0.

Knox’s car idled at the curb, headlights bleaching her front steps in a pale wash. He had never been to her house before, yet he leaned against the leather wheel like it belonged to him, as if anywhere he arrived became his domain. The window slid down with a whir, and there was his grin—too wide, too easy, a mouth uncorrected by braces.

“Hi, kid,” he said.

Her heart stuttered, then fell into the old rhythm. “Hi,” she replied.

A decade collapsed in on itself. The years between them, the people they had tried to become, flattened into a moment.

1.

The first bar glowed like a low ember. Knox breezed through the door as if it were his living room, exchanging a quick catch-up with the waiter from the French place next door, embracing the hostess, shaking hands with a man with a cratered face. The bartender, seeing him, lined up three small glasses without being asked.

“On me,” the bartender said, and kissed Nora’s hand.

“You’re a prince,” Knox replied, already folding the room around him.

Nora lifted a glass half in warning—“I’m a serious lightweight”—and half in surrender. They drank anyway.

She hadn’t known the plan, not really. She’d agreed mostly to avoid another night alone, walls pressing in, waiting for the final phone call. Only when they were settled did Knox explain: a tour by descent, from the best bar in the city to the worst. She laughed, uneasy. What did it feel like to hit bottom?

Knox ordered a French 75 for her and an Old Fashioned for himself. She took a cautious sip, the lemon juice puckering her lips.

He told her about Italy, how a crosswalk turned into a siren, how he ended up in a hospital room listening to a dying woman’s screams through a thin curtain. He mimicked the nurse’s accent, unembarrassed at his theater. His voice faltered only when he explained the bone-breaking surgery he’d need, once his insurance accepted defeat.

She told him about the summer island where money wore loafers, and sons and daughters paraded internships and study-abroad tales. She and her siblings straightened their hair to blend in, practiced smiling like they didn’t notice their grandfather’s tremors. She didn’t tell him about the fall. She didn’t tell him about the coma.

They traded stories the way people pass a cigarette back and forth. When Knox laughed, the room noticed; when he leaned in, the world shrank to the small table, the sweating glass, her knee brushing his under the ledge, testing for heat.

2.

The second bar was louder—music up, bodies pressed close, lights humming in red and blue. People greeted Knox by name, and beers appeared in their hands before they could order. Nora drank hers too fast, warmth flooding her face. 

Knox suggested a cigarette. They wandered into the alley, suddenly enveloped by quiet. He stood close, stepping toward her when she stepped back, flicking a lighter that struggled in the wind and then suddenly obliged. Smoke wound upward, thin as thread.

He offered her a drag. She barely tasted it before he crushed it under his heel and kissed her. Firm, sudden, as if his mouth had been traveling here for hours. The alley seemed to hold its breath. His tongue forceful, she folded into it, hands in his hair, one leg hooked around him. 

When he finally gave her back her mouth, she couldn’t hide her smile.

Back inside, the music had collapsed into a single pulsing note. It followed them as they crossed the street, her stumbling drunk, him leaning hard on her shoulders.

3.

The third bar had no glamour. The counter was sticky. The stools were grimy. The people looked gray around the edges, their eyes ringed with a fatigue that wasn’t only sleep.

Nora rested her head on Knox’s shoulder, begged him not to buy her another drink, and watched a neon sign tremble in the window.

“I messed it up back then,” he said, voice heavy. “I still think about it.”

“Most people had worse first times.” It was meant as mercy but came out small, slurred. “I don’t hold it against you.”

He kissed her, the apology still warm in his mouth, mingling with the tepid beer. His hand slid to her thigh and stayed there.

“I’m sorry, too.” She murmured. “I’m definitely not making it to bar seven.”

“Probably a good thing. It’s a real shithole.” He stroked her hair like a child’s. “You’re too drunk to be out in the world, mon cherie.”

“Oh, no,” she said, almost serious. “Then should we go to your house?”

He laughed, but drove her there anyway, one hand on the wheel, another cigarette glowing in the other. The wind hit her face through open windows, cooling the drink still moving through her. In the near-silent hills, the cigarette flicked out, and his fingers found her knee, then the hem of her skirt, then the delicate seam of her tights.

Everything felt hurried and slow at once. She was alive to his touch and also far away, watching her life lean into his hands. He ran a stop sign like it had been put there for someone else. He ran a red light with barely a pause. She could have said no; she didn’t.

