Welcome to Nightlife!

This story is a stand-alone that is part of my larger contemporary fiction universe. You don't need to have read any other of my stories to get the full experience, but there are easter eggs in here. Just like if you read Nightlife first and go to other books, there will be easter eggs for you there, too. This is a rewritten version so some of the inline comments have vanished :((

All this to say: please comment as you read! I love vocal readers and love responding to you all.

Let's start the ride,

Aimee x

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was being five minutes late everywhere I went.

Lectures, brunches, phone calls. It wasn't dire enough to be ten minutes late and actually miss conversations or points of substance. Didn't matter if I had ample time to prepare, or rushed there in my car.

Punctuality and I just didn't get along.

But I figured, since I was diligent in all other areas, whichever god created me had to give me a flaw—for humility's sake.

Another case in point: Tuesday night. Halston's cringiest nightclub, also known as Topaz, also known as work. Five minutes late, again.

My shift had started at nine-thirty. That's when my payroll started counting from, though I wouldn't be late-late until ten. But so long as Krista Ming stepped out onto the dance floor at ten p.m. sharp, my manager would be happy.

I parked in the staff car park of Topaz, staring at the dumpster and the white-painted brick wall behind it. For three perfect seconds, the dashboard air conditioner whirred like a warm breath. My car's engine creaked and clicked as it cooled down. And outside my little bubble of tranquility, the bass thumped. Ever heard music that sounds like an apocalyptic siren?

Topaz already threatened to give me a headache.

Topaz' staffroom was tiny. Zachary wanted as much space as possible dedicated to gyrating twenty-somethings. Olive green walls, plastered with The Office memes, and a high coffee table had three stools set around it. One corner of the room housed a kitchenette with sparse cabinets, a sink, and a microwave. The other corner housed some coat hooks. I could cross the floor with two steps, which—at five-feet-five—was saying something.

Though I suppose my four-inch stilettos gave me an unfair advantage.

"Your skirts get shorter and shorter each time I see you," Zachary, my manager, marvelled. "Are you still growing?"

Zach fell somewhere between a father figure and an older brother. On one hand, he had a mustache, glasses, and protective tendencies. On the other hand, he kept offering to sneak me liquor on the job. Zach was also the best manager I'd ever had.

"That is the illusion of the heels," I hummed, kicking one pin-like stiletto into the air. "And I have bike shorts underneath."

He jerked his chin toward the personnel door. "You know there are creeps who take liberties out there."

Through that door came the pounding bass that rattled the frames of this building. But maybe that was the dozens of students all jumping in unison.

I shrugged. I knew. I could handle them. "How's tonight looking?"

"Just the freshers with fake IDs right now. We'll probably get packed after eleven, though," he warned, "when everyone's done pre-gaming."

I turned in the mirror and checked that the back of my sequined miniskirt was covering what it should be. My lashes fanned my eyebrows. Diamantes glistened on my cheek and collarbones. My skin seemed airbrushed to perfection—when really, it was some amazing foundation. My friend Vivian had recommended it to me, and now none of my usual acne was visible on my face.

I clapped my hands together with mock enthusiasm. "So we've got time before the onslaught. Shall we play Scrabble to occupy ourselves?"

"Knock yourself out," Zach snorted, rolling with my joke. "Maybe spend the time on Tinder? Finally find yourself a boyfriend."

At my unamused eye roll—if I wanted a boyfriend, Tinder was not the first place I'd go searching—Zachary laughed.

The rum and coke in his hand sloshed dangerously close to the rim of his glass, but he was too cheerful to notice. "You know I'm just kidding."

Once, Zachary had— not quite suggested, as that would have been super unprofessional. It was more of a casual observation. If drinking alcohol helped me stay buzzy for the entirety of my shift, he wouldn't be averse to some of the house vodka going missing. Many of my workmates did this.

