Chapter Text
“I am so not doing that.”
“You said you were bored. I was giving you something to do.” Pidge leans into him, sporting a very evil, very amused grin. Lance thinks that her suggestion is everything short of amusing, considering it would be his one-way ticket to jail on a sexual assault charge.
“The only thing it would give him to do would be to plea guilty on the stands,” Hunk voices the concerns reverberating through his own head. God knows if he was thinking it, his worrywart of a best friend would be as well. “The rest of the women in here are all taken or…”
“Queer?” Pidge adds with a raised eyebrow and a smirk.
“Exactly!” Lance cries, raising his hands up in a placating manner. Normally he would be all for flirting it up at a party, but he is one shot of tequila not-drunk-enough to risk getting another thrown in his face. He’d been rejected enough in the hours before to know not trying anyone else. When he had moped his way over to the couch where Pidge and Hunk had been sitting, surrounded by dozens of sweaty college students in attendance at the party, he had expected for the two to agree to leaving early, not for Pidge to suggest—no, dare him—to kiss a stranger at the stroke of midnight.
“Look, I never said it had to be a woman.”
Lance pauses.
“Oh.”
-
Forty minutes later, the countdown to Midnight is being chanted throughout the apartment. There are more bodies in the open floorplan of the kitchen and living room than what fire safety regulations allow, and even more voices coming from the bedrooms and—questionably—the bathroom. He doesn’t know left from right anymore, and someone is pressed right against his back in a way that he can feel their belt buckle digging into his skin. He would say something, but he doubts the person cares, or could even hear him.
They had started the chanting at a minute, and while it’s only been a few seconds, it feels like it had been forever. He wishes they had left, because then he wouldn’t feel so… He doesn’t want to kiss a random stranger, you know? Like sure, it could be fun, he could kiss someone really attractive and suddenly he’s in the bathroom with his pants at his ankles, y’know? He highly doubts it though—He’s a six foot two scrawny beanpole of a man, and he’s probably all sweaty and his clothes are probably all wrinkled, by now. He has absolutely nothing going for him, and he’s been awkward all night. He’s normally pretty talkative, but after getting stood up the day before, he just hasn’t been feeling it. Everything is pointing towards the dare being a disaster. He was probably going to get arrested, or punched, or both. He’d probably cry afterwards as well, too.
But he keeps thinking about it.
And thinking about it.
And suddenly, when everyone starts to scream and he’s sure he has lost his hearing, it’s like all of his thoughts just go quiet in his head. He didn’t want to just… Stand here all night, waiting to go home. He was twenty-three for God’s sake and standing there was just sad and pitiful, and it would mean that he let that girl from the bar who he was fairly sure didn’t remember his name had meant more to him than he did to her, which the thought of was somehow more sad, and he had no reason not to kiss someone just for the hell of kissing someone at midnight. Other people did it all the time, he was sure.
Yet, kissing the random stranger who had been shoving his belt-buckle into his back had probably not been the wisest choice.