Chapter Text
The party was loud, and Troy was drunk, and Dallas had fucked off to who knows where, but probably to fuck one of the girls who’d been hanging off his arm half the night, and Troy really hadn’t meant to stay this long, but here he was anyway, the night an out of focus blur already in his mind.
The bass was rattling his bones more than his ears, which were registering essentially nothing as he wove unsteadily through the crowd toward the living room where he was pretty sure he’d left his jacket. His jacket was not there. No one’s jackets were there, actually, which was odd because this was where they usually put them. He stood staring at the empty chair for a while, trying to comb his muddled memories for any hint of where he’d left his shit so he could finally go home, when someone tapped him on the shoulder.
He was turning before he’d really registered the touch, stepping away from the hand, back alight in pins and needles. He must have caught his toe or something, because he was falling for a brief moment, before he managed to steady himself on the back of the chair.
“Hey,” said the girl standing in front of him, shifting uneasily on her own feet, tucking the hand she’d reached out to him with safely back into the fold of her arms across her chest.
“Hey,” he said, staring at her. He hoped she didn’t want to fuck him. He could already feel how the words would jumble if he tried to say them, a polite turn down turned awkward and rude, or even mean, by his fat drunk tongue.
“I, uh,” she faltered, looked away, chin ducked down. There was something…not right, about the way she was looking. Standing. Something that left a bitter taste in his mouth. He could feel that he was frowning.
“Do you need something?” Shit, that was rude, way to go Barrett. He could see her shoulders tense and grimaced, then tried to stop so she wouldn’t think it was because of her. He couldn’t tell if he’d been fast enough. Though, if she just left, he could go back to looking for his shit, so…
His dad would probably tell the girl to get lost. Troy grimaced again. The girl was frowning at him now.
“I, uh,” he started, at the same time as she said, “I think you drank my friend’s drink.”
Troy paused. Blinked. Frowned at her. “Uh, sorry?” he said. He didn’t remember that, but he didn’t remember a lot of tonight, and honestly the music was starting to give him a headache. He wanted to go home.
The girl huffed a sigh and rubbed her face, muttered something under her breath that Troy didn’t quite catch.
“Listen, I—” he started to say, standing up straighter and letting go of the chair, fully intending to go find his jacket and his keys and, well, he wasn’t sober enough to drive, but it was probably fine, and anyway he felt like shit and he couldn’t fucking stay here and—
“Hey!” The girl caught him as he stumbled, and he grabbed onto her reflexively, took a moment to breath, hands on each others’ arms. He blinked at her.
“What…?” He let the question trail off, his tongue unwieldy in his mouth. Everything was too bright and loud and his head was throbbing in time with the bass of the music. He couldn’t remember how much he’d had to drink, but surely not this much.
“Are you okay?” the girl asked him. She was very close to him, because, he realized, she was still supporting him, holding more of his weight than she should be. He pushed back gently, swayed, swore. “Hey, hey, man. Why don’t you, uh, why don’t you sit down over here, huh?”
She helped him to a chair, the same one he hadn’t left his jacket on earlier, and he practically collapsed into it. He leaned back, looking up at her standing above him. She was fiddling with the hem of her shirt, not quite looking at him, not quite looking away.
“’M Troy,” he grunted, holding out a hand to shake. His arms felt loose and…squiggly. She smiled, but didn’t take his hand.
“I know,” she said, letting go of her shirt hem. “Troy Barrett, starting right winger for Toronto. Best friends with Dallas Kent. He’s a real son of a bitch, by the way.”
Troy grunted again, a nothing noise, not sure why she’d brought it up. Dallas was a son of a bitch, really. Why was she telling him, though.
The girl sighed, crossed her arms again. She was still looking down at him, and he was still looking up. Sitting down was maybe not a good idea, because the chair felt like it was swallowing him, and he really, really needed to leave.
“Look, sorry, I don’t need to be an ass, I’m just pissed off about,” she gestured vaguely in a circle and Troy guessed she meant the party, or possibly the world. “Listen, I think you drank my friend Lindsay’s drink on accident.”
Troy shrugged. Maybe. She’d said that earlier, too, he thought. He still didn’t remember. Had he really drunk that much?
“I’m not, like, mad, it’s whatever, she set it down for a second—so stupid of her, but I guess you’re not the right person to talk to about that and it’s really not the right time, but, ugh, fuck, focus, Val,” she pinched the bridge of her nose and took a deep breath in and then let it out slowly. Troy wasn’t sure he’d ever seen anyone do that not in a movie. “Listen, anyway, she set her drink down by a couple others, one of them must have been yours, but, whatever. You drank it.”
“Okay?” Troy wasn’t following. She said she didn’t care about this, but she was making it seem like it was very important, actually, that he drank her friend’s drink. His head was fucking killing him, and he was starting to feel less pleasantly unsteady and more like the world was moving around him. How the fuck much had he had to drink? Enough, apparently, to confuse a stranger’s drink with his own and not to fucking notice.
“No, it’s—I mean, it is okay, it’s fine, or it would be fine, normally, like oops, sorry, guess she’ll get another cup, but—” the girl took another deep breath. Her hair was long and golden brown and frizzing out of her braid and she looked, suddenly, very sad.
