Chapter 1: The Wrong Shirt

Midday light cut across the apartment in a strip that made her skull feel like it was being tapped by a metal spoon. The sound that started somewhere inside the base of her cranium was unrelenting. She stayed still for a long time. She didn't open her eyes. The air smelled like old coffee and something cheaper underneath it, as though someone had tried to clean a spill the night before and failed.

Her mouth tasted bad. Coffee, specifically, but also something else, something stale and metallic that clung to the back of her tongue. She tried to swallow. Her throat protested. The motion sent another wave of pain through her temples, and she pressed the heels of her palms against her eye sockets to keep the room from tilting further than it already had.

When she finally opened her eyes, the ceiling was unfamiliar. White paint with a single crack snaking from a ceiling fan base toward the corner. The fan itself was off. Through the apartment's window, the afternoon sun hit a brick building across the alley, bouncing back into her face. She squinted against it.

The man beside her shifted.

He groaned, burying his face further into the couch cushion before peeling his eyes open and catching sight of her. For a full two seconds, neither of them moved. He looked at her with the same guarded wariness she was directing at him, which told her one thing immediately. He was as lost as she was.

"Who are you?" The question came out of her mouth before she could filter it. Her voice was dry, a rasp she didn't recognize.

"I was going to ask you the same thing." He rubbed his face hard, as though he could push the confusion out through his skin. He was young, maybe late twenties, with dark hair already messy from whatever position he'd slept in. His jaw had two days of stubble and his eyes looked like they hadn't been rested in a long time.

"Do you remember anything?" she asked.

"The club. A few drinks. Then nothing useful." He sat up slowly. The couch springs announced him as the apartment was otherwise silent, as it always is in buildings this quiet. He rubbed the back of his neck while she sat up too, feeling the fabric of her shirt shift against her skin.

Gray cotton. Too big, the sleeves reaching past her elbows. She pulled it tight against her frame and realized it wasn't hers. Whatever shirt she'd gone to bed in was somewhere else, possibly on the floor, possibly on him. Her own shirt was somewhere on this couch in the form of a pile of discarded fabric she chose not to look at.

"I'm Lyra." She didn't offer a last name. That part of her felt too personal to surrender yet.

"Percy." He gave her the name without enthusiasm, as though he was also assessing whether giving a real name was the right tactical decision.

They sat in the quiet for a while. The fan overhead made a small clicking sound whenever the breeze from the window caught it, a rhythmic tick like a clock that had given up on telling the right time. Outside, someone honked. A dog barked twice. The sounds had no meaning in whatever city this turned out to be, since neither of them had managed to identify the city through the window yet.

"Where are we?" Percy asked.

Lyra stood. The room spun a quarter turn. She braced her hand against the couch back until it stopped. Through the window, she could see a fire escape, a sliver of street with parked cars, and a building name on the side of the one across the alley. The letters were too smeared to read.

"I don't know. This is someone's apartment, but I don't recognize it."

"Neither do I. Whose place is this?"

"Mine, I think." She glanced around the small living room. A coffee table with two empty mugs. A dead fern in a corner. A framed poster of something abstract on the wall that she hadn't hung, which meant either she had hung it and forgotten, or she had slept through the part where she got the apartment. "I came here."

"You came here last night, then. I followed you." He rubbed his forehead again. "Or we came here together. I can't tell where one story ends and the other starts."

The fragment that did manage to surface was brief and unsatisfying. A club. Bass thumping through her feet. Someone laughed beside her ear, a laugh she knew but couldn't attach to a face. There had been a street, too, a street she could feel under her shoes in a vague residual memory but couldn't name. The pieces refused to lock together, fitting one apart from the next, like the fragments of a photograph that someone had shredded.

Lyra pulled the oversized shirt straight and tugged the hem down. It covered her mid-thighs, just barely. She looked at Percy, who was staring at the floor with an expression of controlled dread. Both of them knew something had crossed a line last night. The absence of memory felt like guilt in the shape of nothing. They'd lost a night. What they'd done in those lost hours was something that would arrive sooner than either of them wanted.

A glass of water sat on the kitchen counter. Lyra crossed the small distance to it, lifting the glass with both hands because the water would be cold against her throat and she needed the weight of it, the simple grounding of gravity pulling her toward something. She drank it all in three long pulls.

The first memory came with the water.

His tongue along the soft skin behind her ear. Low, where the tendon met the neck. His breath catching against her throat while something inside her made a sound she had never produced, something that lived deep in her chest and had no business coming out at a volume it did. The memory hit hard enough that she flinched against the counter. She swallowed the water again, though it didn't help.

The second memory was worse. His face pressed between her thighs, the smell of sweat and coffee and something else underneath it, and his fingers slick and moving without hesitation, finding her as though he'd been trying to find her all his life. His hand on her stomach. His legs wide. The dark between them where his face had buried itself while she made that same sound again, and again.

