"I... I couldn't take it anymore."
She shook her head in confusion. "What?"
He rose his finger to her nose, flicked it, and grinned.
Giselle stared at him ridiculously, regretting the bet she'd won. "What harm could it be?" she'd said when Chris opposed her idea of club-search earlier that day. "We'd be in and out in a matter of minutes."
"What now?" she wondered out loud.
A drunk Chris defeated the purpose of being at the club, as ironic as it was, because this state seemed to strip him of all his charms. And as bad as he already was at relationships, this was an additional blow to any advancements she wanted him to make today. It wasn't as dramatic as she was making it, she knew that, but what was the fun in life without a little overreaction?
Chris sat on a stool beside hers, both hands in his lap. He turned toward the bar behind them and gestured for the bartender to come.
He said, "A tequila shot, please." She gaped at him, and he shrugged at her. "It's Sunday tomorrow."
Giselle turned to the bartender as well. "He will not be having any more of that." The man raised his hands in surrender and moved on to the guy clad in purple who licked a slice of potato and took a shot, his whole body vibrating at the impact. She cringed, asking herself why anyone would ever wanna do that with a potato, then ignored him and turned to Chris. "It's Friday tomorrow, not Sunday, idiot. And are you serious? We're here to find you a girl—"
"Which I don't want."
"But no, you can't be single for the rest of your life!" she almost whined.
"It's really not that serious, Pigtails."
She huffed. "Don't call me that. And do you plan on never dating? Because, frankly, you don't seem too eager..." She gasped mockingly. "You're gay."
He flicked the air beside her head a few times, then said, "Aha!" when he managed to hit her forehead. "It's not like I've never dated."
She rolled her eyes. "Yeah, you have, and it has always ended up in a disaster."
"Maybe girls don't like nice men," he mumbled.
"Someone thinks too highly of themselves."
It's like he wasn't even listening to her. "I already have a girl, you know," said Chris, "and she's enough."
She met his eyes with her narrowed ones. "I find that hard to believe. Who's the lucky lady?"
His lips twitched up. "You."
Her lips stretched in a warm smile. "Yes, I'm your best girl. But we gotta find you a girlfriend. Don't you wanna get married one day? You're too lonely for my liking." She scrunched up her nose at him.
Chris mimicked her mockingly.
"No?" She faked a gasp. "Whatever will the people say?" And then she laughed at the absurdity because that was the last thing they cared about.
He was right, though. It really wasn't that serious. A small part of the reason she wanted to make sure Chris had a girlfriend, she reasoned, was so he could finally ease up to the idea of her relationship with Xavier, who lived in Petrichor. It had been a year since they'd started dating, and Chris still hadn't warmed up to him.
He scoffed at her exclamation. She grinned as her eyes moved around the packed room of partiers once again to see if any girl was waiting for someone to buy her a drink.
Since his past relationships were all disastrous, this had become a game for them in recent months. Whenever she was bored, she'd find ways to set him up with someone, though it never worked out the way she wanted. Chris was set on denying to date any girl Giselle chose for him.
They'd exhausted all the other locations, and this club was the last place she'd brought him to accomplish her goal. If this failed, she was giving up.
Red caught her eye again as she searched the mass. A girl sat alone in the farthest corner of the club. The entire time Giselle had sat there, waiting for Chris, the girl in red kept herself immersed in her phone, looking bored and uninterested in her surroundings.
"Chris?" she called, distracted.
But he was more distracted than she. "Hmm?"