4. Chapter 4

Chapter 4

I sat in Henry's in my usual seat. I had my usual drink in front of me. I could feel the cool glass against my palm and the sting of the whiskey on my tongue as I took a generous sip. I set it down, and it made a satisfying clunk against the wooden counter. The noise around me was a general, quiet hum of conversation that I was unable to discern, and the individuals who were speaking were all a blur. Liam and Zoey could have been to my right, and Luke and Claire could have been behind the bar, but I wouldn't have known…because my focus was wholeheartedly on the presence that was sinking into the stool on my left.

I could feel her as I typically could. It was cold out, but she radiated heat. Her shirt had black sleeves that covered her arms down to her wrists, and I saw the material as she reached for my drink. I honed in on it as she lifted it to her mouth, watched the liquid touch her lips, and saw her throat bob as she swallowed. I wanted to be that liquor. I think she knew that…and she smiled wide. For whatever unknown reason, the wall that I had forcibly placed between us in the past was notably absent, and I breathed a sigh of relief at the feeling of being unrestrained.

The glass remained in Cassie's hand, she lifted it toward me in a cheersing motion, and her dark eyes danced.

"I like this one."

"It's the same whiskey I get every time," I reminded her.

Her mouth stretched further. "I know." A full drink slid before me from the unknown blur behind the counter, and as I reached for it, she asked, "You're hanging around this time?"

I nodded, drained half of my glass in one gulp, and returned, "May as well."

"Good," she replied, "it's my night off."

"Night off from what?" I asked her in a tease.

"Work."

Delightfully unfiltered, I crooned, "And what do you do for work, Cassie?"

She set her glass down, dragged her eyes from my feet to my head, and said, "I think you know that already."

"I do."

"Are you capable of keeping a secret, James?" she questioned me in a tone that felt seductive, and I couldn't help but allow a smile to pull at my lips .

I looked at her, felt our eyes lock as she silently demanded my attention and kept it, and I replied, "Yes."

"Good," she said. "You smile as if you're picturing it."

"Picturing what?" I asked.

"Me," Cassie quipped, reaching for the glass that was once mine and tossing it back. "Working."

Images of her in a scantily clad, glowing getup that barely covered her flashed in my mind. I could nearly feel her breath hot on my face as I imagined her moving over me. My cheeks heated at the notion, and my eyelids were suddenly hooded with lust.

"Maybe I am," I admitted.

Her head tipped to the side. "What aspect of me working are you envisioning, exactly?"

"The one with you on top of me."

I said it with grit in my voice, and her eyes were alight with either entertainment or anticipation—I couldn't decide which.

She hummed a happy noise and voiced, "That's what I thought," and I seriously considered the latter.

Our back-and-forth banter continued on like none other. With the absence of my usual limitations toward her, our conversation and the wit that we threw toward each other was effortless. It was charming. Flirtatious. Brash. It went on for what felt like hours until Cassie sighed with a breathy laugh and quipped:

"Damn…I'm buzzed."

And, of course, she shouldn't drive. Couldn't drive. My apartment had plenty of space…and it was awaiting us both.

A gasp that stretched the capacity of my lungs and rattled in my throat ripped through me before I even had the chance to open my eyes.

It was a dream.

A fucking bad one.

Not bad in the sense that it gave me anxiety or sent my mind to a memory that I wished to erase—bad in the sense that I could see it all burned into my retinas. Bad in the sense that the star of said dream was Cassie. Bad in the sense that much, much more had occurred in that dream before I had woken in a sweaty puddle with a shuddering inhale.

Of course, I had thought of Cassie in a sexual manner in the past. Whenever she'd tease me, I'd want to kiss her in response. She'd use profanities in the middle of a conversation, and I'd consider how it would sound if she were moaning it. She'd wear short jean shorts, and I'd note that her legs were long—so long that if she were to bend over at the waist, I could fuck her from behind with ease.

They were similar to intrusive thoughts of, I don't know, steering off the highway with a rapid jerk of my hand…jumping from a bridge…biting glass…punching a window. I wouldn't do any of those, obviously, and I'd usher the sexual thoughts away just as quickly as I would the others. But this? This dream? It was different.

I couldn't stop picturing her legs wrapped around my head.

My face between her thighs.