“Wh—” Troy began, just as the girl blurted out, “I think someone spiked her drink.”
Troy frowned. Of course the drinks were spiked, they were literally alcoho—oh.
He tried to stand up. It was impulse and then it was motion, and while he was not a very tall man, he was taller than the girl standing in front of him, and much heavier, and so when he unbalanced and fell, he took her down with him. He managed to get a hand under her head before they hit the ground, but she still took the brunt of the fall.
“Fuck, sorry,” he said as he rolled off her. His head hurt even worse than before and his stomach was protesting too, now, and he angled himself away from her as he sat half way up, still unsteady even that far off the ground, so he didn’t throw up on her if he did end up puking.
The girl was lying on her back, just breathing, and he could tell she’d had the wind knocked out of her, at least. Good thing Dallas didn’t have a coffee table. There’d probably be blood or concussions if he’d had a coffee table for them to fall on top of.
Fuck. He really might puke.
“Fu-uck you,” the girl wheezed, catching his attention again as she sat up, holding her ribs. They might be bruised. He was pretty dense, and he’d landed square on her. She’d been trapped between him and the floor.
“Sorry,” he said again, then, “Is your head okay?”
She glared at him, but reached back and felt along the back of her head anyway. Eventually, she nodded. So, it wasn’t the worst it could be.
“Sorry,” he said, again, and laid back down on the floor. It was hardwood, which was wasted on Dallas, and probably he shouldn’t be lying on it, because it was gross and kinda sticky because Dallas forgot to hire cleaners at least a third of the times he threw parties, but it was also really cool right now, and he was kinda burning up.
“Hey, man, hey, no, sit up for me, please.”
The girl was kneeling over him, huffing as she heaved his weight up, propping his torso against hers.
“What?” he asked, confused. He wanted to go to sleep. He was so tired, and his head hurt and he was too hot and he felt sick. Maybe he needed to go outside. Where the fuck had he left his jacket?
“Dude, look, you’re kind of an ass, but you also kind of saved my friend but like. I dunno, man, I can’t just leave you here roofied. You’re clearly not okay.”
He wasn’t okay, was he? He really, really wasn’t.
“Wanna go home,” he said, trying to sit up away from her. He sort of managed it, enough so he could turn to face her, anyway. She kept a hand hovering in case he needed it, which was kinda sweet.
“Dude, honestly, I think you should go to the hospital. I mean, you’ve been roofied.”
Troy groaned. He didn’t want to go to the hospital. He wanted to go to sleep, in his own fucking bed, and maybe call his boyfriend, or, actually, his mom. He really wanted his mom.
Mom would absolutely want him to go to the hospital, though. Fuck.
“Ugh,” he groaned, tilting forward. The girl’s hand braced against his shoulder so he didn’t go too far. He looked up at her again, their faces much closer now. She had blue eyes, and she was frowning in a way he hadn’t ever seen before. It was almost…
“Can’t find my keys,” he said instead of following the thought. This time he did recognize the frown she made. Judgement. Disapproval.
“You were going to drive like this?!” she demanded. He half shrugged. She glared at him some more, then shifted into a crouch instead of a sit. “Can you stand?”
Maybe. He tried it, got his knees and feet under him, managed to use the chair to lever himself up, and the girl helped him up the rest of the way. She slung his arm around her shoulders and one of hers around his hips. He snorted.
“Something funny?” she asked.
“No,” he managed, because it wasn’t, really. His stomach churned. His brain was being constricted by throbbing bass. Somehow they made it outside.
“My car’s over there, can you see?” the girl nodded toward an older model Toyota, that was maybe blue or maybe black, it was hard to tell in the dark. A van, though. Spacious.
They stumbled together over the uneven lawn, and the girl leaned Troy against the sliding door of the back as she reached into her pocket for her keys. Troy leaned his face against the cool glass of the window and wished it was January instead of April; he was too hot, the air too warm for much relief.
“Hey, are you okay?”
Out here, her voice was softer, kinder. He opened his eyes. He didn’t realize he’d closed them.
“Not really,” he said, because apparently he had no filter now. She was frowning at him in that way he didn’t recognize again.
“Okay,” she said. “Let me help you get in.”
Troy managed to get into the car mostly by himself. Really, he more slid into the seat than sat down in it, but he did it under his own power, so he was counting it as a win. He did need help with the seatbelt, though. His hands felt too big, his fingers thick. Driving himself would have been really stupid, like this.
His door slammed, and then a brief moment later the girl was getting into the driver’s seat, closing her own door. She put the keys into the ignition but didn’t turn them. Instead, she turned to look at him.
“Where am I taking you, man?”
He’d thought she was taking him to the hospital but it was possible he’d never actually agreed to that out loud and she had just decided to put him in her car and take him wherever he wanted to go just so he wouldn’t spend the rest of the night on the floor, drugged up at Dallas’ house.
His stomach heaved.
There was a swelling something in the back of Troy’s head, something he didn’t want to look at too closely right now, something he knew he wouldn’t like.
“Hospital,” he said, leaning back in the seat and determinedly thinking of his mom instead. He should call her. It had been a while. Where was she now? Thailand, or maybe Taiwan. He wasn’t the best at geography…
His eyes slipped closed again as the car pulled away from the curb.