The knock on my door comes hours later than I thought it would. I set my whisky down on the table with a small click. WhenI throw the door open, I blink. “What the hell? Why are you dressed like that?”
Xavier’s hair has been pushed back by a lurid pink bandanna, and he’s dressed in the tiniest pair of shorts I’ve ever seen, along with a muscle shirt that appears to be missing most of its fabric. Like all the fashion he seems to favour, it has holes in it. He thrusts a box at me, and my hands automatically come up to cradle it. He crouches to pick up some carrier bags at his feet and then moves past me into the room. I kick the door shut and turn to watch him as he dumps the bags on the bed. “What are you wearing?” I ask again.
“I am wearing clubbing gear. From thenineties,” he adds slowly and loudly as if I’m hard of hearing.
My mouth twitches. “You seem to have skipped back into the eighties and had a brief dip in the seventies. I never sawanyonewearing that in the nineties, and I went to a lot of clubs in that era.”
“Slutting it up, I suppose,” he says cheerily.
I watch him reach into the bags. He produces a box and sets it on the dressing table. He flicks a switch on the box, and I blink as strobe lights flash out red, blue, and green. It’s incredibly bright in the small hotel room, and I put my hand up to shield my vision from the apparent nuclear explosion.
He moves away to the middle of the room and sets his hands on his hips, looking at me.
I shift awkwardly. “What?”
He gestures at my shorts and T-shirt. “I suppose that outfit will have to do. You won’t be up to my sartorial splendour, but we can’t think of everything.”
“Oh. I thought I was dressing for bed.”
“Bed?” he echoes. “We’re not going to bed, Roo.”
I scratch my head. “I think I’m about fifty steps behind you as usual. What are we doing?”
Instead of answering me, he reaches into another bag and produces a small toolkit. After getting out a screwdriver, he drags a chair to the room’s centre and stands on it. Then he starts to dismantle the smoke alarm in the ceiling.
“Whoa. Hang on,” I say, alarmed. “You’ll have management up here.”
He rolls his eyes in a superior fashion that should not be displayed by anyone standing on a hotel chair wearing such short shorts. “Chill out. I’ve already done mine, and nobody noticed.”
“Why?”
“I wanted to smoke a joint. Smoke alarms are fucking awful things.”
“Yes, how dreadful for stopping us from dying a fiery death. What are you doing now?” I ask as he gets down and rummages through a bag.
He finds a small box and then demands in a distracted voice, “Put the kettle on.”
“That is the first normal thing you’ve said tonight.” I flip the switch on the hotel room’s kettle and then watch as he sets about opening the box and placing it carefully on the floor.
When the kettle clicks off a couple minutes later, I hand it to him. I’ll say this for him. He’s definitely taken my mind off my problems this evening.
He pours the hot water into the box, and smoke immediately starts to puff out.
“Is that… dry ice?”
He nods proudly. “Yep. It’s amazing what you can get delivered when it’s on Jez’s credit card.”
I want to laugh so hard. Instead, I cough as a gust of dry ice hits me. Using my distraction, he snaps something onto my wrist. “What the fuck is this?” I say hoarsely.
“Glow stick,” he informs me as if I’ve never seen one before.
“Yes, I know that. What I don’t know is what is it doing on my wrist?”
“For our rave.”
“Ourwhat?”
He nods happily. “Yep. You said you liked clubbing but couldn’t do it anymore.”