Her shivering around me, screaming to the gods as she came on my mouth.

I could feel her convulsing on my tongue.

"Fuck," I moaned a miserable curse, continuing to heave large breaths as if I had just finished sprinting.

I tried to will the vivid non-memories away, yet they remained.

I had offered her the spare bedroom in my apartment. She asked if she could have a nightcap, and I obliged. We chatted on the couch. Our eyes met as we realized how close we were sitting. She smiled that fucking smile…and I went for it. She sighed against me, I felt like a god amongst men, two plus two equaled four, and then, her bare feet were grazing my back as I worshipped her.

I was painfully erect, now—to the point that I was concerned that moving the comforter that laid over my lap would finish me off—and shame was washing over me in a wave. It was just a dream…a harmless dream…but thinking of her in such a way felt wrong on so many levels.

And, fuck me, but that made the thought of it even hotter.

I sprang from my bed, thanked whatever god above that I didn't orgasm from the movement, and headed straight for the shower. The image was probably comical, really, and it was a goddamn blessing that I lived alone. My torso was angled slightly downwards in an attempt to reduce the strain of my dick against the fabric of my boxer briefs. My bare feet slapped across the cherry wood as I power-walked past the kitchen, and I groaned when I glimpsed the time on the stove that read 2:03 A.M. I rushed into the bathroom with an air of desperation, cranked the temperature in the shower to what I could only describe as ice, carefully peeled my boxers off, and stepped in.

"AH!"

I sucked in a breath through my teeth, my muscles stiffened, and I allowed the frigid water to pelt my body. I told myself that I would stand there for as long as was needed to remedy my situation… and the minutes passed. The initial shock of the temperature waned, my fingers and toes began to go numb, my skin—though typically a bit pale aside from the areas that were tattooed—seemed to have a blueish pallor to it, and my cock was still fucking hard.

I wondered bitterly if I would die here. If I would get fucking hypothermia from standing in this shower, waiting for my hard-on to abate.

Monday would roll around, and I wouldn't have the ability to call in for work, being dead and all. My coworkers, most likely Brooks, would be concerned because, if anything, I was a punctual and up-front person. The lack of my presence throughout the day without any alert of it—a no-call, no-show, as it could be called—would be alarming, and they would try to contact me. The phone would ring, and ring…or, perhaps, my phone would have died by then, as well…and that's when the police would show. They would bust down my door, the shower would still be running, and they would race to the bathroom.

And, there I would be. Dead. Blue all over, with the exception of my cock, of course, because I would probably still be fucking hard.

It would be an anomaly. The policemen would be perplexed—I could imagine it:

Policeman One stops in his tracks. "Oh shit, he's dead."

"Uh huh…for a while, looks like," Policeman Two replies. "Better call the medical examiner."

"Is he…is he erect?" Policeman One ponders aloud as he squints at my body.

Policeman Two grimaces. "Oh, Jesus. That he is."

"How the fuck is that possible?" Policeman One notes, "He's past rigor mortis, right?"

"Definitely," Policeman Two agrees. "No idea how he's hard right now…they're gonna want to do studies on this shit."

"An autopsy at the very least, right?"

"Oh, yeah."

Policeman One tilts his head to the side as he takes in my appearance even further, and then asks hesitantly, "…think it has anything to do with how big his dick is?"

Policeman Two nods emphatically. "I mean, he's enormous…probably. They'll want to study that, too."

I laughed loudly at my morbidly imagined scenario, looked down, and whispered, "Oh, thank God," because I was finally flaccid.

I turned the water to hot, regained the feeling in my limbs, and remained there until my skin was splotched with red from the heat. I exchanged my sexual thoughts of Cassie for the memory—the real memory—that had happened the night before. Remorse over what I had said, how she could have taken it, and why repeated over and over in my brain. I supposed that was natural—a natural thing to feel after essentially telling her to fuck off. It would pass, I told myself.

It didn't pass, though…and furthermore, I was concerned that the dream which had left me in a state of, erm, distress was becoming a recurring one. It did recur—both Sunday and Monday at exactly two o'clock in the morning, I awoke in a similarly shocked state. Eyes wide open and flat on my back, I was panting. Damn near covered in sweat, I groaned, realized the sins that I had unintentionally committed yet again, refrained from slapping my face as a form of punishment, and hopped in an icy shower.

