And she let herself be led through the crowd by her as she beelined her way through like she owned the place. People parted like the red sea at her command alone. But Milton Reimer didn't care for the blonde beauty, his eyes set on his friend's gelled hair moving amidst swaying hands and jumping heads in the distance. "Robin, where—"
"Not now," she hisses, turning sharply to face him. He looked exactly as she last left him. "Mingle. Drink armpit punch!"
Milton watched her disappear amidst the crowd with Monica Haring as they left the through-lounge to head up a set of stairs, laughing and talking amongst themselves all the while. But what he didn't see was the sight of them walking into Tina's bedroom and Robin closing the door.
"Are we allowed to be in here?" she asks unsurely. It was dim with nothing but a streak of moonlight gleaming through the window, but still dim enough that she saw the space for what it was. She could barely make out the beige and pink linear patterning of the walls, the vanity across the room and the elegant canopy bed with curtained drapes tied to their poles.
"Tina won't care," Monica threw herself down on the mattress and rested herself back onto her hands. "Although, she'll probably come up at some point with Jason Sanders, so we'll either have to hide under the bed," she points across the room as Robin stiffly sits down beside her, "in that closet or admit defeat and walk out."
"Dibs on the closet."
"You say that now but you'll get crazy claustrophobic in there, and I don't know how I feel about listening to them go at it for one whole minute."
"You can't give the guy a little more credit?" Robin's eyebrows push together. "I say two minutes at the very least."
"He can barely last on a basketball court for two seconds, I doubt he's any better in bed."
Robin rolls her eyes with a breath of a laugh, her eyes landing on the wall across the room. "Of course she has a Tom Cruise poster." His eyes were piercingly blue, even in the dark, and he had a sneering smirk of a smile with his top line of teeth on show. His hair was shiny, gelled and slick back in a much more merciful way that Robin's hair had been.
Monica's eyes followed Robin's across the room just a metre away from the door. "I know. I bullied her into the next century when she got it last month."
"Last month?" Robin almost exclaims, her focus flying to Monica.
"Uh-huh. The girl watches Risky Business once and doesn't know what to do with herself."
"I personally don't get it," Robin's eyes squint on Tom Cruise's eyes that were almost grey in the lightless room. "Rebecca De Mornay did way more for the movie with her hair than he did with his stupid glasses and annoying grin."
"His lack of pants and sliding across the floor to Bob Seger really didn't do it for you?"
"It was the nail in the coffin."
Monica's head tilted back with a laugh. "You're tough, Rob."
"Pragmatic," Robin corrects, trying not to flutter too hard at the thought of being nicknamed by her.
"Right, right," Monica sits up from the pressure on her hands. "How could I forget?"
Robin watched Monica turn her head to face the window, the faint chatter outside rumbling behind the glass. She looked entirely heavenly, just her side profile sparkling in the light of the moon. It felt impossible that she was right there next to her, existing in the same space as her—willingly. It felt impossible that she got to sit there and watch the moon kiss her skin and envy it selfishly.
"Why didn't you go with Billy?" Robin asks.
Monica's eyebrows furrowed, turning to face the girl next to her. "Because I'm with you."
"But you're still with him technically if you're hanging out." Robin didn't mean to sound so bitter, but she couldn't take it back, especially considering she didn't really want to.
"We have sex," Monica says plainly. "That's all that it is. He just..."
"Inevitably saw how amazing you are and decided he wanted more."
"He'll never be satisfied and I'm under no obligation to satisfy him," Monica shrugs, pursing her lips. "That's all."
"So, hypothetically he went home with someone else tonight..."
"It's his business," Monica says with all certainty and ease. She tilts her head. "He's cute but he's not that cute."
Robin knew she was only joking, she could tell by her smile, but she thought it all over. "I don't get how people do it."
Monica was concentrating on Robin just as hard as she concentrated on listening. Her eyes flickered between Robin's eyes and every other part of her face. The heart outline of it, her abundance of freckles, her straight nose, her rose-painted lips that she remembered more than she could see them in the darkness of Tina's bedroom. They looked soft.
"Do what?" Monica asks, finding Robin's eyes.
"Casual. Is that what you call it? Just no emotional tether."
"Coming from the girl that doesn't want a guy." Robin rolls her eyes. "Her words." Then she threw herself down on Tina's bed, extending her arms out flat beside her. She looked ultimately frozen as she stared up at the ceiling and nothing else.
Monica expected Robin to say something or move a muscle, but she barely even blinked. So, she laid back, too, her hands resting on top of one another on her abdomen, and for a long quiet moment that was all there was. Just two girls dressed up as people they weren't, staring at the ceiling of someone else's bedroom.
But suddenly Monica missed Robin's voice. She missed her nervous rambling and even her cackling laughter. No, she missed her cackling laughter especially because of the smile that came with it.
She rolled her head onto her right cheek, looking over at wide-eyed and silent Robin. "Why are we laying?" Monica whispers, smiling slightly.
Robin didn't move an inch but still answered. "My body feels too heavy."
"I hear gravity can do that sometimes," Monica quips, checking to see if she succeeded in making Robin smile, but she was unmoving. "We don't do it."
"What?" Robin asks.
"No emotional tether. I do like Billy." She looked up at the ceiling, too, embarrassed to admit what she was admitting out loud let alone to someone else's face. "A lot actually, it's repulsive. I think I could see myself falling in love with him if he wasn't such a piece of work."
Robin rolled her head onto her left cheek, her eyebrows drawing together. "How? What do you see in him?"
"We have real conversations. You know behind all of it there's an actual human being and he lets me see that. So, I care about him deeply but not in the kind of way that would ever amount to love."
