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Rachel throws her head back, runs her fingers through her hair.
Laser lights flicker and flutter and blur her vision, as does the fourth drink she holds half-spilled in a sweaty hand.
She moves her hips to the beat, closes her eyes for a moment.
Quinn lets out something like a scream, one arm around Jay, the other up in the air. Rachel laughs. She takes a few tumbling steps across the little circle they’ve been dancing in, somehow having created their own bubble in this crowd. Rachel places herself on Quinn’s other side, under her raised arm, and when it sinks, it clumsily hugs Rachel’s shoulder. The bass and the heat and Quinn being so carefree send vibrating shocks all the way through Rachel’s chest and straight into her wildly thrumming heart.
“We should do this more often!” she yells into Quinn’s ear, nose bumping Quinn’s cheek where it’s shining with perspiration.
“Yeah,” Quinn yells back, “we totally should!”
Somehow, Quinn turns about twenty years younger when they go clubbing. This is the only space where Rachel has seen her boss let loose, but if Rachel wasn’t so drunk and hyped up herself, she would think it seemed almost wrong. Classy, bitchy Quinn, suddenly woo-ing and dancing like a girly teenager would strike Rachel as something foreign, if she wasn’t this close to blacking out herself.
Rachel tries to remember how they got here. The day had been the biggest mess. Rachel really just needed to get as drunk as possible after everything, and naturally, Quinn had been on board. Somewhere, they’d picked up Jay, and Jay knew about this club, so now here they were. “It’s a gay club though,” he had explained, and Quinn, already drunk Quinn, had shrugged, looked at Rachel. So. Here they were.
“Bathroom,” Quinn shouts, motioning wherever she thinks she remembers the bathroom being.
“Me too,” Rachel mouths at Jay, who doesn’t seem to notice either of them leaving as he makes eyes at some guy in the crowd. Rachel grins, absentmindedly grabbing Quinn’s arm to not lose her.
Quinn looks over her shoulder with a big smile on her face. Rachel’s hand slips down Quinn’s arm until their fingers intertwine, and Rachel lets herself be pulled through the dancing masses.
Then, the crowd spits them out, and a door closes behind them, muting the music considerably. A wall of mirrors greets them, and Rachel has to lean against one of the sinks taking in how much the stalls behind them sway in the reflection. But Quinn’s hand is steady in hers, and she gives it a squeeze. They make eye contact in the mirror, briefly, before someone catches their attention, noisily stumbling out of one of the stalls, and glances at their hands with a knowing grin. The weight of Quinn’s palm immediately drops from Rachel’s. For a moment, Quinn looks sober.
Rachel’s pulse quickens. She all but jumps into one of the stalls, slamming the door shut behind herself.
She hears Quinn enter a stall and then leave it a minute later, but remains frozen in hers. She stares at her hand, the one that had been in Quinn’s, and can’t compute why any of this feels so substantial all of a sudden. Rachel is too drunk to analyse Quinn being weird, so she finally gets out of her stall, eyes cast to the floor.
She washes her hands and glances up, and there is Quinn, leaning close to the mirror, fixing her lipstick. Oh.
Rachel stares.
Rachel gapes, she knows this, but her face isn’t friends with her brain right now, so she gapes at Quinn, at Quinn’s red, red lips, at how her mouth makes an O as her lipstick retraces it. Quinn is focused, and now even Rachel’s drunk mind is able to differentiate between this woman in the mirror and the party girl that she’d seen on the dance floor.
“Are you really having fun?” Rachel blurts out.
Quinn leans back from the mirror, drops her lipstick into her purse.
“Of course, Rachel,” she slurs, “aren’t you?”
“It’s just...” She doesn’t even know what she’s trying to say. “This doesn’t really seem like you.”
Quinn blinks at her and grabs hold of the sink to steady herself. “What part?” she asks, and for some reason, that has Rachel’s head spinning even more than before.
She tries to think of something other than holding my hand like that in a place like this but it preoccupies her hazy mind for a silly moment, and Rachel looks down nervously. She settles for, “The woo-ing?”
Quinn hums a laugh. “We all pretend to be someone we’re not sometimes, don’t we, Rachel? You of all people should know.”
Rachel just stares, her gaze falling to Quinn’s freshly reddened lips again.
“It’s more fun that way,” Quinn continues. “Just being whoever out there. I’m more fun that way.”
“You don’t have to pretend,” Rachel replies, her feet taking a step towards Quinn that her head didn’t plan. Quinn’s eyes are wide. “You’re so fun,” Rachel smiles, and feels thoroughly stupid. Quinn is shaking her head, raising her eyebrows. Rachel blinks up at her from under heavy lids, and Quinn laughs a genuine laugh.
“Don’t give me that, Goldberg, come on, let’s go back out there and have fun .”