At his house, the rooms were almost how she remembered—same stairs, wrong hallway. He moved her through it like a blue heeler herding a wayward ewe. Upstairs, he pressed her back against a door and angled her chin so her eyes had to meet his. “You always had such sweet eyes,” he said, tender.

He didn’t ask. He didn’t wait. The urgency in him was a kind of spell she couldn’t fight; she was only breath, only the scrape of the door against her shoulder. It was hungrier than it had been, back then. He said her name too often. 

When it was over, sensation returned in odd pieces: the ache in her collarbone, the rush in her ears, a laugh she couldn’t stop. Too high, too loose.

She wandered naked to his bookshelf and touched the spines. She called out titles—loved, hated, left unfinished, possibly to come back to one day. He promised to take her to a secondhand shop in the Valley, one with an old cat and a bell on the door. She hadn’t expected to see him again, not really. She also hadn’t planned to end up here tonight.

“Sure,” she said, and meant maybe. “I’d like that.”

4.

The beach glowed blue in early light, too bright for her swollen eyes. Knox leaned on a cane as they picked their way over rocks, each uneven step shadowed by his injury. He carried a paper bag with brie, strawberries, a baguette, and a few bottles of beer.

They ate with the salt wind in their mouths, the rind of the brie sticking to their fingers. The ocean glared silver, dazzling and pitiless.

When Nora braved the water in her bra and borrowed shorts, she clung to Knox as though he were the only thing holding her against the tide. The waves dragged at her calves, stronger than they looked. She shrieked, half-joy, half-fear, laughter spilling into the sea.

On the sand afterward, he rested his head on her chest and looked up with an openness that felt almost suffocating. He told her about the pregnancy while he studied at an expensive art school, how his ex had chosen to end it, how the absence still sat in his gut like a ghost. “I think about it all the time,” he admitted. “Sometimes I wonder if it’s haunting me.”

She answered with her own wound. The call about her grandfather—death, long looming, now pressing close. Her uncle said she was the bad apple, better left out of the will before she spoiled more. Her aunt agreed, her dad stayed silent, as always. Nora knew they were only guessing, mean-spirited hope. Still, the pruning stung much worse than the money she knew she’d never see.

Two bodies pressed together on the sand, the ocean murmured comfort neither of them deserved.

Later, they packed the food back into the bag and drove to an artist friend’s house, where Knox had promised to model. The painter asked if Nora would sit too. “You have such an interesting face,” he said, squinting at her like she was already a canvas.

“Sure,” she replied. “You can have my face.”

Back at Knox’s, she sang in the shower, soft and sad. Steam curled thick around her. 

He appeared in the doorway, drawn to the sound, and told her, “You have a beautiful voice.”

Before she could laugh it off, he pushed her down, pressing her to the cool tile, holding her tight like she might dissolve under him. Sand ground into her spine.

5.

At the sushi bar, a late lunch, everything gleamed—polished counters, plates chilled and crowned with glistening fish. Knox ordered without asking, studying her face for approval after each choice.

When the first dish came, he nudged the final piece of sashimi toward her. “That’s yours,” he said.

She squeezed his good knee under the table. “Thanks.”

He leaned back, sighing. “I should have done more by now—written more, tried more. I’m wasting time.”

“You’ve only been back home for a month, recovering. That counts.”

“I could’ve written a play.”

“Do you want to write a play?” she asked.

He looked at her like she’d missed something obvious. “Of course.” His voice carried enough that the waitress raised an eyebrow before retreating.

They ate in rhythm, alternating bites. Nora wondered how he lived both as a failure in his own eyes and as a man who drew whole rooms into his orbit. From the outside, she told him, he was dynamic. He snorted but seemed soothed by the word.

On the drive back to his place, her phone lit up with a text from her dad—a link to her grandfather’s obituary in The New York Times, no further explanation. The article had been published hours ago.

Knox asked her to read it aloud. She wept as she went. He corrected her when she mispronounced Pulitzer.

At his house, he pulled her into his parents’ kitchen and interrupted their dinner, beaming. “Guys, this is Nora. Tell them who your grandpa is. He just got an obit in the Times.”

She stumbled through the explanation while his mother peered over her glasses, polite but exhausted. His father, much older and increasingly ill, was seized by a coughing fit, hacking until the sounds turned wet and animal.

Nora stepped into the hallway, hands over her ears.

