Of Love and Duty

Clubbing Night

London, early April 199*

Dance music was, without doubt, not her cup of tea. Or Pop music, for what it mattered. She still didn't get why her friends were so crazy about this or that band. Yes, some songs weren't bad but, in her ears, not enough to swoon over the lead singer or another musician and plaster her bedroom's walls with their faces, like Amina.

However, Dance music would serve her business.

So, there she was, after collecting her guts and accepting Amina's invitation to go clubbing with her cousin and friends. So there she was, in one of London's hippest dance club, surrounded by people she didn't know, unfamiliar smells, and a genre of music she didn't like. 

Thank to the Old Gods and the New One, she knew how to dance.

A funny thought popped in her mind, as she swayed her body on the notes of a new, softer song.

A club was not different from Bacchic mysteries.

People lost themselves in alcohol, music and ecstatic dances, disinhibited, mingling, offering and taking whoever offered themselves. Indeed, if she looked at it from that point of view, a club was the second or third best place to be done and over with it.

She swept her head, looking one more time at the boy.

He had been staring at her for a while now, dancing closer to her.

His eyes sent shivers down her spine, so clouded they were by alcohol or whatever drug he might have taken—a good thing, she couldn't find in her the will to cast a confounding spell.

He was a young man in his early twenties; his fashionable clothes were a little crumpled, his hair styled like some teenager heartthrob, and smelled of aftershave mingled with sweat and alcohol. A bit too thin for her taste and didn't look the healthiest, though it could be due to having danced for a couple of hours or whatever he had drunk.

In the club's strobe lights and if she squinted, she could fancy that he looked like her crush.

She turned around, swaying her body as she took a deep breath.

She could do it.

When she faced the boy again, he was only a few steps away. Fixing her eyes into his, she curled the corners of her unclosed lips into a smile that—she knew it—was more archaic than sensual. Nevertheless, he stepped closer, his movements mirroring hers.

She did not like his eyes at all—or perhaps, she didn't drink enough alcohol to disconnect her brain from her body. With the corner of her eyes, she glimpsed Amina sitting on a couch and kissing someone.

She must do it.

The boy's clammy fingers ran down along her jaw, grasping and lifting her chin—turning her face toward him. When he leant closer, she caught a swift of his vodka-loaded breath.

She swallowed.

She had to do it.

Someone grasped her wrist and yanked her before the boy could kiss her.

With a dull anger burning in her insides, she looked back at the boy as the person pulled her off the dance floor and away from the crowd. When they were somewhere private enough, she freed her wrist.

"What are you doing?" she growled.

"No, what were you doing."

She scoffed, looking away. "You already know what I was doing, and why."