I grabbed the guardrail and heaved myself up with utmost care. The whiskey tugged at the edges of my consciousness, sloshing around in my skull. It made me quite dizzy.

Twisting sideways on the narrow ledge, I raised one leg over the rail, then the other, my hands tightly clasped on the iron bar.

Ingrid followed suit as soon as I was safely stood on the other side. Or at least, she tried, because as she got up and made to climb over the rail, her foot slipped and my stomach dropped.

I remember it in slow motion. She had her hands wrapped around the rail, one knee up in the air... Then she suddenly tipped backwards. Her eyes rounded with the shock, but her lips morphed into a faint smile.

Not so fucking fast. Not on my fucking watch.

I lunged for her and managed to grip her forearm with both my hands. She actually had the nerve to laugh as she dangled over the ledge, and to this day, I sometimes wonder if she'd 'slipped' on purpose. It was a huge risk, but by her own later admission, she'd have had nothing to lose.

"Ingrid!" I yelled, feeling her slide from my grasp. "Grab the rail!"

I pulled, or at least I thought I did. My feet jammed against the slightly elevated ledge, my chest pressed against the guardrail. It took a gargantuan effort to drag Ingrid up, even as she reached for a lower rung of the rail and held onto it.

Eventually, though, I could get my hands under her shoulders and lift her enough for her to rest her knees on the concrete ledge. After that, I didn't let go of her until she successfully crossed over to safety and toppled me to the ground.

"What the actual fuck?" I exclaimed, exhausted, catching my breath.

"I guess that makes me Kate Winslet now," Ingrid snickered as she rolled off me. We lay on our backs together, even as it began to rain softly. "Talk about a rush of adrenaline."

"You almost gave me a heart attack. Seriously. There's only so much disk space on my conscience."

Ingrid rose on her elbows. "You'll have to stop blaming yourself at some point, you know? That kid needs you. You gotta go be a decent dad to him, else he'll turn out fucked up like us."

"No pressure," I snorted. “Where the hell did that come from, anyway?”

She sat up. The rain intensified. Cold, heavy drops hit my face and I closed my eyes. It felt so good. Refreshing. A welcome, soothing relief after the strenuous exercise from earlier.

"There's no fixing us, is there?" Ingrid whispered into the wind and I nearly missed it. "At least you've got your little boy to live for. How's that not a second chance worth taking?"

I sat up beside her and crossed my legs. "I never even wanted him," I mumbled to myself.

"At least you consented to conceiving him," she shot back.

I wanted to slap myself. Shove a boot up my own arse. I hadn’t exactly consented, but Ingrid didn’t need to know. From the little I’d gleaned during our brief acquaintance, I deduced she’d had way worse.

Instead, I let my forehead fall on her shoulder. She turned, forcing me to look up, and her rain-soaked lips found mine in the dark. Before long, we lapsed into a heated make-out session as she moved to straddle me.

It was strange how sex just made everything else fade to black. For however long it lasted - and Ingrid knew how to get the most out of me, although tonight would likely not be one of those times - nothing else existed besides our bodies mashed together. The rawness, the urgency of it made my blood boil, much like the scare Ingrid had given me minutes ago.

The rain pelted down on us hard, but we fucked harder, faster, on top of the world as it were, not a single fucking care, not one, while it lasted—

Ingrid screamed in my arms and it sounded like she might be crying, only it was impossible to tell in the rain.

"You ok?" I asked, wiping down my face.

She nodded.

"You sure?"

"I said yes, goddammit."

She clambered to her feet and headed for the stairwell. I did, too, and stooped to pick up the whiskey bottle.

~

"You were screaming about her in your sleep last night," Ingrid elaborated, forking up a piece of pancake.

I could hear myself gulp. "Sorry about that."

"No, don't be. I used to have trouble sleeping myself."

"And how did you fix it?" I couldn't help asking.

"Well." She chewed up her bite of pancake and stuffed more into her mouth. "I nearly died of an overdose this one time and this guy I was...," she hesitated for a long moment, "seeing forced me to get my shit together. But mostly I drink and fuck a lot."

I grinned into my plate. "Tell me about it."

We ate in silence for a couple of minutes after that.

"So, you didn't tell me," she resumed. "Who's Liz?"

I closed my eyes and sighed. Then remembered Ingrid was also widowed.

"She's...was my wife."

"Oh." Ingrid had the decency not to look down on me with pity, although her expression seemed somewhat saddened. "Sorry."

"Yeah, don't mention it," I managed dismissively.

