chest, feeling the hard planes, the rapid beat of his heart. This was choosing the fire, knowing you’d get burned.
He walked me backward until my knees hit the bed. We fell onto the tangled sheets, a slow, graceless descent. He loomed over me, his eyes tracing my face as if memorizing it. “I should go,” he murmured, but he was lowering himself, his body aligning with mine.
“You shouldn’t,” I whispered, arching up to meet him.
This time, there was no hesitation, no playful discovery. It was a raw and hungry reclamation. He kissed down my neck, my collarbone, taking a nipple into his mouth, sucking hard until I cried out. His hand slid between my legs, finding me already wet, already aching for him. He swore, a filthy, reverent word against my skin.
“Look at you,” he breathed, his fingers circling, delving inside. “Soaked for me. Again.”
“Yes,” was all I could gasp. The complicated world, the engaged woman, our careers—it all shrank to the point where his touch met my skin.
He notched himself at my entrance, his gaze locked on mine. There was a question there, a final chance to stop. I wrapped my legs around his hips, my answer clear.
He pushed in, a slow, inexorable slide that made us both groan. It was different sober. Deeper, more intense. Every nerve ending was awake, screaming. I could feel every inch of him, the stretch, the fullness, the shocking intimacy of it.
“Fuck, Sage,” he choked out, burying his face in my neck. He began to move, a relentless, driving rhythm. His thrusts were deep, claiming. Each one pushed a broken sound from my throat. My nails dug into the muscles of his back, seeking an anchor.
The room filled with the sound of skin on skin, of ragged breathing, of the bedframe knocking a soft, persistent rhythm against the wall. He shifted, hooking an arm under my knee, spreading me wider, sinking even deeper. The new angle stole my breath.
“Right there,” I begged, my words fragmenting. “Oh, god, right there.”
He obeyed, his pace turning punishing, focused solely on that perfect, coiling tension building low in my belly. His blue eyes were dark, unfocused, seeing only me. “Come for me,” he demanded, his voice guttural. “I need to feel you come.”
It was the command, the sheer desperation in his tone, that undid me. The climax ripped through me, violent and consuming, my back bowing off the bed as a silent scream tore from my throat. He watched me unravel, his own control shattering. With three more sharp, brutal thrusts, he followed, his body shuddering, a low, ragged groan escaping as he spilled himself deep inside me.
He collapsed, his weight a welcome anchor. We lay there, glued together by sweat, our hearts hammering a frantic, synchronized tattoo against each other’s chests.
Reality, cold and insistent, began its drip-feed back into my consciousness. The smell of sex. The stickiness between my thighs. The ring. The invisible, weighty presence of Jane.
Kaisen rolled off me, onto his back, one arm flung over his eyes. The silence returned, heavier now.
“I have to tell her,” he said to the ceiling, his voice hollow. “I can’t… I can’t live like this.”
The finality of it was a cold splash of water. He wasn’t talking about us. He was talking about ending his engagement. Because of this. Because of me.
The immensity of it, the fallout we were courting, crashed down. I had wanted him, yes. But I hadn’t wanted to be the reason for a shattered life.
Before I could form a thought, his phone buzzed on my floor, vibrating against the wood. He flinched. We both looked at the screen, lighting up where it lay beside his discarded shirt.
The name flashed, clear and bright in the dim room.
Jane.
The buzzing was an obscene intrusion, a chainsaw ripping through the fragile aftermath. Kaisen didn’t move his arm from his eyes. The phone went silent. Then, a second later, it started again, a persistent, angry hum.
“You should get that,” I said, my voice hollow.
“No.”
It stopped. The quiet it left was worse.
He finally sat up, swinging his legs over the side of the bed, his back to me. The muscles in his shoulders were tense knots. I watched him, the landscape of his spine, the way his head dipped forward. The guilt was a physical thing in the room, a third person sitting between us.
“We didn’t use anything,” I said. The words were small, clinical.
He went very still. “I know.”
“Last time… in Florida… we didn’t either.” The realization was a cold spike of pure fear, cutting through the post-sex haze and the emotional chaos. My cycle was a mess from stress. His hand went to the back of his neck, gripping it hard.
“Fuck,” he breathed, the word sharp with finality. He stood, a sudden, decisive motion. “Get dressed. We’re going out.”
“Where?”