On Monday morning, I had thankfully recovered from my brief bout of hypothermia, and as I drove to work, I—once again—thought of Cassie. Not in the lewd manner that I had been attempting to erase from my dreams, but with shame regarding my horrific behavior. I had considered contacting her, but I didn't have her phone number—I had never asked her for it, and I never intended to—and I was cursing myself because of it. I didn't know what I would say, but I still had the urge to reach out and talk to her . There were several routes I could take:

Erm, sorry, I can be a douche sometimes. We cool?

I'm definitely not friends with the guy who tried to rip your top off.

I didn't look at your tit when it happened .

Your, um, glow in the dark makeup was cool. Where'd ya buy it?

Stupid. All of those options were idiotic because they skirted around the actual matter at hand, and Cassie was too smart— too inquisitive of a woman not to see behind my false intentions. That aside, none of those words would have been near enough. I felt as though I needed to crawl on my knees for forgiveness. To tell her that I was shocked at the sight of her—frozen underneath her as she moved above me, and when our eyes locked, I had splintered and snapped. That pushing thoughts of her out of my mind was one of the hardest tasks I had ever been daunted with, and that was why I was an asshole—I was pushing her away for obvious reasons, and I was so fucking sorry. But I couldn't do all of that because…y'know… the insinuation.

There was no middle road that appeared to me along the lines of apologies. Not now. And I hated myself for that.

Monday was a distraction, at the very least, because work was… interesting. I was no longer drowning myself in the day-to-day monotony of my job. No —now, I had workplace drama. The moment that I walked to my cubicle, I saw Shawn's dark, curly head whip to mine from the adjacent workspace. He wore a cringe on his face as he watched me set my things down with care.

He leaned on the edge of his desk, greeting me with a long, drawn out, "Heyyyyyy, buddy—"

"Why are you hey buddying me?" I returned.

Shawn's green eyes darted to the left and right, finding the other cubicles beside us unoccupied. "Have a good weekend?"

"Shit weekend," I retorted. "And I feel like you know I had a shit weekend and why because you're alarmingly up to speed regarding my personal life."

"Is…now when I officially apologize about Gas Lamp?" he asked hesitantly.

"Yes."

He gave me a meek smile. "Sorry. Shit idea."

I exhaled heavily. "It's all good, man."

"I take it you didn't talk to Cassie," he remarked, glancing at the ceiling.

"No." I was going to be snarkier, but when Shawn looked to me with a tinge of sympathy, I backpedaled. "No, I, ah—haven't seen her. Haven't reached out. I don't have her number."

"Right, right," Shawn replied. "You should, though…mend bridges. Form bonds. Ask her out."

I barked out a laugh. "Fairly certain that she hates me at the moment, but thanks for the sage advice. "

"Yeah, the tail end of that conversation wasn't exactly in your favor," he stated with a cringe. "Yikes, man. You have work to do."

"You kept eavesdropping?" I asked him with high eyebrows. He shrugged, and I chastised him, "Brooks."

"You were loud!" he defended himself. "It was impossible not to listen in. And I… kinda thought I'd end up hearing the beginnings of a feelings confession, followed by a kiss, followed by—"

"Shawn."

"I strained my ears to keep hearing, okay? I'm sorry." He did not sound sorry in the least. Shawn carried on with, "I'm a sucker for a good love story. I was rooting for you…despite the fact that you were a total dick, dude. What the fuck?"

"Are you a love doctor, Brooks?" I asked bitterly.

He shrugged. "I root for love when I see it. Apologize to her. Buy her chocolates."

I stated plainly, "She's twenty-two years old. That's a little young for me."

"Who gives a shit? Your brother's girlfriend's whatever that you told me about…Zoey. She was younger, yeah? What's the difference?"

"Ah, that was a five-year age difference. This is nine. "

"So? What's the rule for acceptable age to date…half your age, plus seven?"

The math in my head was lightning quick.

"Twenty-three," I replied. "My youngest acceptable age to date would be twenty-three—"

"You rounded up!" he retorted. "Twenty-two and a half. It's like you're making excuses not to ask her out. I mean, fuck, man—you're tense. I'd like to not see you walkin' around the office with that look on your face anymore—"

"What look?" I interrupted him. "I have a look?"

