You And Me - A Collection of Les Twins One Shots

The Box

Now and then, Larry liked to indulge in a little nightlife fun.

Tonight it was just Roy and him among the crowd in one of the hottest clubs in downtown Manhattan, a place called "The Box". 

For once, Larry was happy not to have his twin at his back. In fact, he thrived in the knowledge that while he and Roy were about to have the night of a lifetime, Laurent was at home, sulking.

His brother had told him time and time again to be careful when going out with their New York clique, especially when they weren't together. And every time, Larry had rolled his eyes and told Laurent to mind his own damn business. But tonight Laurent's overbearing sense of protectiveness had turned into a full-fledged fight between them.

"Drink?" Roy asked and while Larry would have usually said no, the echo of their fight earlier bubbled to the forefront of his mind.

'This place is a drug den, Larry. Do you have any idea what kind of people hang out there?'

Laurent was right about that, at least. The club that Roy took him to wasn't comparable to any nightclub Larry had ever been to. "The Box" was the kind of place that had people lining up for hours, just to be turned down by a bouncer with an expensive-looking butterscotch coat who deemed them and their scantily clothed girls unworthy of a visit.

"What do you want?" Roy asked with a nod toward the bar and Larry thought about Laurent again and his resolve to make his own decisions tonight hardened. He wasn't a kid, he didn't need a chaperone and if he wanted to drink, he'd damn well do so.

"Whiskey," he said and pressed a crinkled fifty-dollar bill into his friend's hands. He swallowed down the guilt as he waited for his drink to arrive, telling himself that he didn't do it out of spite but because he was in the mood for it.

It was around 2 AM and a stage performance of mostly nude women had just ended and Larry was beginning to feel the effects of the Whiskey that Roy had shoved wordlessly into his hands. He started moving to the music, his eyes scanning the crowd for a girl to catch his interest to distract him from the fight he'd had. The entire club reminded him a bit of a Moulin Rouge-style theater with the nudity and the red satin and extremely overpriced drinks. In one of the candle-lit booths next to them, another patron poured liquor straight from the bottle into his mouth, a scene that Larry was used to seeing after years and years of frequenting clubs in both Paris and New York City.

"C'mon, I want you to meet someone," Roy said, nodding toward a black door next to the dressing room, and before Larry knew it, he was being dragged across the dimly lit dance floor, his friend's fingers clutched tightly around his wrist.

The doorway was a mere frisson in the wall and in between the large crowd of sweaty, barely dressed people (the female nudity seemed to be the one constant of the club's concept), Larry suddenly found himself in a tiny room that had a single light bulb dangling from the ceiling over a square metal table and a total of three guys sitting around it. One of them had a beautiful girl with curly hair and caramel skin in his lap and Larry vaguely recognized her as one of the dancers from the stage performance. Larry quickly averted his gaze when the guy's beefy hand started wandering across her body. And what the actual fuck had they just stumbled into?

The mood shift was instant.

The room was quiet, with only the muffled beat from the music creeping in through the walls and the quiet sucking noises of whatever the hell the girl was doing with one of the bouncers coming from the corner of the table. Larry was so distracted by the goddamn make-out session that it took him a second to spot the white powder on the tabletop. A trail of cocaine was strewn across the tabletop and just like that, Larry's blood ran cold. What the actual hell had Roy thought, bringing him here?