The Hangover

“There’s a point in every hangover where you stop fearing what you did—and start fearing what you don’t remember.”

"Oh my God, Jargus! What the hell happened last night?"

The words tore from my throat like gravel scraped across raw concrete. Every syllable rasped with effort, my tongue thick and immobile, as though it had been left out to dry beside a dead fire. My mouth was a barren wasteland—parched, bitter, and reeking of regret. The coppery sting of old alcohol and guilt lingered, coating the back of my throat like a crime I couldn't wash away.

Somehow, Hobart’s winter chill had wormed its way through the brick and plaster of my flat, yet sweat glued the sheets to my skin in clammy defiance. I forced a groan past cracked lips, rolling over with the cautious choreography of a man who suspected his body had mutinied overnight. Every muscle fibre screamed protest—tight, inflamed, vengeful.

Jargus lay beside me—not just a dog, but my K9 partner, a working asset turned silent witness—his body curled close, radiating warmth. Solid. Unmoving. Real. In a world narrowed to nausea, pounding light, and the lingering taste of shame, he was the one constant that hadn’t shifted. His presence offered a strange comfort—like waking up at the crime scene but finding your partner already there, waiting.

Light sliced through the curtain's gap, lancing directly into my skull. I winced and turned away, but there was no real escape. July in Tasmania—where even the bloody sun comes at you like it’s got a score to settle.

The night before had started with such innocent intent—just a few drinks at Salamanca to mark the occasion. Colleagues, familiar faces, the casual clink of glasses over polished timber. The kind of thing that’s supposed to feel earned. But at some murky point—somewhere between “just one more” and the silence that comes after slurred farewells—I’d lost my grip. The drinks had lined up like dominos: tall, gleaming, filled with poison disguised as celebration. One after another, each shot traced a slow burn down my throat, leaving behind a trail of fire and something heavier. Something sharp-edged and invisible.

I’d aced it. The senior detective exam. Not just passed—aced. Top of the list. The promotion into Major Crimes wasn’t just another title or pay bump. It was a launchpad. Escape velocity from the grind of general duties, the politics, the whispered doubts. With the right cases, the right headlines, I’d be looking at sergeant stripes before I hit fifty. A future worth raising a glass to—maybe even worth obliterating myself for, apparently.

Faces from the night flitted through memory, hazy and distorted—like watching CCTV footage through a rain-slicked lens. Laughter, louder with each round. Slaps on the back that started as celebratory and became punishing. Somewhere in there, my restraint had vanished, replaced by a version of myself I barely recognised. Reckless. Desperate. Hungry.

The irony was, I knew better. I was a bloody detective. I’d seen what happened when people lost control. And still—I’d done it anyway.

Now I lay in the aftermath, temples drumming in sync with my pulse, feeling like I'd been dragged backwards through every bad decision I’d ever made. The future—promising as it might have seemed last night—was no longer on my mind. I needed water. Grease. Silence. A confessional, maybe.

Jargus hadn’t moved. His body, powerful and warm, was nestled tight against me. I reached out with a hand that shook slightly, brushing his head with the tenderness I couldn’t yet afford myself.

He whimpered softly, then opened his eyes. Those usually sharp, alert amber eyes were dulled now—glazed, accusatory. It was a look I'd seen countless times, just never directed at me.

"You too, huh?" I muttered, my voice a dry scrape, and scratched behind his ear. His head tilted incrementally, acknowledging the gesture, tolerating it more than enjoying it.

He wasn’t just a dog. Not to me.

Jargus was my partner—on paper and far beyond it. His K9 unit record already read like something reserved for veterans twice his age. We’d been paired through the Rokeby integration trial: me, the career detective orbiting burnout; him, the quiet prodigy with a nose like a search warrant. Together, we’d tracked people through forests and lies.

He was all the things they train for—intelligence, intuition, obedience—but there was always something else threaded through it: independence. Agency. He made decisions. Good ones.

There were moments I’d catch him watching me, tilting his head with that surgical stillness, and I’d wonder what he saw. A partner? A project? A man trying too hard to hold it all together?

Still, we were climbing—together. Two overachievers in a department that never quite knew what to do with partnerships like ours.

And now here we were: one man, one mutt—both wrecked. One hungover, the other quietly judging, each of us regretting choices we couldn’t take back.

"We need to get up," I groaned, kneeing him gently.

The words were dragged through rust and razorblades. The room held that strange, padded silence that follows a heavy night—curtains drawn, time suspended. For a brief, merciful moment, it was easy to pretend the world hadn’t resumed without me.

Jargus raised his head with the speed and enthusiasm of the recently embalmed. His gaze found mine and held it. In those amber eyes, I saw something startlingly human. Judgement, yes. But also loyalty. Understanding. Disappointment.

There was something primal in that look—older than law, older than regret. A silent rebuke, perhaps, but not abandonment.

"Come on then," I said again, with more authority, trying to inject life into the command.

He sniffed the air, as if confirming there was no bacon, no danger, no tennis ball. He surveyed the room with the slow disinterest of a seasoned detective revisiting a cold case, then dropped his head back down with a finality that would’ve impressed a magistrate.

"Fine, you lazy pup," I murmured, fingers moving again to the soft place behind his ear, tracing circles that grounded me more than they comforted him.

For a moment, the room was still. No sound but our breathing—his steady, mine ragged. My head throbbed, my stomach churned, but the guilt... the guilt was the loudest thing in the room.

