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The club is boiling, full of liquid neon light poured over the bodies writhing on the dancefloor. Alex isn’t a stranger to clubs; he’s hit as many of them up as he can since he turned twenty-one (nothing like having two lawyers as parents to make you toe the line), but this…
“Why are we here?” he yells to Nora over the loud bass music.
She adjusts her shimmery silver crop-top, and links her arm through June’s.
“Welcome to life as a bisexual,” she shouts back. “Where else are you going to find a willing man?”
“I’m pretty sure Brock from the office is into me!”
“Do you really want your first time with a dude to be with Brock?” June says, taking a sip of some disgusting artificial looking drink. Sometimes Alex has no idea why he and June are related. How can any relative of his like VKs? It's an enduring mystery. “Much as I hate to be your wing-woman, you can definitely do better. Hence…”
“Why we’re here.”
“Why do you finish each other’s sentences now that you’re together? Why is that a thing?”
“Oh hello,” someone says above Alex’s left ear, and he turns into a plunging sequinned neckline. “You’re rather gorgeous. Want to dance?”
“Those are some very impressive heels,” Alex replies, and the queen grins at him.
“Don’t you just know it, darling. I’m Erica.”
“Please take my brother away so I can make out with my girlfriend,” June yells drunkenly over Alex’s head, and he flips the bird at her.
“Only if I have his consent,” Erica’s laughing, and Alex is too, allows himself to be towed onto the dance floor. Erica’s a good dancer, and Alex lets the alcohol take over. It is just like any other club, he thinks, slightly grimy, people grinding on each other everywhere, the beat throbbing through the floors and walls. It just…feels less aggressive, in a way, less macho. Or maybe that’s just him. He doesn’t know. Maybe he’s reading too much into the whole gay club thing, into his panicked coming-out to June and Nora one night at a bar after work. Social justice and equality issues aside, it’s just love, isn’t it? Could it just be the same?
He’s been saying things like this for weeks. Hence the impromptu night out. Hence Erica the amazing drag queen leaning down to say that she’s got to be on stage in five. Hence a deep breath and a kiss, right on the mouth. Erica grins into it and kisses him back for two hot minutes before pulling away and beaming at him. A little of her lipstick is smudged red, like someone took their crayola outside the lines. A very drunk couple shove into them.
“Have a nice night, cutie,” she says, and then she’s gone, and Alex wonders whether kissing a drag queen counts as kissing another man. He doesn’t know, he doesn’t know, god, he’s got so much to learn.
After a few minutes of being buffeted about by the crowd, he decides he needs air, begins to shove his way towards the sign for the smoking area. He’s still pleasantly drunk, buzzing. Outside, it’s getting cooler again – god, it’s been a roaster of a summer – and he inhales the smell of cigarettes, feels the rough bricks scratch through his thin, sweat-soaked t-shirt. All around him, people are chatting in low voices and he closes his eyes, tries not to think but of course he’s not drunk enough for oblivion yet and he just kissed a drag queen and maybe a man, and he had that whole weird thing with Liam during high school and he can’t believe he just didn’t work it out then for god’s sake…
“Hello, is this bit of wall taken?” someone asks, and Alex opens his eyes into the most conventionally attractive face he think he’s seen short of a magazine cover. Tall, cheekbones to die for, all angles and cut glass, and fair colours blended together. Even with his height and broad shoulders, in the dim gold streetlight he looks half-transparent.
“Well, it’s monosyballic, but you know, I reckon you could take your chances,” Alex says. “Doesn’t seem to be in a committed relationship.”
The beautiful man laughs, and Alex’s stomach does something odd.
“Well, that’s good news,” he says, “would hate to impose my presence where it’s not wanted.”
“Oh, I definitely think it’s wanted,” Alex says before his brain catches up. Jesus, he thinks, we're flirting are we? “I’m Alex.”
“Henry.”
God, his voice is annoyingly sexy; all British and old fashioned and fucking perfect. Where has this man come from? Is this some sort of drunk hallucination. Henry’s arm brushes his, and Alex feels a little shiver go down his spine. Nope. Definitely real. He is definitely real, and Alex is feeling things, and yes maybe his little bisexual freak-out was not unwarranted because damn, he’s exchanged all of two sentences with this man and his mind is going filthy places.
“So,” Alex says after a moment, watching a pair of stoners attempt to blow smoke rings like sad dragons in ripped up black tops. “What interests you, Henry?”
“What interests me?”
“You learn more about a person by what they’re interested in than what their job is.”
Henry is giving him a sidelong look, a smile. Calm down, Alex thinks fiercely, you know how to flirt. This is not a big deal. Just because it’s with a (fucking gorgeous) man instead of a girl it doesn’t make it any different.
“Books,” Henry says, after a moment. “I studied literature at uni. I write. There’s just so much you can do, so much you can say. You can never be done.”
“What’s your favourite?”
“Great Expectations,” Henry says, and then laughs again, “no, not really. Too grim. Jane Austen’s fantastic. Lizzie Bennet is a role model. Yours?”
“That biography, of Alexander Hamilton. Ron Chernow’s one. I just…” Alex rakes a hand through his hair, “it speaks to me. He was such a dick in real life, the musical cleans him up a bit, but he had such drive, and it’s so inspirational.”
“I haven’t seen the musical. My sister says it’s good.”
“I’m not into theatre, but it was fucking amazing man. If you get the chance, go. Lin Manuel Miranda’s a genius.”
“Since it comes so highly recommended,” Henry says.
Someone pushes past them. They keep talking, and in the shaded, watercolour night, he finds out that Henry is a pianist with a singer for a sister, and comes from London and thinks that the world is pretty terrifying but he’s damned if he’s not going to try and make it a better place. Alex returns with stories of June and Nora, and how weird it feels that his sister and his best friend are together now, and stories of growing up in Texas and working for Congresswoman Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez…
“Well she sounds incredible. Is she as awesome in real life?”
“Man, you have no idea.”
And then somehow it’s the two o-clock in the morning, and an ambulance screams past and Alex makes some catty comment about the state of health insurance in this country, and Henry turns to him and says, slightly breathless, “Can I kiss you?”
Alex nods. And then he’s going up on his toes to get his fingers into Henry’s hair, sliding a hand across the firm, broad muscles of his back, and thinking that he could maybe probably kiss Henry forever and never get bored. Then promptly tells himself off for that because for fuck's sake he really doesn’t need to be this romantic about someone he’s just met. And then he forgets how to think at all.
“Do you want to come back to my place,” he says, sometime later, taking a deep breath of polluted air and looking up into a pair of stained-glass blue eyes.
Henry smiles, traces a finger down Alex’s cheek. “Sure.”