Where I End and You Begin

Where I End and You Begin by Andra Brynn

Book: Where I End and You Begin by Andra Brynn Read Free Book Online
Authors: Andra Brynn
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wood and smirk at the guy sitting across from me. Not the guy I came here with. Whatshisname. The guy who challenged me to a drinking contest. I can’t remember how it came to that, or why I agreed. I’m an idiot.
    But at least I’m a drunk idiot. At least I don’t care.
    The dimness of the bar—McGruder’s, I think, the dingy dive just off campus that everyone goes to—crowds in. Hot bodies press against me on all sides. I don’t know any of them, but it doesn’t really matter. They are loud, they shine bright in the dimness. They keep me occupied.
    When did I get here? I couldn’t say. I know I came with whatshisface, after stopping at the Taco Hut for some food. Must have been around six. Just before that I’d changed into a low-cut shirt and shiny black skin-tight pants and then done a bit of pregaming in my room with Tanya. We each had a glass of wine, though she was staying in and writing an essay tonight. And I am here. Wherever here is.
    The table under my elbows is old and shiny, an ancient piece of bar furniture engraved with accidental scratches and deliberate messages from the past to the future. Chris has a big cock. Call Sandy at blah blah. Janie loves Trevor. The air around me is choke-thick with the haze of cigarettes, and the sour smell of spilled beer lurks beneath the smoke, a thin shard of dark yellow beneath the gray poison.
    But none of that is very important. What is important is that the guy across from me is hot, or at least I think he’s hot. He looks hot. That might be the alcohol talking. I can’t find the guy I came with in the press of people, so he’s probably off making out with some other girl.
    That’s fine. Boys always want to fuck someone. Always. Someone will fuck me. Someone will hold me. It doesn’t really matter who it is, in the end. I just need it, more than I need a drink, more than I need air.
    “Again!” someone is shouting, and I find another shot in front of me. I have no idea what’s in it, but I pick it up. I manage to coax my eyes to go in the same direction at once and I look my challenger in the eye. His gaze is intense, shadowed by huge dark eyebrows, and his black hair is plastered to his forehead with a sheen of sweat. But he has a little smile on his face that promises me whoever loses this contest will still win. The air between us crackles.
    He grabs his shot glass and we lift them to each other.
    “Hook your arms!” someone else says. “Do it at the same time!”
    Wobbling, I pull myself up over the table and he mirrors me. We lock our elbows around each other. His skin is hot and damp, his arm meaty. The realities of flesh. The crowd around us shouts in time: “One! Two! Three!”
    We drink. It was vodka.
    The bar spins around me. Even my thoughts are slurred.
    “Ah, shit,” I say. “I gotta piss.”
    “You piss, you lose!” A girl next to me is grinning, her sparkling top almost falling off. Her teeth are bright white, a slice of sharp ivory in the darkness, the grin of a shark moving in for the kill.
    “Drink!” a guy says. He’s tall and gangly, his fingers long and thin as he presses another shot into my hand. He looms over me like a scarecrow, and I can’t see his face.
    Suddenly the music is too loud, the bar too hot, the people too sinister. I know, in the back of my wasted brain, that all this is just a product of the alcohol, but that doesn’t help me now. We’re all just chemicals knocking together inside a sack of skin. All emotions are chemicals. Hormones. Adrenaline. A bunch of neurotransmitters, amino acids, proteins. None of it is real.
    I still need to get out of the press of people.
    “I have to go,” I mumble. Or shout. I can’t tell. My ears hurt, my head full of razors wrapped in gauze. Turn wrong, I’ll get cut, bleed out, die on the floor. I slide off the high bar chair I’ve been perching on. I know I’m bruising my ass, but I’m too drunk to feel it. The sticky tiles under me kiss the soles of my shoes,

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