Chapter 7 #2
“Huh.” She thought back, but dinner was a mostly pleasant blur. “That explains a lot.” She shrugged. “Might as well go ahead and get drunk then.” The hotel room had a fully stocked bar and she intended to use it.
“And why is that?”
“Because we’re here.” She gestured at the city.
“And being here means…?”
She started ticking items off on her fingers. “I don’t have Arrivals or Departures. I don’t have a reputation to worry about. I’m not concerned something of a magical origin is going to try to kill us at a moment’s notice.
“My dad—Jevryn, that dad—isn’t likely to show up unannounced to be disapproving of my inebriated state. My other dad—that’s Griff, by the way—isn’t here to worry I’m entering a self-destructive spiral. And neither are my friends.”
“What about me?”
She shook her head. “That’s the great thing about you right now—you don’t have any reason to give a shit.
” Most of the time, if she thought about the fact he’d probably never actually loved her, and later pretended to still have feelings for her in order to use her connection to the Station, it hurt and it pissed her off.
Right now, it was a relief to know he didn’t care. “Oh, hey, we’re here.”
She managed to stop babbling—she’d forgotten how much alcohol loosened her tongue—as they entered the hotel and took the elevator up to their floor.
She had a tiny moment of clarity, in which she felt embarrassed by the babbling, but that embarrassment was proof that the pleasant buzz was starting to wear off and she didn’t want to come down.
She wanted to be temporarily irresponsible, and she didn’t want to do it alone.
“You should get drunk with me.” This might have been said too loudly, as the guy walking past them in the hallway gave Kaden one of those guy looks that basically congratulated him in advance for scoring.
“It’s not like that,” she called after him. “It’s platonic drunkenness.”
Kaden’s hand on her shoulder halted her forward momentum. “Platonic drunkenness lies that way.” He pointed at their room door, which she’d been walking past.
She found her room key and let them in, shedding her boots as she walked to the kitchenette. When she bumped into the counter because she forgot she was wearing Alihana and the hilt caught, she unbuckled the sword.
You are making poor decisions, Alihana said.
“Oh, fuck off.”
Kaden raised his eyebrows.
“Them,” she said, dropping Alihana on the kitchen counter, “not you.” The room had come with a surprising amount of alcohol that likely cost a marked-up fortune, but Nyx avoided the helpful laminated sheet informing her of the price tags of all those lovely options.
She’d been earning a salary in Earth Between with nothing to spend it on, so she figured she might as well drink the overpriced hotel liquor and tip the housekeeping staff an obscene amount.
She sorted through the options, settling on a canned margarita for herself and thrusting a beer at Kaden before jumping over the back of the couch to land on the seat cushions. Grabbing the remote, she turned on the television and started flipping through the channel guide.
Kaden settled on the opposite end of the couch, watching her scrutinize the options. “Are you looking for something specific?”
“Yes.” How were there this many channels and nothing to watch?
“And what would that be?”
“Something worth playing a—oh, here we go.” She selected the channel and the guide disappeared, replaced by the stunning vista of Middle Earth.
It was already partway through The Fellowship of the Ring, but it would do.
They’d both seen the films before. “Drink any time Sam or Frodo seem mournful, fearful or out of their depth, an elf is being haughty, somebody mentions the ring, or Aragorn is being hot.”
Kaden looked at her skeptically. “You want to play a drinking game. With me.”
She shrugged. “I want to drink enough to temporarily forget my problems while cosplaying the college experience I could’ve had if anyone could’ve remembered me long enough to befriend me in college.”
He shook his head. “The longer you drink, the longer your sentences get.”
She almost made a comment that the longer he drank, the longer his stares got, but something in the back of her brain told her it lacked that certain witty punch she was going for.
She was also feeling slightly judged. She threw a hand up, though it was fortunately not the one holding the margarita.
“Isn’t this the normal behavior everyone wants out of me?
Look at me, I’m on pseudo-vacation getting drunk like I’m supposed to. ”
He didn’t answer. Probably because he had no actual interest in hanging out with her, which was completely fair given their history, and she’d forgotten that the couch was his bed and the living room his room, so it wasn’t like he could opt out of this situation and leave.
“Right. You probably just want to go to bed.” She found the remote, turned off the TV and stood, feeling dumb, weirdly old, and sad. She didn’t want to be out dancing in a club right now, but she didn’t want to be alone in a hotel room in a strange city either.
Kaden’s hand shot out and grabbed her wrist, rough calluses pressing against her skin. He yanked her back onto the couch and let go. “I’m not appropriately inclined to recognize drinking condition number four.”
She should probably still just go to bed. But there was that whole thing about how much she really didn’t want to be alone. “How many conditions were there again?”
The corners of his lips quirked up. “Four.”
Okay, so the last one was…oh. “Aragorn was an impulse add. Okay, due to the limited screen time of the female cast, you can drink whenever a hot chick is on screen.”
Kaden turned the TV back on, and they were immediately drinking because Sam and Frodo were looking fearful and out of their depth while sitting at a dark tavern table.
A few seconds later Nyx was drinking because a deeply cloaked Aragorn, holding a pipe with a hand ornamented with a fingerless black glove, was looking dark and mysterious from across the other side of the tavern.