Time is supposed to move faster when you're drunk. Meanwhile I tried to think up an excuse, something convienent but not suspicious. Then I realized that contrary to Blinky Dee's feelings about me, I'm not special here at all; I could cartwheel out of the living room and no one would notice, not even how I bent my knees. For the inner circle, fewer randos just meant that time was passing. It would have been more impressive to signal to the room my inane belief that my exit required an explanation.
I lit a cigarette outside the front gate, then walked to the tram stop. Checking the timetable, a yellow printed sheet for the next tram to Andel, I sighed out a heavy drag of smoke, and my heart jumped. Seven minutes.
Our pub was a pub for locals. "Very Czech." The place had probably been the watering hole for three generations of cobblestone layers and dissidents. We had discovered the pub a few weeks earlier, after we left the student party together for some air and found ourselves suddenly needing to warm up, and a place to drink and smoke and not be seen. Our low-grade efforts to speak Czech, and our good behavior—meaning we drank whatever got served and dismissed whatever got seen—must have endeared the place to us; not mentioning that we were cute as shit. Most importantly, it was not the kind of place for anyone who knew us, or wanted to know.
"You're a disaster," she said.
"Am I?" I raised my tequila shot. And toasted, "To disaster."
We drank our shots in one go. And before we could finish chasing our shots with beer, two more tequila shots appeared on our table. "Dejkueme," we said. She lit my cigarette, and then hers.
"I had a dream this night," she said. She meant last night. "There were spaceships, and a news reporter. He was like Monty Python. I thought he might say, 'And now for something completely different.'"
"But he never did."
"No!" she laughed sweetly. "And now I'm stuck in a kind of suspense. That's how my brain works. I get less and less stable by the end of the semester."
"And I'm the disaster."
"You are. Because it's difficult to say whether classes ruin my system every semester, or because each semester I see you and it's like pressing random keys at the same time without purpose, not even just to see what happens. Just dfljnflghbn cxh." She rolled back her eyes and seemed to scoff with her whole body.
"Did you just crash?"
"Yes! You know those kinds of errors which seem to be solved after a reboot but then they pop up again? That's you."
"So you need a hard reset."
She smiled and her left eye-brow arched upward like it does when she blushes. She had adoringly colored-in the lines of that lame double-entendre. A server came to our table to announce last call. And we closed our pub down.
Outside we smoked and opened our phones to check for messages. She typed a message to her boyfriend, and I read my wife asking if I'd be staying out.
I asked her, "Which way you going?"
"Well I told my parents that I would be with him tonight," she said. "But he's not telling me where he is. I could go to his apartment. Or we can elope." I rolled back my eyes and shook my body and gave a little "dfljnflghbn cxh." She laughed and asked, "What about your story?"
"She's probably hosting," I said.
"Yeah, probably."
"Let's go."
We decided to go to my place anyway. My bedroom and the bathroom were near the front door, on the opposite side of the flat from the master bedroom. I turned my key and gently pushed the front door, and clank. The door slightly ajar, I pushed the door harder and the door CLANKED louder. The chain was latched. We looked at each other. "We should have eloped," I said. Her face was red and soft like dying embers. She whispered, "We should get a—" A door opened audibly from inside the flat, and we heard footsteps in the dark approaching us, until my wife's face appeared in the slit between the frame and the front door.
"Dude I messaged you," my wife said. "Do you have anywhere else to go?"
"Not really. Just let us in. We'll give you a head start."
"We? Whatever. Look, I have a guy. Can we be adults about this?"
"We? Just unlock the door please," I said as my wife shut the door.
"We should get a hotel next time," she said. We heard the chain unlatch, then footsteps retreat into the flat. And I opened the door.