She stood at the counter for a long moment. The glass was already empty. Her own body felt alien, as though last night's version of her had gone off on its own adventures and left this version behind to deal with the consequences.

"Percy," she said, without turning around.

"Yeah?"

"We should probably figure out who you are before we figure out anything else."

He came over to the kitchen and leaned against the doorframe. He was rubbing his jaw now, as though the stubble there might scratch something free from his head. "Fair enough. You just haven't mentioned who I am either."

"I don't know who you are."

"Me neither."

The silence that followed was dense. Two people, apparently, who had spent the previous night with each other's bodies and not with each other's names. The situation was grotesque enough to be funny, which it wasn't. Lyra waited for the other shoe to drop, for memory to keep coming in pieces, because it was coming. More fragments surfaced. His face in the dark between her legs. His thumb along the inside of her knee and her hips tilting toward it as if responding to a command she'd never given. His teeth at her collarbone. His lips at the curve of her shoulder. He had come inside her. Twice, she thought. She couldn't be sure about the second time, but the first one she remembered with enough clarity to feel the heat of it now.

She pressed the edge of the counter into the small of her back and breathed through her nose, trying to compose something that looked like normal conversation.

Percy reached for the same glass she'd just used and poured himself water. He drank half of it, then set the glass down and looked at her. "Lyra."

"Yeah."

"Did I—" He stopped. He looked at the floor. "Did I cross something?"

"Probably."

He nodded. The acknowledgement came easy, which surprised her. For most men, waking up in a woman's apartment with no memory of how they got there, having slept with her in whatever way that had been, would have triggered a defensiveness she expected to be thick. His, though, was thin and almost apologetic.

"I'm not going to make excuses for what we did last night," he said. "Even if I can't remember most of it. Whatever happened, I'm sorry it happened without you being fully there to decide for yourself."

That almost made her feel something warm, though she pushed it away quickly. He was being civil, reasonable, which made the physical residue of last night harder to process. Her body remembered him in ways her mind couldn't yet match. The sensation of his mouth at her collarbone was still there, ghosted against her skin. The place where his thumb had traced along her knee still itched. Her hips had answered before her brain could process the signal, and that responsiveness was the part she couldn't argue with.

She straightened and smoothed the gray shirt one more time, and for good reason. The fabric clung to the curves of her legs and hips where his hands had been, and every time she adjusted it she was acutely aware of his presence on the couch behind her and the couch's indentation where he'd been lying.

"Okay," she said. "Fine. Let's just sit down."

They returned to the couch. The couch they'd occupied for six hours the night before, occupying it again now to figure out what to do next. Percy sat at one end. Lyra at the other. A stretch of gray cushion between them. The space was small enough that the air between them felt charged, as though the previous night had charged the fabric permanently, and now every proximity brought back something she could feel in her skin before she could think it through.

His thumb brushed the inside of her knee.

Almost as if it were on autopilot, his hand moved of its own accord. It was a tiny movement, just the tip of his thumb dragged along the softer skin just above her ankle where her leg was bent. And her hips tilted toward it before she could stop the impulse. It was automatic. A reflex she'd built into herself sometime over the last few hours and didn't even remember constructing.

She froze. He pulled back as if burned.

"Sorry," he said.

"Don't be."

The words came out before she could edit them. He looked at her again. She looked back. Somewhere between them, the revulsion from waking up in a stranger's house began to dissolve. It was replaced by something more complicated. Curiosity, mostly. The question of how a night she'd blacked out on could have been so physically overwhelming that her body was still reacting to him without her permission.

Lyra grabbed a throw pillow from the couch and flicked it at him, hard enough that it caught him in the shoulder. "Are you a virgin?"

The question came out sharp, defensive. She needed to know where he stood. She had a history, specific and complicated. A man named Annabeth, a friends-with-benefits arrangement that had lasted long enough to set rules and boundaries, to create a framework in which sex lived apart from feeling. The rule had been simple: touch was touch, and feelings belonged somewhere else entirely, and the two zones were to stay separate. She'd lived by that for two years. She needed to know whether this stranger fit anywhere inside the architecture she'd built for her emotional life.

Percy caught the pillow. He looked at her. "What kind of question is that?"

"A fair one, considering where we are."

He didn't answer directly. Instead he rubbed his jaw and looked at her across the couch, and the look was too full of recognition. This was recognition that had nothing to do with her name or her face or whatever credentials she'd carried into the room last night. The recognition was more elemental. It was the look of a man who had felt something he shouldn't have felt and hadn't stopped.

She understood, without him saying a word. He'd felt it too. The magnetism of someone whose body responded to touch with a fluency that bypassed every rule she owned. The thing about her rulebook was that it relied on the assumption that sex was separate from feeling, that one could give the body pleasure without handing over the rest. Last night had proven that assumption wrong for someone, and that someone's silence in response to her question was as good as an answer.

"He felt it," she said quietly, as if to herself.

