"Sooo..." Clive questions after Lily leaves them. "What's the big emergency and just so you know," he prattles on from one topic to another in the way that only Clive can. "I took charge over setting up the stage for the show for you since you were so incapacitated. You look like shit by the way. And don't forget, I agreed to drop everything to meet you here because you agreed to pay for my beer."

Just the mention of alcohol manages to rile Jesse's already nauseated stomach, inciting the urge to hurl right there on the table. He'd done enough of that before leaving his house so he makes a visible attempt at swallowing it down again. Desperate for some relief, he takes a chance on Lily's advice by wrapping both hands around the steaming mug that she'd deposited in front of him and takes a long whiff. He'd thought that nothing but time and a dose of her poisonous concoction would quell the constellation of symptoms associated with his hangover. But, Lily is a genius, Jesse surmises. The effect of the distinct aroma of strong dark roast is immediate. It clears away the mixture of other odors swirling inside The Bucket, working to aggravate all the signs in his body that he'd indulged in too much spirits.

He ignores Clive's comment about having to drop everything and grumbles, "trust me, I feel like it too." Then he says with a grimace, "but I didn't strike out last night," to correct the assumption that he had.

"No, I was there. You did," Clive assures him with a chortle. "Spectacularly. You didn't just strike out. You tanked. Bombed!" he keeps going. "You've been out of the game for too long, my friend. You're probably just too hungover to remember and I gotta point out," he adds with a slight shake of his head. "That's maybe for the best. Let's just hope that everyone who had been there is hungover too."

Jesse wants to remind him that he'd never even 'played the game' before last night in the first place and in the second place that it was because of his influence that he's in this situation. Instead, he gives Clive a puzzled look as he tries to stitch together the trickle of fragmented pieces of his memory as they roll in.

"Look," Clive tells him. "Not that I was thrilled about it, but I drove you home myself. Well not home-home," he corrects. "You asked me to drop you off at the cemetery and made a really awful joke about waking the dead. Do you have any idea how much I want to hit you for that? Those twins were hot. I had them eating out of my hands."

"Says you," Jesse grunts with skepticism but doesn't comment on going to his wanting to visit the cemetery. Thankfully, he can't remember that either. "I have no recollection of those events," he comments.

"Well it happened," Clive assures him.

"What happened after that?" Jesse asks. "After the cemetery."

"I asked you if you wanted me to stay with you and you said no," Clive answers, adopting a gentler tone. "What's this about, Jesse?"

Jesse ponders the question along with Clive's sworn statement about the events of the night before. As the professional tale spinner that he is, he's not sure if it would be wise to rely solely on the recount of Clive Kincaid. More so because, the picture that he's painting doesn't coincide with the ones in Jesse's mind -- of obscured hands touching him. Plus, there's the evidence of distinct small finger nail bites imprinted in his skin.

"How drunk were you last night?" he asks Clive even if he is afraid to know the answer. "Let me see your hands."

With a bit of hesitancy cy in his movements and a lot of confusion in the scowl on h, Clive obeys Jesse's requests. He raises both hands and answers, "not at all. I drew the short straw. Designated driver."

"Oh thank God," Jesse breathes. "I thought that you and I might have..." he starts to explain but waves the idea away with the relief he feels.

"What is going on?" Clive presses in exasperation. "You're kind of starting to freak me out."

"I had sex with someone last night," Jesse blurts out.

"No, you did not," Clive responds.

His dry, matter-of-fact-tone is insulting to Jesse as it calls his ability to romance the fairer sex into question. Clive's penchant for rambling on without a care denies Jesse the ability to rebut.

"The amount of whisky you imbibed would have rendered your ability to perform null and void," Clive takes the pleasure of informing him.

Jesse lowers his voice and leans into the table to refute those claims. "Unless you or someone else is in the habit of dropping used condoms in people's beds," he starts to say but stops when the thought provokes a creeped out shudder through his body.

Then he continues, "or there is some truth to the excuse that Mr. Landry gave his wife about being haunted by spirits that time he came home with a hickey and smelling like another woman's perfume then, I slept with someone last night. How do you explain these?" he questions as he chucks off one sleeve of his plaid shirt to reveal his arm.

Clive blinks at him and jokes, "maybe you did wake the dead. Maybe Mr. Landry was right."

"I'm serious, Clive," Jesse scolds.

"Well, Congratulations then," he offers with a nod of approval. Growing serious, he adds, "I fail to see why you're so peeved about it. So, again, what's the problem?"

Keeping his voice in a whisper, Jesse informs him, "I don't remember any of it. I have no idea who it was."

Clive returns to nodding his head with his mouth turned down in a contemplative frown. The movement makes Jesse feel as if he's on a dingy out in the water.

"Again, I don't see how that is a proplem," Clive says with a shrug. "That was the point of last night.

"You don't understand," Jesse moves in closer and lowers his voice even further to say. "It happened in my bedroom. Which means that I was home. Which means that if you didn't drive a woman home with me, I slept with someone here in Fresh Water."

Clive gasps, his eyes widening with understanding.

"Dude," he hisses. "That is strictly against the rules."

"It gets worse," Jesse whines then reaches for his phone.

"How could anything be worse than..." Clive starts to complain but his words are cut off to focus on the screen when Jesse hikes his phone up to his face.

"When I went to call you earlier, my call history was already opened," he explains. "The last person I called around before midnight was Tullisa."

