4. Off The Clock
Chapter four
Off The Clock
Lorelei
Ineed tonight the way you need air after holding your breath too long, though thinking too hard about that would mean admitting how much of the last three days I’ve spent bracing for a ritual nobody will explain.
Tonight I don’t want to know anything. I just want to be twenty years old with a fake ID and a car full of people who don’t require me to manage what they think of me.
Kiwi’s driving, one hand on the wheel and the other conducting some invisible orchestra to whatever’s playing, off-key in a way that somehow makes her more likeable.
The passenger seat is buried under a nursing textbook, a stethoscope case, and what looks like an entire pharmacy’s worth of highlighters, which is how I’ve ended up in the back with Zaconia instead, and neither of us minds.
Kiwi and I met the way most things at school happen: assigned lab partners in a gen-ed class I only took because the time slot worked.
By week two she had correctly diagnosed half my symptoms of exhaustion without my saying a word, because apparently that’s what future nurses do whether you’ve consented to the diagnosis or not.
“You’re doing the thing,” she says now, glancing at me in the rearview. “The thousand-yard stare thing.”
“I don’t have a stare thing.”
“You have several. I’ve catalogued at least three.”
“You’ve only known me a month.”
“I’m very observant. It’s a professional skill.”
Zaconia, sprawled across the back seat with me, doesn’t look up from her phone. “She’s right. You do the one where you stare at a fixed point like it personally wronged you.”
“I don’t do that.”
“You’re doing it right now.”
I make myself stop, which proves their point, and Zaconia grins like she’s won something.
She and I met a little differently. Same building, different class.
She spotted me after choir one afternoon and walked over with, “You sing like somebody’s paying you to feel something.
Come get coffee with me.” It should have been unsettling, and instead I laughed.
Her family goes to the same church my mother married into, so our first real conversation became an hour of comparing notes on which hymns Alistair’s choir director insists on butchering every Sunday, and for that one hour I got to be part of my mother’s world without performing a version of myself that didn’t exist.
I’ve been chasing that feeling back ever since.
The bar is the kind of place that doesn’t ask questions if you look confident enough asking for a drink, all sticky floors and a karaoke machine that has seen better decades.
The second we walk in, my shoulders drop.
Nobody here knows my last name. Nobody has an opinion about a folder on a hall table, a ritual with a dress code, or a boy named Marcus who used to exist and now mostly exists as a lesson.
Here I’m just a girl with two friends and a badly printed song list, and the relief is almost dizzying.
“Okay.” Zaconia slides into the booth across from me and scans the list like a battle plan. “Rules of engagement. Kiwi gets first pick because she’s driving and deserves the dignity of choosing her own humiliation.”
“I’m doing the one about the truck,” Kiwi says immediately.
“You’re always doing the one about the truck.”
“‘Before He Cheats’ is a classic, okay.”
While Kiwi negotiates her slot with the guy running the machine, Zaconia leans across the table, close enough that I catch the drugstore vanilla of whatever she’s wearing.
“Your turn’s coming.”
“I didn’t agree to a turn.”
“It’s karaoke. Agreement is implied the second you walk through the door.”
“That’s not how consent works.”
“It’s exactly how karaoke works. Different laws entirely.” She taps the list and slides it toward me. “Pick something. I’ll do it with you.”
“Why do I need you?”
“Because you have the face of somebody who’s never done a duet, and I refuse to let that stand.”
Some reckless, off-duty part of me actually wants to say yes, so I do.
Kiwi’s truck song is, against all odds, genuinely great — off-key in exactly the way that makes the whole bar cheer louder — and she takes a bow like she’s closed a Broadway run. For three minutes, I forget I’m the kind of person people write files about.
Then it’s us.
Zaconia picks “Cool for the Summer” before I finish reading the list, which tracks.
It’s been ours since the second week we knew each other, Kiwi blasting it through her car speakers on the drive to campus and Zaconia deliberately mangling the harmony until I laughed.
During the first verse, she’s all performance, hand to her chest, milking every syllable for the room, and I laugh hard enough to nearly miss my cue.
The chorus is where it changes. We’re supposed to trade lines back and forth, but somewhere in the second round Zaconia stops looking at the crowd and starts looking at me, and I stop looking at the crowd too.
My next line catches in my throat, and the backing track keeps going, and for one full bar neither of us looks away.
Then Zaconia laughs, big and easy and very obviously on purpose, and spins me under her arm like the moment was choreography instead of whatever it actually was. The room laughs with her, the song ends, and I tell myself I imagined it.
I don’t fully believe myself.
Later, Kiwi is arguing with the machine operator about a second truck song when Zaconia pulls me toward the side hallway by the bathrooms, supposedly for air, though the hallway doesn’t have anything the main room doesn’t.
“You’re doing the stare thing again,” she says, back against the wall.
“Maybe I like staring at you.”
“Bold.” Her mouth curves. “I like it.”
“You like everything. You flirted with the bartender, the machine guy, and I’m pretty sure the jukebox.”
“The jukebox started it.” She hooks one finger loosely in the collar of my shirt, doesn’t pull, just leaves it there. “But I don’t mean it with them the way I mean it with you.”
“How do you mean it with me?”
“Come here and find out.”
Rafe’s name surfaces, and I push it back down before it can bring the rest of the house with it.
Then I go.
Her mouth is soft and certain and tastes like the cheap well vodka we’ve both been drinking too much of.
For a moment there’s nothing in my head at all — no folder, no dress code, no Offering — just somebody wanting me without an agenda attached.
Her hand slides along my jaw and down, careful and unhurried, and I lean into her touch, my fingers curling into the front of her shirt while the noise from the bar blurs into something distant.
It is easy in a way almost nothing has been lately, and that might be why it scares me.
Zaconia pulls back slightly, forehead resting against mine, both of us breathing harder now, and for one unguarded second the joke falls away and she looks like she wants this to mean something.
Then she laughs before I can name what I saw and steps back, grin already returning, the performance sliding neatly into place.
“Okay,” she says, turning toward the noise. “Ten out of ten, would make out with you again, but Kiwi’s about to lose a truck-song fight and I refuse to miss it.”
She’s gone before I can decide whether I’m relieved or disappointed that she laughed first. I follow her back into the noise anyway, warm and buzzing and lighter than I’ve felt in days.
Maybe I should figure out what that kiss means, or think about Rafe, or ask myself why being wanted without explanation felt like such a relief.
Not tonight. Tonight I get one thing I don’t have to understand, and I use it on her.