Lines We Cross
1211 Words
The café pulsed with the quiet rhythm of late morning life—the hiss of steaming milk, the clink of cups, low laughter curling in the corners like smoke. Outside, the city lay blurred behind fogged glass, a watercolor of movement and gray light. Inside, everything was warm—too warm for Ethan, who felt the heat press against his skin the second he stepped through the door.
He spotted John immediately. Impossible to miss: broad-shouldered, leaning back in his chair with the easy confidence of a man who owned every space he entered. He lifted a hand in greeting, grin already splitting his face.
“Well, well,” John drawled as Ethan slid into the booth opposite him. His voice was too loud for the room, but John had never cared about volume. “Look who finally remembered what eight hours of sleep feels like… or maybe it wasn’t sleep at all.”
Ethan blinked, feigning ignorance. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
John’s grin sharpened, eyes glinting with mischief. “Don’t do that. Don’t sit there with that post-coital glow and expect me to believe you just meditated or something. Your skin has color, your eyes aren’t doing the dead-goldfish thing—they’ve got light in them. Hell, Ethan, you’re practically glowing.”
“Stop,” Ethan muttered, reaching for the menu just to give his hands something to do.
“Oh, come on.” John’s laugh rolled out, low and pleased. “You think I can’t read you? You got laid. Finally.”
The words hit like heat under Ethan’s collar. He hated how true they sounded—how just hearing them brought back flashes of last night: the taste of wine on her lips, the sound she made when his mouth found her throat.
He dropped his gaze to the laminated page, watching his own reflection blur in the glare. He barely recognized the man staring back—shoulders looser, jaw not clenched like a vice, something almost like a smile threatening the corners of his mouth. It unsettled him, that ease.
“I’m not—”
“You don’t have to answer,” John cut in, grinning like a wolf. “Your face is writing the whole damn confession.”
The waitress appeared, saving Ethan from having to respond. Orders were placed, coffee arrived, and when she drifted away, John leaned in, resting his forearms on the table.
“Seriously, I’m glad,” he said, his voice softer now, the tease tempered with something like genuine warmth. “You needed it.”
Ethan stared at the swirl of steam curling off his cup. The words landed heavier than he wanted to admit because they were true. He had needed it—needed the burn, the chaos, the obliteration of thought. Last night had cracked something open inside him, something sealed under years of polite dinners, empty conversations, and nights where silence tasted like rust.
But with the release came something else—a thin, cold blade sliding under his ribs. Not guilt over Julia. Not even over his daughters. No, this was stranger, sharper. Because even in the aftermath, lying in that hush with sweat cooling on his skin, another image had hovered at the edges of his mind. Green eyes. A slow, dangerous smile. Fingers stained with blue clay.
Vivienne.
He forced her out of his thoughts like dousing a flame with gasoline—violent, messy, useless.
John’s voice cut through the static. “You know,” he said lightly, “s*x saves more marriages than therapy ever will.”
Ethan huffed something close to a laugh. “Coming from you, that’s rich.”
“I’m dead serious.” John shrugged, lifting his cup. “You’d be amazed how many couples I’ve seen go from signing divorce papers to booking a second honeymoon just because they remembered what it’s like to actually touch each other.”
“You sound like a lifestyle blog.”
“Try personal experience.”
Ethan’s head snapped up. “Personal?”
John grinned like a man holding a winning card. “Guess what my wife and I did last week?”
“If this ends with a pottery class, I’m walking out.”
“Swinger club.”
The coffee nearly scalded Ethan’s throat. He coughed, staring. “…What?”
“You heard me.” John’s tone was maddeningly casual. “Relax—we didn’t do anything wild. Just watched. Turns out that was enough for us. No rules broken, no pressure. It was… freeing.”
Ethan shook his head slowly, somewhere between disbelief and reluctant curiosity. “Jesus, John.”
“Point is,” John said, his grin tilting sharp again, “desire isn’t polite. It’s not supposed to be. You lock it up long enough, it starts bleeding through the cracks—and then you’ve got chaos.”
The words snagged on something deep in Ethan. Chaos. That was what last night had been. Violent, necessary, pure.
John sipped his coffee, eyes gleaming over the rim. “Don’t tell me you don’t agree.”
Ethan’s laugh came out hollow. “Maybe. Doesn’t mean I didn’t feel like a bastard walking into my house at two in the morning.”
“Dad guilt,” John guessed.
“Something like that.”
John leaned in, his voice lower now, almost kind. “You’re a father and a man, Ethan. Those things aren’t synonyms. Sometimes they cancel each other out. But one doesn’t have to die for the other to breathe.”
The words sank deeper than Ethan wanted them to, heavy and uninvited. He stared at the condensation sliding down his glass.
“You know what kills faster than heart disease?” John added, grin lazy now. “Starvation. And I’m not talking about food.”
Ethan let out a short laugh, shaking his head. “You’re insufferable.”
“Maybe.” John smirked. “But you wear the afterglow well. Don’t waste it.”
The silence stretched, filled by the hum of the café—the hiss of milk frothing, a burst of laughter from the far table, the clink of china. For a moment, Ethan let himself breathe. Just breathe.
Then his phone buzzed against the table.
One new message. From Bennett.
We ran the panels. You were right about catecholamines—off the charts. All of them… except the first one. The one under the roses.
Ethan read it twice, then a third time, as if the words might rearrange themselves. But they didn’t.
Except the first one.
Frank Davis.
A chill licked down his spine.
Either the killer learned quickly—or that first death didn’t belong to the same pattern at all.
And if it didn’t…
If that one was hers…
His fingers tightened around the phone until the edges bit into his palm. Across the table, John was still talking—something about real estate, or retirement—but the words came muffled, distant, like voices underwater.
Ethan nodded absently, throat dry, heart thudding slow and heavy. In his mind, an image bloomed sharp as broken glass: a girl on a swing, sunlight slanting through leaves, laughter curling like smoke. And beneath it, the whisper of her voice: He was my first real love.
- Writer
