And then the room started moving without me.
It happened slowly at first. A tilt. A warmth behind my eyes. The music was getting louder and softer at the same time, which didn’t make sense but made perfect sense to my drunk brain. I blinked. The dance floor swayed. My stomach, which had been quietly tolerating the evening’s decisions, issued its first formal complaint.
I needed a bathroom. Now.
"Miley." I grabbed her arm. "Bathroom," I said quickly.
"You okay?" she asked, leaning in.
"Gonna be sick," I admitted.
"Go, go, go. I’ll find you," she urged.
I pushed through the crowd, which was harder than it should’ve been because my legs had apparently decided to operate on a two-second delay. The main bathroom had a line stretching halfway down the wall. I couldn’t wait. My stomach was staging a full coup and the negotiation window was closing fast.
I turned down a corridor. Quieter. Dimmer. Doors unmarked. The music faded to a dull pulse behind me. I was looking for a bathroom, any bathroom, and my vision was doing that thing where everything was sharp in the center and blurry at the edges and I was walking with the careful determination of someone trying very hard not to surrender to gravity.
"Are you following me?"
The voice came from my left. Cold. Clipped. British-edged.
Or a hallucination of Jace Hunter. Because there was no way my actual boss was standing in a dim hallway at a club on a Saturday night looking at me like my existence was an inconvenience he hadn't scheduled.
I squinted at him. "You’re not real."
His expression didn’t change. "I assure you, I am."
"Nope." I shook my head, which was a mistake because the corridor wobbled. "You’re not. You’re a hallucination. My brain is punishing me for the third cocktail. I’m going to close my eyes and when I open them you’ll be gone."
I closed my eyes. Counted to three. Opened them.
He was still there. Same suit. Same glasses. Same face that looked like it had never smiled and was personally offended by the concept.
"Huh," I said. "Persistent hallucination."
"I’m not a hallucination. And you are clearly inebriated."
"I’m not drunk. I’m… lightly impaired." I pointed at him. "And you can’t be here. You’re my boss. Bosses don’t exist in nightclubs. It’s against the rules."
"What rules?"
"The rules of the universe. You exist in your office behind your clean desk with your little cube thing and your red pen. You don’t exist here." I gestured vaguely at the corridor. "Here is where fun happens. And you, Mr. Hunter, are the opposite of fun. You’re the dictionary definition of anti-fun. If fun had an enemy, it would be your face."
He stared at me. I stared back. The corridor tilted gently to the left and I compensated by leaning gently to the right, which probably looked ridiculous but felt like expert-level balance management.
Then, because the drunk version of me had zero impulse control and a death wish I’d be paying for tomorrow, I held both my hands up in front of him. Palms out. Fingers spread.
"Look," I said. "Clean. See? No coffee. No weapons. No biohazards. Just hands. Regular human hands attached to a regular human person."
His eyes went to my hands, then back to my face. "What on earth are you doing?"
"Showing you that I’m harmless." I wiggled my fingers. "No contamination. No germs. Nothing that requires emergency sanitization. You can relax."
"I don’t need to…"
"And these," I continued, cupping my own chest with both hands, "are not weapons. Okay? They’re just boobs. They’re soft. Like clouds. Soft, harmless clouds that cannot hurt anyone. You touched them at the market and you survived. So clearly they pose no threat to your wellbeing."
His eyes went wide. His mouth opened. Nothing came out. It closed, then opened again, as if his brain had drafted a response and his body sent it back. For one glorious second, Jace Hunter—a man who had a prepared answer for everything—had absolutely nothing.