"But you could fall in love, right?" Robin asks. "Under different circumstances with someone else?"
Monica smiles, turning her head to face Robin. She searched her eyes as best as she could in the dark, the breath of space between them making it easier, and nodded. "Yeah I could."
Their thinking occupied the silence as they just stared into one another's eyes.
"I could imagine you in love too," Monica adds.
Robin wasn't sure that she could imagine it herself. She wasn't sure that she had ever given it much thought outside of the world allowing her to love. "Really?"
"Oh absolutely," Monica's eyebrows cinched. Their voices were only loud enough for the both of them to hear. There was no music either of them had to shout over, no rowdy teenagers except for in muffled noises downstairs and on the other side of glass. "It's just in your nature I think."
"My nature?"
"Yeah. You're just so full of life. You've got a hell of a lot to give. I guess that's another reason why I was so surprised by your dating history."
"Or lack thereof."
Monica laughs. "You're such an idiot."
"The list of insults are really growing."
"They're not insults," Monica disputes. "You're an idiot in a good way. You're crazy in a good way. You're weird in a good way." She jolted her gently with her elbow, "It's why I like you so much."
Robin could have sworn time stopped at those very few words. "You like me?"
"You don't like me?"
"I think you're the most interesting and beautiful person that I've ever met," Robin spills in her momentary daze. And the second she caught her breath, she realised it wasn't time that stopped, just her heart, and she didn't know it but Monica's heart stopped too.
Her lips parted as she searched Robin's eyes, and every urge buried under the surface had released but all that was left for her to do was allow the muscles in her body to stop fighting them.
She blinked twice, then her eyes flickered to Robin's lips and Robin's eyes did the same. She had only spent the past four nights wondering what Monica's lips felt and tasted like.
Monica's head shifted to angle itself down and she slid her right hand out from underneath her left one, sitting it in the space between herself and Robin instead. Her chest rose and fell, long breathes expelling past her parted lips. But in spite of herself, she dragged her hand against the mattress, ever so slowly, her fingers stopping centimetres away from Robin's hand as they curled into her palm.
But the second a chant of Reed's name pierced through the stilled silence of the room, Monica's neck turned itself towards the window quick enough to get whiplash.
"Reed! Reed! Reed!"
Robin's eyes closed down hard, and lost in a new darkness behind her eyelids, she felt the presence of Monica beside her disappear. Her red heels clunked across the floor with each step it took towards the window, and she brushed aside the white lace curtains to look at the commotion outside.
Reed Wilson was trying his hand at the keg, most likely in attempt to overthrow Billy's latest so-called achievement. But he didn't last, the crowd outside erupting in a cacophony of loud boos.
Robin opened her eyes and sat up, focusing on the blonde's back. Her high head of curls and her bare shoulders.
"What an asshole," Monica says. When she turned around, she was smiling with her usual easygoing nonchalance like nothing had happened and it was all in Robin's head.
She sauntered over, her hips swaying with each step. "I should call on that rain-check with Billy before we're forced to figure out how tight that closet really is. Maybe even get some seconds of that armpit punch, huh?"
Robin knew exactly what this was and what was happening. Monica was silently asking behind her eyes to let this be less than nothing. Robin wasn't sure she was capable of that much, but she obliged and stood up.
"A wise women once said it's all part of the rush."
Monica laughed with a widely red-lipped smile, and any tension that had been wandering the air had filtered itself out the room.
But they headed downstairs anyhow, making their way through the teenagers still at it in the living space. And as they walked across the through-lounge, Robin stopped first and faced the kitchen where her suited-friend stood.
"I just spotted Milton," she says. "He's the one with the—"
"I'd recognise Dave Stewart from a mile away," Monica says the very minute he tried to scoop up some of the punch, only to end up getting most of the contents of his punch all over his blazer. "He looks cheerful."
Robin frowned at the pitiful sight of her friend moaning and whacking the alcohol off himself. "I should have never dragged him with me."
"Well, did you have a good time at least?" Monica turns, facing her body entirely towards Robin.
"A memorable one," Robin says.
Monica angled her head, quirking a brow, "For better or for worse?"
"Definitely for the better."
They both smiled at their little inside joke of sorts with the world still moving chaotically around them.
But it only took a single turn of Robin's head to notice Billy stood on the other side of the room with a few of his friends as he openly stared at the both of them and took a long and deep drag of his cigarette. "Your not-boyfriend's spotted you," she says.
Monica followed her eye-line and groaned. "Jesus, the guy's got blinkers on or something."
"Only for you."
"Ergh, god forbid." Monica began to make her way over. "Catch you later."
"Sure," Robin barely mutters, just watching the blonde walk away easily without looking back. Until she did.
"Oh, Robin," she walks back over, "in case I don't." Her lips formed a slanted smile. "For the record, same." Robin's eyebrows knit, and before she could ask what Monica meant, she said, "Only, you're the funniest person I've ever met, too." And it all made sense.
Robin felt her heart physically swell and Monica could see it written all over her face. Then she turned around without looking back for good this time and walked right over to Billy, resting her elbow on his shoulder as she took the cigarette out from his mouth and put it between her own lips.
Billy said something to her only. She said something back. And it was like even with his group of friends, Tommy Hagan, Owen Stuart and two other douches from their grade, it was only them. Two people looking directly at each other and ignoring everything else around them.
Suddenly, Robin was rocked a little on her feet by the shove of Steve Harrington budging right past with his head down. "Excuse you," Robin called after him, but received no sign of acknowledgement. "What a dingus."