“Afraid not, ptichka. I need you awake and conscious in my bed tonight.”
He accompanies the words with a squeeze of my knee, and the guys guffaw as I fight a blush. Peter is completely unapologetic about his desire for me, using every opportunity he gets to touch me and otherwise lay claim to me—in private or in public. My bandmates are convinced we fuck like rabbits all the time, and it’s true.
My husband has the stamina of a teenage boy on Viagra.
Still laughing, the guys down the vodka, and Peter immediately orders another round. I eye him with some confusion—I’ve never seen him drink so heavily—but I figure he’s just letting off a little steam after a long week.
Two more rounds of vodka shots later, though, I realize something else is going on. For one thing, I’m pretty sure Peter spilled his last shot on the floor. My bandmates were too drunk to notice, but I’m only lightly buzzed and I saw him tip the glass to the side right before he took the shot with them.
It’s as if Peter is deliberately trying to get them plastered.
After another half hour and three more rounds of shots, my suspicion solidifies into certainty. Rory and Simon are now ten sheets to the wind, with Rory singing an Irish ballad and Simon pitching in off-key, while Phil is deep into a philosophical treatise on the randomness of life and reversion to the mean. Peter is acting like he’s equally drunk and fully into Phil’s ramblings, but to me, it’s obvious that my husband is manipulating the conversation—to what end, though, I don’t know.
“And so you see, a movie studio CEO could think he has the golden touch with blockbusters, but really, he’s just on a winning streak,” Phil slurs, and Peter nods, as though it all makes sense. “You think you have it made, but it’s just luck, man. Just fucking luck. And then bam! The pendulum swings the other way. Because it’s all random and reverts to the fucking mean. We don’t get that as humans—we think we have control ’cause we see a pattern—but it’s all bullshit. Life is like a rusted-out pendulum in an earthquake, swinging this way and that, sometimes getting stuck on an upswing. And sometimes—sometimes your whole life is on an upswing, until a tremor shakes that rust loose.” He shakes his head mournfully, and I decide he’s definitely had enough.
I don’t know what Peter’s agenda is, but alcohol poisoning is no joke.
Leaning over, I touch my husband’s hand and pitch my voice low. “Let’s go home. I’m getting sleepy.”
He turns up his palm and gently squeezes my hand, his eyes completely sober even as his lips curve in a seemingly tipsy smile. “Just a little longer, my love. Phil here has a point.”
I frown, confused. “He does?”
“Oh, yeah,” Phil slurs. “You just don’t see it ’cause you can’t see it. You can’t even imagine it. No human can, because our minds aren’t capable of coming up with truly random patterns. And when algorithms do it for us, we don’t believe they’re random. Like the random shuffle on your music player? Not random. If it were, you’d sometimes get the same song two, three, four times in a row, and that does not seem random to us. That seems like a song is being deliberately chosen, like there’s a purpose behind it, but that’s false. It’s just math, just programming. And so—”
“So they tweaked the algorithm, removing true randomness to make it seem more random,” Peter says, sounding drunkenly serious as he plays with my fingers. “I hear you, man. It’s crazy.”
Phil bobs his head. “Isn’t it? I tell Marsha this all the time, but she doesn’t believe it. She doesn’t get that sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence, that something can be simply random. Like take you and Sara. There was some bad guy named Peter in her past, and Marsha thinks it’s you, even though the FBI told her—they outright told her—that it’s not. Like what makes more sense: that you’re a wanted killer who for some weird reason is allowed to roam free, or that there might’ve been two Peters in Sara’s life? It’s like a song that comes up twice—hard to believe, but genuinely random. I mean, there is that one FBI guy who’s still talking to her, but I’m pretty sure he’s just hitting on her, the asshole.”
I freeze, my hand tensing in Peter’s grasp as my husband chuckles and shakes his head, all but oozing male sympathy. “Wow. Asshole indeed. What’s the guy’s name?”
“Tyson or something like that.” Phil hiccups and loudly yawns. “Rhymes with bison.”
Shit. My heart hammers in my chest as Peter glances at me, his gaze hard and unreadable. Has he suspected something like this all along? Is that why he’s been plying Phil—and by default, Rory and Simon—with alcohol all night?