Page 15 of About to Fall

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.

Sabrina was half Irish and half Russian and had been drinking since before I landed my first quad. She was 5’4” and maybe 110 pounds and she could drink men twice her size into the floor without losing the ability to walk in heels. I had seen her do it at two World Championship banquets and a federation gala, and I had driven her home from all three, and she had never once been less than perfectly coherent when she got out of my car.

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.