I lifted the glass and pretended to drink, mostly to give my hands something to do. But somewhere between pretending and putting it back down, I actually sipped. The burn hit the back of my throat before I registered what I had done.
Nothing has ever tasted that good in my life. It moved through me, like a door cracking open in a room that had been sealed too long.
I took another sip. One glass couldn’t kill me, right?
A man walked up to the two girls and slid into the space between them. I watched how easy it was, how neither of them had to do anything except exist in the right outfit. They were my age. Same city, but completely different lives.
I was sitting in a bar, looking like I had lost an argument with my existence, while girls were being bought drinks by men who wanted them.
What did I do wrong, exactly? At what specific turn did the road go this way?
Fuck my parents.
I took another sip.
Fuck my life.
I took another.
The glass emptied, and I pushed it toward the bartender. He refilled it without asking, and I appreciated that about him.
Fine. I would marry Dmitri. He was rich. The building alone told me that much. Rich meant that Cole ate properly,slept somewhere safe, and stopped chasing ghosts with me. If marrying a stranger with good bone structure and questionable morals was what this chapter of my life required, then that was it. I stopped waiting for better options anyway.
The second glass went down faster than the first. I pushed it forward again, and that was when my body decided to weigh in on the conversation.
The weakness came first, settling into my limbs. Then the burning started, deep in my stomach, climbing upward through my chest and into my throat.
No. Not here, please. Not now.
I picked up the fresh glass the bartender had set down, and my hand was shaking. The glass rattled faintly against the bar top. I pressed my lips together and told myself to hold it together for ten more minutes, just long enough to get outside, into a cab, and back to Cole.
The bar tilted.
“Are you okay?” The bartender’s voice reached me in pieces.
I got off the stool, and my elbow caught the glass on the way down. It hit the floor and shattered. I barely heard it over the noise already building inside my head. I took a step, one hand pressed hard against my stomach, bent slightly at the waist, breathing through my teeth.
A hand closed around my wrist. “You haven’t paid.”
Right. I forgot.
I pulled at my bag with fingers that weren’t cooperating, searching for the change I knew was somewhere at the bottom. My breath came out in short, uneven pulls.
“Miss, you need to pay.”
“I will p—” the word broke apart before it finished. I wasn’t sure if anything I said came out at the right volume.
“Security.” The grip on my shoulder tightened, and I winced, pulling against it.
One moment I was upright, and the next I was on the floor. The noise in the bar swelled around me, as if something were shattering nearby. I heard a sound like a burst or a crack, but I couldn’t figure out what it was. The darkness came first, and everything else went quiet after.
I woke up to a scent that didn’t belong to me. Leather and underneath it, vanilla and dry wood. My body sank into something soft enough that getting up felt like an unreasonable choice.
Light came in from somewhere above. I blinked at the ceiling, my head heavy. The kind of heaviness that doesn’t come from rest but from the body shutting itself down. The ceiling stretched farther than any ceiling I have ever woken under.
The curtains were open, and the city beyond the windows blurred into an endless view. I was in a bed centered in the middle of a room that had no business being this large.
This was not my apartment.
