Free The Insiders by J. Minter

ice cream and chocolate sauce off each other.” I tried a laugh, which came out sounding like I was choking on a chicken bone.
    â€œOr they’re just having sex.”
    â€œI was kidding,” I said.
    â€œI wasn’t.”
    â€œSometimes you’re a little too blasé to deal with.”
    â€œThat’s only ’cause you’re so naïve.”
    â€œThanks a lot!” I said, and maybe I said it a little loudly because a table full of people looked over. But they were all old, past thirty, so who cared? I knew that Liza had much, much better things to do on a Saturday night than chase after me and my guys, and that led me to knowing that she expected something from me that I didn’t want to give. But I couldn’t change how I felt. I didn’t want to be with her in the way I was last year, if it wasn’t going to be genuine.
    â€œThis is one of those nights that’s so awful that it makes me wonder why I live at all, you know?” I said. “Let’s just go.”
    â€œFine,” Liza said. She’d barely touched her drink.
    We began the slow walk home. Both our phones rang, but we ignored them. Saturday night was just heating up and the streets were busy. We passed Inca-Eight, a new club that had taken over the space where Suite Sixteen used to be, and even though the bouncers smiled at me and Liza, neither of us suggested that we shouldcheck it out.
    â€œI should get over you,” Liza said.
    â€œUm,” I said.
    â€œI know I sound matter of fact about it,” she said. “We were never wild enough together. And that was part of the problem, right?”
    â€œI guess.” I was never sure, though, what the problem was exactly. Everyone else thought we made sense together.
    We got to her street and she kissed me goodnight on the cheek and we stared at each other. Then she shook her head quickly and ran up her steps. And all I could yell after her was, “Let’s talk later!” Which was pretty funny when you thought about it, because we’d already said everything we’d been needing to say.

arno’s night goes on forever and ever
    â€œNow this is what I call a good time,” Randall Oddy said. He sat between Arno and Kelli on a black leather couch at Ringo, a new club on Little West Twelfth Street that was run by Ringo Starr’s stepdaughter Francesca in the basement of her town house. There were only forty people allowed in the club at any one time, and right then there were forty-one, including Francesca, who was playing old Beatles songs on the sound system, drinking absinthe, and chewing on the sleeve of a shirt that belonged to an eighteen-year-old soap opera actor who was passed out next to her.
    Kelli was drinking a pint can of Miller Lite that she’d bought at the corner store. She didn’t appear tired, or bored, or anything. Arno was staring at what he could see of her from around Randall’s sparrowlike chest. Randall was staring at her, too. They were both fighting back yawns. It was 4:45 A.M.
    Kelli pouted her lips, which she’d painted a pinkish white in the bathroom an hour earlier when she’d runinto the model Jamie King, who’d bought Kelli’s ankle bracelet off her for five hundred dollars. Now Jamie waved across at them from another couch on the other side of the room. But they could barely see her in the darkness—the whole place was done up in black leather and black velvet and all the lights were swathed in black silk. So except for the occasional flash of jewelry, it was really dark.
    â€œI wonder where Jonathan’s house is in relation to here,” Kelli said. She dragged her fingers through her hair.
    â€œYou don’t need to go back there,” Arno said. She looked around Randall to see him.
    â€œWhy not?”
    â€œYou can stay with me,” Arno said.
    â€œOr we can just stay out all night,” Randall said. “And we can all crash