“A pharmacy.” He was already pulling on his boxer briefs, stepping into his trousers, snapping them closed. He found his shirt on the floor, shrugged into it, leaving it untucked. He looked rumpled and dangerous, a far cry from the man in the expensive suit. “Now, Sage.”
The urgency was contagious. I scrambled up, my body feeling used and tender. I yanked on a pair of soft cotton panties and a bra, then went to my dresser. I pulled out a worn, gray hoodie and the only sunglasses I owned, cheap aviators with a slight crack in one lens. When I turned, he was doing the same, zipping a plain black hoodie he must have had in his coat pocket last night. He put his own sunglasses on, hiding his piercing eyes.
We looked like two criminals about to rob a bank, or two idiots hiding from the sun of our own mistakes.
The walk to the 24-hour convenience store three blocks away was made in near silence. The bright Florida morning felt accusatory. Every car that passed, every person walking a dog, felt like a witness. He walked slightly ahead, his posture rigid. I kept my head down, the hoodie pulled up despite the building heat.
The automatic doors hissed open, releasing a blast of air conditioning and the smell of stale coffee and industrial cleaner. The fluorescent lights were unforgiving.
“Wait here,” he said, his voice low, nodding toward the magazine rack by the entrance.
I didn’t argue. I leaned against the cold glass of the door, watching him. He moved with a grim efficiency, his stride eating up the linoleum as he headed for the family planning aisle. He didn’t browse. He just reached out, took a small box from the shelf, and carried it like a piece of evidence to the counter.
The cashier, a bored-looking older man, scanned it without comment. Kaisen pulled cash from his wallet, not waiting for the receipt. The entire transaction took less than a minute. He pocketed the small box and walked back to me, his jaw tight behind the sunglasses.
“Let’s go.”
Back outside, the humidity wrapped around us like a wet blanket. We didn’t speak until we were back in the sterile quiet of my apartment. He tossed the hoodie onto my couch, removed his sunglasses, and placed the small, blue-and-white box on my coffee table next to a stack of old case files. It looked so innocuous. It looked like everything.
He went to my kitchen, ran the tap, and filled a glass of water. He brought it to me, then retrieved the box, opening it with a precise tear. He read the instructions silently, his eyes scanning the small print. The clinical nature of it all was a bizarre counterpoint to the raw, sweat-slicked passion of an hour before.
“You need to take it now,” he said, handing me the single pill. It was small, white, unremarkable.
I took it from him, our fingers brushing. I put it on my tongue, accepted the water, and swallowed. The act felt like a confession.
He watched my throat work. “I’ll pay for it. For that. And for… anything else.”
“I have insurance, Kaisen.”
“I don’t give a shit about insurance.” He took the glass from me, set it down hard. “I give a shit that I’ve been reckless with you. Twice. That I’m so fucked up over my own life that I’m making catastrophic decisions and you’re bearing the consequences.”
“I was there too,” I whispered. “I made the choices.”
“Did you?” He turned, his blue eyes blazing with a self-loathing so deep it scared me. “Or was I just the senior investigator who took you to a beach house and fucked you, then got you high and fucked you again? The power dynamic here isn’t exactly balanced, Sage. I was supposed to be training you, not fucking you raw and sending you to buy morning-after pills in a hoodie.”
The crude summary was meant to hurt, to push me away. It worked. I flinched.
“So what is this, then?” I asked, my voice gaining strength. “A professional misconduct hearing? You absolving your guilt by painting yourself as the predator? Maybe I wanted you. Maybe I still want you, despite the ring and the fiancée and the fact that this is going to explode in our faces. That makes me complicit, not a victim.”
He stared at me, conflict warring on his face. The door to his cage was open, and he was terrified to step out, terrified to stay in. The phone in his pocket buzzed again, a muted vibration. He didn’t even glance at it.
“Jane,” I stated.
“I know.”
“You have to talk to her.”
“I know that, too.” He finally pulled the phone out, looked at the screen, and powered it off. The finality of the gesture was more shocking than if he’d answered. He dropped the dead device on the coffee table next to the empty Plan B box. “But not today. Today, I’m right here. Dealing with this. With you.”
He sat down on the edge of my couch, elbows on his knees, head in his hands. The formidable Kaisen Crowley, reduced to a weary man in a wrinkled shirt in my messy apartment. I sat beside him, not touching. The space between us was charged, a minefield of unsaid things.
“What are we doing?” I asked, the question hanging in the still air.
He lifted his head, looked straight ahead at the blank wall. “I have no goddamn idea.”