But I declined for two reasons: the first was that I preferred all my wits about me during shifts. Being Krista Ming—dubbed the queen of Halston's nightlife by thousands of students—all night required a lot of energy on my part. I had to giggle and dance and flick my hair with incredible frequency. Somehow Zachary thought being drunk would make me do those things more. I admitted that those tasks were easier with fewer inhibitions, but that still did not seem worth it.

Because I had constant attention whenever I worked at Topaz.

Girls wanted photos to put on their Instagram, and boys wanted hugs only to say they had hugged the Krista Ming. My scant moments of peace resided in the staffroom, with Zach and my other co-workers. Being around so many strangers who were all hammered—it didn't seem wise to get tipsy.

The second reason I always refused to drink on the job: all the house liquor we had tasted like shit to me. I was a soju type of girl, whose charms our fine vanilla establishment had unfortunately not yet discovered.

"I forget, how's your girlfriend at the moment?" I shot back. "Make sure you use your left hand sometimes to give her a break."

Zach's face took on a mock-pained expression, but he was as impervious as ever. Nothing anyone said could douse his spirits, which is probably why he took to his job so well.

"Good one." Zach swilled his drink, nodding toward the throbbing door. "Are you heading out now? Or going to keep stealing wages from me?"

"Tempting, Zach. But I'll go. Must not deprive the people of their queen," I replied sarcastically.

If I seemed to be self-deprecating, Zachary only nodded and told me to have a good night. After all, he was the one who saw me at the end of every night, exhausted, sweaty, and drained. The furthest thing from glamorous. Like I would be in about six hours.

It took only a moment before someone noticed me. After all, a fair percentage of Topaz' patrons came on Tuesdays hoping to see me—and my neon tube top was impossible to miss under the black lights. It screamed, here I am!

"It's Krista Ming! Hi, Krista!"

It was easy to see the bouncing bodies, frenetic expression and drunk laughter and adjust my own body language to match the crowd's energy. The easiest way to get people to like you was to mirror them. In words, in posture, in mood.

"You look so pretty!"

Suddenly, all my lethargy from classes today was tucked away into another compartment of my mind. I leaked a swing into my step and surveyed the room through sultry, drooping eyelids. I dazzled like the disco light swirling above my head.

"I love your top!"

"Hi, darlings," I crooned, as I made my way over to the throng of people and got to work.

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I knew having a lecture at nine in the morning on Wednesdays was going to kill me. Or, at the very least, bite me in the ass with sharp, gnashing teeth.

I knew this way before the semester even started, because Tuesday was the day when everyone's student loan payments came in. Clubs and bars put out entry discounts and drink specials to convince broke students to convince themselves they weren't that broke, weren't too broke to party. It drew students to town in their hundreds.

On Tuesdays, I worked late—so late, that it might have been easier in terms of inertia to just not sleep. Objects in motion tended to stay in motion, and objects asleep in bed tended to stay asleep in bed.

I usually clocked out around four, drove home, showered, and slept by five. Only to very reluctantly get up at eight to prepare for my Biophysics lecture. That's what I had done an hour ago, and now I was pulling open the door to the lecture hall, trying to be as quiet as possible.

Five minutes late.

I shrugged my tote bag higher on my shoulder. Today I hadn't bothered with makeup or hair—actually, I couldn't be stuffed with those anytime I went on campus. I wore my high school leaver's t-shirt—yes, I never moved on, plus it was comfortable—gray sweatpants and crocs with socks. Crime against fashion.

But I found that the more comfortable I dressed, the less attention I received. And that was a glorious thing in my books.

As I picked my way down the lecture hall stairs, the sleep I'd never gotten clawed at my eyes, trying to drag me down into sweet, cozy darkness.

It might have been easier to stay up for the lecture and power nap throughout the day. I was lying to myself. My highly-prescribed, Pre-Medical timetable left no room for power napping. But that was my problem for this afternoon.

My problem for the morning was finding an empty seat in the crowded lecture hall. The lecturer was picking up steam, and the tendency to leave a space between each group of peers meant all the aisle seats were taken. All the empty seats came with an awkward shuffle over the laps of multiple students.

