Chapter Three
The first thing Bryce noticed was his tongue. It felt dry, heavy, and coated with gunk. The second was the pounding behind his eyes. He groaned and rolled onto his back, his stomach protesting. The couch springs complained, and something slid off his stomach and hit the floor with a soft thud. Blanket. Right. Someone had tucked him in.
Cracking one eye open, Bryce saw that the living room was a wreck. There were empty bottles, a cold carton of noodles, two mismatched chopsticks stuck upright like antennae. Morning light leaked around the blinds, too bright for his head, which felt two sizes too small and had a full marching band practicing inside it.
He squinted toward the kitchen. Coffee machine humming. Water running. Sage. Memory flickered from the previous night. His grin, the beer, the dare,that kiss.Bryce shut his eyes again. “Oh, hell no,” he muttered.
Pressing his palms over his face, Bryce tried to scrub the flash of memory away. Nothing helped. His brain, ever the helpful biology major, decided to analyze it instead.Drunken behavior.Impaired judgment. Simple cause and effect.Then another thought slipped in:Chemical reaction. Dopamine surge.He groaned louder. “I am not writing a lab report about this.”
“Talking to yourself again?” Sage’s voice came from the kitchen. Too awake. Far too calm, all things considered.
Bryce cracked an eye open. Sage leaned against the counter, mug in hand, gray eyes clearer than they had any right to be at this hour. His hair was damp, shirt clean, jeans unwrinkled. Show-off.
“Coffee?” Sage asked.
“Please.”
Sage placed a mug on the table. “You were out cold. Didn’t even move when I tried to wake you.”
“Great. Love being an unresponsive corpse.” Bryce sat up, groaning as his spine popped and his stomach roiled. “Did I—uh—say anything stupid?”
Sage took a sip of his drink. “Define stupid.”
“Anything about, you know…experiments.”
“Ah.” Sage’s mouth twitched. “You mean the part where you declared we should ‘switch it up’ and then kissed me?”
Bryce froze, halfway through a gulp of coffee that immediately burned his tongue, causing him to hiss after he swallowed. “So that happened.”
“Yep.”
“Right. Cool.”
“Relax,” Sage told him. “You were drunk. I didn’t take it seriously.”
“Good,” Bryce shot out. The coffee mug rattled when he put it down. He wanted to say more. Maybe apologize, but his throat felt tight, so he went for humor instead. “Guess that’s another failed experiment.”
Sage snorted. “You’ve had worse.”
That should’ve made it easier, but it didn’t. The casual tone lodged in Bryce’s chest, right where the memory of that kiss still hummed, unwanted but stubborn.
Sage disappeared into his room, muttering something about class notes. Bryce sat on the sofa for a while, staring at the coffee mug like it held answers. Then he stood, shuffled to his room, and tried to bury himself in work.
Textbooks lay open across his desk:Cell Biology,Genetics in Context,the usual suspects. He stared at the same sentence for five minutes before realizing he hadn’t taken any of it in. Instead, his brain replayed the kiss again. Soft, warm, far too short. He pushed back from the desk. “Nope. Not doing this.”
Bryce muttered to himself as he paced. “It was one kiss. Stupid. Drunk. You were just lonely. Alcohol messes with judgment. Everyone knows that.” But for every excuse, Bryce’s brain tossed back how he’d reacted. Heart rate spike, muscle tension, heated response. He could practically hear his physiology professor saying,‘Attraction is just neurochemistry, Mr. Jones.’
“Yeah, well,” Bryce told the imaginary professor, “so is nausea.” He tried to laugh, but it came out strained.
Shoving the books aside, Bryce stripped and told himself a shower would clear his head. It didn’t. Warm water only gave him time to think about how he’d leaned in first. How Sage hadn’t immediately shoved him away. How his lips had been—
“Stop.” He slapped the faucet off and stood dripping in silence.
By the time Bryce wandered back into the kitchen, Sage was bent over his laptop, scribbling something on a pad of paper. His T-shirt had ridden up slightly, a strip of skin showing above the waistband of his jeans. Bryce’s eyes snagged there before he could stop them.
Observation,his inner scientist noted.Subject: Sage Everest. Environment: domestic. Stimulus: undefined.
He turned to the fridge just to have something to do. “You going to campus today?”