6.

That night, she borrowed a champagne scrap of a dress from his sister’s closet down the hall. His eyes widened when she returned to his room, and before she could ask if it looked okay, he had her bent over his desk, the wood biting into her hip.

In the midst of it, he asked what they would name their child—sharp, slicing through the haze of drink. She laughed it off, but he asked again, and again, a fixation. She felt like livestock. A breeder.

After, he smoothed the straps of her dress back onto her shoulders and told her she was beautiful. She asked him if he’d help her pick out a black dress for the New York funeral. He hummed assent, low and pleased, like the thought aroused him.

They went out again. The bar was lacquered with history, old Hollywood faces trapped under the varnish of tabletops—cutouts from magazines, photographs fixed in place. Knox named them one by one, hardly missing a face. She tried to keep up but he was the one holding court. He paid for her drinks, his hand steady even as hers grew clumsy.

They sang in the car on the way back, voices ragged, laughter cutting through half-remembered lyrics. She didn’t wonder how drunk he was, driving, always driving. He took her to a party in the Hollywood Hills, a house teetering above the city like it wanted to let go.

Inside, the rooms swelled with people: artists, friends, strangers. Knox was magnetic, shaking hands, kissing cheeks, drawing everyone in, whether they knew him or not. He introduced her proudly, his hand at the small of her back like he was presenting something he owned.

She smiled too brightly, drunk and drifting. Knox pressed a glass into her hand; she didn’t ask what it was. She laughed with a girl whose name she’d forgotten as soon as she heard it, and the two of them stripped down and plunged into the pool.

The water swallowed the noise above. Submerged, the world became garbled nonsense. Peaceful. She floated on her back, eyes closed, and thought how easy it would be to sink.

Knox pulled her out and draped his jacket over her shoulders. Shivering, dripping, she let him tug her along to the car. Much too drunk to follow her own sentences, she still chattered goodbyes to her new friends, words slurring, breaking apart, reforming without sense.

By the time they reached his house again, Nora was mute, barely upright. She pulled an oversized, borrowed T-shirt over damp skin, body collapsing into his bed before her mind could catch up. She surrendered to the mattress, the world hazy and harmless.

She thought the night was over.

7.

“Wake up.”

The voice came to Nora from a great distance. She tried to answer, but her mouth was heavy, untethered from her brain.

A hand touched her jaw. A pat, then a sharper slap. “Wake up, please.”

“I can’t,” she murmured, the words dragging through molasses. The film of sleep clung to her body, pinning her down.

Fingers pushed up the hem of her too-big shirt. His voice hovered above her, urgent and careless: “Are you asleep?”

She couldn’t form the answer.

“I want you,” he said, and shoved himself inside her.

The cry that escaped her was small, too thin to stop him. 

“Baby, baby, baby,” he cooed against her face, kissing her cheek as if gentleness could erase the trespass. “Please.”

Her hands rose weakly of their own accord, pressing against his abdomen. Her eyes screwed shut in refusal of the conscious world.

“No,” she whispered. “Stop.”

But he didn’t. His grip tightened, prying her thighs further apart. The sharp edge of pain made her whine, the sound muffled against the pillow.

“Shh,” he soothed, the cadence of someone lulling a child. “You’re doing so good.”

“I don’t want it.”

“I need you,” he insisted.

“Too tired,” she slurred, as her head, loose on her shoulders, pressed against the headboard. Eyes rolled back, she drifted into a strange dream of being rocked to sleep in a cradle.

0. 

When morning came, the bed was empty, still warm. Nora descended the stairs barefoot, drawn by the smell of eggs and the clatter of a pan. Knox stood in the kitchen, humming faintly, spatula in hand. Two mugs of coffee waited on the table.

She hovered in the doorway, watching. Memories circled, jagged but blurred. She didn’t need them all. The soreness between her legs, the smell of him still on her. Red-violet fingerprints ghosting her skin.

Despite it, Nora didn’t hate him. She didn’t have any hate left to spare. Instead, she loved him, a little. Maybe she had for years. Not enough to tell him, not enough to go further.

The spiral was finished. Nora had followed him down through every circle, Knox a lovely guide to the descent. She was still drunk, throat sore from cigarettes and the beginnings of a cold, yellow bruises blooming on her shins. She was clay, kneaded into a new shape, something worse, uglier.

It was time to go home. She had a funeral to attend.