No way in hell was I going to clamber over anyone to get to a seat. I wandered further down the aisle, scanning for a spare seat with desperate hope. I didn't want to get too close to the lecturer and make uncomfortable, apologetic eye contact as I disrupted his class. Then, an abrupt movement on my right caught my eye.

A guy was shuffling his gear inwards, leaving a seat free for me. I sank into it with gratitude. Eager to dissolve into the lecture, I shrunk lower into the seat and curled my shoulders around myself as I pulled out my supplies.

"Thanks," I whispered.

"No problem," the guy murmured back.

I unpacked my textbook and notebook, clicking and hovering my pen on a new page. The lecturer was explaining content on synapses and receptor cells, which I had read about over the weekend. Ever since my freshman year at college, I had made a goal to do all my recommended readings before lectures.

The first year had been a huge learning curve for me. I had struggled to keep up with the pace, barely scraping the grades I needed for my degree. I suppose the change was so drastic because I had floated through high school on my natural intelligence alone. It sounded boastful to say, but it was true.

I had topped my high school classes with only moderate effort, somehow managing to do ballet, lead the debate team and sit on the student council. Admittedly, it had gotten harder as I prepared for SATs in my summative years. That's why I stopped ballet at sixteen, and demoted myself to being just a regular debate team member by senior year.

But, boy, was I unprepared for college.

The density of the workload meant that now, at the start of my senior year, I didn't have many hobbies outside of studying and my two jobs. I wanted to do something more impactful for the world than just be a model. I wanted to change the world for the better, somehow, no matter how big or small. That meant maintaining the work ethic and good study habits I'd glossed over in high school and taught myself in college.

So, because of my preemptive revision, it seemed I had missed little new content in the first minutes of the biophysics lecture. As I listened half-heartedly to the familiar concepts, I let myself steal glances at the man beside me.

His black hair was short, but growing out so that it framed his temples in two smooth swoops. He had a straight, elegant nose and deep-set eyes. With his Science Faculty hoodie and bulky, customised laptop, he looked every bit a STEM geek. A cute STEM geek.

He must have noticed my stare, because his eyes shifted and caught mine. I blushed and looked down at my notebook, my pen still.

"Late night?" he asked quietly, after a few moments of silence.

When I dared lift my gaze again, he had a soft, amused smile on his face. He could probably deduce from my knotted hair and prominent eye bags I hadn't gotten a lot of sleep—just like half of the students in the auditorium.

"Yep. Probably not the wisest thing to do before a nine a.m. lecture."

"Can't say no to student night," he stated simply. "That's what college is for anyway. Have you heard about the Holy College Trinity?"

"I can't say that I have," I replied, holding his deep brown eyes with my own.

In the corner of his notebook, he drew a small triangle and tapped his pen at one vertex.

"Here's sleep," he shifted his pen to the next vertex, "here's social life," he moved his pen again, "and here's grades. You can only ever have two at a time. That's college. Four years of juggling."

I couldn't help but laugh at that. At how neatly my whole life at present could be summarised. At his deadpan face. At his witty joke—which was not his, because, yes, I realised I had heard about the Trinity before, but not by this name.

"Then I guess I have my sleep and my grades."

His wry expression softened a little then, and he answered, "Same. I'm Quentin."

"Krista."

Quentin offered me his hand to shake. I had a fleeting moment to observe its warmth and steadiness, before the lecturer mentioned something about axons that I definitely had not read up on. I was forced to—shocker—pay attention to the actual lecture.

Throughout that hour, I didn't dare look at Quentin again. What if he caught me staring and thought I was checking him out? Awkward. No, instead I intently watched our lecturer and the textbook in front of me. His presence next to me felt like a wall of warmth, making my brain hum with awareness.

The most I let myself do was glance at the triangle he had drawn on the corner of his page, and smile to myself.