“Getting properly wankered,” he said in an academic sort of tone, “is a fine art. It is if you want to avoid the messier side effects, anyway.” While she absorbed that, he caught the bartender again. She didn’t know how he managed it. Must be one of the benefits of giant gingerism: he was impossible to miss.
The bartender produced two bottles of water—boo—and four more shots. Red shoved a water at her and paid again. Then he finished his rum and Coke in two impressive gulps, and drank his own water, which made her feel less indignant.
“All right,” he said finally, splitting the shots in half. “You and me. Let’s have it.”
Surprise filled her, chased by pure pleasure. She swallowed her share easily this time, barely shuddering at the taste, and when he did the same, something inside her felt lighter. Warmer. Chloe giggled at nothing and let her head tip back onto his shoulder. For one dangerous second, his arm wrapped around her waist and squeezed. His hair spilled over her skin as he bent his head closer.
Then he let her go, as if it had never happened at all. He caught her hand, stepped back, and they were moving again, their clasped palms their only connection now. Chloe wobbled behind him like she was on stilts. She hadn’t realized just how integral Red’s chest had been to her structural stability during the last ten minutes. Stumbling after four shots? How mortifying. But fun, too.
Until she realized where Red was leading her, anyway. To the dance floor. Because that was what she wanted. She’d told him so in the taxi: she wanted to go out, get drunk, and dance. Except, now that they were headed in that direction, deep into a churning mass of bodies, she didn’t want to do that at all. It was flooding back suddenly, how much she’d always hated this part. With her friends, she remembered, she’d bobbed awkwardly at the edge of the group, feeling like a ninny.
That wasn’t how she wanted to feel tonight.
She tugged at Red’s hand and he looked back at her, raising his eyebrows in question. When she looked at the dance floor and shook her head, he changed course without a word, pulling her smoothly toward the sticky, shadowy booths in the corner. They slid into one beneath an alcove, and by some audio-architectural miracle, the volume lowered just enough for Chloe to hear herself think. Thank God. All this pounding and pulsing was making her vaguely homicidal.
“What’s up?” Red asked, his knee nudging hers. She looked at their legs beneath the filthy table and a thought danced wildly through her mind: he could touch her. He could slide his hand up her skirt right now, and no one in this hellhole would be any the wiser.
Then she looked up, met his endless eyes, and could’ve sworn he was thinking exactly the same thing. Each flash of strobe lights in the room lit up another facet of the hunger on his face. But he didn’t move. He sat and waited patiently to hear that she was okay.
And suddenly, she was bored with lying to him. Must be the alcohol. “I don’t like it here,” she shouted.
He gave her a look that seemed to say, Color me shocked. But there was no gloating in his response. “Want me to take you somewhere quieter?”
“Yes. No. I—” She hesitated, her mind whirring. This, tonight . . . It wasn’t what she’d really wanted. Because she hadn’t known what she’d really wanted when she’d put this on the list. She’d been hunting for an indescribable thrill, a feeling she remembered from nights out with her friends, but she’d misunderstood where the feeling came from. It wasn’t about drinking and partying in some dingy club.
It had been about the people. The constant laughter they shared, too high on each other to care that they were being obnoxious. Group trips to the bathroom like a small army unit, where the mission objective was helping each other squat over filthy toilets without their dresses touching the seat.
Belonging.
Maybe her list wasn’t quite as perfect, or as clinical, as she’d assumed. Because this was the first item she hadn’t enjoyed crossing off, and she couldn’t deny that she was disappointed.
But she could fix this, couldn’t she? Plans changed, didn’t they? Wasn’t that why she’d written the list in the first place—to become the kind of woman who turned disappointments around, who thought flexibly and did what she wanted to do?
Yes, she decided. Yes. That was exactly why.
She turned back to Red, found him waiting with those three little lines of concentration between his eyebrows. “I want to go somewhere else,” she shouted.
He nodded. “We can do that.”
But she wasn’t done. “I want to know what you do for fun.”
His frown cleared, replaced by a startled, hesitant pleasure. “Yeah?”
“Yes. Show me.”
*
They left the club, and Red put his jacket over Chloe’s shivering shoulders. He wouldn’t miss the warmth—when he was around her, he burned from the inside out. She must be tipsy as fuck, because she didn’t push him off or say something smart; she just smiled all pretty and held his hand as they cut through the cold, wet night.
Since the moment she’d decided to abandon their plan, she’d been electric. Vibrating brilliance, her walk slow and loose hipped, all the barriers and little hesitations he was used to from her fading away. Like she’d turned fearless.
He liked it. He liked her so happy that her soft, full lips had a permanent curl, that her eyes sparkled and her cheeks plumped. Tiny drops of rain spattered the lenses of her glasses, beaded on the flyaways frizzing from her hair, slicked her skin until she gleamed under the streetlights like a jewel. He slung an arm over her shoulders and she let him. Joined together like that, they strode through familiar, sleepless streets.
Leaving this city for London had been Red’s first mistake of many. He’d thought he needed to do things in a certain way, as rigid then as Chloe was now about her list. But being around her was really driving home how wrong he’d been: there was no single way to reach any goal. He should’ve been flexible, should’ve stayed in the city he loved and tried to succeed as himself, instead of going somewhere else to be someone else beside a woman who’d never really given a fuck about him.
He still wasn’t sure how to take things back to the start, how to build the life he wanted on his own terms—but tonight, he looked up at the stars and knew, really fucking knew, that he’d figure it out. He was figuring it out.
The funny thing about Chloe was, when he wasn’t busy panting after her . . . she made his head a hell of a lot clearer.
“I think you’ll regret asking me to do this,” he admitted, his voice rising over passing traffic and distant music and the shouts of drunken students waiting at a nearby bus stop.
“Why?” Her shoes made little squeaking noises against the wet pavement. “Are your hobbies so depraved?” Her voice was rich with a flirtation he didn’t quite trust. If she could sound that unreservedly into him, she was a little bit drunk.
Lightly, he said, “I think you’d like it if my hobbies were depraved. But no, they’re not. They’re boring.”