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"stranger danger"
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connie' house
confessing to your best friend that you had zero plans on the saturday night before senior year? rookie mistake.
less than an hour later, you found yourself at a makeshift home bar, clutching onto a blood orange and cardamom cocktail like it was your lifeline at an end-of-summer bash.
the dim lighting cast a hazy, golden glow over the basement, giving it a surreal, almost dreamlike quality. it was the kind of lighting that made people look better than they felt, masking their exhaustion beneath a deceptive sheen. the air hung thick with oppressive heat, stifled by too many bodies crammed into too small a space, their mingling scents a heady mix of spilt drinks, stale sweat, and a pungent cocktail of cheap perfume and cologne.
the music—a thumping r&b remix—pulsated through the speakers, each bass-heavy beat reverberating through the floorboards, vibrating up your legs and settling deep into your bones.
around you, lips met in sloppy kisses, hands wandered without care, and the partygoers seemed to surge like a living entity—a tide of strangers who hadn't encountered each other until now, pressed together in a swaying mass, grinding together in a primal dance they hadn't anticipated.
it wasn't that you hated parties—actually, you kind of enjoyed them—but this? this was something else entirely. a suffocating, sweat-drenched mosh pit of half-drunken revellers in search of their next prey.
it was, without a doubt, your personal version of hell.
but for sasha braus? this was heaven.
"pink dress, pink dress..."
you observed the room, your eyes darting through the oscillating crowd, struggling to keep up with the flickering lights.
you were searching for your best friend, a needle in a haystack, but also for something else—a way out of your own spiralling thoughts.
the only reason you even contemplated stepping out of your house that night was sasha's insistence that it might be a good distraction from the fresh wounds of a recent breakup.
