He's The Boss

3

If you don't count the lights, the music, and the crowds of people, this place is really not very different from the apartment I'm supposed to call home. There is this feeling like I'm encased in something that won't let me touch anything or anyone. There is this feeling like I'm floating along, without purpose. And I love it.

It's funny how I can do this for hours and not feel exhausted. How easy it is to fake happiness. How we are all intimate and yet unknowable within this space.

I lose track of faces, but remember their touch, their energy. As always, I never linger with one person too long. There are too many to get a taste of. And I want to make the most of what little time I have.

Everything's fine and perfect until one guy who refuses to let me go. Every time I try to discreetly move away, he grasps my arms and yanks me close enough to feel his erection. He slows, shooting me a look that I know all too well. He wants me to go down on him – out here even, if I'm game. It's a challenge he's issuing me, and usually, that'd be enough.

But not this time. Or at least, not with him. I'm tired of giving, giving, giving, until I have nothing left. I only came tonight for some fun, not to be some guy's Friday-morning water-cooler conquest brag.

"Hey, dude, could you maybe let go of me?" In times like these, I wish I had more of my mother's courage. Of course, she would never have been caught dead at a club like this, even in her younger years, but she sure would have shown that creep. She would have verbally murdered him – and done it with such style and flair, it should have been poetry.

Instead of releasing me, he tugs me even closer. He plants one of my hands on his crotch as he leans in and says something in my ear – something about someplace we can go for privacy. He's given up on his first idea and settling for something more mundane, but I'm still not sold.

"Thanks, but no, thanks." I move to twist my arm out of his like my younger sister Haley taught me once – I never went for self-defense classes, but she did. It almost works, but at the last minute, he starts moving, dragging me across the floor with him.

"Hey!" I cry, trying unsuccessfully to dig my heels in. "Let me go!"

My cries drown out in the music, my struggles look like some sort of bizarre and oblivious form of dancing. This is bad. I've gotten myself into some tricky situations before, but never like this. Emotionally, I'm already a wreck. I don't have it in me to fight back ...

I let out a gasp as something bumps into me, and a cold, fizzy liquid spills down the front of my blouse.

I stop, he stops, and thankfully, he releases his grip on me. All I see is a stranger's apologetic face as he holds an empty beer bottle by the neck. But at this moment, I could kiss him – his mistake was all I needed.

Without a word or a second glance, I bolt, which isn't exactly easy through the mass of tightly packed bodies. But eventually, after too long, I make it out of there.

I'm outside, standing on the sidewalk, steam rising up from the vents and tickling my skin.

I take a minute to check my phone. 2.30 am. I'm supposed to be up in five hours. I guess that incident with the giant creep was a sign for me to call it a night. That, and the fact that the front of my blouse is soaked with booze.

Behind me, the door to the club opens, although I don't pay much attention to it until a voice calls out to me, "Hey!"

Oh shit. It's him. Doesn't this guy ever quit??

Swallowing anxiously, I begin fumbling for my keys to use as a weapon. I whirl around, only to freeze when I realize it's not the pervert, but the one who distracted the pervert.