Mailboy (Wattys 2015 Winner)

15. The City

"Yeah, if you wanna find love then you know where the city is," 1975 

Zoey Willow Hunter

I never thought I would be able to love my friends more than I did now.

We were all walking in the streets of downtown, with the sun an hour away from setting. Joel had his arm around Diana, Lucy was walking hand in hand with Aaron and well, the rest of us were just walking separately. Nico was in front with James and the other guys, laughing loudly. James and Nico made a good team; their jokes left everyone holding their stomachs, out of breath. Smiles filled our faces and that couldn’t make me happier.

The only downer in this trip was Xandra. The moment she and Oliver broke up was going to impact this trip more than I had anticipated. She stood on one side of the gang and Oliver stood on another. Lucy nudged me when Xandra was getting further and further from us.

“Go talk to her,” insisted Lucy, despite my pleas.

“No, you crazy woman?” I said in a weird voice, making the you sound like a ju.

“Zoey,” warned Lucy.

“Lucy,” I said in the same voice.

Lucy looked at me and frowned, “fine, I’ll do it.” She detached herself from her boyfriend and talked to Xandra.

I walked over to Amir instead and gave him a sympathetic smile, “how are you?”

“I’m dying,” he sighed, softening his Lebanese features, “It should be illegal for idiots to wake you up at 8 am during Ramadan.”

I patted his back, “well, at least you’re not missing out on the fun.”

“Zoey, what happened with Nico?” He blurted out, making me stop.

Even though Amir was the one who saw me kiss Nico, he hadn’t spoken to me about it until now. I was hoping he had forgotten about it, but apparently not.

“Amir,” I said in the same tone, mockingly, “what happened with Forrest?”

He let out a small laugh, “don’t cute yourself out of this.”

“You’re the one who knows what happened. I don’t remember anything.”

I still hadn’t decided if not remembering was a good thing or a bad one. One thing was clear; if I had remembered, I would have acted completely different around Nico. Knowing how you kissed a boy under the influence of alcohol never really was a good memory. Therefore, things would have been awkward.

Plus, me not remembering caused a lot of stuff to happen with Nico, all of it resulting into us being friends now.

“Do you want to know what happened?” He asked.

Did I want to know?

“Yes,” I said unwillingly.

Amir nodded as if he was expecting this and started to tell me everything.

“You were completely gone. I don’t know how many bottles of beer you emptied, but they were a lot more than you should have had. The rest of the group was drunk too, so no one really noticed, except me. Then everyone went to sleep, but you didn’t. You kept on mumbling a whole bunch of stuff about backstabbers and horrible people.”

“Yeesh,” I winced, feeling a blush form in my cheeks.

“Yeah. Nico was awake too and he was sitting in front of the fire. You sat beside him and talked to him about something, I don’t remember what. He grabbed your hand and I think he wanted to get you back to our tent because of how drunk you were. But you got mad and started shouting about Oliver and how much of an asshole he was—”