The only living soul still in the room with me was the one trained not to leave.

I tried to extract myself from the tangle of sweat-drenched sheets with some semblance of dignity. That illusion lasted about as long as it took gravity to intervene.

My limbs, acting entirely of their own accord, ignored every command issued by my brain. Coordination—once a reliable ally—had clearly taken the morning off. I lurched sideways, graceless and off-kilter, and crashed to the floor with the balletic elegance of a tranquillised rhinoceros.

Carpet fibres scratched at my skin as I sprawled inelegantly across the floor, breath coming in short, uneven bursts. I reached out blindly, palm flailing for some form of support—bed frame, wall, anything—and instead made contact with something slick, lukewarm, and unquestionably out of place.

The sensation registered before sight could catch up. My fingers recoiled, but not before the texture imprinted itself on my memory like a boot on wet concrete.

"Eeew!"

The word burst from my mouth unbidden, halfway between a gag and a whimper. I brought my hand into view, and there it was—slack and glistening, dangling from my fingers with grotesque indifference: a used condom. Its viscous contents oozed downward in slow defiance, strands of fluid stretching toward the carpet with the consistency of three-day-old rice pudding.

It clung to my skin like it knew exactly what it represented.

I stared at it, horror unfurling in my chest with the cold precision of a morgue drawer sliding open. Shame prickled beneath my skin, momentarily eclipsing the nausea that had been mounting since consciousness returned.

"That had better not be mine," I muttered under my breath, frowning as if the condom might feel compelled to answer.

Sarah’s face came to me like a ghost—Detective Sarah Lahey, my partner in ways not yet official but undeniably intimate. Complicated didn’t begin to cover it. Our relationship had been evolving in those unspoken spaces between duty and desire, and despite every whispered rumour that stalked my name through the corridors of the Hobart police, I had been trying—genuinely trying—to remain loyal. Monogamy wasn’t a natural state for me, but with her, I’d made a quiet commitment to change.

So then... if this wasn’t a memory of us, who the hell had I been with?

My brain, still fogged by a hangover that felt like it had been crafted by vengeful chemists, refused to supply the missing details. The maths wouldn’t work. The timeline wouldn’t reconcile. I was staring down an equation that didn’t balance.

I held the latex monstrosity aloft, as if in courtroom presentation.

"This isn't yours, is it, Jargus?"

The dog raised his head with theatrical slowness, ears pricked with vague interest. His amber eyes—still cloudy with disapproval—narrowed at the offending object. He studied it with the detached curiosity of a museum curator confronted with an artefact too obscene for public display. After a few seconds of unimpressed inspection, he let his head fall back with a low huff, nestling once again into the sheets. Disinterested. Judging.

I rubbed my temples, trying to force coherence from the broken film reel spinning in my mind. Flashes came in fragments. Strobing lights. Bass that thudded against my ribcage like it meant to break in. Heat. Bodies packed tight in chemical proximity. A woman’s hand sliding down my sternum, fingernails tracing the edge of my abdominal muscle like she was reading braille. But no face. No voice. Just the sensation of someone.

And that was what frightened me most—that it was a someone, and I didn’t know who.

The nausea, until now held at bay like a distant drumbeat, surged forward in organised attack. It began with a warm tide in my throat and that familiar, sour taste that precluded disaster. My tongue felt foreign in my mouth—too thick, too dry, coated with the residue of spirits I couldn’t name and choices I couldn’t defend.

Pain bloomed in my abdomen. A violent cramp seized me, folding my body inwards. The bile rose without mercy. There was no time for hesitation.

I scrambled to my feet with the desperation of a man whose body had declared open rebellion, legs buckling beneath me as I stumbled towards the bathroom. Every step was an argument with physics. When I finally reached the toilet, there was no ceremony—only surrender.

My stomach heaved. The sound that escaped me was low, wet, and wholly indecent. I expelled something thick and bitter, the exact composition of which I didn’t care to examine. My body convulsed with each retch, throat raw from the violence of it, muscles contracting in rhythm with remembered mistakes. Several dry heaves followed, my abdomen now an echo chamber of futility.

Eventually, the spasms faded, leaving behind a dull, throbbing ache and a bitter tang on my tongue.

I slumped sideways, panting against the cool tiles. I didn’t bother to wipe the sweat from my forehead. I didn’t speak. This was punishment. It was penance. It was also familiar—far too familiar.

Dragging myself across the floor like some wounded animal, I reached the shower and activated the water without glancing at the tap. Hot, cold—who cared? It just needed to wash everything off. Every particle of failure clinging to my skin. Every trace of someone I couldn't remember. Every lie I hadn't yet told.

I slumped against the tiles, spine pressed flat against cold ceramic. The contrast was brutal but necessary. Water beat down on me in relentless rhythm, each droplet a percussion of atonement against my skin. My eyes slid shut. For a moment, I was just breath and water and pain.

Then the tide began to pull me under.

Consciousness blurred. My limbs grew leaden. My thoughts turned to fog, impossible to hold. Faces flickered in the black—Sarah’s eyes, her disapproval, her silence. And behind her, something darker. Something formless, yet watching.

I drifted, weightless in a storm of half-formed memories and the gut-tight certainty that last night had been more than just another blackout.

It had been a mistake.

And like all mistakes worth fearing—it wasn’t going to stay buried.