“It’s dark. I can’t tell yet,” I said, feeling a twinge at the tenor of her eagerness. “I’ll introduce you if he is, I promise.”
Gaz had triumphed. All the Fawkes dummies had eerie jack-o’-lantern heads, and were suspended from the wood-beamed ceiling in various grisly positions. The lighting was flickering and spooky, but ripe for romantic shenanigans, and the drinking and dancing were in full swing. Clive met us at the bar in a costume that was split down the middle: half of the pipe, mustache, and hat that make up the classic Sherlock Holmes, and half a set of glasses, a thinner waxed mustache, and slicked-down hair that screamed Watson.
“The Sexy Sherlock I’d envisioned had other plans,” he said, gesturing at me, “so I decided to do a Jekyll-and-Hyde thing and go as both of them.”
“That must have taken you forever,” I said, impressed. “It’s really good.”
Clive beamed. “If I may,” he said, turning to Lacey, “there is a gentleman chemistry major who, when you came in, expressed an interest in seeing if the two of you have any.”
He gestured to an extremely good-looking blond who shot Lacey a seraphic smile.
“Damn,” she murmured appreciatively. “I haven’t scored this fast in a long time.”
“Well, you’re a busy woman,” I said. “But you’re on vacation now.”
A grin spread across Lacey’s face. “And it’s my birthday,” she said.
Just before Clive led her to her prey, he shot me an endearing smile, and I felt a rush of gratitude toward him for caring so much that my sister had a good time. With Nick gone and our TV nights on hold, I’d slipped right back into my old habits with Clive, but I knew it looked like—and, honestly, felt like—I was just killing time until Nick returned. I could hear Cilla’s voice in my head from that afternoon, and stubbornly muted her as quickly as I could. Clive was more than lovely. He was smart and cute and available and interested, and maybe I should try to look at him the way I’d noticed him looking at me.
And yet, the first person I scanned for was Nick. Instead, I got India Bolingbroke—dressed, in grand Halloween tradition, as Sexy Person of Vaguely Hawaiian Origin As an Excuse to Wear a Coconut Bra—who was herself surveying the room with a deflated air; apparently she didn’t know Nick’s whereabouts any better than I did. I saw Joss in one corner dressed as Karl Lagerfeld, sprayed silver hair in a frizzy ponytail. Lady Bollocks, perched on one of the deep windowsills, sported what looked a fortune’s worth of Marie Antoinette garb and had brought three boys dressed as peasants, to whom she was feeding cake (which made me wonder if Bea had very well-hidden fun depths). Cilla had done herself up as Ginger Spice, in a Union Jack dress, and she appeared to be berating a large, lumpy burrito with a head. As I inched closer, I recognized Gaz, stuffed into a flesh-colored nylon body stocking. He’d paired it with a long, red wig and the world’s most garish pair of massive, hollow plastic breasts. They looked like Jell-O molds with nipples. My gaze, against every ounce of my judgment, drifted between them to the large sparkling heart-shaped bauble resting unluckily there.
“Oh my God,” I said, starting to giggle uncontrollably. “You’re Kate Winslet. From the scene in Titanic where he paints her naked.”
“Right you are,” he said. “See, Cilla? People get it.”
“But it’s not accurate,” she hissed, pointing to the tufts of black, curly hair glued to Gaz’s crotch. “The Heart of the Ocean was not green and she did not have pubic hair in that scene.”
“Well, we never saw for certain,” Gaz offered. “Anyway, it’s for modesty. The bloody stocking stretches too thin—I had to put something there or you’d see all my bits.”
“I can’t believe that your objection to this is on authenticity grounds,” I said to Cilla, stealing a sip of her dramatically steaming glass of pitch-black punch.
Cilla uncapped my Sharpie and wrote Gaz is a genius on my shirt.
“There. The first enormous lie of the night,” she said.
Gaz tacked onto the end of her sentence: at pretending he is not dynamite in the sack.
“Much better,” he said.
It took me fifteen minutes to find Clive and Lacey, and then another fifteen to get a drink (so I got three, for maximum efficiency). The more the cocktails flowed, the less little and white the lies scribbled on my shirt became—someone wrote Bea is SO NICE on my breast—and the sweatier and looser our dancing was: me, Clive, Lacey, Damian the Incredibly Hot Chemistry Student, and whoever else happened to be in our radius, including a guy dressed as Captain Hook whom I’d noticed staring at me with increasingly sexy intensity. I was wrestling with whether to strike up a conversation when the pirate beat me to it, putting his lips right to my ear.
“Yer makeup’s runnin’ down your face, innit,” he yelled.
I ran a finger across my cheek and it came away dark from rivulets of sweaty mascara. I had to laugh. This was exactly what I deserved for breaking a promise about Clive that I’d barely even made to myself.
I waved at Lacey. “Be right back,” I shouted, mopping at my face.
But as I headed out to the nearest bathroom, I caught sight of a familiar figure turning tail and sprinting up the main stairs, and like a magnet to metal I shot toward it.
“Hey,” I called out, but Nick was already most of the way upstairs. I followed him straight to his own open door, which I caught before he could close it behind himself.
“Welcome back,” I said.
He jumped. “I almost didn’t recognize you without your ponytail,” he said. I could swear his eyes flickered to my cleavage and then immediately away. “What’s that costume?”
“I’m a Little White Lie,” I said, catching my reflection in his mirror and wiping again at my cheeks. “Feel free to add one. I suggest, ‘I have every intention of going into this party.’”
“I am going,” Nick said, but it was thin.
“Bullshit,” I said. “You’re hiding.”
Nick turned away and stretched, his shirt riding up slightly and revealing an appealing side-ab muscle.
“You’ve seen the papers. My head’s been a bit scrambled,” he said. “I thought getting torched with you lot would make me feel right again, but I’m not quite sure I’m ready yet.”
I imagined India having a drunken Where have you been?!? hissy on the dance floor. I wouldn’t want to deal with that in front of two hundred people, either, especially after a half-baked paternity crisis. Nick just looked so downtrodden; I felt suddenly, fiercely protective.
“Come on,” I heard myself say. “We’re getting you out of here.”
“But I just got here,” Nick said.
I put my hands on my hips. “Right now, ‘here’ is alone in your bedroom,” I said. “Tell me something. When did you last have any fun?”
“You’ve been out with me—I’m terribly fun.”