Free The Kiss Off by Sarah Billington

and he was going off. It was like the whole room was all moving together, throbbing with the beat which I could feel in my heart and stomach and vibrating all over me.
    “What do you think? Grab a drink?” I asked. Mads nodded. We both looked around.
    “Where do we…there!” Mads pointed over to the other side of the dark club, where there was a bar with fluoro lighting along the length of it and a mirror behind shelves containing what looked like hundreds of bottles of alcohol. We grabbed each other’s hand and I took a deep breath before stepping onto the dance floor to squeeze our way through to the bar. We squeezed past a waitress with a tray of shots held high, she looked stiff and tense as she tried to manoeuvre slowly and carefully through the throng of bouncy clubbers. As I stepped across the dance floor, my shoe gripped a little too well to a couple of sticky spots on the floor, where clearly drinks had been spilled already. It would be fun cleaning that up tomorrow.
    “Wait,” Mads yelled at me in the crowd and she bent down to the floor for a second. She came back up, squealing and jumping up and down. In her hand, she held a golden ticket – someone’s discarded yellow wrist band. She immediately fastened it around her wrist, licked her fingers and started scrubbing the black ink from the back of her hand. It wasn’t coming off, just smudging a little so she slid the wrist band onto her other wrist, looked at me and wiggled her eyebrows with a smile.
    “It’s party time!”
    We got to the bar and there was a small huddle of older people clasping their martinis and cocktails tightly.
    “What can I get you?” The bartender asked.
    “Oh, um-”
    “I’ll have a Bacardi.” Mads said nonchalantly, flashing her wrist band. I stared at her, but she ignored me.
    “What flavor?” The bartender asked. He didn’t even blink an eye.
    Mads said “You choose for me” And then she winked. Winked!
    I pinched her. “What are you doing?” I turned around, looking for Dev, but we seemed to have lost the boys.
    I hissed in her ear as the bartender turned around to make her drink. “What about Dev?”
    “What about Dev?” Mads asked. “Oh please, like I- like he’d even go there,” she said, motioning to the bartender. “Call the cops!” She turned back around and flashed him a toothy smile as she handed him her money and picked up her glass.
    “Thanks,” she practically purred and stepped back from the bar and the crowd of people forming.
    “I’ll have the same,” I told him, though I didn’t have anything to flash. Any second now he was going to want to see my hand or wrist and I’d be busted. But he didn’t ask, didn’t look. He just turned around and made another rum and raspberry for a minor. Score!
    When I reached Mads, her drink was half gone.
    “Hey – this is really yum!” she said.
    I took a sip of my drink. Oh wow, yeah. It was good. “Yeah.”
    We clinked glasses. I was going to enjoy this, because I didn’t think I was going to get away with it again. At least Mads had the wrist band. Dev appeared shortly after and wrapped his hands around her waist, and he was soon followed by Drew and Ravi. Handing her their money, Mads got them a couple of beers and we hit the dance floor. The bartender didn’t even seem to be looking for her wrist band anymore, so it appeared we had a direct line to alcohol, an unexpected bonus of the evening.
    After a couple of drinks, Mads and the boys and I were feeling loose and were dancing like mental patients. Moshing to Madonna, and doing the sprinkler to LMFAO. We sang/screamed along to songs we knew, it was fun. We had a couple of random people join in, a couple of guys started dancing with us as we did the lawn mower and the shopping cart and that one guy was pretty badass at the robot, we were all cracking each other up. I never actually got their names. Hang on, that could have been what he said that time that I kept laughing and nodding at