They stayed up in the VIP section of a nightclub this time, and Elfie had a half a glass of white wine despite both of them knowing she was underage for alcohol. In the VIP section, no one got carded, anyway. They hid back in a dark corner, sitting on a sofa sectional where they drank, ate from an array of appetizers that filled the table after Tryp had read the entire menu to the waiter, and talked. The VIP dance floor was far over on the other side, diagonally around the catwalks, and Elfie could just make out bodies twisting through the haze. Below them, the crowd boiled and shrieked, and Elfie leaned over the balcony to watch for a few minutes. Tryp stood beside her but leaned with his back to the crowd, talking to her and sipping his drink.
He was sipping his drinks tonight, Elfie noticed, and no shot glasses littered the small cracks between the half-eaten plates of deep-fried food.
Even that half, maybe a third, of a glass of wine calmed her down so that she enjoyed dancing with Tryp. He had his hands on her just enough to be attentive, to be sexy, but not enough so that she felt molested in public.
During the car ride back to the hotel room, she giggled at his jokes some more, because he had a lot of them. “Where are you getting all these?”
He laughed with her. “Rhiannon knows a lot of jokes, and on the tour bus, we watch stupid horror movies and she tells me jokes. Or we used to, anyway. Now that Jonas is practically taking a whizz on her every chance he gets, she sits with him instead of watching Zom-pocalypse movies with me.”
“I’m sorry. That sucks.”
“She was my friend first, damn it. I should still get to watch stupid horror movies with her.”
They arrived back at the hotel and rode the elevator up to Tryp’s suite. Jonas had started putting Tryp’s room farther away from Rade and Grayson’s in a transparent attempt to literally separate them. In the elevator, Elfie watched Tryp through the mirrors on the walls. His dark eyes scanned the elevator, taking in the buttons and fixtures. A tendril of a tattoo wove up his neck toward the back of his ear. She had liked that the first time she’d noticed it, and she almost reached over to touch it, but there was plenty of time for that later.
In his suite, Tryp shut the door behind them. “Would you like a drink?”
“No,” she said. “Yes. Yes, I would.”
“What would you like?”
The bar in the corner had a selection on hard liquor bottles crowded on top. “I don’t know. Make me something.”
“Okay,” Tryp said, bending to take some orange juice out of the mini-fridge. He poured some in a highball glass and more glass clinked over there as he poured from the bottles.
Elfie trailed her hand over the back of the sofa, trying to look sexy.
He walked over to her holding two glasses and held the orange one out to her, keeping the brown-filled one for himself.
Elfie sipped, and the sweet juice ran down her throat. “This is really good. What is it?”
“Orange juice.”
“No, no. Load it up.” She handed the glass back to him.
“One of us needs to be lucid tomorrow morning.” He drank from his own glass.
“It’ll be fine. Load it up.”
Tryp doctored it back at the bar and returned, holding it out to her. “With vodka.”
She tasted it, and something astringent tickled her tongue. “That’s better.”
Tryp drank some of his. “You’re not going to get wasted, are you?”
“Of course not.”
“You don’t usually drink.”
“Some occasions call for a drink.”
“And what occasion is this?” he asked.
The last night I’m a virgin.
“Our first night,” she said, throwing that right out in the open, and she held up her glass for a toast.
He clinked her glass, and they both sipped. The screwdriver burned down her throat, and Elfie tossed the whole rest of the glass back.