"What?"

"That thing between us. It wasn't the alcohol."

He didn't deny it. "No."

So they sat there with that honesty between them, with the pillow still in his hands and the morning sun still loud enough to hurt, and tried to be civil. Civil enough to suggest water. Civil enough to argue, badly and clumsily, about whose fault the blackout had been, both of them pointing at the other's last drink without any real conviction behind the accusations. She offered him the cup again. He took it. Their fingers touched for a fraction of a second when he reached for it, and both of them seemed to register the contact with more than just physical awareness.

When he handed the glass back, his hand lingered on hers. The small of her back registered warmth where his palm found it, pulling her a half-step closer. Her fingers, as if someone else had been driving, rose and curled into the dark hair at the nape of his neck. Neither of them spoke. The argument about who'd been drinking more was gone. What took its place was a kiss, unhurried at first and then hungry, tasting of coffee and last night and the careful lie they'd been telling themselves since waking up.

Percy's mouth pressed against hers. She matched him, her tongue finding his, her hands pulling his head closer, wanting to be closer still. The couch seemed to shrink around them. Whatever restraint they'd been performing was done, stripped away by a need that had been building since the moment her body registered his thumb against her knee.

He ended up between her legs. On the couch again, but deliberate this time. This time the amnesia was gone, replaced by memory in full, every sensation from the night's six hours laid out in sharp relief beneath their skin. Lyra wrapped her legs around his waist. She could feel him inside her, or close enough to feel what was coming, the heat and the pressure and the weight of him sliding down her body as he found the exact place she'd memorized in the dark.

When he came back inside her, the gasp he made was halfway to a prayer. Lyra arched off the cushions. His name reached her throat, whatever it was, though she only knew it now as a sound she'd been waiting to speak.

The afternoon bled into evening. They moved from the couch to the floor, the floor to the doorway where the hall light spilled in, and the corridor between rooms. Tongues and teeth at her collarbone. His mouth in the hollow behind her ear, working the spot where he'd started everything, as though returning to the beginning was the only way to keep moving forward. Her hands pulled him closer every time, every time she felt enough of him to feel the lack of him in the gaps between them. Proximity wasn't enough. She wanted him inside her. He gave her exactly that, over and over, as though each repetition was a confession neither of them could speak.

Between repetitions, they lay tangled on the floor with sweat cooling on their skin, catching breath and looking at each other with the bewildered fascination of two people discovering something impossible about their own bodies. They'd done this for six hours already. The night before. Apparently this didn't change anything, because they were doing it again, and every time it felt like the first time and the hundredth time all at once.

Late in the night, lying on the kitchen tile while the fridge hummed its low indifferent song, his phone buzzed on the coffee table by the couch. Neither of them had moved to pick it up. The screen lit up the dark room with a pale blue glow that made the whole apartment look like it had been underwater.

The name on the screen was from California.

Underneath the name, a single word sat in the notification preview. Girlfriend.

Lyra watched Percy glance at it. His eyes tracked the word for a full second, then moved away. He didn't pick up the phone. He didn't turn the screen face-down. He just let the glow fade back to black and stayed exactly where he was, with his arm still around her waist and his forehead pressed against hers.

She watched him watch the phone. Something shifted in the space between them, a small but permanent rearrangement of the furniture. He hadn't said anything. She didn't ask, partly because she didn't want to know and partly because knowing would mean acting on it, and acting on it meant choosing a side in a situation neither of them had fully agreed to be in.

Percy's gaze moved back to her face. He could see the awareness in her eyes, the question she wasn't asking aloud, the acknowledgment that somewhere beneath the wanting he'd done something to her that a phone call three thousand miles away could not undo. A rule about no feelings couldn't survive what had happened between them today, not in the hours she'd just been on the floor with his mouth at her throat, not now with his hand still resting on her hip as the phone lay dark on the table between them.

Neither of them moved to leave. The kitchen light hummed above them and the phone sat silent in the dark and the rest of the night waited somewhere beyond the walls, and Lyra settled her weight against his side and closed her eyes.

Outside, the city continued without them. Traffic noises from the alley below, a distant siren, the hum of a building alive with a hundred other strangers. None of them knew what was happening on this kitchen floor. This gray apartment in a city neither of them had fully named yet. Two people in a blackout they'd woken into still partially lost inside, with a phone on the counter that had told them exactly the wrong thing at exactly the right moment.

Percy's thumb traced the curve of her hip again. Slowly. Tentatively, as though he was rechecking something he'd already confirmed. Lyra did not pull away. She let her own hand rest on his forearm, fingers loose, and felt the steady beat of his pulse under her fingertips, a metronome that matched her own, or almost matched it, that kept time with a rhythm neither of them had written but both of them had been given.

The phone stayed dark. The kitchen tile was cool against her back. Somewhere in the apartment, a faucet dripped once and then stopped, and the silence that followed was absolute.