Chapter 4: The Unwanted Kiss

Chapter 4: The Unwanted Kiss

The ride home was a mausoleum on wheels.

It wasn’t even his car. Marcus, in a magnanimous gesture that was actually the final twist of the knife, had offered to drive them back. Liam was crammed in the back seat of a sleek, modern car that smelled of leather and some cloying pine air freshener. He was an unwanted piece of luggage.

The silence was a physical entity, thick and suffocating. Chloe sat in the passenger seat, staring out the window at the blurred streaks of city lights. She hadn’t said a word since they’d left the arcade. She hadn't even looked at him. Each passing second of her silence was another nail in the coffin of his hope.

In the rearview mirror, Liam could see Marcus’s eyes flicking towards him, a smug, triumphant glint in them. Marcus was the hero of this story, the one who had tried to save the night from the crazy guy. He had won.

Liam stared at his own reflection in the side window, a pale, ghostly image superimposed over the dark, rushing streets. His face was gaunt, his eyes wide and haunted. He looked like a stranger. He half-expected to see the Thin Man’s skeletal visage appear behind his shoulder, its fixed smile a silent commendation of his total social collapse. The entity had fed on his humiliation in the arcade. He knew it. He could almost feel a lingering coldness in the car, a phantom presence that had followed them from the glowing chaos of Murphy’s.

When Marcus pulled up to their apartment building, the engine’s soft purr dying into another crushing silence, Liam knew he had only seconds to act.

“Well, this was… a night,” Marcus said, turning to Chloe. “I’ll text you about The Taproom.”

“Yeah. Okay,” Chloe replied, her voice small and distant. She unbuckled her seatbelt, her movements stiff and deliberate.

This was his last chance. A final, desperate gambit to salvage something, anything, from the wreckage. As Chloe got out, Liam scrambled out behind her, his hand clutching the one thing he’d managed to acquire all night.

“Hey, Marcus, thanks for the ride,” he said over the roof of the car, forcing the words out.

Marcus just gave a noncommittal grunt and a two-fingered wave before pulling away from the curb, his red taillights disappearing around the corner, leaving Liam and Chloe alone under the buzz of a single, flickering streetlamp.

The silence that descended now was somehow worse, more intimate and accusatory.

“Chloe, wait,” he said, his voice cracking.

She stopped at the foot of the stairs leading to the building’s entrance but didn’t turn around. Her shoulders were tense, her posture defensive.

“I, uh… I got this for you,” he said, stepping in front of her. He held out the prize he’d retrieved from the arcade’s front counter after his meltdown, his hand shaking so violently he was surprised he didn't drop it.

The small, green plush octopus dangled from his fingers. In the garish lights of the arcade, it had seemed quirky and cute. Here, in the cold, dim light, it looked pathetic. Its oversized eyes seemed to mock him, its eight limp tentacles a testament to his failure.

Chloe finally turned to look at him. Her face was pale, her expression unreadable. She looked at the plush toy, then at his face, and he saw it again—that flicker of fear in her eyes. The fear of an unpredictable animal.

“You… you didn’t have to do that, Liam,” she said quietly. “All that money. And… the screaming.”

“I just really wanted to win it for you,” he whispered, his desperation a raw, open wound. He needed her to understand. He needed her to see the intention, not the disastrous execution. He needed her to see him not as a lunatic, but as a guy who was trying, however pathetically, to impress her.

He pushed the octopus into her hands. Her fingers were cold as they brushed against his. She took it, holding it loosely at her side.

“Thanks,” she said, her gaze dropping to the pavement. “I should… I should probably get inside.”

She started to turn away, and a primal panic seized him. He couldn’t let it end like this, with this chasm of awkward fear between them. He had to close the distance, to prove that he wasn’t someone to be afraid of.

In one last, horribly misguided, all-or-nothing impulse, he reached out, his hand gently touching her arm. She froze. Taking her stillness as an invitation instead of the warning it was, he leaned in and pressed his lips against hers.

It was a clumsy, desperate kiss that lasted only a second, but in that second, a universe of failure unfolded. Her lips were unresponsive, a soft but unyielding line. Her body went completely rigid under his touch. She didn’t push him away; she didn’t slap him. She did something far worse. She became a statue of denim and shock, a living monument to his catastrophic miscalculation.

He pulled back, his face burning with a shame so intense it felt like a physical fever. The space between them crackled with what he had just broken.

“Goodnight, Chloe,” he mumbled, the words tasting like ash in his mouth.

He didn't wait for a response. He turned and fled, practically running up the stairs and into the building, his heart hammering a frantic, shameful rhythm. He didn’t dare look back. He couldn't bear to see the look on her face.

He stumbled down the hallway, the familiar beige walls closing in on him. His mind, in a desperate act of self-preservation, began its insidious work of rewriting the narrative.

She was just surprised, he told himself, his thoughts racing. That’s all it was. She was surprised. She didn’t push me away. That’s a good sign, right? The kiss… it changes things. It sealed it. She knows I like her now. She’ll text. Tomorrow, she’ll text, and everything will be okay.

He repeated the mantra over and over, a fragile shield of delusion against the crushing reality. He was so caught up in the frantic spin of his own thoughts that he didn't feel the cold spot in the hallway outside her door. He didn't notice the way the shadows seemed to deepen and stretch as he passed.

He reached his apartment, 4A, his sanctuary, his cage. His hands fumbled in his pocket for his keys, his personal symbol of safety and control. He just needed to get inside, lock the world out, and lose himself in the green glow of a screen until the memory of her rigid shock faded away.

His fingers closed around the familiar cold metal of his keys. He pulled them out, raising them to the lock.

But he stopped.

His key was poised to enter a lock that didn't need it.

The door was already slightly ajar.

A sliver of perfect, consuming blackness showed through the gap. The deadbolt he had so deliberately thrown on his way out, the heavy thunk that had been such a comfort, was disengaged. The door was unlocked.

A cold dread, far colder and sharper than any social humiliation, washed over him, extinguishing the last embers of his pathetic, self-induced hope. Every rational explanation died in his throat. A gust of wind? The latch not catching? Impossible. He had locked it. He knew he had locked it.

He could hear something from within the dark sliver of his apartment. It wasn't a television or a computer fan. It was a faint, rhythmic sound. A soft, wet, scraping noise.

With a hand that felt disconnected from his own body, he pushed the door. It swung inward without a sound, opening into the waiting darkness of his living room. The scraping stopped.

Rejection was not the worst thing in the world. Humiliation was not the worst thing in the world. The worst thing in the world was coming home, expecting to be alone, and finding the one thing that should never, ever be there, waiting for you in the dark.