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“I think you’ve had enough, Evvie,” she said.
“C’mon, Han, cheer up!” I responded, pushing her shots towards her.
Hesitantly, my friend took her shots, watching me the entire time. I didn’t give her time to question me again though, instead, I dragged her away again. I got her onto the dancefloor, and we went about as wild as you can go in six-inch heels, drunk off your face. The music was a blur of noise bashing around inside my head, and there were bodies pressed in all around us.
As the shots hit me, I lost any sense of the passage of time. I wandered around the floor as I danced, and Hannah wove through the crowd with me. She disappeared at some point, and then I felt myself moving.
It was all quiet suddenly, and I looked around, trying to get a sense of where I was. A man was standing in front of me, and I felt the wind at my back.
“Heh,” I laughed drunkenly, “you look like someone I know, heh.”
“You’re pretty drunk, aren’t you?” the man said, moving closer.
“Mike!” I crowed, “I knew I knew you!”
It was making perfect sense in my head, but this boy was laughing at me, so I frowned. We pressed against something, cold and hard and rough. His mouth was on mine again, and his tongue was in my mouth. I couldn’t find it in me to be bothered by what he was doing. I moved lazily against him, finding no great joy in anything except the fact that he was supporting my weight when I wasso, sosleepy.
“I don’t want to do anything you don’t want,” Mike said, pulling away from me.
“Someone inebriated doesn’t have any capacity to consent, so I don’t want anything,” I said, or at least I thought I did.
Because judging by the way Mike then looked at me, there was no way I’d said that.
“Oh, Evelyn, you’re really,reallydrunk,” Mike laughed, “I’m sorry for kissing you, let’s get you somewhere safe, huh?”
“I’ve got her,” a deep voice interrupted, “you can head back down, I think some people are beginning to leave now.”
“Are you sure?” Mike’s eyes looked large and worried, but there was something else there, something suggesting he didn’t want to leave us be.
“Go, Mike,” I assured him, “I’ll be fine.”
“The air will do her some good,” the man agreed, and then Mike was gone, and someone was helping me sit in a chair.
I collapsed into it and ripped off my heels. The person was chuckling as I swept my hair back from my face and leaned my cheek on a cool glass table that had appeared in front of me.
Again, time seemed to be sucked away from me, and between two blinks, I felt more and more sober. I finally sat up, and the man in front of me was none other than Julian Brooks.
“How are you feeling?” He asked, and his voice was low and concerned.
Everything inside me felt conflicted. This man was supposed to dislike, if not hate me. He had made that much clear over the last year. I sometimes wondered if he even remembered me from that night, or thought I was just one more person trying to hurt his only daughter.
Julian didn’t look older than thirty-five, and yet, he had a nineteen-year-old daughter. I tried to do the math in my head, but it got lost somewhere in my drunken brain and all I could figure out was that he must have been in high school when he had Hannah.
“I feel fine,” I murmured.
It was true, the cool of the table against my cheek, and the wind dusting across the top of my hair felt perfect. Looking at his face only made the night better.
“What’s on your mind?” was his next question.
“I’m just wondering why you hate me,” I said.
I knew how it sounded, and I had always prided myself on not needing anyone’s validation except my own, but I was drunk and vulnerable, and my best friend’s dad hated me.
He sighed, and it was this big heavy sigh that I unintentionally mimicked.
“I don’t hate you, Evelyn. I just find you very difficult to be around.”
I pouted at this because being told I was difficult was almost harder than being told he hated me. Feeling a little more steady in my head, I sat up fully, leaning back in the chair I had been helped into. It was a comfortable wicker thing, and taking in my surroundings more clearly, I realized I was on the terraced rooftop garden. It was somewhere Hannah and I went regularly, to drink and complain about our courses. I had never been up here with Julian though.
