Drinking

The first drink becomes a second, then a third. The afternoon light outside the windows softens into early evening while the quiet bar stays mostly empty around your booth. Alice matches you glass for glass without comment, the sharp academic edge she usually carries loosening into something warmer and more expansive. By the time the fourth round arrives the tipsiness has settled in properly for both of you, the kind that makes old stories easier to reach and harder to keep polished.

You start with the safe ones. The disastrous group project in second year. The night the whole corridor got locked out after a fire alarm and ended up drinking in the car park until dawn. Alice laughs properly for the first time since she found you on the pavement, the sound low and genuine. She reminds you of the time you both tried to cook a full roast in a shared kitchen the size of a cupboard and nearly set the smoke alarms off for three floors. The reminiscing rolls on, easy and familiar, the years of drift between then and now shrinking under the weight of shared history and alcohol.

Somewhere around the fifth drink the conversation drifts closer to the edges. Alice leans in a little, blonde hair falling forward, and her voice drops into the quieter register she only ever used when the nights got late and the defences came down.

“Do you remember that night after the end-of-term party in third year?” she says. “We’d both had far too much. Ended up back in your room because mine was full of people still going. We sat on the floor talking about everything and nothing until it got properly late. Then the talking slowed down. You looked at me like you were deciding something. I looked at you the same way. We got so close. Closer than friends are supposed to. I remember thinking if either of us moved another inch there wouldn’t be any going back.”

She turns her glass slowly, watching the liquid rather than your face for a moment.

“We didn’t. Someone knocked on the door. Or the moment broke. I can’t even remember which. You went to sleep. I left. And we never talked about it again.”

Alice finally looks up. The tipsiness has made her eyes softer, but the intelligence is still fully present underneath. There’s a small, almost private smile at the corner of her mouth, the kind that carries more weight than the words that precede it.

“Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if we hadn’t stopped. If we’d just let it go where it was clearly going. I used to think it was better that we didn’t. Lately I’m not so sure. Some nights I catch myself thinking it might have been the one thing I actually regret leaving unfinished.”

The quiet bar holds the admission without comment. Outside the evening has properly settled in. Across the table Alice watches you with the open, slightly tipsy honesty of someone who has just put an old almost on the table and is waiting to see whether you will pick it up.