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There are better places to be on a Saturday night than surrounded by drunk, sweaty 20-somethings in the most revealing costumes they could find.
There are also worse places, so Lockwood downs his drink and wishes that he hadn't worn so many layers. Between the trench coat and vest and the overlarge flannel borrowed from George, he was certainly well dressed for the brisk October night outside, but less so for a house party.
A drunk girl stumbles into him, and that's all the convincing it takes to get him to step out for some air. Perhaps naïvely, he expects to be alone – the garden is just as packed as the flat. He manages to find a quiet corner and leans against the brick of the building.
"Mind if I join you?" Ventures a voice a few moments later.
Lockwood cracks an eye open. There, haloed with light-leak from the party, stands a girl in a blue skirt suit, dark bob just brushing her shoulder pads.
"Be my guest."
The heat radiating off of her when she moves closer to him is jarring. He's still roasting from inside, but she's got to be running a fever or something with how warm she is.
"JD?” She asks, after a while.
"Excuse me?"
She points at his costume, and he bursts out an embarrassed laugh.
"Oh. Yeah. Veronica?"
"Yeah."
"Meant to be, then."
It's supposed to be a joke, but her cheeks flush a brilliant rosy shade and he can feel his ears brightening too.
"Sorry."
"No, agh." She offers a similar nervous chuckle. "It's fine. Just, my friend's been…"
Her face turns an even deeper shade of red as she trails off, and a kind of joyous nausea flares beneath his sternum.
"Well now you have to tell me," he says, a smile spreading across his face.
"You'll laugh!"
"Probably."
"Oh, that makes me want to tell you."
"No, come on. What's your friend been doing that makes you blush so much?" He pauses, then: "More than a friend, maybe?"
Now she laughs. "No. We tried for a little while, but we liked being friends more. Less stressful."
Lockwood nods like he understands, even though one of the pitfalls of having exactly one friend is that he's never experienced something like that. Something in him wants to understand, though, and badly. He wants her to teach him.
"What've they been doing, then?"
She gives him a cursory once-over, then sighs. "I've just had a rough week of classes, so my friend suggested…well, that I get drunk and find someone to make out with. It was just kinda…too fitting that someone dressed as JD would make a 'meant to be' joke, you know?" A pause, then she rushes: "Not that I'm suggesting we do anything."
And maybe it was whatever was in the punch talking, but Lockwood says, "I mean…if you're okay with it, I wouldn't be opposed."
There's a silence that feels a lot longer than it is, and just as he starts to wonder if he's somehow said something wrong, she says, "Why not?"
"Really?"
"Sure."
When he kisses her, he does it hesitantly – he wants to give her the option to back out. But she arches into him, almost like she's trying to make up for her height, and he's comfortable taking that as permission to go for it. Carefully, slowly, he crowds her against the wall. She slides a hand around the back of his head to wind her fingers in the hair there. He presses her closer in response, slipping his hand underneath her blazer. The heat of her skin seeps through her button-down like sand through a sieve and his fingers tingle, cold from the outside air. Her teeth catch on his bottom lip – accidentally? On purpose? He doesn't particularly care – and he would let her kiss him until neither of them have any breath left to gasp, but she does eventually break away, tipping her head back against the brick.
"I didn't catch your name," he says, breathlessly. She looks at him with wide blue eyes – it's not intentional, but something about them makes him feel searched.
He can't decide how he feels about that.
"Lucy," she replies. Her voice is like crystallised honey, sweet and rough and low. He wants to kiss it out of her mouth, taste the saccharine softness on his lips for hours to come. He wonders if it would be weird to tell her that.
Instead, he says, "I'm Lockwood."
"Nickname?" Lucy smooths the lapels of his coat, pausing halfway down and just holding the cloth.
"Last name. First name is Anthony."
"Anthony," she repeats, trying it out in her syrupy, aureate tone. This time he does kiss her, hiding the way his name on her tongue makes him feel with the confident press of his mouth against hers. It's languid this time, her hands tightening in his coat, and he pulls away just enough to speak against her lips.
"This party's dead. Wanna ditch it with me?"