Extended Epilogue
LUC
I've become a regular at a shitty dive bar in the West Village these days. It's the kind of place people go when they want to get drunk without having to engage in bartender small talk or any shit like that.
It's a good bar. The kind where no one cares that my last name is Nero because they have their own problems they are attempting to solve at the bottom of a glass.
Tonight, I hold up at the end of the bar, far enough away from the action that no one settles nearby, but not too far to make sure the bartender forgets to refill my glass.
Not that he does. I may be trying for blackout drunk, but I'm still drinking the most expensive whiskey they've got.
"Another?" The bartender asks, stopping by to check my glass.
"Two," I say, only half joking.
He pours a double and heads back to some wannabe hipsters who stumbled in and are drinking rail liquor and talking too loudly.
I'm not drunk. That's the problem. I've had enough that I should be, but the Nero constitution is an inconvenient thing, and apparently tonight my body has decided that clarity is what I deserve.
And clarity is the last thing I want. It reminds me that I've lost the only woman I ever felt anything for, to a fucking monster.
And I have lost her. We might not have spoken for months, but that doesn't mean I haven't kept tabs on her.
It's done.
She's made her choice.
Not only is she staying married to fucking Orlov, but they are also apparently laundering money together.
I snort at the thought.
I've known it was coming. I'm not an idiot. I knew the moment I saw them together at the ballet. She's in love with him, and Katya is not a woman who gives her heart easily. Trust me, I've been trying to capture it for nearly a decade.
The final nail in the coffin should have been when she refused to marry me, and yet I still stuck around like a fucking joker, hoping that Artem would treat her so horribly that she would fall into my arms.
I wasn't ready to let go of her.
I'm ready now. Or rather, I will be, after I get fucking wasted at least a dozen more times.
I drain my glass, ignoring the burn of the liquor as I gesture for another. The bartender raises a brow but says nothing, just pours more, and waits for a generous tip.
I'm halfway through the refill when she sits down.
Not next to me, one stool over, which is the specific distance of a person who wants proximity without implication.
I notice her the way I notice everything: automatically, catalogued in half a second.
Dark hair pulled up in a messy bun, the kind a woman does after a long day.
Jacket that costs real money, which means she earns real money, which means the bad bar is a choice and not a necessity.
Immediately, my interest is piqued.
More so when she sets her bag down forcefully and requests the best Scotch.
She takes a sip, exhales, and stares at the bottles behind the bar with the focused expression of a woman conducting a private internal argument she intends to win.
I look away. She's captivating, but I am here to drown my sorrows, not end up right where I started.
"You look like someone died."
"No one died," I tell her.
"Breakup?"
"Something like that."
She considers this, takes another sip. "How long?"
"Eight years." I pause. "Give or take."
She winces. "That's a long time to be wrong about something."
I look at her. "That's a specific way to put it."
"I'm a lawyer." She shrugs, like that explains the precision. "We're trained to be specific." She turns back to her drink. "Also, I've had a day, and being diplomatic requires energy I don't currently have."
"What kind of lawyer?"
"Public defender." The way she says it has a peculiar flatness, like she's waiting for me to say something dismissive about it so she can decide whether I'm worth talking to.
I don't. Instead, I take a sip of my own drink. "Rough one?"
"Lost a case I should have won." She traces the rim of her glass. "Client's going to do eight years because a judge decided procedure mattered more than truth." She glances at me sideways. "So yeah. Rough one."
I look at her for a moment.
She's not asking for sympathy. That's what I notice first — there's no performance in it, no invitation to comfort her. She's just stating facts, the way someone does when they've accepted the outcome and are now simply in the business of surviving the evening.
I understand that.
"Luc," I say, reaching out my hand.
She looks at me, brow raised, but takes it anyway. "Noemi."
She flags the bartender again. "You want another?"
"Fuck it, why not."
We drink in silence for a few minutes, which is comfortable in the way that silence between strangers occasionally is, when both people have decided the other isn't a threat and aren't yet sure what else they are.
"So," she says eventually. "Eight years."
"Eight years."
"What happened?"
"She married someone else."
There's a pause. "Shit."
"Yeah." I conveniently leave out that we were never actually together. She doesn't need the footnotes.
She turns on the stool to face me more fully, and I notice for the first time that she's been deciding something. There's a specific look women get when they've finished the preliminary calculation and arrived at a conclusion, and she's wearing it now.
"I'm not looking for anything," she says, very clearly. "I want to be upfront about that. I've had a terrible day, and I'd like to have a drink and fuck a very attractive man who isn't going to tell me I'm too intense."
I look at her and chuckle. "Who said you were too intense?"
"The last three men I dated." She picks up her drink. "Apparently I live inside my own head."
"God forbid."
"Exactly." The corner of her mouth moves. "So. One more drink, and then we leave, fuck, and go about our merry little lives."
I study her for a moment. The dark eyes, the loose strand of hair that escaped whatever was holding it up. She’s all business.
I think about Katya in Artem's arms.
I think about eight years and the weight of the thing I just put down.
"That works for me."
We barely make it through our drinks before we are on one another. There's something refreshing about not playing coy, and we both feel it.
We get a hotel room. A nice one with Egyptian cotton and a lush duvet. I'm fucked up, but I'm not cheap.
As we step inside, hands all over one another, I have the good sense to pull back, groaning as her hands slide down to my belt. "You sure about this?"
She rolls her eyes. "Shouldn't I be asking you that? After all, I propositioned you."
"True." I lean down, our lips barely brushing. "But I'm more than happy to fuck you until you forget your name."
She reaches up and pulls the rest of her hair loose and it falls around her shoulders, and she looks at me with an expression that is both an invitation and a challenge, which is, I'm realizing, just how she looks at everything.
"Promises. Promises."
She's not passive. She never is — she has opinions, even about this, and she makes them known with a directness that makes me laugh once, low, against her throat, because I didn't expect it and it's the best thing I've felt in months.
"Something funny?" she breathes.
"No." I pull back just enough to look at her. "Something good."
She studies me for a moment with those dark eyes, and then she does something I don't expect. She smiles. Not the careful, assessing expression from the bar. Something real, brief, like she didn't mean to let it out. Like I caught her.
Then she pulls me back down.
It turns out there are worse ways to drown your sorrows than in a beautiful woman who doesn't want anything from you.
I can't think of a single one.
Stay tuned for Luc and Noemi’s story coming Fall 2026