"Were you married long?"

I gave half a shrug. "We'd been together for a while, yeah."

"So, I'm guessing..." She poked at her pancakes with her fork, thoughtful. "You're a total dick."

It was a statement, not a question, and I frowned in confusion.

"No, don't worry," she rushed to explain, "I like that. But it comes way too naturally to you, so I'm guessing you've always been a dick. Which, I mean... It makes it fair to assume you might have been a dick to your wife. Now you're feeling guilty and that's why you're miserable."

"You've read me like an open book," I admitted, begrudgingly.

"More like a mirror. It's like looking in a fucking mirror, mate," she clarified for me. "Kid?"

"What?"

"Is there a kid, did you have kids?"

That made me tense up. "What makes you think I'd have a kid?"

"Married people your age usually do, even if they're not married anymore."

It felt like the lid had already sprung off Pandora's box, so I just went on.

"I have a little boy," I conceded. "He..."

"What?" Ingrid wanted to know.

I realised I was about to share too much information and steeled myself back into nonchalance.

"No, never mind." Then, feeling like I ought to change the topic before she dragged me down too deep, I turned the tables on her. "So what about your husband?"

She briefly stopped chewing, but she looked annoyed, rather than surprised.

"Sorry," I apologised, "it...it was in your file."

Emma had warned me not to blabber. I did it, anyway. Idiot.

"That's okay." She cleared her plate and took it to the sink. "He, um...he jumped to his death in the Hudson."

She said it as if she'd pushed him herself and was glad of it.

Suddenly it became impossible to swallow. Her eyes quizzed me, read me like before, and she must have seen my face fall on my pancakes because the penny dropped in her mind as well.

"Shit," she breathed, "did Liz...your wife’s dead, too?"

I acquiesced quietly. “She...she drowned, in a river. Suicide.”

Ingrid averted her gaze. "My fucking stupid mouth, I...I'm so sorry, Jude, truly."

"No, not your fault," I said through gritted teeth and excused myself to go to the bathroom.

It felt like my breakfast had lodged itself in my throat and it made it hard to breathe. I splashed cold water on my face, ran my fingers through my hair. My own reflection in the mirror frightened me.

When I felt stable enough again, I went out and found Ingrid sorting some laundry in the bedroom. She was facing away from me, so I snuck up on her and hugged her from behind. She threw her head back and giggled as I gnawed at her neck.

Our feet shuffled until I pushed her up against the wall, one hand flattened on her stomach, sliding down into her shorts. She grew rigid in my arms as my fingers ventured inside her, but something felt...wrong. I loosened my grip, pausing to test the waters.

“Everything ok? Ingrid?”

I withdrew my hand, kept it on her hip.

"Let me go," she pleaded, her voice strained. "Please let go."

I backed away, as if she'd scalded me. She was trembling faintly. My calves hit the bed behind me and I sat down on the corner of the mattress, wordless.

Ingrid turned to face me. She was breathing hard and sweating. Her marriage hadn't been a happy one, either, I figured. It couldn't have been, since she didn't seem in the least bothered by her husband's death.

"I'm sorry," I blurted weakly.

She calmed down one shaky breath at a time, alternately balling her fists and uncurling her fingers. Her eyes had clouded over, like muddled water. The usual spark of mischief residing there had died out, replaced by a kind of vulnerable dread I could have never imagined her in.

I couldn’t bear it. I shut my eyes and dropped my head, but she walked over, to stand between my thighs.

"It's ok," she whispered over my lips. "I just..." Her hands cradled my head. "I need to see you, I need to look into those fucking green eyes of yours..."

"Look who's talking," I retorted.

She straddled me on a kiss as I held her waist, then she rested her forehead on mine.

"You know, Jude," she began, sounding tired, "you might have ten extra years of being a hot mess, but - and I hate to say this - I'm a woman. Even under normal circumstances, us girls get more shit in a year than you guys have to deal with in a lifetime. And we're not normal, Jude, are we? You and me, we're fucked up by default, born broken and we own it - but every shag, every drink, every high is just a fucking band-aid and whenever it's ripped off, we're right back to square fucking one."

I wrapped my arms tighter around her. Not too tight, in case she'd get uncomfortable again. But she pressed herself into me, kissed me hard and I took that as my cue to flip us over and laid her slowly down, on her back. We didn’t break eye contact as we made love. Rough, unforgiving - yet love, nonetheless. Or some freak mutation of it, at any rate.

People like us...we always gave love a run for its money.