Four
DALTON
“H ere’s to us. May we get what we want, may we get what we need, but may we never get what we deserve,” I toast before I throw back the shot and slam the glass on the low table. I don’t chase it. I wait, feeling the distinct heat of liquor traveling the slope of my chest.
Doesn’t work.
“Fucking hell,” I murmur, using a cocktail napkin to wipe a stray drop of tequila from the tabletop. “Can you believe this shit?”
It’s been twenty-four hours, but the stubborn imprint of Essie’s hand still tingles on my pectoral like pinpricks of glitter. But not, like, good glitter like that shiny lotion she rubs on the tops of her tits in the summer, but more like when I sleep funny and lose circulation in my leg.
I grab my half-finished beer and take a long pull. I need to kill the lingering remnants of Essie Romero.
“I mean, of course I can believe that guy Alec would be interested,” I go on, barely able to hear myself over the thud of the bass coming from the dancefloor. “I should have known this would happen eventually.”
She’s so unbelievably gorgeous and everyone loves her. She was supposed to be mine.
I check to see if Essie answered my text from an hour ago but nothing yet.
“Weird,” I comment. “Last time Essie didn’t answer a text, it was the day she got her wisdom teeth out and was high on anesthesia—which was so fucking cute. The entire ride home, she kept pointing at monuments and asking if I saw them.”
I pick up another shot and swirl the tequila while I scroll on my phone, wondering if maybe my service sucks.
…Or maybe she doesn’t want to talk to me anymore. Wouldn’t blame her.
“Should I call? I thought she’d be here by now.”
The music gets even louder: a song Essie and I once danced to at a club in Adams Morgan. It was the summer before our parents met, and the District was sweltering. She barely wore anything, and I put my hands all over her while we danced. She let me, and didn’t mind when my fingertips ventured under her short skirt and grazed her upper thighs. Back then, we touched each other all the damn time.
Not anymore.
Our best friends touch each other a lot, and that shit’s annoying as hell and constant—and I mean constant.
Like, right now, Everett and Cora are making out, which is why they haven’t responded to a single thing I’ve said in the last ten minutes.
Super rude, but whatever.
Everett and Cora are indescribably hot together, but just in case anyone forgets how hot they are, they tend to do things like this: make out right in front of me—like, right in front of me. When I blow, I can make Everett’s hair move. And Cora Flores—even when she and Everett are passing my best friend’s dignity back and forth with their tongues—seems to know I’m messing with Everett’s hair. Her hand immediately threads through it, tangling his dark brown locks around the aggressively large sapphire engagement ring he gave her eleven months ago.
“Yeah, so this is fun. Best Halloween ever—even better than freshman year when I drank too many boilermakers and had to get my stomach pumped while dressed like an Oompa Loompa.”
No response.
“Cool. Super happy to be here,” I drone even more sardonically now, but my words get lost in the tremors of bass reverberating as the DJ works a new song into the mix, heavy on the downbeats and loud enough to spike the stock price for hearing aid startups across the country. It’s exactly the type of music that makes me want to fuck.
Sighing, I tip the rim of my beer bottle into my mouth and find it empty—gross. So, I drink Cora’s gin and tonic because she’s too busy anyway.
“I saw that,” she mentions while Everett sucks a hickey onto her neck.
“I’ll buy you another,” I promise, sliding the empty glass onto the table.
Instead of resuming the gradual process of swallowing Everett whole, Cora tilts her head to the side and assesses me. “Why are you pouting?”
“He asked for a threesome and I said no,” Everett lies, detaching his lips from Cora’s neck and giving me that asshole-smirk of his.
I flip him off. “Fuck off, Logan. You’re not even that good at kissing.”
Everett’s eyebrow shoots up, and the fake eyebrow piercing he’s wearing catches one of the club’s flashing green lights. His costume, as far as I can tell, is an excuse for Cora to dress him in a fishnet shirt that shows his nipples. On the flip side, Cora isn’t even dressed up because in all her pierced and gothy glory, I think Cora just is Halloween to begin with.
“It’s been years, and I’m much better now.” Everett maintains before he faces Cora. “Tell him, princess.”
Cora straight up ignores Everett because she’s funny as hell. She bobs her chin in my direction. “What’s wrong with you?”
I sigh and check the time. “Nothing. I’m good. Better than good. I’m just grand, really. Hey, so when’s Essie coming?”
Now, Cora’s eyebrow (with its real piercing) rises. “She didn’t tell you?”
“Tell me what?”
Everett and Cora glance at each other before they look at me again.
