Chapter 27

Complexity #27: A little rule-breaking seems like a good idea at the time.

James looks at the black lacy dress hanging on the door to the closet like it's personally offended him somehow.

"You're wearing that?"

"What's wrong with it?" I ask, confused by his reaction. I've only just gotten out of the shower, a dressing gown wrapped around my body as I walk up beside him.

"Nothing, it's just… I mean, it's a little short, isn't it?" he replies apprehensively, his eyes dragging over it once more.

"And since when have you cared about that?"

"Some guy is definitely going to try to take you home in that."

I shrug. "I mean, maybe, yeah, but I'm not going to let him. The whole point of a hen party is getting drunk with the girls, not picking up some random dude. I'm not even the one having strippers at my party."

He gives me a half-hearted glare. "That was Freddy's doing, not mine, you know that. And he already paid the deposit so I couldn't say no."

I laugh at that, letting my hair down out of the towel it's wrapped up in. "Yes, I know. But if I'm not freaking out about that, you have no right to be freaking out about my dress."

"I just want you to wear that when I'm going out with you," he says, almost grumpily.

"I can wear it a second time, if that'll make you happy," I tell him.

He thinks on that for a second. "Oddly enough, I think that would make me happy. Also, you know, don't let any random bloke take you home tonight."

I scoff at that. "I think Dom would actually kill me if I tried to leave my own hen party early. She's been planning this thing for weeks - honestly, I think she's put more effort into this than she did into the celebration for her and Rajhi making the National Team."

And that celebration had been absolutely insane - apparently Dom and Rajhi aren't the only members of the Wasps who can drink the rest of us mere mortals under the table. Even Jameswoke up with a vicious hangover the next morning, and I'm pretty sure Freddy and Caroline ended up a solid three towns over somehow.

"I'm sure it'll be one to remember," he tells me, then laughs. "Or, maybe to one to… not-remember, I suppose."

"Something along those lines," I say with a smile, drying my hair with a quick flick of my wand.

James gets ready much faster than I do, looking exceptionally fit in a dark red button-down and black jeans. He kisses me goodbye before leaving to go over to Fred's place, which is apparently ground zero for his stag party tonight.

The fact that both of our parties ended up on the same night was pure coincidence - it just so happened to be the night that worked best for my entire side of the wedding party as well as his. Although I suppose it works out kind of well this way, because then neither of us is left sitting at home alone for the whole night - we've both got our own thing going.

I put on the very same dress James had been glaring at not too long ago - his observation that it's exceptionally short wasn't an incorrect one. And paired with some black stilettos, my legs seem to go on for days - something I'm quite satisfied with when I study my reflection.

I know the stylish factor of it is probably going to be ruined with whatever obnoxious neon-coloured sash Dom has picked out for me to wear all night, but it's good for now.

Once I'm satisfied with my reflection, I Apparate on the spot, and when I open my eyes, I'm at the London penthouse Dom rented for the night. I knock on the door, and when it opens, a shot glass is shoved into my hand before I can even step into the doorway.

"Shot required for entry," Dom tells me, beaming at me and holding up a shot of her own.

And so, without even questioning what it is she's just handed me, I down it in one go. It tastes like death, but the buzz hits almost instantaneously.

"I hope you're not planning on doing that when every person arrives," I tell her, stepping through the doorway.

She laughs. "No, that was only for the guest of honour. I've got a sash and a tiara for you, by the way."

Of course she does.

She disappears from the room, then comes back bearing a glitter-covered black sash and impossibly sparkly tiara. Which is exactly the sort of thing I'd expected, although I do greatly appreciate that she went with black instead of some blindingly bright hot pink.

I put the sash on and let her place the tiara on my head, and almost as soon as she does, there's another knock on her front door.

"Originally you were supposed to get here a full half hour before everyone else, so that you'd be nice and tipsy by the time everyone arrived," Dom tells me as she walks to the front door. "Of course, I probably should've included your perpetual lateness in my calculations."

"It's not that perpetual," I retort, helping myself to whatever cocktail she has mixed up.