"It's like…you're a jack-in-the-box that's been cranked to juuuust before it's about to pop," Shawn explained.

I nearly snorted. Though his description was apt, I muttered, "I don't look like that."

"Maybe I just know you well." He shrugged. "Worked in the same space for a few years; I'd like to think so."

I sighed. "Fine. Maybe you have a point."

"So…"

"So… what?"

"So," Shawn pressed, "ask her out."

I grimaced. "Zoey's boyfriend's little sister."

He cocked an eyebrow up high. "Lingering tension between you and Zoey?"

"God, no…that was months ago. It just feels… wrong?"

"Dirty," Shawn corrected me, and I threw him a quick glare.

"There's a—a bro code about shit like this, right? Thou shalt not pursue a bro's sibling."

One of his dark eyebrows raised up. "How close are you with Zoey's boyfriend? He's a bro now?"

"Complicated friend circle," I stated. "Kinda."

Shawn immediately replied, "Mmkay, well, do you think Cassie's into you? Because I was up front and center for the tension bomb, and it was comin' from both of you."

I ground my teeth together. "We wouldn't work," I told him simply. "All of the other stuff aside, I'm a jealous guy—"

"Turner," Shawn laughed disbelievingly, "that's an understatement. I saw your face on Friday."

I exhaled. "Yeah, she makes me a little crazier than normal. I get it. Point being, even if she wasn't strictly off-limits, I don't want to be…I dunno… toxic."

Shawn began to hum the Britney Spears song by the same name. His maroon sweater-clad shoulders bobbed from side to side, I allowed him to do so as I watched him with half-lidded eyes, and then he sang an off-key, high-pitched:

"I'm addicted to you; don't you know that you're toxic?"

"Shawn. "

He beamed a smile at me. "I'll allow the first-name calling. You're stressed. You do you, boo… speaking of you being crazy—"

"Where's this going?"

"I swung by the sales cubes. Tommy got in early."

I threw my head back and groaned loudly, following it up with a hushed, "Couldn't he just have quit? Save me the misery of potentially seeing his face?"

"You broke his fingers, Jay."

I cringed at the news, though I had a sneaking suspicion of that already. "And you know this because…"

"Because he has splints on the index and middle fingers on both of his hands, James! He was typing like this."

Shawn then held his arms out to the side, pointing them down at ninety-degree angles, and began to individually click buttons on his keyboard with fingers that he kept forcedly straight.

I chortled at the sight. "That's funny."

He smiled at my amusement but replied, "It is not funny, Jay—"

"If you're tryin' to get remorse out of me for this one, it's not gonna happen." I added, "In fact, I should have done more."

He sighed heavily. "Bottle up the crazy, Turner. I know you can do it."

"Instead," I offered, "I should talk to HR and tell them that Tommy dragged us to an inappropriate venue for a work event and proceeded to assault an innocent woman."

"And then…technically… you assaulted him," Shawn stated. "That's not gonna end well for you. Like I said," he whispered, "bottle up the crazy."

He turned back to focus on his work, effectively ending our conversation, and I used the rest of the work day to ponder how I could render Tommy unemployed.

‘Damn…I'm buzzed.'

Spoken in Cassie's voice, the words played over and over in my mind. They weren't real. They had never left her mouth outside of the confines of my brain—not to me, at least—but damn, did they feel like they were. Friday night, in my first forbidden dream, they were there. Saturday—yep. Sunday and Monday? You bet your ass. Tuesday, though? Somewhere between Tuesday night and Wednesday morning , my testosterone-riddled brain had made the connection. Mid-sleep, those cursed words left her lips, and they were my tip. My clue. My internal realization that I was, in fact, dreaming .

I recognized the dream. Unlike the nights before it, I was… aware. I felt as though I had control. I consciously told myself, ‘You're dreaming, Jay, snap out of it,' and despite all of it, I followed through. I bent the laws of my imagination as far as they would go. At some point, while unconscious, I had come to the conclusion that doing those things with Cassie in my mind wasn't… forbidden. It was just a dream.

And the things we did were fucking filthy.

