Watching the light from the candle cast shadows across his fingers, he still disagrees with her. He’s not bad at drugs so much as he appreciates them in a different way. As opposed to deriving his high from the substance itself, Paul’s tastes are finer, he tells himself, more refined; he appreciates the preparation, the chase, the anticipation. That sliver of time when he can be sure of his decision without having to concern himself with its consequences. But then, what was he supposed to do: give Alcott a full bag of the stuff and say that the thought of snorting it was enough? How dull, he imagines Mark saying. How boring.
Using the toilet seat as a makeshift table, he uses his credit card to crush the mephedrone. The more he works it, the whiter the crystals turn, and Paul questions, briefly, the merits and pitfalls of inhaling such a chameleonish substance. But before he can think any longer, he pries open the baggie and plunges the long end of the key into it, scooping up a healthy pile of speckled dust. The first bump he does is borderline unbearable: it burns worse than cocaine, and instead of blow’s familiar gasoline-y drip, Meow Meow (can he call it that?) tastes and smells like artificially sweetened stale piss. Still, after snorting a few gulps of air to clear his sinuses, he convinces himself to snort a second bump, and then a third. He wants there to be a noticeable dent in the stuff by the time he slips the baggie back to Alcott. He wants them to see just how fun he is.
*
It’s 4:07. No. Now it’s 4:08. From the orange couch in Alcott’s living room, Paul watches another minute blink by on the clock above the stove. Alcott sits next to him, his arm draped over his shoulder; on the other side of the coffee table, Mark drinks from his beer. A half-finished cigarette burns, neglected, in an ashtray. The Very Best of Fleetwood Mac has been playing for the past twenty minutes, and they’re all doing their best to ignore the lyrics to “Gypsy.” Paul wonders what time the sun comes up in London. He wonders if the Thames turns blue at the first light of dawn, or red.
How many bars did they go to once they left the Looking Glass? Four, Paul counts. Or: three bars, and one dance club. A place with strobe lights and a moody fog machine, where Alcott started getting handsy with Paul (pushing his groin against his thigh as they danced, slipping his fingers through his belt loops, working his palm up under his shirt, etc., etc., etc.) while Mark made an extended trip to the bathroom. Paul had done more Meow Meow, but he considers his decision to be one fueled by self-preservation, as opposed to pleasure seeking. Twenty minutes after his initial three bumps, a jolt of euphoria shocked him, much as Alcott said it would, and Paul found himself smiling involuntarily, and saying fascinating things, and wanting, more than anything else, for everyone to just be friends. He knew he was buzzing, and he could tell Mark was becoming mildly irritated, but the prospect of shutting up, of not sharing everything that he was feeling, struck him as actually impossible, and so to help temper that impossibility, he ordered himself two more vodkas and some tequila. It turned out, though, that he overshot that decision—about thirty minutes later he nearly fell asleep in the back of a cab—so when they arrived at the next bar, he promptly found an unoccupied stall and cut himself a line of not-insignificant size, just to level himself out. The rest of the night followed a similar seesaw pattern, with Paul and Alcott and Mark snorting and drinking and groping in search of an acceptable high until, sometime around three thirty, the mephedrone disappeared and Alcott couldn’t get a hold of his dealer.
“The bloody son of a bitch,” Alcott said, furiously staring at his phone after trying the man for the seventh time. They were standing on Hollen Street, three blocks from where Paul and Mark had eaten dinner earlier in the evening. “What else could he possibly be doing?”
A minute later, Alcott proposed that they return to his flat and drink whatever he had lying around while they waited for his dealer to return his call.
And now what? 4:08 flips over to 4:09, and it becomes clearer and clearer that Alcott’s dealer—a Mancunian called Jose—has called it a night.
Mark finishes his beer and looks at Alcott. Alcott smiles and looks at Paul. Paul does his best to look at neither of them, and in the process looks at both of them.
They’ve been doing this for the past fifteen minutes, ever since they finished the sambuca stashed behind the coffeemaker on the top of Alcott’s fridge. Passing the baton of furtive looks, Paul thinks. It reminds him of the gym he used to go to in New York, where old married men would spend hours in the steam room, staring each other down, giving each other peeks of what lurked beneath their towels. A few times after he had finished working out Paul had joined them, under the pretense of needing to sweat out some imaginary cold. Beyond the sadness of the experience, what struck him most acutely was its sheer tedium: here were a bunch of dudes staring at each other—literally, staring at each other for an hour—without actually ever doing anything about it. For God’s sake, he remembers wanting to scream, just whip it out already. We all want the same thing, don’t we?
And indeed: Don’t they? Honestly, though, Paul’s not sure. He knows what Mark wants—he’s hardly been subtle about it. And he suspects that Alcott’s gunning for the same, multilimbed outcome. But what about him? What about Paul? He doesn’t want Mark to think that he’s won, but if this thing happens, Mark’s sense of victory will be impossible to prevent. But then, his desire to prevent his lover from feeling a sense of accomplishment seems like a petty reason for not pursuing an experience. That desire, though, which is very real and which Paul admits he should probably address at some point, skirts the more pressing issue, the more pressing question: What does Paul want? Objectively, sex with two (or more) people sounds fun. The logistics might prove to be a little stressful, but still—fun. To say otherwise would be to lie. Wendy was right about that. So, yes, from a purely primal sense, this is something that Paul wants. Yet obviously it’s not that easy; Paul’s not a purely primal being. None of them are. They are all cursed with the ability to reason what unreasonable consequences might ensue if they end up sleeping together.
He has a headache. He hopes against hope that Jose calls back.