He was twenty-four the time it all happened.
He was just sitting in the back of a club that smelled like expensive cologne and bad decisions, watching his friends completely lose their minds over women who were, objectively, everywhere.
The club was loud. The kind of loud that gets into your chest and stays there. Lights doing things that lights shouldn't do. Music that had abandoned the concept of melody entirely.
Ruaan sat in the corner booth with a cocktail he'd been nursing for forty minutes and his phone under the table.
His friends were gone. Not physically — they were right there, technically. But mentally, emotionally, and in every other way, they had departed the moment the women arrived. Jamal had two of them on his lap. Keston was whispering something into a girl's ear that made her laugh too loudly. Derek had simply disappeared into a dark corner with someone and hadn't been seen since.
