Passionfruit

15.

It was nearly three in the morning. Luka, Gumi, and Miku had long since crashed all around the hotel room, and it was impossible for me to do the same.

I rolled over on my makeshift bed. It was little more than some spare blankets from the closet and some pillow from the bedroom, but it was comfortable enough. The bedroom was empty, with Luka snoring softly on the floor next to me, but there was no point. I couldn't imagine sleep finding me anytime soon.

I had accepted this out-of-place calmness as my new normal post-performance feeling. Today felt like just another day, with this girl's night feeling more like a slumber party and less like a celebration.

Twitter had little news for me. At least, little news that interested me. Miku's retweets popped up constantly, spilling all the juicy gossip that circulated the internet, but none of it drew my eye. This person was arrested with drugs, this person just broke up with this person, this person was spotted with a mystery man...

Laying on my stomach, my eyes flickered up to the door leading out into the hall. Len would most definitely be back by now. I knew from the internet that he had advanced to the next round, and while I had scrolled past quite a few clips of their impressive-looking performance, I was too scared to open any of them. Knowing my luck, Miku would open her eyes at the perfect time and wonder why the fuck I was listening to TR at three in the morning.

You up?

I sent the message before I could stop myself, retreating from my texting app and back to the safety of Twitter. As if I had poked a sleeping tiger.

I refreshed my feed for the fifth time in the last thirty minutes, the first tweet a poll from Radio City. Who was your favorite performance of the night? I let out a huff of amusement, tapping on Merge just for the hell of it. My eyes widened as the results were shown to me. We were in the lead with an insane 68.8 percent of votes.

"Shit," I said softly to myself, retweeting it. TR had the second, with 24.3 percent.

My phone vibrated.

You can't sleep either?

The message appeared at the top of my screen. I tapped on it, typing my response.

Nah. Been scrolling Twitter for like four hours. Everyone's passed out.

Back to Twitter. I checked the comments of the poll. The most-liked comments were at the top, most of them describing why they felt Merge deserved their vote. While we had felt our kimonos were a bit overkill, the audience seemed to think quite the opposite. There were countless comments about our energy, our perfected choreography, and how our outfits complimented both. There was a fair share of criticism as well, some saying that we looked fake. It might have been me being self-conscious, or perhaps it was because I had done the most talking, but a lot of these comments seemed directed towards me.

I closed Twitter, convincing myself to focus on the positive comments. They were probably TR fans, anyway.

Another message popped up.

Same. They didn't even want to go clubbing, they were so tired.

I smiled. It was awkward, texting each other in such close proximity, clearly dancing around the question of hanging out even though we were both obviously thinking it. Or so, I hoped we both were.

Is there one close by?

Might as well cut to the chase, then.

Kai keeps wanting to go back to this place by the river. I think it's called Tao's.