"No, I'd say it's pretty damn perpetual," Caroline replies, stepping into the room and giving me a knowing look.

I take a sip of my drink. "Rude."

"Honest," she replies with a shrug, before helping herself to a drink as well.

It doesn't take long until the apartment is entirely overrun with people, with music blasting at full volume and the drink stock significantly dented.

I've firmly crossed the threshold of tipsiness, and it doesn't help that any time I finish a drink, another one is very promptly shoved into my hand. And then I drink that one too.

Despite that, I'm still doing my best to maintain actual conversations with people - I can fully succumb to drunken stupidity and end up dancing on a table once we're at the actual bar, but while Rose is telling me all about planning her move is probably not the best time for it.

"As soon as Scorp gets a long weekend at work, we're going to go find a flat properly - because right now I've just got a shitty little temporary place for the first month or so of training, and it's hardly big enough for the both of us," she says, before taking another sip of her drink.

"How's his job search going?"

Rose shrugs. "I think he's more or less resigned to doing freelance work for the time being. Everyone needs a copywriter or an editor as a one-off every now and again, so it's not like he'll be short on opportunities."

"Yeah, that makes sense," I nod.

"Honestly, I'm just excited to finally be settled somewhere, you know?" she tells me. "I've just been in school or in short-term positions for so long, and I'm excited to finally just be somewhere where it's like 'yes, you can stay here as long as you want and you don't need to constantly be thinking about your next steps.' I'm sure you get that with the Auror Office - I mean, you've basically got a job there for life, right?"

A wholly uninvited sense of dread rolls over me, completely out of the blue. It's the first time it's happened, the first time that I've ever felt something like that about working at the Auror Office. Maybe because of the implication that I'll be there for the rest of my career; I've always kind of held that thought at the back of my mind, knowing that I could theoretically work there up until the day I retire, and I've always thought that's what I wanted.

The fact that I'm not so sure I want that anymore is an entirely unexpected and new revelation.

I have to temper that reaction, because god, the middle of a party is absolutely not the place to start having those thoughts. I can deal with them and the resulting identity crisis later, when I'm not half-drunk and trying to have a fun girl's night.

"Yeah, I guess I do," is what I eventually manage, and I'm saved from having to think about it any more by the sound of a bottle of champagne popping in the kitchen.

"Abby!" I recognise the voice as Amelie's. "Get in here!"

"I haven't had enough to drink so far tonight, it seems," I tell Rose, rolling my eyes good-naturedly.

She grins. "Of course not. Go down some champagne and rectify that."

She turns to join Lily and Roxanne's conversation, and I head into the kitchen before someone comes over and drags me in there themselves.

I'm not sure what I was expecting to find in the kitchen, but Amelie, Molly, Dom, and Caroline standing around a pyramid of hovering champagne glasses wasn't quite it.

"We've invented a new drinking game," Caroline announces proudly, before holding up a plastic ring. "We're taking turns trying to get this in one of the glasses - if you get it, you get to pick someone to drink."

"Oh, and I'm in here so that everyone can pick me to drink, yeah?"

Molly tries to deny it, meanwhile Dom just tries to defend it. "The whole point of this is a last hurrah, you know? Before you descend into responsible married life."

I scoff at that. "Have you met James? If anything, he makes me less responsible. I can guarantee this isn't the last time I'll be getting drunk in my lifetime."

"It's the principle of the thing," she replies. "But fine, I promise I won't pick you every time - I want everyone here plastered by the time we go out to the bars, not just you."

And honestly, I think that's the best I'm going to get. Dom's absolutely the biggest threat in this game anyways - professional Quidditch means that she's always able to completely destroy the rest of us in any sort of aim-based drinking game.

Caroline holds the plastic ring out to me and I take my first shot. And, much to my own surprise, it actually lands in one of the glasses.

I look over at Dom, grinning. "Yeah, that one's all you."

"It's what I deserve," she responds, before pulling the glass from the stack and chugging it all in one go.

We keep going at it until all the glasses are gone, at which point the number of participants in the game has practically doubled and the champagne has - much to my surprise - been doled out almost evenly.

