Re: By the stage
It felt as if Lia had only just left him; he could still taste her on his lips, could still feel the heat of her lingering on his fingertips. Samuel had stood idle after she had gone, sipping his whiskey, thoroughly ignoring everyone around him even after the first band took the stage and the dance floor thronged with even more intoxicated, gyrating patrons. But that sound, that piercing, shrill cry, shook him instantly from his selfish reverie. He blinked, clearing the dreamlike fog from his eyes, and immediately saw the source of the cry - or at least what had caused it.
He pushed his way through the crowd, his half-full highball glass discarded at the first table he slipped past. The scuffle was perilously close to the stage, though the rabble crowding the band and their attendant security meant it had gone unnoticed by most. Samuel cast a quick glance to the obvious instigator, a sizable brute lurching back toward the wisp of a girl he recognized as his first-floor neighbor. It's like a war, she had said. He wondered why that small phrase came back to him now, and with such strength. Samuel shook this off, dismissing it as unimportant, and slipped into the fray.
Samuel said nothing as he moved behind the man, content to let him focus on his undersized opponent. Though alcohol had dulled his own reflexes, he felt markedly better than his current quarry looked. The man lashed out, his bruised jaw clenched as he threw a wide right hook toward the girl's dark head. Samuel stepped toward him then, his hand wrapping tight around the other man's wrist, wrenching it sharply as he snapped his hand downward. He kicked out, his heavy boot meeting the back of their attacker's knee, knocking him off balance and slamming the man's head into the table before them. "God damn it I did not want to have to work tonight," he growled. His hand shifted, twisting the man's arm high against his back; satisfied his prey was going nowhere, he looked back to Momoko, then to her friends, now clinging to the wall of patrons behind them. "You okay, kiddo?"