Chloe was, she supposed, someone who might be referred to as "quiet"... at least by the standards of the students with whom she shared a flat.
They went out at least three times a week, usually to the campus nightclub (though, every so often, they'd venture into town to go to a "real" club). Before going out they would spend several hours in the kitchen, pre-drinking and playing noisy, chaotic games that almost always resulted in something getting broken. After going out they would return home at three in the morning, talking in hushed voices that were somehow louder than their normal voices.
After a few gallant outings during Fresher's Week, Chloe had decided that clubbing wasn't for her. After briefly trying to persuade her otherwise, her flatmates accepted this. They'd invite her out to the pub every so often, but it was given, now, that if they were going out out, Chloe would be staying at home.
This situation now put her at a frustrating disadvantage. What she wanted to do, Chloe thought to herself, was hook up with a boy. And hooking up was something that mostly happened at nightclubs. That was certainly how her flatmates managed it. In fact, some of her flatmates were enviably good at it.
Kate, for example. Kate was the girl in the room next door to Chloe, and Kate was particularly good at attracting the attention of broad-shouldered boys with posh accents and wet-looking hair. At least once a week, it seemed, she would return from a night out with one of them following along in her wake.
Chloe was under no illusion that these boys were just friends. They were Kate's conquests, or she theirs. Chloe knew this because her room shared a thin cinder block wall with Kate's room. When Kate hooked up with a boy, Chloe could hear everything.
The noises Kate made were almost always the same -- exaggerated, tortured, porny moans that somehow, though infuriatingly fake, would turn Chloe on. The boys would grunt, mostly -- sometimes low, satisfied grunts and sometimes a high and desperate ones.
Kate would always apologise in the morning. "I'm sorry," she'd say. "Were we too loud? Oh gawd. SO embarrassing. We just got... you know... a bit carried away."
And though she blushed while apologising, Chloe couldn't help but feel that Kate was somehow bragging -- somehow showing off to her, to Chloe (who had never brought a boy back to her narrow little halls bedroom, and had never moaned theatrically underneath a different boy two nights in a row, and who in fact had never had a boy so much as buy her a drink).
The ease with which Kate managed to bring attractive specimens home with her made Chloe feel like something of an ugly duckling by comparison. Or... not ugly, as such, but ungainly. Kate knew exactly what she was doing. Boys were effortless for her.
Chloe had witnessed this in the first few chaotic weeks of term when she had ventured out with the group. She'd watched Kate be approached by a seemingly-endless stream of boys, and watched as she flirted with those she liked, dismissed those she didn't, and steadily harvested drinks and fawning compliments and attention all night long.
It was something which had hardly bothered Chloe at the time. Now, however, she felt almost sick with envy at the thought of how easily Kate would be able to source a willing cock to suck. And the thought that she, Chloe, really didn't know if she could.
Nonetheless, she had made up her mind: she was going to try.
*
She picked a Wednesday, because nobody from her flat ever went out on a Wednesday. And she timed her exit carefully so that nobody would see her leaving halls in a short black dress and makeup that had taken her more than two hours to complete.
It was a brisk evening, and only just dark as she crossed campus. Chloe felt watched. She felt like she was wearing a costume. The dress was the shortest she owned, and it kept riding up her thighs to become even shorter. She had shaved her legs and they itched. Even for the short walk to the campus nightclub a coat would have been comforting.
She arrived. She joined the short queue at the door behind a white boy with dreadlocks. He eyed her openly as he finished a can of lager, and Chloe instantly fantasised about offering to suck his dick, and him accepting, and him taking her by the hand and leading her away somewhere, a room somewhere on campus, and making her kneel between his legs...
The boy with the dreadlocks appeared to lose interest in her. He was let in. Then Chloe: wristband, handstamp, into the slightly muggy warmth of the campus nightclub.
It wasn't packed, but there were enough bodies that Chloe had to slide her way to the bar. She purchased a cider. Found a spot at the edge of the room. The music vibrated through the floor and through her feet and all the way up to her knees. She drank. She watched milling bodies -- groups of people swimming between one another like fish.
And none of them looking at her.
How to approach a boy? How did Kate do it? Kate didn't do it. Kate never approached a boy. Boys approached Kate.
Should she dance? Chloe didn't want to dance, but she equally didn't want to stand by the wall drinking alone all night.
Taking a breath, she insinuated herself into the crowd. Warm bodies on every side. She brushed up against boys. They moved around her. Gave her space. Bodies moving away from her, as though magnetically repelled. She paused and looked around, trying to make eye contact. Nobody.
For almost half an hour, Chloe tried. She did dance for a while. And boys floated into her periphery and then floated away again before she could really engage with them. Around her everyone was in their tight-knit nuclear groups -- impossible to slip into. The longer she kept at it the more she felt obtrusive and obvious. A freak or a slut; someone who people were avoiding on purpose.
Piqued, she retired to the bar and ordered another cider, which she took to the edge of the dancefloor. As she went to take a sip someone lurched against her and knocked her drink neatly out of her hand. It splashed onto the floor in a slick of ice and liquid.
Irritated, Chloe looked up to see the boy with dreadlocks who she'd caught looking at her outside the front door. He was with his friends. In fact, it looked like his friends had been dragging him to the bar when he'd stumbled into her.
"Oh shit, I'm so sorry!" he said, leaning close to shout in her ear.
"It's fine," said Chloe, but the music was too loud and he didn't hear her. He apologised again and again, and then -- quite suddenly -- he had her by the arm and was taking her to the bar. Chloe let herself be taken. His name was Aaron, he whisper-shouted to her. And he was sorry. He wanted, he told her, to buy her a replacement drink. He felt guilty. He was so clumsy. Let him make it up to her.
Chloe felt a sudden shot of adrenaline. A maddening little impulse to act. Now. To do what she'd come here to do. The first boy that had spoken to her all night, yes, but why not him? She wasn't sure if he remembered eyeing her in the queue, but the fact that he had made it feel bizarrely as though she knew him already.