“What?” I demand, dropping my phone onto the table.
The only thing faster than Cora’s head shake is the grimace crossing Everett’s face. They know something—something they won’t tell me—which blows. If anyone can keep a secret, it’s my stony best friend who not only hid his obsession with Cora for seven months but legitimately led her to believe he hated her, and Cora, who has zero issues telling me to fuck off.
“Tell me.”
“Fuck off,” she responds.
Case in point.
“Cora Bora. Tell me.”
Now she gives me the finger. “You know I’m not going to tell you shit about my friends,” she replies before she crushes her face back onto Everett’s.
I watch them make out, which Everett notices in his periphery. “Relax,” he tells me, voice muffled because Cora is sucking on his lower lip. “Essie is the most responsible out of all of us. She’s fine.”
But I know it’s about Alec. I still don’t get it. Why would Essie meet someone in a bar when she doesn’t even drink? And why would she bring him to Cora’s old condo? And why the hell would Essie skip Halloween when she loves Halloween?
Like, she really loves Halloween. Her costumes are always meticulous and cute—but also super hot. Last year, she was the Windows Blue Screen of Death, which was just a tight blue dress with an error message she printed on herself. She looked so good that I did four sake bombs and asked her if she wanted to be the beneficiary on all my insurance policies.
Not going to lie: Every time my laptop crashes, I get a little turned on.
“Where is she?” I press, glaring at Everett.
Everett lets out the trademark bored sigh he’s been throwing around the entire twenty-nine years we’ve known each other. He leans back, exposing more of his neck while Cora licks it with the flat of her tongue, dragging her piercing over his pulse point. “If you wanted her to be your business, you should have made her your business months ago.”
My eyes narrow. I hate how he’s right, but hell is going to turn into a froyo shop with unlimited toppings before I admit it.
“I cannot take you seriously when you’re wearing eyeliner, my guy,” is my response, but Everett doesn’t hear me because his tongue is so deep, I have to assume he—being a consummate environmentalist—has discovered an alternative fuel source in Cora’s throat and is trying to mine it.
There’s a spare shot of tequila on the table. I throw it back and grab the discarded Ghostface mask next to me—the only costume I could pull together after barely surviving late nights at Hannington-Hale this week. I’m on a mission now.
Everett and Cora are prodigiously good at keeping secrets, but Lan and Valeria are soft. Bet I could wear them down.
The club is the best kind of bedlam tonight: loud, teetering on the edge of full-on disorder, and packed with miles of skin and bright clothing. The pounding music escalates as I move closer to the dancefloor, and I raise the mask to the top of my head so I can see in the dark. Flashes of green cut with shades of purple and blue, and then it’s bodies—sweaty, gyrating bodies.
The collision of limbs and elbows and the slickness of the dancefloor tickle my brain just the right way. Hot energy brews in my fingertips and legs, working up my body. A hand touches my exposed arm. Another slides along my neck. I brush them off, resisting the urge to get lost in other people, in throbbing bass, and in the burn of liquor.
In the center of the dancefloor, music thuds in the recesses of my body, winding itself into my bloodstream. I feel it from my feet to my throat. I could feel it everywhere if I wanted, and maybe that’s what I should be doing—chasing highs instead of chasing girls. Then a pair of women dressed like milkmaids envelops me, and I can sense it: the radiating tingle of a sure thing.
This could be fun.
But then one rests her hand on my chest, and my body still prickles with Essie.
I don’t want to fuck these milkmaids—a sentence I never thought I’d utter (sort-of pun intended) because, one: I don’t think being a milkmaid is a real job anymore except at Colonial Williamsburg, and two: I like to fuck . Up until two years ago, I’d rarely turned down an opportunity.
I turn down the opportunity a lot now.
Lander and Valeria are on the far side of the dancefloor where it’s darker. If I thought Cora and Everett’s public foreplay was overkill, I was a sweet summer child. These two may already be fucking.
Unlike Cora and Everett, who showed up dressed as intimidating hot people, Valeria and Lander are in costume…maybe. I think Lander is Peter Pan because he’s wearing this green shirt and the tightest green pants I’ve ever seen. Valeria, on the other hand, is wearing bright orange—barely. She’s showing a lot of skin, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing since her livelihood hinges on her showing skin. But I need Lander to focus, which he literally can’t do when Valeria is dressed like this.
The guy can barely focus when she’s wearing a parka.
“Hey,” I announce myself, which has zero impact whatsoever on Lander clutching Valeria’s hips while she grinds her butt against his crotch. “Sick costumes. You look amazing.”