It was waking that was the problem. Instead of flinching myself into reality, heavily breathing until I fully woke and racing to the shower, I was face down. Face down and bucking my hips into the fucking mattress. I didn't even get a chance to open my eyes—after what I believe were four thrusts, I came so hard that my hands fisted in the sheets, and I had the primal urge to bite. My teeth sank into my pillow, a sound came out of me that could have easily been mistaken as pain-induced, and I rode it out until my muscles ceased their clenching.

I opened my eyes, and the erotic haze was lifted. I cursed myself with a, "God dammit," that was immediately followed with, "Oh, no," as I realized the mess I had made of both my mind and my sheets.

One swat at my phone on the bedside table, I saw that it was—of course—two o'clock in the morning. It was always two o'clock in the morning when I would wake from my dreams of her. I threw my pillows to the floor, yanked the fitted sheet off of the closest corner of my bed, and used it to wipe myself clean the best I could. With the evidence of my most recent sins having somehow escaped through the fly of my boxers and splattered across my sheets and duvet, I contemplated the hours of the local laundromat. I flopped on my back onto the naked portion of the mattress and reached for my phone for a quick Google search, finding that all laundromats in Salem weren't open for several hours. Just south of Roanoke, though—there was a twenty-four-hour laundromat there.

Did I want to drive twenty minutes to the laundromat and twenty minutes back, spending several hours just to wash my bedding that was partially covered in my own sticky body fluids? No. Of-fucking- course I didn't want to do that— especially not at this hour. However, this hour, as unappealing as it was, would allow me to perform my walk of shame in the cover of the early morning.

So, I went. I rinsed off, packed up my things, and drove across town to the laundromat at two o'clock in the morning. My eyelids heavy and my mind buzzing with further thoughts of remorse, I fought sleep as I watched my sheets tumble in a circle through the glass door of a washer. By the time I transferred them to the dryer, I was in the process of berating myself. I was inflicting this self-punishment because even though it was just a dream, I knew what I was doing. I know how my mind and heart work and, don't ya know it, deciding to lucid dream-fuck Cassie Cohen and finish myself off onto my bed was mentally crossing a line.

And if I thought I was grumpy before… that wouldn't have even compared to my mood throughout the morning.

I arrived at work with palpable bags under my eyes. I set down my across-the-shoulder laptop bag at my cubicle. I began to fish my glasses out of the side pocket…and Shawn caught my eye. His head had swung on a swivel to view me, his eyebrows high as he noted:

"Jesus, Jay, ya look like shit."

I let out a long breath through my nostrils. "Brooks," I began slowly, "you know I like you. I do, man. But I will literally pay you not to talk to me today." I considered my last sentence and then rephrased to, "I'd literally pay not to have anyone talk to me today."

He frowned. "So, you haven't talked to Cas—"

"No," I snapped, gently placing my glasses on my face. "I haven't."

"Okay, okay," he replied, nodding. "I only take cash." I shot him a warning glance, saw the light-hearted joke in his eyes, and he held up his hands in defense as he smiled. "Or beer."

I sighed. "Beer. I'll get you a beer."

Shawn tapped both of his index fingers against his desk one after the other, as if he were playing the drums. They rapped the counter three times, he gave me a curt bob of his head, and he spun back to focus on his work.

It was uneventful; the remainder of my work day—quiet. My morning had mostly consisted of searching on the company-wide software to see if Tommy had been assigned any clients yet. He hadn't. My thoughts of sabotaging his success and inevitably getting him fired dwindled down as the day went on, and I was able to focus on my work. I popped my headphones in, listening to music that could only have been described as Emo Grunge to try to drown out the noise in my mind, and before I knew it, I was seated in the kitchen space eating my lunch.

Alone. I was eating my lunch alone …and though the lack of disruption further put my mind at ease, I was curious why I was given the opportunity of alone time in the first place. It wasn't until I saw Shawn out of the corner of my eye, swiftly redirecting Paula from accounts payable away from the break room, that I realized that it was his doing.

Shawn laughed a bit too hard, the sound itself not believable in the least. Paula, who is a talker, smacked his arm in a playful manner, and he glanced back at me quickly with a pinched expression on his face. I let out an amused breath at the sight of Shawn metaphorically stepping on a landmine by diving into a conversation with one of the most verbose middle-aged women I've ever met.