It doesn't mean I'm not drunk, it just means at least I'm not the only one.

After another hour or so of pregaming and a total depletion of the alcohol, I finally decide that we should make a move to a bar. I'm letting Dom have full control of where we go, but now that we're out of drinks, I'm impatient to get there.

She doesn't disappoint. The place that she's picked - I don't get a chance to read the sign before we go in - is clearly a popular spot, given the line stretching outside the club, and she's clearly made prior arrangements, given the fact that she walks straight up to the bouncer and he lets us skip the line immediately.

As soon as we step foot inside, my vision is instantly filled with bright, flashing colours. It takes me a moment to adjust to it, but as soon as I do, I survey the expansive room. The dancefloor is filled with bodies, the music is so loud it's shaking the floor, and there's a clearly visible VIP section sitting above the din at the very back.

Which, naturally, Dom marches us straight towards.

With another smile and wink at a bouncer, Dom gets us in there too, and beelines straight to a table marked off with her name.

"You really went all out," I tell her, taking a seat on the plush velvet sofa.

She grins, taking the seat next to me as everyone else in our party files into the VIP area as well. "Yeah, well, making the National Team came with a nice hefty bonus check, and this seemed like a good way to spend it."

"You are, quite literally, the best party planner I could've asked for."

"I know," she replies, looking rather smug.

We all order our drinks, and when they arrive, they're all in a bright array of colours, all glowing and glittering in some way or another.

"It's so pretty," Roxanne announces, giggling to herself about her sparkling purple drink.

"Oh god, the young ones are completely gone," Molly says, laughing brightly in a way that suggests she's also completely gone.

I'm only allowed to lounge on the couch until I've finished my first drink - at which point, Dom grabs my arm and demands that we go dance. And I'm more than happy to oblige her; something about the glittering drink I've just downed has given me a boost of energy, and the dancefloor below us looks like something out of a dream.

We're halfway down the stairs to the dancefloor when she stops abruptly, and I have to grab onto the handrail to avoid colliding with her.

"Fuck," Dom says, and I turn in the direction of what she's looking at. "We have the whole fucking city and then some, and they still end up at the same place as us?"

I see Freddy first, and then quickly realise that the entire group of boys is walking into the club. Part of me instinctively wants to start searching for James amongst the group - if only because I'm drunk and finding him is more or less my automatic inclination as soon as I've had a few drinks anyways - but the other part of me reminds myself that the whole point of tonight is not being with James.

Self-control. I can maintain some of that.

"This club is huge, I think we can probably manage to keep our distance, especially with our own table," I tell her, looking away. "Come on, I thought we were going to dance."

She glares at them for just a bit longer, before seeming to resign herself and turning back to me. "Alright, yes, let's go dance and keep you far away from your fiancé."

The rest of the party follows the two of us out onto the dancefloor not long after, someone hands me another drink, and I let myself get lost in all of it. The bright lights and pounding music feel like a dream, and I find myself laughing with the group of girls at things that aren't even funny.

It feels like a perfect night.

And there's no sense of melancholy to it either - because like I'd pointed out to Dom, this isn't the last night like this. I'm not losing this part of myself any time soon, regardless of what a ring on my finger might suggest.

But if we'd thought none of the boys were ever alerted to the fact that they ended up at the same club as us, we were wrong. Freddy makes an appearance on the dancefloor with us at one point, clearly a little drunk and seeking out his girlfriend as a result, and Caroline ends up physically shooing him away.

I catch a glimpse of James across the way - his hair's messily slicked back, his sleeves are rolled up to his elbows, and one of the top buttons on his shirt has come undone.

Merlin, he's hot.

He looks over in my direction, and our eyes lock. I feel warm - even warmer than I already was as a result of dancing on a crowded club floor, and I give him a flirtatious smile before turning my attention back to the girls.

It's annoyingly harder not to think about him than it should be.

I shift my position in the group, so that I'm not facing him anymore and not letting myself stare at him for any longer, because it seems that's the only way I'll maintain my self-control.

