Re: [Gatecrashing.]
The man of the hour was fucked up but he wasn't obsessive. He wasn't trashed on something that made the party blurry light, it was pinprick light and a flood of knowing things and knife-edge sensation. Jack felt tuned in and he swigged the tequila from the neck of the bottle as the music pounded and the girls span and span and span. Adrian was sliding into the party atmosphere like a duck to water and Jack threw back his head and laughed and nearly lost his fedora, which would have been criminal. Cat span, and Dahlia lingered near enough that Jack could see pieces of what might-have-been slot themselves together under the skin, and wasn't that interesting? Did Dahlia know all? If she did, was this a royal shafting of her pathetic best friend, or just ruthlessness in a woman almost as terrible as Jack himself?
He watched them, all of them, under the slant of the brim and a wicked smile and when a girl slung herself into the group he danced with her for as long as his attention-span lasted which was ...not all that long, really. But she was one of many and the crowd that had come in with him was a tangled mix of personalities and alliances and it might even have been interesting if there hadn't been real entertainment at hand. Still, it was warm writhe of bodies to a pulse-beat and then she kissed his cheek, she disappeared in search of a beer, and Jack swallowed enough warming tequila to hand off the bottle to whoever wanted it.
It didn't matter who it was Jack danced with. It didn't matter, because the hit was pure, sharp delight and when it even began to wear off, he knew there was more. Cat was trashed and visibly so and that was a momentary contemplation on the edge of the buzz: was Cat the kind of girl who had a limit? Dahlia was drinking and had the glitter of someone who wanted to be Cat's degree of trashed and if this was a clusterfuck, they'd all fucked themselves into it and it wasn't Jack's problem.
He grinned at the slice of Adrian's face nearest and he held out both arms to the girls, who might have been older but weren't, like, pathetic-old, Dahlia with her keen, hungry edge and Destiny who span without the hectic need of Cat herself.
"But we're young and beautiful so it more than makes up for you both," he said magnanimously, and who he bound up in that 'we' was entirely up for debate.