The information takes a few moments to sink into Clive's brain. Jesse can see him working to process it. Clive's eyebrows draw down and his eyes shift quickly while he tries to connect the dots. Once he puts two and two together, his light green eyes turn wide as saucers and he chokes on a breath of air that has him breaking into a fit of coughs.

"No!" he exclaims once his lungs are functioning again. "You banged Tullisa? That is definitely not in the rules."

"Shhh..." Jesse hisses. "Keep your damn voice down." he orders quietly.

"Jesse," Clive drawls out in a tone that says he is both impressed yet wary and that Jesse should be too. Then he gasps. "You're a walking dead man, you know that right? Lily is going to castrate you."

Jesse groans his acknowledgement of what he knows is a fact. If he had slept with Tullisa, Lily is going to do more than just castrate him. However, the safety of his reproductive organs is the least of his worries. With the possible reality spoken out loud, cemented in his brain as the truth and staring him in the face in the form of the short call with Tullisa at almost midnight -- a call that he cannot recall making -- he feels even sicker than he already does. No amount of coffee sniffing can fix that problem. That much he knows.

He knows Tullisa well enough and by that he means all her life. This could ruin everything and he expresses as much to Clive.

"Let's not get ahead of ourselves," Clive says.

His tone fills Jesse with hope that he may have a plan that may help, so he waits, albeit, hesitantly. A lifelong friendship with Clive Kincaid has taught Jesse a few things. One of them being that when it comes to his friend, he knows to keep his expectations for success set at a minimum and pray that the outcome doesn't either land him in handcuffs or with some type of bodily injury.

While he waits in earnestness, Clive regards him with amusement in his eyes.

"You're sweating buckets," he laughs.

"That's really unhelpful," Jesse responds. "I don't know if it was her," he explains although that doesn't make the situation any better. "I mean the call lasted only a few seconds. So maybe...I don't know," he says in a panicked tone. "I really don't remember. How do I find out?"

"I have no idea," Clive answers with a nonchalant shrug of his shoulders.

"What do you mean you have no idea?" Jesse seethes. "This is your field. Your area of expertise. You got me into this mess and you are going to help me fix it."

"Yes," Clive agrees with a look of pride on his face. Then he says to Jesse, "I get that you're new to this lifestyle so I'm going to lay it out for you in a way that you will understand. The point of drunk sex, no-strings-attached sex, one night stand sex, but particularly drunk sex," he counts out on his finger. "Is to not remember. Whether it was good or bad and most likely it was bad, you will feel no shame. No one goes looking for the person they had sex with while high or drunk. It just doesn't happen."

Jesse feels even sicker.

"I'm sorry, man," Clive offers sincerely. "I don't think there's any way to fix it. You can't 'un' have sex with the town's most wholesome girl. Just try to focus on the silver lining," he suggests.

"Which is what exactly?" Jesse huffs.

"At least you wrapped it up. She's not going to get pregnant and because it's Tullisa then you know that you didn't catch anything," he lists.

None of it helps Jesse feel better.

"But it's Tullisa," he complains. "The girl I've looked at as a baby sister all her life. What am I supposed to do? Pretend it did not happen?"

"Sister...right," Clive snorts. "And that's the exact reason why you can't pretend that it did not happen. Even for me that would be a jerk move."

Before Jesse can question him about the 'sister' retort, Reed Schumacher walks into The Fresh Water Bucket carrying that usual air of self-importance all around him.

"Yeah, I was thinking of asking Tullisa to go with me," he says to Dan Meyers walking in behind him and loud enough for everyone within earshot to hear. "She's really beautiful. My colleagues would be so impressed. I just don't know about her unique name, you know? It lacks the culture and sophistication of a true socialite. It's so backwater. I'm not sure how my colleagues will accept it. Maybe she has a middle name, like Charlotte that she can use."

The entire conversation upsets Jesse and makes him want to puke for a whole different reason. Or ram his fist straight into Reed's pompous nose.

As he passes by their table and opens his mouth to greet both Jesse and Clive, Clive sticks his leg out causing Reed to stumble and grab the table to keep himself upright.

"Hey Shoemaker," Clive teases in that way he used to when they were children.

Reed straightens and rights his full three piece suit even if there is absolutely nothing wrong with it.

"Well," he mutters under his breath. "I see that some things never change. Will you ever outgrow being such a juvenile. You know, this infantile behviour is why you will never get out of this town."

"When did you get back?" Clive asks like he hadn't just been insulted.

"Wouldn't you like to know?" Reed answers.

An awkward pause settles around the four men and Clive breaks it with a low chuckle.

"Good one," he says. "And actually, I wouldn't like to know," he answers. "I'm not even sure why I asked. I'm really not interested because you are the most basic person I've ever had the unfortunate displeasure of knowing."

"I see you've graduated from pop up reading books. Good for you buddy. Keep visiting that thesaurus," Reed quips.

"Have you ever bothered to find out why her mother named her Tullisa?" Jesse interrupts to end the retaliation from Clive that he knows is coming.

Reed shrugs his shoulders and answers, "I just figured it's because she's weird."

Jesse grits his teeth to keep from retaliating himself as Reed leaves them to walk to the counter.

"I've never liked that guy," Clive says as he stares at Reed's back.

"You do provoke him on purpose," Jesse answers to his comment. "It's like watching really bad foreplay."

"Don't even joke about that," Clive warns with a shudder.

While Clive's dislike for Reed is purely immature and stems simply from him not liking Reed's stuffy look 'for a guy who had been raised the same way that they had', Jesse's reasons are far more personal.