Barring that last little shred of discipline I've got left in me, I'd probably be snogging him against the back wall of the club right now.

Which is… not a great mental image for maintaining said discipline.

"I'm going to go get a drink," I tell Molly and Caroline - the two people closest to me - before making my way off of the dance floor and over to the bar. I could theoretically go back up to our table to order it, but I don't want to bother with stairs right now, so I decide to just go to the bar on the bottom floor instead.

There's a cluster of people all waiting to place their drink orders, so I join them and wait, all the way until I'm up at the front.

While I'm standing at the bar waiting for the bartender to come my way, I feel the sudden presence of someone's hand on my hip and a body pressed into the back of mine and I freeze. But before I can get my senses back enough to slap it away or otherwise react, there's an unmistakable voice in my ear.

"Hello, love," James says, just barely audible in the din of the club.

"Merlin, James, you scared me," I reply, but I lean back into him despite the bite of my words. He's warm and familiar, and I'm so very drunk. "You can't just walk up behind me in the middle of a club like that - I thought you were some random bloke trying to feel me up at first."

"I'm sorry, babe," he murmurs against my skin, brushing his lips against the skin just below my ear in a way that suggests he's not really feeling all that remorseful right about now. Just the opposite, really.

"You know, I think this is - ah - probably against the rules of these sorts of things," I tell him, doing a truly terrible job of putting any sort of conviction behind my words as I tilt my head farther to the side, giving him better access as he sucks at the sensitive skin on my neck. His hand drifts down from my hip, toying with the short hem of my dress and dipping his fingers underneath it. "We're not supposed to be with each other right now."

With the bass beating loudly in my ears and the alcohol flowing through my veins, everything feels intensified and, god, absolutely incredible. I practically whimper when he removes his lips from his neck to answer me, the sudden absence of his touch acute.

"That's half the fun of it, isn't it?" I turn my head to see him grinning wickedly, a wild sparkle in his eyes as they lock with mine.

And that? That's when I know I'm done for.

Sneaking out of the club without anyone noticing and getting home is a bit of a blur - I'm too distracted by James' hands and his lips wandering over my body to care much about the specifics, but I'm desperately impatient by the time we make it through our front door, my hands fumbling at the buttons on his shirt and trying to get the thing off of him as fast as possible.

I succeed about halfway to the staircase, shoving it off his shoulders just after he manages to unzip the back of my dress.

"I was right, by the way," he murmurs against my skin, placing a kiss just below my ear. "Some guy did try to take you home in this dress."

"Somehow I feel like he would've tried to take me home regardless," I reply, helping him in the process of shimmying my skintight dress off of my body.

"That's also correct." He kisses me again.

I pull away from him when we get to the bottom of the staircase, because his hands are wandering and it's proving wildly distracting. "If you keep doing that while we're trying to go up the stairs, we're both going to end up falling."

"Hurry on up those stairs then," he replies, letting me go.

And so I do, James following close behind, so that as soon as I reach the top of the stairs he's right there with me, pulling me into the bedroom with minimal patience.

We fall into bed gracelessly, too focused on each other to really worry about anything else. My calf bangs into the footboard and James nearly rolls us both off the bed when he tries to pull me on top of him, but the imperfections of the situation are entirely side-swiped by the fact that I desperately need him - all of him - right now.

The rest of our clothes - his trousers, my bra, his pants, my knickers - all get abandoned fairly quickly, and when he presses into me and swears loudly against my skin, I wonder how the hell I managed to go three whole months without this.

I can't even remember why I went three months without this.

"I love you, I love you, I love you," he says repeatedly, almost like a prayer, as he regains his composure and finds a steady rhythm.

"I love you too," I reply breathlessly, kissing every single inch of him I can reach, letting him consume my every conscious thought.

Self-control is overrated anyways.

Sneak peek of chapter 28…

He just shrugs, before changing the subject completely. "You're not mad at me, are you?"

I don't follow his train of thought, so I give him a questioning look. "Why would I be mad at you?"

"Because we broke your rule," he answers.

Oh. That.