Paula was lingering by Shawn's cubicle when I returned. Her fire-engine red head was thrown back in laughter— loud laughter—and she invited him out to lunch. I heard the hesitation in his voice, which he quickly masked with a cough before agreeing on a nearby deli, and they were out the door.

Shawn didn't return for over two hours.

When I finally caught him slinking back into his chair at his desk, I removed my earbuds, stood, and made my way over. I leaned against the entrance to his cubicle with my right shoulder and crossed my ankles.

"Long lunch, Brooks."

He looked at me, offering me a small, bitter smile. "Paula."

"How is she?"

"Well," Shawn inhaled a long breath and, upon exhalation, rambled out, "her oldest daughter has been studying for finals—she's a sophomore in high school. The middle one just got her first girlfriend and boy, let me tell you, Paula is opinionated about her coming out as a lesbian." He rolled his eyes heavily. "I wasn't about to debate with Paula, so I smiled and nodded and held my tongue, but damn, she's a bigot."

I shook my head, sardonically noting, "That sounds entertaining."

"Oh, I'm not done," he continued with a grimace, now leaning back in his chair and speaking to the ceiling. "Her youngest, the boy—is starting middle school. He's into theater, and she called him a fuckin' dandy." I cringed at the word and, without even seeing my face, he replied, "I know. It went on for hours. Anyway—I'm gonna work on filling out some paperwork with the state—county—whoever the hell I need to fill it out with. Get the process started to adopt her kids."

He said it offhandedly, and I laughed at his sarcasm. "I don't think that's how that works."

"I'll find a loophole somewhere."

"Mhm. That'll be great—three teenagers." I joked, "They'll call you Daddy Brooks."

Shawn glanced my way, still leaning back as he smiled wide. "There he is. I knew your usual sassy ass would be back at some point."

"Uh huh. So—you've been jumping in front of social-related bullets for me all day."

Shawn shrugged. "You requested quiet time. I delivered."

"Very chivalrous of you."

"You seem better," he remarked.

I wasn't operating at 100% capacity, of course, but I was better. And because that was partially due to his interference throughout the day— and because he legitimately seemed to care about my headspace as of late—I felt my hardened exterior soften even further.

"Mhm," I hummed. "You wanna get a drink later?"

"I was joking about the payment, you know," Shawn noted with a wry grin. "This bullet was free of charge."

I knew that already, so I simply replied, "Regardless."

Shawn nodded. "Where are you thinking?"

On an afternoon like this one—what should have been a run-of-the-mill Wednesday—I would typically relax at home after work. Henry's was great. I loved the bar, I did, and Wednesday was a day that Luke and Claire typically had off. It was common that they would frequent their place of employment on said day to enjoy the atmosphere when they weren't behind the counter—oftentimes with Liam and Zoey and, by default, Cassie. I did join them occasionally, but I had grown to appreciate my own space, as well. My own whiskey, if I were so inclined. The comforting sound of whatever music I desired to listen to, me placing a half-drank glass back on the side table as I lounged on my couch, and… nothing else. Maybe I would cook dinner; maybe I would order something in—it didn't matter. All that did matter was that I was within my own beautiful, quiet isolation.

This most definitely was not a run-of-the-mill Wednesday, though, and a visit to the bar was ripe on my mind. The quiet of the day had allowed me to take pause, and I itched to talk to Cassie—to apologize, know that we were… okay… and to force her out from under my skin. I had no issue with Shawn joining me on my excursion. Actually, the more that I thought about it, his presence could be a delightful buffer from all things Cassie after I got my apology to her out of the way. However, the knowledge that he had—not only of Cassie's work but of my feelings for her—couldn't be shared.

"Mind driving to Salem?"

"Salem?" he asked. "For what?"

"My brother and his girlfriend bartend down the road from my apartment complex," I explained. "They're normally off on Wednesdays. I figured I could grab a drink with them while they aren't serving me, for once."

His eyes widened, and he nearly flashed me all of his teeth. "Are you introducing me to your family?! "

I laughed. "I couldn't keep you a secret forever, baby. The bromance is too real." Shawn chuckled, and I added, "But I do have a condition."

"Conditional love," he murmured. "I knew it. Throw it on me; what's the condition?"

I stood up straight then, crossing my arms as I stated:

"You need to keep your goddamn mouth shut."