I still have zero idea what these costumes are supposed to be.
Lander has his mouth against Valeria’s ear, either licking it or whispering. With Lander…it’s a tossup.
I’m genuinely not sure what else to do, so I start dancing next to Lander. He doesn’t notice at first, so I dance a little harder, adding in a fist pump (which I know is dated, but actually looks really good if the vibes are right.)
Then the song changes, so Valeria turns around—finally. With his face briefly unoccupied, Lander notices me and bobs his chin. “What’s up?”
“Do you two know where Essie is?” I shout over the music.
“What?”
“I’m asking where Essie is.”
Lander’s face pulls into a frown, but quickly smooths as his eyebrows rise over his bright blue eyes. “Yeah, they were German,” he says while he grips Valeria’s butt over her minuscule orange skirt, which has a jack o’ lantern printed on it. “They were mercenaries from Germany who fought in the Revolutionary War.”
“….Why are you talking about German mercenaries?”
“You asked me about Hessians,” he snaps—as if military strategy is a perfectly normal thing to talk about in a nightclub.
Then again, it’s Lander, so…
“Lan, he asked where Essie is,” Valeria interjects, sighing before she faces me. “And if she didn’t tell you, we’re not telling you either.”
“Baby,” Lander murmurs, glancing at Valeria before he faces me again, “look at him. He’s going to find out eventually.”
“No,” Valeria warns, expression stern. “Absolutely not.”
“But—”
Her hand shoots up and clenches my best friend’s jaw. “Lander Dawson, if you reveal something I told you in confidence, I will—” And she rises on her toes to whisper in his ear.
Whatever Valeria says makes Lander’s jaw drop. “But you’d suffer just as much—”
“I still collaborate with Essie and Cora once a month,” she reminds him. “I’ll be fine.”
“ Sorry ,” he mouths at me before resuming the pre-fucking ritual of dry humping his fiancée right in front of me.
Now they’re moving like there’s a shortage of mortars and pestles, and they want to save the species by taking their place. He’s definitely going to bang her in this club tonight, which is annoying because I suspect persuading them to tell me Essie’s whereabouts becomes infinitely more difficult if Lander is inside Valeria. I don’t blame him though. If Essie were my girl and we went to a club together, I’d definitely screw her in the shadows too.
Wait.
Lander, Valeria, and I go to clubs all the time, and whenever Valeria is wearing a skimpy outfit (which is basically always), Lander keeps her phone in his pocket.
Fuck yeah.
I move to the beat, fist pumping just enough so I don’t look too suspicious. To my relief, Valeria doesn’t see me get behind her fiancé and low-key start grinding him. Lander glances back and doesn’t mind when he sees me… And yes, maybe both of us should find it bizarre that I’m basically dry humping my best friend, but honestly? This isn’t the first time.
And anyway, Lander’s a good dancer—even in skintight pants—but he doesn’t notice when I take Valeria’s phone from his pocket.
Contraband in hand, I plunge back into the crowd, getting some space from my friends (mostly to carry out this act of subterfuge without getting caught, but also because Lander looks like he’s going to the elf version of Coachella, and I don’t fuck with that).
… Oh shit , I get it: Valeria’s ass is a pumpkin, and Lander is Peter.
Peter Pumpkin Eater.
Cora and Everett are gone when I get back to the table, which means someone is getting butt stuff in either a bathroom or a storage closet or an alley. I pray to the butt gods for a solid O on behalf of my friends, and then I unlock Valeria’s phone after two tries (her password isn’t Lander’s birthday like I figured, but their anniversary works—because they’re sickeningly cute when they’re not fucking in public).
Damn . Everything is in Spanish, which I barely know. Luckily, the language of logos is universal, and like I suspected, Valeria can track Cora and Essie. The Cora dot is nearby, closer to the alley (called it), and Essie is at the Halcyon.
Weird. There’s no reason why she would spend her favorite night of the year in a building she doesn’t even live in.
I have to know.
For most of my life, even before I dropped out of Harvard Law, my father claimed I had no perseverance. The opinion of a man who made a pass at one of my friends and tried to silence another means little to me, but the notion hasn’t left me.
Well, fuck it. I have plenty of perseverance.
Here’s to my father: May we get what we want, may we get what we need, but may we never get what we deserve.
For once, I’m going to get what I want and need.
I pocket my phone and leave Valeria’s on the table near Everett’s coat. Then I throw back the last shot of tequila, grab my mask, and venture out into the October night.