Chapter 10 #2
It should calm me. Usually it does. Tonight it only intensifies the fact that I’m thinking too much and not cleanly enough.
I shouldn’t go upstairs.
That thought arrives with complete clarity as I close the front door behind me.
It remains complete and rational while I cross the hallway.
It remains complete and rational when I start up the stairs.
It remains complete and rational right up to the point where I find myself outside Annie’s room, staring at the light beneath her door and noticing, with an accuracy I do not enjoy, that I’ve already adjusted my watch twice in the last thirty seconds.
This is what alcohol does. Not in the crude sense people such as Carl mean when they talk about it, but in the more insidious way.
It softens the distance between thought and action, until the action can pass itself off as an extension of logic rather than what it actually is, which in this case appears to be compulsion dressed up as concern.
I knock once.
Then, after a pause long enough that I almost leave, the latch clicks.
She opens the door in a faded shirt and sleep shorts, blue hair loose over one shoulder. Her laptop’s open on the bed behind her.
She looks at me with the kind of surprise that confirms I haven’t, in fact, arrived under any reasonable pretext.
“Cody?”
“You’re still awake.”
It’s not what I intended to say, and I know from the immediate narrowing of her eyes that she hears the flaw in it.
“Yes,” she says slowly. “Is everything okay?”
I exhale once through my nose. “Can I come in?”
She steps back.
The room is exactly as I’d expect it to be after a few weeks of occupancy by someone who travels often and settles strategically.
Camera on the bed. Notes stacked beside the lamp. Her boots aligned near the wall, though not with the kind of precision I would use.
The whole room carries the faint trace of vanilla, rain, and cold coffee. The same scent that follows her through the office and has, against my better judgment, become something I notice too quickly.
I stay near the door. That would suggest restraint if the circumstances themselves weren’t already evidence to the contrary.
“What’s this about?” she asks.
Direct. No cushioning. No attempt to smooth the interaction into something more comfortable than it is.
I appreciate that.
“I need to clarify something.”
Her brow lifts. “At night. In my room.”
“It wasn’t practical earlier.”
“That sounds fake.”
“It isn’t.”
She folds her arms and leans lightly against the edge of the dresser, watching me with that same infuriating composure she had in the office the first time I tested her. “Alright. Clarify.”
I should start with the cleanest version. Boundaries, perception, risk, structure. There are a dozen ways to phrase it and all of them are technically true.
What complicates them is that none of them are the only truth in the room anymore.
“The way things are moving around this house,” I say, choosing each word with more care than I feel, “is becoming unstable.”
“Because of the missing money?”
“That’s part of it.”
“And the rest?”
I look at her.
There it is again, the problem I keep reaching and retreating from. She doesn’t deflect or soften. She doesn’t make it easier for other people to stay vague in her presence.
If anything, she seems to regard vagueness as a challenge, which would be admirable if it weren’t currently making my life more difficult.
“The rest,” I say, “is you.”
She actually blinks at that, though only once. “I’m sorry?”
“You’re visible now.”
Her shoulders shift almost imperceptibly. “That’s not exactly news.”
“No,” I say. “But it matters more than you think it does.”
She lets out a short, disbelieving breath. “This is about the potluck.”
“This is about pattern.”
What am I even saying? Am I making sense? I don’t know how to express myself properly.
“This is about you showing up at ten at night to explain my own existence to me like I’m a filing error.”
My jaw tightens. “That’s not what I’m doing.”
“It’s exactly what you’re doing.”
“I’m telling you that you need to be more careful.”
“With what?”
“With who sees what. With where you are. With how—”
She pushes off the dresser. “How I’m perceived?”
“Yes.”
“By the town?”
“By anyone.”
Her eyes narrow. “You mean by your family.”
I don’t answer immediately, which tells her more than an answer would.
“Right,” she says, whispering now, and somehow more cutting for it. “So this is about Duke.”
“It’s not only about Duke.”
“But it is about Duke.”
“It’s about the fact that you’re new, and this house doesn’t handle complication cleanly.”
Her mouth curves, but there’s no humor in it. “That may be the first honest thing you’ve said since you got here.”