Rachel’s stomach tumbles, images of Quinn dancing for her, with her, manifesting and taking over Rachel’s thoughts. Quinn holds the door open, re-immersing them in noise. The music dulls everything, and Rachel barely notices herself reaching for Quinn’s hand as she passes her, now Rachel being the one dragging Quinn across the dance floor.
Finding Jay is completely hopeless. Rachel doesn’t mind, if she’s honest. Quinn has intertwined their fingers again.
They find a spot where the crowd isn’t too thick to dance, and dance.
Rachel hasn’t let go of Quinn’s hand.
And Quinn moves differently now, closes her eyes every now and then, letting her head roll back. Rachel stares at her exposed neck, imagines attaching her mouth to it. It tugs at something deep in her stomach. She blames the alcohol, of course. And that lipstick. And Quinn’s hand in hers.
Next to them, two girls are making out, and Rachel catches Quinn’s hooded gaze flickering towards them. Rachel looks, too. Looks back at Quinn, and swallows.
Someone pushes Quinn and she falls against Rachel, who moves both hands to Quinn’s hips to catch her. They’re laughing, and then they’re dancing closer, with Rachel’s hands glued to Quinn, shifting up and down ever so slightly. Even in the midst of all this sweat and alcohol, she can smell Quinn’s perfume. Blindly, she drags Quinn closer.
Someone brushes against Rachel from behind. She glances over her shoulder. A beautiful stranger winks at her, puts her hands on Rachel’s hips. It has Rachel’s stomach twisting in so many different ways. She starts feeling claustrophobic, trapped between Quinn and this girl, and then Quinn’s arms come up to rest on her shoulders and her throat constricts and this is all too much. Quinn’s eyes go cold and shoot daggers behind Rachel until the girl leaves, finally, and Rachel gasps.
She thinks she can hear something like “My girl!” yelled over her shoulder, but the music swallows most of Quinn’s voice. Rachel’s heart flutters out her throat with nervous energy.
Breathlessly, she lets herself remain caught in Quinn’s hold. The woman leans back a little, chin tipped down, and gives Rachel a smile. “You weren’t enjoying that, right?” Quinn asks, a hint of insecurity audible even through all the noise.
Rachel shakes her head, runs her hands up Quinn’s sides. “No, this.”
Quinn doesn’t break eye contact.
Everything is spinning. Rachel sees a guy with a coke pen in her periphery and thinks, this is the highest she’s ever felt, no drugs involved. This is heaven.
She thinks about kissing Quinn, then. She lets herself look at Quinn’s mouth again, lets herself feel the way her heartbeat reacts. And they’re drunk, dancing, arms around each other, in a gay club. There really isn’t any way to justify not kissing Quinn, right now.
But Rachel feels her whole body shaking as the thought turns into plan. Even drunk, even like this, she’s terrified. This is Quinn, after all. This is Quinn, and she’s just Rachel, and this is Quinn .
The grin she’s trying to give Quinn quickly morphs into a laugh, and Quinn is laughing back like she just knows.
Confetti cannons go off around them. From somewhere, balloons are released into the air. Everyone on the dancefloor is screaming and with an explosion of reckless emotion, Rachel kisses Quinn on the mouth, once. This could still be excused as friendly, Rachel thinks in a panic, kissing Quinn’s cheek next in an attempt to lighten the weight of the moment that has just started crushing her ribcage.
Quinn’s arms tighten around Rachel’s shoulders.
Quinn’s cheek is pressed to Rachel’s, heated skin to heated skin.
Quinn’s face shifts, pressing closer, nose sliding over Rachel’s cheekbone.
Rachel is torn between reading this as pushing closer and pushing away, so she plays it safe and leans back. Which, oh god, means eye contact. Quinn’s pupils are blown. There is something very distant about the look on Quinn’s face, and it burns. Clouds of drunkenness seem to veil her eyes. Rachel’s hands have come to sit low on Quinn’s hips, she realises, and without conscious thought, she grips her harder. A waft of air-conditioned coldness blows across the dance floor and for a second, Quinn’s eyes go clear, and sharp, and wild. Quinn’s brows knit together, and with a frown, she pulls Rachel back in.
Quinn kisses her open-mouthed and slow. Rachel can feel the sticky smear of Quinn’s lipstick on her own mouth. She licks at Quinn’s upper lip and feels Quinn sharply exhaling hot air, breathes it in. They pull at each other, fronts colliding, moving to the beat of music they can barely hear at this point with cotton softness cushioning their brains.
And suddenly, Rachel is painfully aware of her drunken state. The idea that she might not remember this in the morning has her stomach dropping. She pulls back with a gasp.
She grips the back of Quinn’s head, puts her mouth to her ear and yells, “Why did you do that?”
Leaning back, she sees Quinn staring, with her mouth agape, lipstick almost entirely gone.
“What? You did it first!”
They keep staring, both trying to come up with fault, with blame, but there is a smudge of red above Quinn’s mouth and Rachel wipes a thumb over it. And leans back in.