Chapter 1: Davis
Then
Twenty-eight minutes.
That was how long we had been in this club, inhaling weed and cigarette smoke. It was thick and skunky, but kind of buzzy, which I could have enjoyed if not for the lighting. That shit was magenta and blue and flashing enough to make me blink on overdrive if I stared at one spot for too long.
Only twenty-eight minutes and I was already itching to trek back to the hotel. I didn’t exactly have plans for the hotel, but I figured sweatpants and the canal view were enough to justify an early night. My friends and my brother wouldn’t even care. Hell, they probably wouldn’t even notice.
Out of habit, I took another drink. Mistake. That sip burned like a scrape with a hot poker down my throat. Beer clawed at me like a barb. The blaring music pulsated around me, aggravating this stinging headache that I had been nursing between my eyeballs since yesterday morning. Not a hangover, but more like a stress-migraine, I figured. Coupled with the tipsiness that was starting to infiltrate my stomach and my extremities, this headache was well on its way to putting me to bed early—and the eurobeats weren’t exactly helping.
I turned to the left, where my friend Gray Davenport was seated next to me. He was holding an old-fashioned glass in a way that made him look thirty, rich, and debonair as fuck. Of course, all of those things were true aside from the age; Gray was twenty-two, like me. He was just significantly better at it than I was.
Gray’s attention was focused over the railing that lined the second-floor of the club where our private table was located. His free hand, the one not holding his drink like an international super spy, drummed impatiently on the low tempered glass table in front of us. He glanced over his shoulder and found me watching him.
“Oh, don’t do that shit, Ridgeway,” he protested in his perfect New England diction, shaking his head as he took in the expression on my face. “It was bad enough that you pulled this all through college, but you’re not going home early on our first night in Amsterdam.”
“I didn’t say anything.” Another drink. Another mistake. More goddamn eurobeats.
He was right though. Gray was always right. Before he preempted me, I was planning on telling him that I was ready to bail and head back to the Waldorf Astoria—not that I particularly liked the Waldorf. It just so happened to be the current in a seemingly endless series of over-the-top hotels that Gray had chosen in this “last hurrah” of his: a post-graduation summer trip through Europe with his oldest friends before his year as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. Yeah, I knew how pompous it sounded. But I learned a long time ago that when Gray Davenport wants something, he gets it—and it’s better to get the hell out of his way.
“So you’re not leaving, right?” He raised an eyebrow in a silent directive that was practiced and charming and had sealed many a deal in the twenty-two years we had been friends—since birth or whatever.
“No way he’s leaving,” interjected Gray’s best friend, Walsh Webster, who went to Yale with Gray and me. “Right?”
There was truly nothing inquisitive about Walsh’s comment. Really, it was more of a command: the kind dealt by any good consigliere, which was exactly what Walsh had been to Gray since the day they met freshman year.
“Nope,” I agreed reluctantly, genuinely (albeit internally) hating both of my college buddies at that moment. “Staying right here.”
I loathed that I was staying right here.
“Good,” Gray confirmed, nodding with satisfaction before he cocked his head to the left. “It’s early, and in ten minutes I’ll have a sea of beautiful women up here and you’ll be glad you didn’t bail.”
“Davis doesn’t give a shit about beautiful women,” my twenty-year-old brother, Kieran, called out from the other side of the table. There, he too was seated by the second-floor railing and glancing over it. “He wouldn’t know what to do with one if she walked right up to him and—”
To my relief, Kieran’s comment (sure to be disgusting enough to prevent him from ever finding a job outside of our father’s company if I recorded it and leaked it to a newspaper) was hastily cut short by the quick row of expletives that Gray released as he peered over the railing.
“What?” Kieran questioned, flinging himself to the side to look out over the dancefloor below. “What happened?”
“She just…politely declined the drink we sent her.” Gray’s face read as a mix of astonishment and outright confusion as he turned his attention back to our group. “Well, that’s new.”
I took a sip of my beer instead of making the comment that was at the tip of my tongue: That it was normal, probably healthy, for Gray to face rejection.
“Maybe they didn’t pass on the message correctly,” Kieran reasoned, his voice tinged with disbelief. He glowered as he looked over his shoulder, brown eyes narrowed as he surveyed the VIP area. “Where the fuck did that guy go? The waiter or whatever. Do you think he misunderstood me? Maybe he only speaks Dutch.”
“I’m pretty sure he’s the owner. Plus, you were speaking to him in English,” I reminded my brother.
Kieran rolled his eyes in that petulant, younger brother way of his. Twenty-year-old-style—annoyed for no reason. “Well, no shit. I obviously speak English. But that guy—”
“Over ninety percent of this country is proficient in English,” Gray cut in, shutting Kieran up so easily that I couldn’t remember the last time I was so jealous of anybody.
At that, Kieran shrugged both shoulders, twenty-year-old-style again. “Fine. Then one of you four can come up with an explanation for why she’s down there drinking her cocktail alone, and we’re all up here staring at her.”
“I’m not staring at her,” I commented, maybe being condescending, but I didn’t care. “So don’t group me in with this.”
Plus, it was true. I was the only one not staring. The minute that we had settled into our perch in this bacchanalian explosion of an Amsterdam nightclub, my four friends had all homed in on this poor woman sitting alone at the bar. Ideas flew like shrapnel: the things that they would do to her if they had a chance. And they would have a chance, they all assumed, because that had been the theme of this trip: flash enough money, well-orthodontia-ed American smiles, and entitlement to seduce any woman in every city we had stopped in. Rome to Vienna to Munich to Berlin to Brussels—and now Amsterdam. A summer of unparalleled hedonism—and I had spent most of it sober and celibate, babysitting the other four and ordering room service breakfast for the gaggle of women that awoke in our suite every morning.
As he glared across the table at me, Kieran’s expression darkened. “You’re really going to play holier than thou? The only reason we noticed her was because you were practically drooling onto the dancefloor when you saw her.”
“I really hate that visual,” Peter Davenport, Gray’s younger brother and the last member of our group, remarked slowly before adding, “Fuck I’m blazed out of my mind…”
“I wasn’t—”
“You were,” all four of them said, cutting me off in unison so impressively that I would have complimented them if I weren’t so annoyed with them.
Frustrated, I took another drink. Sure, they weren’t entirely wrong. I had spotted her below, seated alone at the bar and nursing a drink while men entered and exited her orbit with hopeful expressions that quickly shifted to disappointment. She had been effervescently pretty, I determined: striking at first glance with long, deep auburn hair and fair skin like polished ivory, both offset by eyes that I could tell were a green that verged on gray even from my seat up here. Beautiful—and so out of my league that I would need an oxygen tank and a Sherpa to even hike up to her level.