I take a step toward her before I think better of it. “You think I’m being dishonest?”
“I think you’re being controlling.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“No,” she agrees. “It’s worse.”
I adjust my watch, instantly annoyed at myself for doing it in front of her, because she notices everything and will absolutely file the gesture under pressure. “You’re part of a system whether you like it or not, Annie.”
“There it is.” She points at me once. “That. You do that thing where you turn people into systems because then you don’t have to admit they might do something you can’t anticipate.”
“That’s not—”
“It is. You talk about variables and structures and patterns like that makes you objective, but half the time it just means you’re trying to force human beings into categories that make them easier to manage.”
“You’re being imprecise.”
“I’m being accurate.”
“No,” I snap. “You’re being emotional.”
Her eyes flash. “And you’re drunk.”
The silence after that is immediate and absolute.
I laugh once, low and without amusement. “That’s your assessment.”
“That’s my observation.”
“That’s not the same thing.”
“It is when I can smell bourbon from where I’m standing.”
I should leave.
The conversation has tilted too far. I know that.
Whatever clean intention I might’ve claimed at the door has already collapsed into something much messier, and the fact that she can see that almost as clearly as I can isn’t helping.
But she’s standing there, looking at me, halfway angry and halfway waiting to see whether I’ll finally say the thing under the thing, and the alcohol has reduced my ability to stay at a safe analytical distance from any of it.
“You came in here to tell me who sees me and why that should matter to me.” She throws her hands in the air in frustration. “I don’t get it.”
“Because it should.”
“Why?” she asks, and now there’s heat under it—not fear but frustration, the kind that takes up space without apologizing. “Why does it matter so much to you?”
I stop.
Because that’s the question, isn’t it?
And there are answers available. Sensible ones. Answers about the investigation, about perception, about how easy it would be for someone already tampering with the system to redirect attention toward the most visible outsider in the house.
All of those are true. All of them matter.
None of them are sufficient.
She takes a step closer.
“Well?” she asks.
I shouldn’t want this.
The thought arrives whole, uninvited, and so exact it’s a line item in my bloodstream.
I shouldn’t want the defiance in her voice, or the intelligence in her eyes, or the way she meets pressure by becoming more herself instead of less.
I shouldn’t want the woman who sees patterns the way I do and resents being managed the way I instinctively manage everything. I shouldn’t want someone who’s already too embedded in the exact situation I’m trying to contain.
Which is precisely why I do.
“Because I can’t account for you,” I say.
Her brows pull together. “What?”
I move before I’ve decided to.
One step. Then another.
“You don’t fit cleanly anywhere,” I say, hearing my own voice lower and hating how much of it is truth.
“You walk into a room and everyone underestimates you until they can’t.
You learn systems too quickly. You notice things you shouldn’t have enough context to notice.
You make this place less predictable just by being in it, and I do not like unpredictability. ”
Her pulse moves once in her throat. I see it because I’m too close now not to.
“And yet,” she says softly, “you’re here.”
The room narrows.
“This is a bad idea,” she says.
“Yes.”
“You shouldn’t be in here.”
“I know.”
“Then why are you?”
Because I came upstairs intending to restore order and have instead found the opposite of it. Because alcohol lowers the barriers.
Because I’ve been circling this for days under increasingly dishonest labels and am exhausted by the effort it takes not to name it.
“I shouldn’t want this,” I say, more to myself than to her.
Her breath catches.
And then, because thought has finally lost the race it was pretending to win, I kiss her.
It’s impulse, plain and undisciplined, and the moment it happens I know two things with absolute certainty: first, that I should stop; second, that stopping is now the hardest task available to me.
She freezes for the first half second, surprised, and then her hand lifts to my shirt, grabbing hold of the moment just long enough to test whether it’s real.
Her mouth parts beneath mine, warm and alive with the same frustration that has been flashing between us since the day she walked into my office and corrected my number without blinking.
I should step back.
Instead I kiss her again, deeper this time, because whatever restraint I had left has gone from compromised to irrelevant.
The argument’s still there inside it, the friction, the refusal to smooth either of us into something more convenient.
What are we doing?