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With my free hand, I reach out for his chest and grab a handful of his shirt. “Dude. Stop it.”
“Oh, this isperfect!” Elena squeals. She stumbles away in her heels, leaving Adam to stare at me with complete nonchalance. He is so blasé sometimes.
He pushes my hand off his shirt. “What?”
“I don’twantto get under someone new. Maybe if I didn’t spend half my time getting wasted with you, Charlotte wouldn’t have left. So how about you shut the fuck up?”
Adam narrows his dark eyes to mirror my glare and for a split second, I consider cracking my beer against his skull. But if there’s one thing my field training has taught me, it’s patience and remaining calm in high-pressured situations. I relax my shoulders and take a step back from him, but our eye contact holds strong. A threat lingering between us.
Elena reappears, thrusting her friend forward. Adam still doesn’t break, and neither do I.
“Gracie, I want you to meet .?.?.” Elena says but trails off when she realizes she doesn’t know my name.
“Weston,” Adam finishes for her. The corner of his mouth twitches with a cruel smirk, and he continues to look me straight in the eye as he adds, “But don’t get your hopes up, darling. He doesn’t know how to treat a girl right. Just ask his ex.”
Fuck my patience.
My fist connects with Adam’s jaw before his final word even lands. Elena and her friend scream as Adam rocks back against them, knocking one of them to the ground. Under the flashing lights, everything is a blur. Adam lunges toward me and together, in the midst of swinging fists and grappling, we crash into the table in the middle of the booth. Glass shatters around us, liquid seeps through our clothes. All of the girls are screaming now. Brooks grabs Adam, Cameron grabs me. They pull us apart, but our adrenaline is pumping and we are out of control, desperate to get one more punch in. Adam may be fueled by booze, but I’m full of pain and anger.
“Weston.Weston!” Cameron hisses in my ear, his huge arms locked around my shoulders as he holds me steady. My chest rises and falls with each heavy breath I take. “You can’t act like this.”
Brooks has Adam backed up into the opposite end of the booth now, and the distance is enough to snap me out of my sudden rage. There are shards of glass everywhere. The girl knocked to the floor is helped back to her feet while another girl flies off the handle in a fit of rage at the spilled cranberry juice down her white dress. Elena screams obscenities into Adam’s face.
Club security descend upon the booth within seconds. One bouncer twists my elbow with such ferocity that ifIdid that to a troublemaker, I’d be accused of police brutality. He hauls me out of the booth.
“Everyone out! NOW!” I hear one of the other bouncers order, and he begins corralling the girls out of the booth too, which of course, they protest.
“This is our booth!”
“They aren’t even with us!”
“We don’t know them!”
The bouncer snaps, “EVERYONE!”
And it’s humiliating, being physically dragged through this club on display in front of the masses whoaren’tlosing their shit. Adam isn’t far behind me. We are guided to one of the emergency exits I noticed earlier and thrown straight out of it into a back alley behind the club. Cameron, Brooks and the group of distraught girls voluntarily follow.
“You and you,” one of the bouncers says, pointing to Adam and me. “Don’t show your faces around here again. You’re banned.”
The door slams shut, the echo traveling down the alley until it fades into the cold night air. No one says a word as we all stand motionless, processing. Cameron sparks up a cigarette and leans against the wall, bemused, and I dare to exchange a glance with Adam.
His shirt is soaked and his jaw displays a hint of redness. The look in his eye makes it pretty clear he’d go for a second round, so I grit my teeth and turn my back on the group to walk away. I should know better than to get into a fight, and now I have something else to be mad at myself for. Why can’t I hold myself together?
“You absolutedouchebag!” one of the girls yells after me. She’s not wrong.
I hear heels click against the concrete as someone runs to catch up with me. It’s Elena. She steps around me, hand held up to block me. There’s lipstick smeared on her chin, and her drunk gaze struggles to focus on me. “Do you have any idea how much that booth cost? You just ruined our entire night!”
“Give my friends your Venmo. I’ll pay the bill. Okay?”
“No! You ruined our night!”
“It’s not the only thing I’ve ruined,” I mutter, then step around her and hasten my stride.
More arguing breaks out in the alley behind me, Adam’s voice mixed with what sounds like every single one of the girls’ voices at once. I’m not a total asshole. I do feel bad for getting these girls kicked out of their own booth, especially when it’s someone’sbirthday, but Adam just had to push me over the edge.
As I hit the street, I pull out my phone, full of hope that maybe Charlotte will have tried to call me back before she went to sleep tonight. But it’s approaching one in the morning, and there are no missed calls and no new messages. My stomach sinks and I switch over to the Uber app.
I’m going home. I’m going to bed, to stare at the ceiling all night, and then I’ll deal with this hangover in the morning.
