Chapter Text
He likes having money.
He likes the way the credit card feels heavy in his hand, as if the money is pressed between its walls, likes the way the titanium sounds against the sticky mahogany bar as he drums a rhythm with it. He likes that he never has to know how much is on there to know that there’s enough on there, that he never has to pat down his pockets, or call up the bank, the way he sees people do in grocery stores sometimes. He likes that he’s freshly seventeen and no one’s checked his ID, no one’s asked why he’s settling the tab for unpronounceable champagne and thirty-five tequila shots.
David’s friends are at the other end of the club. He cut his hair when he met them, matched their asymmetry, sharp haircuts, painted nails, impossibly expensive fabric draped across their bodies, different variations of monochrome. They’re older, and old money, and carry themselves with a sort of aristocratic weariness that he’s been trying to imitate. They dance and drink and kiss like its a chore, and they don’t talk about how rich they are. They don’t actually talk much at all, and when they do it’s in a long, transatlantic drawl, like the syllables got tired on their way out.
Even when they’re drunk they seem bored, even when their spaghetti straps have fallen off their shoulders, and sentences fall loosely from their mouths, and their mouths are against each other’s skin. Even then they’re deeply cool, and after he’s paid for their drinks he works his way back across the crowded club to their table, expects to see them lying about the long leather couch like he’s caught them mid-photoshoot.
There’s a waitress there instead, making a precarious stack of their glasses. He thinks, for a moment, that he might have just taken a wrong turn on the dancefloor, arrived at the wrong place, but he watches as she plucks his jacket from the seat of the couch, throws it over her bare shoulder. He can’t hear her over the loud beat of the song but he can see she’s singing on something else, and she’s taken one of her shoes off, rubbing her foot against her calf as she clears the table - full of empty bottles, and empty of his friends.
“My friends?” he asks, and her ponytail whips her face as she turns. She leans forward, straining to hear him, and he can see the careful sweep of her eyeliner, the elaborate tattoo that creeps along her collarbone. She shrugs as he repeats himself, utterly disaffected, sober, bone-tired. David thinks he wants to be like her too, wants to be with someone like her. He thinks there’s something romantic about being poor.
“It’s my birthday”, he adds.
He’s not sure why he says it, not sure why it comes off so desperate, loud against the waitress’ ear. It’s not as if he needs people to know. People know. There’s a card from his parents back at his hotel. Alexis blamed the timezones when she called him in the early hours in the morning. His friends know. His friends came out with him tonight.
“Happy birthday,” the waitress leans back, takes her first proper look at him, and he’s too drunk to count the expressions that move across her face before she schools it into directive. She bundles his jacket into his arms. “You should go home.”
She gestures towards the exit, and he goes, presses against people who are pressed against each other, until he’s stumbled successfully up the narrow stairs, and through the heavy doors. He stops short of the gutter outside the club, head thrown up to the sky as he tries to quieten the music still thrumming in his ears.
There’s a line of people, gorgeous and impatient, tapping their skyscraper heels and leaning on their friends and he lets himself luxuriate in their jealousy for a while, sucks the night air into his lungs and fortifies his body with the irresistible feeling of being envied. They want a spot in the club like him, they want to be drunk. They want to have money like him, have more money than him, and they want women, and men like him, and bodies against their bodies, and couture against their skin, and someone to take them home, at the end of the night.
He should go home.
You should go home, she said.
But home isn’t in New York City, and his parents aren’t at home. His parents put him up in an upper east side hotel suite, and he doesn’t, exactly, at the moment, remember where that is.
The people waiting now seem much more grown up, like they’d know what to do, like they’d send him on his way and he’s gripped by a sudden urge to run up to the closest group, tug on the hem of their clothes like a lost child until one of them takes him by the hand, leads him back to his doorman. He wants his parents to come get him, wants to know if they’d care.
He tries to act like Alexis as he walks away, instead. Alexis always seems to know exactly what she’s doing, would know exactly what to do if she were lost in the city, when she gets lost in cities. She wouldn’t go home, not straight away, she wouldn’t panic about people panicking, wouldn’t be left alone like this. She’s popular and flighty and invincible, with an easy self-assurance that annoys him, because it means she gets into trouble, because it makes him breathless with worry, because his parents don’t care , because he wants to feel like that too. He wants to bluster into some other bar, find some other friends, have some other birthday. He wants to drink until it’s morning, he wants to get lost and make Alexis find him, rescue him, make him safe. He wishes he could do that. He tries to do that, tries to let himself be swept along with a tide of other people, let the sidewalk rise up to meet him every time he stumbles, let the crowd jostle him sober, but he’s not Alexis.
Anxiety just screws his rib cage tight, with every street he doesn’t know, every non-descript sandstone building that looms over him. He tries not to think about his parents, tries not to think about his friends. He tries to remember the start of the night, peering wide-eyed through tinted windows on the way to the club, and the places he passed, and the stores he saw. He does his best not to walk in circles, does his best to keep his breath even, does his best not to look like he has no idea what he’s doing. He wishes he knew what he was doing. He wishes he was older.
When he’s older, he’ll know what to do.
There will come a time where he’ll be older, and sober, and he’ll know how to handle this. One day he’ll tell this story, lying across a mattress on the floor of the bedroom in a house he owns. It’ll be nine pm, because he’ll be old, and his back will ache, because of the boxes he’s hauled up the stairs, and he’ll be happy. There’ll be a man in his room, in his arms, whose legs won’t reach the end of the bed, whose hair will tickle David’s skin. His eyes will be kind, and the corners of his mouth will tease, and he’ll wear a wedding band, and David will wear one too.
You were just a kid , the man will say, and he’ll be right, because he always is. David will be older, and he’ll be sober, and he’ll know that he should have just called a goddamn cab , his new-old flip phone weighing down the back pocket of his pants, that night. He’ll know he shouldn’t have walked home, shouldn’t have stumbled through the back streets of the city for hours on end, arrived back at the hotel with the sun. He’ll know he should have had better friends, will have better friends, one day, when he’s older.
But he’s just a kid.