“Your cousin!” Amber cries. “Yes! Jon said he looks like you, but this is… Wow.”
“Yeah, we do look slightly similar. In the dark.”
“You look exactly the same,” Shashi mutters, and I watch her fast mind gathering intel, comparing shoulder heights, eye colour, scanning our hands and our shoes, but she does it all without sound and barely a movement, nothing but the clank of ice in the gin and tonic she twists around in circles.
I feel as though we’ve done something wrong. Like we’re about to get caught. But last I checked, there’s no rule about hanging out with your double. Even if you have a crush on him. Even if you…
Fuck.
If we sleep together, is that incest?
“Jon asked us to wait out here for you,” Amber says, her tone a little more conspiratorial than I’d like.
I can’t meet August’s eyes when her words bring his attention to me. “Well, that’s weird,” I reply, perhaps a bit testily. “We’re not together anymore,” I add, perhaps a bit pointedly.
“I said you wouldn’t come,” Shashi interjects, still scrutinising August.
“I almost didn’t. But I thought…” What did I think? Nothing to do with Jon, that’s for sure. “We just stopped in for a few free drinks. We probably won’t stay for the whole thing.” But now I can’t help but glance over at August. I’m practically begging him to suggest we go somewhere else. Somewhere private. My place or his. I really wouldn’t care if he’d just stay with me.
Fuck, that came off as desperate.
It’s fine. It’s not like he can hear me.
He certainly can’t, because to my great surprise, he nods towards the bar and asks, “Should we go through?”
“We’ll meet you.” Amber’s quick to grab Shashi’s hand, and her red hair swishes in the light when she turns away, then gets caught in her eyelashes when she looks back at me. In an instant, her arms are around my neck, and she plants a huge, cherry-red kiss on my lips, before leaning her head back to stare into my eyes. “I missed you.”
“I missed you too, Amber.” And I did. A lot. Her and Shashi and the whole thing. All of what I lost in the breakup. But then she’s off, and I know where she’s gone, so I take August’s hand and lead him to the bar, deep into the middle of the thickest crowd of people.
He hasn’t tried to stop me, and he hasn’t tried to ask me about any of it, and my mind’s reeling. Yes, this was a terrible idea. Maybe we should leave. But I can’t send him off home on this note, and I’m not taking him to some dodgy quiet pub to try to talk this through.
I order two beers, and four shots of raspberry vodka, because why the fuck not? I’m so anxious about this whole mess I’mpulling us deeper into. I just want him to… I don’t know. “Drink?”
I shove a small, sickly shot at him. The support band’s still playing, and maybe I picked the noisiest bar in the venue to give myself some breathing space.
He doesn’t look convinced by the shot, and if it’s too loud for him to argue about it, that’s perfect. He takes the drink, taps it against mine, then we throw them back. I’ve got the next one in my hand a second later, pushing it into his.
His frown has a touch of humour, and I’m glad to see it. He takes the drink, we tap, we drink. Then I’m honestly about to order another to keep myself distracted when he takes my hand. His strides are as fast as they can be, working us out of the crush of the crowd.
I guess he knows his way around here too. Why wouldn’t he? The place has been here forever. I wonder how many bands he’s seen here in his world.
He takes me up the back, into the dark, up the stairs, and pulls me into one of the small rooms, tiny, empty, sticky, just a few red velour chairs and a thick, transparent-plastic wall to look down onto the stage. Then he turns to me and asks, point blank, “What’s going on?”
Wow. Look at that carpet. It’s really very interesting. Red. “I don’t know. Nothing?”
“Who’s that girl?”
“Amber or Shashi?”
“The girl who kissed you,” he snaps.
“Oh.” I make myself meet his eyes. “That’s Amber.”
“And what is she? Is she… Are you…” He glares at the doorway. “Should I leave?”
“Leave?” My mind is so scattered right now, cold and hot and maths all day and this man who is me, and all my feelings forhim, and he won’t kiss me, and the two shots hit me suddenly, and…
Is he jealous?
