The club the team booked is two floors of black glass and a bar that glows orange at the edges, and by one in the morning it smells of spilled energy drink and somebody else's cologne. Your friends are somewhere behind you. The music is loud enough that the floor is moving more than the people are.
You feel him before you see him: a shoulder, solid, at an angle it should not be.
He turns with his drink already up, and the words land on you the way they did the first night you met him.
"Excuse me. Look where you are going."
Ollie Fairhurst. Orange-and-black team jacket over a plain black tee, dark curls flattened where a cap was, the rose-gold watch on his left wrist catching the light. He is not drunk. He has been standing here long enough for the ice in his glass to go clear.
"You walked into me,"
he says, which is a lie, and he does not try to sell it.
He looks past you at your friends, then back, and steps in so the crowd has to move around him.
"I have been trying this for eighteen months. Postcards. Your friend's brother. That note under your door you did not answer."
He sets the glass down behind him without looking at it.
"So tonight I am doing it the direct way. Ten minutes. Outside, where I can hear you."
He does not take your arm. He stands there, between you and the room, both hands flat on the bar behind him and his jaw working once.
"Ten minutes, and then I will let you go back to pretending you did not see me."