Escape Room

By Imogen Markwell-Tweed

Combining humor, mystery, and aching hearts in a single space, Imogen Markwell-Tweed’s Escape Room is a heartwarming tale about how a second chance at love can be worth the risk. Jesse Gitner wouldn’t call his life boring, perhaps average or mellow. Working in IT, Jesse plays it safer than he did in his radical college years. A simple life, innocently following the career of the man who broke his heart. So when he wakes up in an eerie replica of his own apartment with no memory of how he got there, the last person he expected to be trapped with is his ex. State senator Vincent Turner the Third is hardworking and more than a touch self-loathing. Struggling to be his authentic self and please his father, Vincent has cobbled together his life as best he can. He never expected to see Jesse again, let alone be trapped with him and not know why. Forced together after fifteen years, Vincent and Jesse attempt to escape from their confines and simmering feelings. That is until the door of their apartment prison finally opens.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bryant Street Shorts
• Release date: Aug 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9781094421346

Imogen Markwell-Tweed

Imogen Markwell-Tweed is a queer romance writer and editor based in St. Louis. When she's not writing or hanging out with her dog, IMT can be found putting her media degrees to use by binge-watching trashy television. All of her stories promise queer protagonists, healthy relationships, and happily ever afters. @unrealimogen on Twitter and Instagram.

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

Jesse wakes up with his hands cradling his head and no memory of the last two days.

It’s a slow, stuttering sort of waking, like a broken engine sputtering with smoke seeping from the cracks. His eyes open but they’re too blurry to see anything. His lips part but his throat is too dry for words to come out and his muscles twitch but he’s too exhausted to stand.

It’s one lingering second into the next that Jesse realizes his memories are just gone. He sits up, so fast that his head spins and a wave of nausea crashes through him and squeezes his guts.

Jesse swallows, rough and dry, again and again as his head pounds until the nausea recedes.

Woah, fuck, he manages to get out. His hands grapple with the fabric of his couch, fingernails digging in as he tries to steady himself. He’s fairly certain that he’s not actually in a spinning, out of focus room. He’s, like, ninety percent sure of that. He must just be having a killer hangover. He doesn’t remember drinking and he hasn’t really blacked out since undergrad, but apparently that doesn’t mean anything because there’s no other reason for Jesse to be so fucking dizzy and—

This is not his couch.

Jesse blinks. The fabric under his hands is decidedly, certainly not his couch.

Jesse knows his couch. It was the first purchase he ever made that wasn’t secondhand or on sale. His couch, a green velvet sectional, is the most important piece of furniture in Jesse’s entire apartment and, he’s only somewhat humiliated to admit, is the most commitment he’s ever shown to anything or anyone. It cost over a thousand dollars. He cried when he got it. It’s a great couch.

Most importantly, it’s a velvet couch.

Jesse’s hands are splayed across the edge of the seat, fingers curled under the cushions, and he’s not touching velvet at all.

He forces his eyes open. It takes a few blinks and a few more swallows, but eventually the room evens out enough. It is his apartment but… it’s also not.

It’s a poor imitation of his apartment, like someone redid it from memory with a low budget. The couch he’s sitting on is green, but it’s a thin velour instead of the rich velvet. The coffee table in front of it is shaped right—a long oval found at a flea market the day after he got his first job out of college—but the stain is too dark and it has rugged edges like it wasn’t sanded down. Like it was sloppily, hurriedly remade.

Jesse stands. His legs wobble and his knees buckle. He throws out a hand, catching himself on the edge of the not-right couch. His arm trembles, still weak, but he holds himself up.

The room is so wrong. Looking at it, at the way the edges of the furniture are off and the colors are not quite right, Jesse feels suspended in the moment like at any second a scream or a laugh will break through his growing panic and tell him how to feel.

This must be a joke. It must be.

Because this is a weird, not-quite-there version of his goddamn living room, down to the books on the shelves, and Jesse is pretty sure if this isn’t a joke then it’s a torture room and that is way, way, way fucking worse.

The longer he’s standing, the easier it is. His muscles are coming back to him, one at a time it feels like, and as he carefully moves around the fake apartment, the bursts of adrenaline that his fear is providing helps smooth out the error of his leftover hangover.

Or, wait, fuck.

Jesse has no memory of drinking—what he remembers is leaving the office Friday night, later than usual because of a project he’d been working on all quarter. His plans had been to meet up with his Discord buddies for a round of gaming before hitting the hay. He had no plans to drink at all—and no memory of that changing—and the more Jesse stares at the carefully constructed replication, the more he’s starting to think he’s not hungover.

Jesse has never been drugged before. But he has seen every action movie available on HBO and he’s pretty damn sure that discombobulation and hangover-like-symptoms would make sense if he had been drugged.

The thought splutters in his mind and he stops, heaving again, as he re-thinks it over and over again.

If! He! Had! Been! Drugged!

What kind of sentence was that!

Jesse works in IT. He likes gaming and bad science fiction novels and Indian food. He’s not the kind of guy that gets drugged for an elaborate Saw franchise level prank. He’s certain of that. If anyone had asked him two days ago if he thought he’d ever be abducted and thrown into a replica of his apartment, he would have laughed loudly.

Except now Jesse is standing there, with a splitting headache, holding a foam picture frame with an actual photograph of him and his mom in it, and he’s pretty goddamn sure that he’s been abducted and thrown into a replica of his apartment.

Jesse tries to breathe. It’s way more difficult than it should be and he’s almost got the energy to be annoyed by that, but not quite.

Well. Well, okay. Jesse gathers the remaining energy in him, fast dwindling, and makes it to the door.

The door, which looks exactly like his door, which has the goddamn paint splatter on it by the keyhole from when the delivery person rang the doorbell as he was repainting, is not a door at all.

Jesse tugs on the handle, twisting and pulling and pushing. He throws his whole body against it, uses one foot flat against the too soft door for leverage and yanks, he does everything he can think of to pry the edges of the door open; with no tools and bone-deep exhaustion, it becomes a lost cause within only a few minutes.

Jesse’s throat twists and his lungs burn and he’s not crying but he’s pretty sure that’s just because he’s dehydrated. He sinks to the floor, letting out a hiccupped groan when it’s too damn soft underneath him.

He pulls his legs up to his chest, resting his cheek on his knees. For a few minutes, he lets himself just sit there. Jesse has no fucking idea what is happening his head spins in the most nauseating way, his hands shaking as he tucks them between his legs—and he tries to think of a single solution that doesn’t sound batshit wild.

Jesse can’t come up with anything that doesn’t make him want to tear his hair out, though, and after a few more minutes, he can feel the way his eyes are drooping. The panic is fading to fully fledged fear and he’s worried that if he passes out, that’ll be it—whoever has put him here will come back and he won’t even be awake to protect himself.

With this in mind, Jesse manages to get back onto trembling legs. He notices for the first time that his shoes and belt have been removed, he’s in the soft brown slacks and blue hoodie that he wore to work. His socks have tiny Star Wars logos all over them and a hole in the heel.

Jesse does not want to die in old, holey novelty socks.

This fortifies him a little. He manages to get a good grip on his elbows, hands tightening around himself as he mocks some comfort in the hold so that he can walk around without starting to scream.

He explores the rest of the living room. The books are real, at least, but the cabinets are all empty and there’s no TV on the stand. The walls are soft and the floor is plush and the whole thing is so disconcerting that he’s too afraid to look in the kitchen or bedroom.

The only other space he does explore is the bathroom and it’s a miracle beyond all miracles that instead of a plush replica, it is a

Reviews for Escape Room

[Kelsey Laurent · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Love this concept and had such a fun time reading!