The basement had been warm for hours, and winter had been reduced to whatever people carried in with them. Melted rain darkened the shoulders of coats thrown over chairs, cold glass sweated between warm fingers, and every time somebody opened the door upstairs, a thin draft crawled down the staircase before disappearing into the heat. The rest of the room had softened around alcohol, beer dried tacky between the floorboards, somebody had crushed a lime beneath the leg of the couch, and the old leather smelled faintly of dust whenever anyone dropped too hard onto it.
Sacha had been working on Kasper's nerves for most of the party, mostly because he had noticed how often Kasper's attention wandered toward you and apparently valued his own survival very little. Felix had taken the safer approach, he sat at the end of the couch with his phone in one hand, occasionally watching the room over its edge, quiet enough that Kasper almost forgot he was listening to everything.
you were somewhere close.
Kasper knew that without checking. It had become irritatingly automatic, knowing roughly where they were even when he was doing something else. A bright voice somewhere behind him, movement at the edge of his vision, their name passing through somebody else's conversation. He kept track of them with the same careless certainty with which he knew where he'd left his keys.
Then a voice near the kitchen carried through everything else because it had your name inside it. Kasper looked over before he could stop himself.
The guy was vaguely familiar. Expensive shirt, drunk red cheeks, hair still arranged like he'd checked it in a bathroom mirror five minutes earlier. There were three people around him and the swollen confidence that came from having an audience.
"They're fucking exhausting." The guy laughed into his cup. "Everybody acts like they're some campus sweetheart because they buy drinks and know everybody worth knowing."
"Dude." One of his friends glanced across the room.
"What?" He followed the look and found you. Apparently embarrassment had died several drinks ago. "I'm serious. Take the money away for six months and see how many people still answer."
Kasper's bottle stopped halfway to his mouth.
"Oh, he's fucking stupid." Sacha's expression flattened first.
"Yep." Felix locked his phone.
The guy hadn't noticed the weather changing around him yet. Kasper had. Anger rarely arrived hot for him, because the real kind did the opposite. It emptied everything out until noises separated cleanly from one another, the bass in the walls, glass touching glass, somebody laughing near the stairs, his own teeth meeting when he closed his mouth. When he appeared beside you, his free hand reached behind you and hooked into the back of their belt, fingers settling there with familiar ease.
[Photo]
Across the room, somebody murmured something to the guy. He glanced at Kasper, then at the hand hooked into the back of your belt, and laughed again.
"What, Varga?" His cup lifted in a lazy little salute. "You gonna bite me because I talked about your owner?"
Sacha made a strangled sound that might've been a laugh if there'd been anything funny left. "Oh, fuck."
“Don't spill that.” Kasper handed Sacha his beer.
"That's what you're worried about?"
Kasper ignored him. His fingers slipped free from your belt, then went to the front of his jacket. He dragged the zipper down, shrugged the thing off his shoulders in one rough movement, and pushed the bundled weight of it into your arms without taking his eyes off the guy across the room.
"Hold this."
The first punch landed before the guy could finish smiling.
[Photo]
Kasper's knuckles caught the side of his mouth with a thick, ugly sound, flesh and teeth and bone all briefly becoming the same material. The cup flew first, then the guy, stumbling sideways into somebody's shoulder hard enough to send both of them into the counter.
Liquor splashed over the cabinets. Someone screamed with delighted horror because AMU students could watch a man get punched in the face and still somehow treat it like halftime entertainment.
"Jesus fucking Christ, Kasper." Felix was already moving after him.
The guy came back angry instead of smart, blood bright across his lip and one hand grabbing at Kasper's shirt. Good. Kasper caught his wrist, shoved him hard enough that his spine struck the counter, and rolled his jaw while the room opened around them in a widening circle of bodies and raised phones.
"Come on, then." Kasper's voice had gone quiet. "You had plenty to fucking say."
