8. Nico
I nursed my club soda and watched Adrian try to keep up with Sabrina. Try being the operative word.
Adrian was a confident drinker. He knocked back his first three whisky sours like a seasoned pro. He matched Sabrina round for round through the first hour with the swagger of a man who believed he had an easy win in sight.
I was going to enjoy watching him get knocked down a peg.
By the second hour, Adrian's swagger had softened. By the third, he was practically sliding off the booth. It was only by sheer willpower he wasn’t a puddle on the sticky club floor.
Sabrina was still dancing and laughing with our group. Her lipgloss had faded but that was the only evidence of her drinking.
“Your new friend is fading,” I said to her when she came back to the booth to reapply her lipgloss.
“He's fun.” She grinned mischievously. “I like him. He's trying so hard to keep up.”
“He's going to lose.”
“Obviously he's going to lose. But I respect the commitment.” She leaned over and whispered something in Adrian's ear that made him grin—slow and wicked and entirely too self-satisfied.
Then she pulled him to his feet.
He swayed for a moment, catching himself on her shoulder, but then followed her onto the dance floor with the loose limbed confidence of someone who had stopped caring what anyone thought approximately three drinks ago.
Even wasted, he was still an elite athlete.
The body memory didn't turn off. The coordination didn't fully leave.
Adrian was drunk but he could still move—hips finding the beat without effort, body rolling with a fluidity that was easy and loose and completely unselfconscious.
Like the music had crawled inside him and was moving him from the inside out.
Sabrina joined him and the crowd adjusted around them—a small pocket of space opening up, heads turning, the particular gravitational pull of two attractive bodies moving together with genuine skill.
The bass was heavy, pulsing through the floor and up through my feet, and the lights strobed across them in flashes of pink and gold.
I watched. I couldn't not watch.
Sabrina's back was against Adrian's chest now.
His hands were on her hips—casual, easy, a little too low.
Her head tilted back against his shoulder and she was laughing at something, red hair spilling across his collarbone, damp at the temples from the heat of the crowd.
His mouth was near her ear, saying whatever it was that was making her laugh, and she was pressing back into him like she fit there.
The emerald dress was riding up. His fingers pressed into the fabric at her waist—not gripping, just holding—and her arm came up to hook around the back of his neck, body arching against his in a way that made something tight and hot build behind my sternum.
They looked good together. Objectively good. Two beautiful people moving like they'd done this a hundred times, like their bodies already knew each other, like the rest of the club didn't exist.
Her eyes were half closed. His were open, scanning the room, and when his gaze found mine across the crowd he smirked—deliberate and knowing—before turning his head to say something against Sabrina’s ear.
Her laugh cut through the music. High and delighted and a little too loud.
I couldn't look away. I hated that I couldn't look away.
The song ended. Another started. Sabrina detached herself from Adrian long enough to come to the booth for water, her cheeks flushed and her mascara slightly smudged.
“Come dance,” she demanded.
“I'm fine.”
“You're sulking.”
“I'm supervising.”
She rolled her eyes and went back to the dance floor.
Adrian tried to spin her under his arm when she returned and they were both too drunk for it—she stumbled on the turn and he caught her around the waist, pulling her against him to keep them both upright.
She grabbed his shoulders for balance, laughing, her face pressed into his neck.
He was laughing too, one arm locked around her, his other hand splayed across her lower back to steady her.
They stayed like that—tangled together, swaying, her fingers playing with the hair at his nape while he murmured something that made her tip her head back and grin.
I drank my club soda and did my best not to sulk.
◆◆◆
At 3 a.m., I started corralling the group.
Some were making plans for an afterparty but Sabrina came willingly—she had reached the stage of the evening where she was ready for her bed.
Leah was coming with her, already half asleep against her shoulder, which meant my passenger seat was suddenly occupied by the one person I had been trying to ignore all night.
Adrian came less willingly but more out of drunken confusion than reluctance to leave.
“Time to go,” I said.
“Nicky!” He said it like he'd forgotten I was there and was freshly delighted to be reminded. “Where'd you go?”
“I've been here the entire time.”
“You should've danced.”
“I was making sure nobody slipped you guys a roofie.”
“Sounds boring.” He slung an arm around my shoulders and leaned into me with enough of his weight that I staggered slightly. He smelled like whisky and sweat and that sweet herbal vape he was always sneaking out to smoke. “You're always so boring, Nicky.”
“And you're going to have a hangover tomorrow that makes you reconsider your life choices. C'mon, Zhao, we're leaving.”
I dropped Sabrina and Leah off first because Sabrina lived closest—a walk-up in the Annex.
Sabrina blew a kiss at us from the doorstep before hauling Leah inside with the practised ease of a woman who had managed drunker friends in higher heels.
I watched from my parking spot to make sure they got in.
Beside me, Adrian had slumped against the window.
“Don't fall asleep.” I reached over to shake his shoulder. “Where do you live?”
“Hmm?”
“Zhao, focus. Your address. Where am I dropping you off?”
