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She seemed to take a second and then nodded.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s go.”
I smiled wide, pulling her into me for a hug.
“Cool,” I said. “And like I said, you get uncomfortable, just let me know. We’re gone.”
“I will be uncomfortable the entire time,” she laughed. “But if it gets too much, I’ll let you know.”
I turned back to Faison, whose attention had momentarily shifted to a blonde woman walking by wearing roughly three inches of bathing suit on her entire person. He noticed me looking at him and perked back up with his big, genial grin.
“You coming?” he asked.
“Let’s go,” I said.
An hour and a half later, we were in the thick of it. I smelled like cheap beer now too, rivaling Faison after I did a keg stand and proceeded to spill half of it down me. No one seemed to mind. It was part of the experience, apparently.
We wandered through the crowd, hanging out with Faison and his friends for a bit and then moving along through the others, stopping at random to watch shows at stages that seemed to be placed along the beach with no rhyme or reason. Some of them had actual performers on them, doing music or talent shows consisting of entirely hammered people. Some of them were just stages where a hundred barely clothed people were dancing.
We reached one that was a little less crowded than the others, and I impulsively pulled Kristen with me onto the stage. She resisted for just a split second before joining me and as we danced, the world closed in around us. Nothing else mattered besides the two of us, enjoying ourselves and each other in the sunlight, surrounded by music and the freedom to let our proverbial, and in her case literal, hair down.
She didn’t know I had something planned. Something that I had been working out and working up the courage for this entire time. But first I wanted to have this experience of letting go, of embracing the silliness of the atmosphere and not caring who saw us, or what they thought. I wanted us both to be able to revel in each other’s company in spite of our surroundings. To use them to amplify our connection rather than distract from it.
As the sun slowly began to set, I took her hand, and we made our way back to the hotel, putting on the bare minimum of required clothing to go into the strip and see what was going on that night. It meant a white T-shirt for me and a red mesh shirt that went down almost to her knees over her swimsuit. I could tell she felt a little self-conscious, but before she could second guess herself, I kissed her and took her hand.
“Ready to see what the night has in store?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Let’s go,” she said. “I’m ready.”
I hoped she was. I had a hell of an idea, and I really hoped she was simultaneously not going to see it coming and be ready for what it would mean. Tonight was going to be a big night. A fun night. And one that neither one of us was ever going to forget.
18
KRISTEN
The entire day had been a whirlwind of insanity that just didn’t seem to slow down until we went back to the hotel to get real shoes on and put on something over our bathing suits.
Part of me wanted to stop. It was so much. All of the people, the noise, the revelry, it was more than I was used to. Even when I had gone to school, I wasn’t a party person, and all of this was stuff that had happened around me, but I didn’t really participate in. My breaks as a student primarily revolved around my friends and I going to a hotel near the beach, lounging by the ocean and drinking wine and going to bed with the window open so I could hear the ocean.
I was pretty boring that way.
But Camden never even had the opportunity. As he had said, his life went from high school to work, and he skipped all the fun stuff of college that a person should at least have the chance to turn down if it wasn’t their thing. I understood why he would want to experience it, even with both of us in our thirties, and my fears of being seen as weird, old people had been unfounded. Most of the partiers either didn’t seem to notice or care. We were just two more bodies in the pile.
We ran into Faison again as we walked, hand in hand, along the main strip. He was chatting up a girl when we passed and the two of them joined us when Camden told them we were heading to the club nearby. It was a surprise to me that we were heading there too. I thought we were just milling around, but Camden mentioned the place by name and seemed to know where he was going.
A prickling of suspicion entered the back of my mind. I knew he wasn’t lying when he said he had never done any of this before, but I was wondering what he was up to. He said that he had made reservations and had everything planned out before we left but had been rather vague beyond the hotel as to what that meant. I decided not to ask questions and go with the flow, hoping to help him do the same, but now I was questioning that approach.
What was he up to?
We made our way to the club that he mentioned and got inside after waiting in a short, quickly moving line. The bouncer had looked at our IDs for an extra second before looking us over. I got the impression he was thrown by our birthdates and immediately suspicious of them until he got a good look at our faces. It was the first time since we had been there that I had been made to feel much older than the rest of the partygoers. It was always something in the back of my mind, but no one else had seemed to bring it up until then.
The club was dark and loud as we made our way in, and once we made it into the main part of the club, I saw what was going on and almost said we should leave.
There was a large bar in the middle of the room, and a DJ was speaking loudly, hyping something that was upcoming. On either side of the bar were women in bikinis dancing, and the crowd of onlookers were dancing with drinks in the air. Faison was leading the way to the bar, and we followed him and the girl he had seemingly connected with. I missed her name, but I had a feeling neither one of them particularly cared about names at that moment.
Music blared as we all got drinks and made our way back to the crowd to dance. Camden was loosening up, and the perpetual smile on his face was infectious. He also was starting to move on the dance floor in a way that shocked me a bit.