He patted his pockets, eventually pulling out his phone. It was dead. He stared at the black screen for a moment as though expecting it to magically turn back on.
“Cam's place,” he said. Cam? His roommate? Girlfriend? Boyfriend? The last possibility lodged somewhere unpleasant behind my ribs.
“And where is Cam's place?”
A pause. A long one. “Toronto.”
“Yes, I gathered that. What's the address?”
“It's the one with the...” He made a vague gesture. “The building. With the thing.”
“Zhao.” He didn’t respond. “Adrian, I need an address.” I kept my voice patient because one of us had to be. “Give me your wallet.”
He struggled and fumbled a bit and pulled out a card holder from his back pocket, slapping it into my waiting palm. His license still had his Vancouver address. Fuck.
“I just know how to get there from the rink.” He was too drunk to be embarrassed. “Not from here.”
I looked at him—slumped against the window, pink hair in his eyes, shirt riding up, pearl necklace askew—and made a decision I was absolutely going to regret.
I took him back to my apartment.
◆◆◆
Getting Adrian up three flights of stairs was an athletic event in itself.
His legs worked independently of each other and his centre of gravity shifted without warning.
Twice I had to pin him against the wall with my shoulder to keep him from tipping backward down the stairwell.
He found this hilarious. I found it exhausting.
His arm was draped over my shoulders and his weight was warm against my side and I was acutely, painfully aware of every point of contact between us—his hip against mine, his fingers curled loosely in the fabric of my sweater, the heat of his breath near my ear when he turned his head.
I unlocked my apartment and guided him inside and deposited him on the couch.
He immediately started wrestling with his leather jacket—tugging at one sleeve, then the other, twisting in a way that hiked the crop top halfway up his torso and exposed a dangerous amount of tattooed skin and taut stomach.
I stood there with my hands at my sides, debating if I should help him.
He got it off eventually. Tossed it on the floor. Looked up at me like he'd just conquered Everest.
“Stay,” I said.
“Woof.”
I ignored that. I filled a glass of water and set it on the coffee table beside him along with two ibuprofen from the bathroom cabinet. I pulled the throw blanket off the armchair and unfolded it.
Adrian was watching me do all of this from the couch—propped against the cushions with his legs stretched—and the expression on his face was one I'd never seen before. Softer than usual. Stripped of the smirk, the sharpness, the armour of irreverence he wore like a second skin.
“You're taking care of me,” he said. Not a question.
“I'm making sure you don't die on my couch. There's a difference.”
“No.” His voice went quieter. “You’re taking care of me. You do that.” His brow furrowed. “You take care of everyone.”
A beat.
“Nobody really does that for me. Cam tries but...” He shook his head slowly.
“And who’s Cam?” I tried to sound casual but failed. “Your girlfriend?”
He frowned. “I’m gay.”
Right.
“Cam’s my brother.”
For some stupid reason, something in my chest loosened. I fussed with the blanket so I didn't have to look at his face.
“Take the pills, Zhao. It will help with your hangover.”
He popped the pills and picked up the glass. Drank half of it. Set it down with exaggerated care and then looked at me again with those dark eyes that were glassy and unfocused yet somehow still managed to make my pulse stutter.
“Nicky.”
“What?”
“Can I tell you something?”
“If it will make you drink the rest of the water.”
He picked up the glass and finished it without breaking eye contact, this time the glass hit the table with a thud. “You're so beautiful.”
The room went very quiet except for the wild thumping of my heart.
“Like—” He motioned one ringed hand from my head to my chest. “A prince.
Prince beautiful. It's annoying. Your whole—” another wave, less coordinated this time, “—face.
Situation. The glasses. You're wearing those glasses and—” He squinted at me, searching for the right words. “I like looking at you.”
I stood there holding the throw blanket with my pulse hammering in my throat and absolutely no idea what to do with any of that.
“You're drunk. You need to sleep it off,” I said. My voice sounded strange to me. I hoped he was too wasted to notice.
“Okay.” He agreed, then tipped sideways on the couch and closed his eyes and was asleep within thirty seconds, one arm hanging off the cushion and his boots still on and the pearl necklace pooling against the hollow of his throat.
I stood there for far too long.
Then I spread the blanket over him, unlaced his combat boots and set them by the door.
Refilled the water glass and put two more ibuprofen next to it.
His mouth was hanging slightly open and his pink hair fanned across my throw pillow, and I thought about how he had said the word beautiful like it was a confession.
That was the part I couldn't get past. Adrian was an enigma—undeniably attractive, infuriatingly cocky, the kind of person who could have anyone he wanted and knew it. He moved through the world like consequences didn’t apply to him and attention was his birthright.
People like that didn't call you beautiful and mean it. This was all some game to him.
Except he'd been too drunk for strategy. There'd been nothing calculated in it. Just some slurred words and that soft, unguarded expression I'd never seen on him before.
I went to my bedroom and closed the door and sat on the edge of my bed in the dark and pressed my hands against my face.
This is not happening, I told myself.
My pulse disagreed.