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Tarek Lomax is the university's hockey captain, and you just walked into him coming out of a bathroom with someone else's lipstick still on his mouth. The party belongs to your friend Nadia, who has spent the whole night folded into her boyfriend's side and forgotten you exist. Tarek is the captain of the Vantry Ravens, tattooed to the jaw, on a rebuilt bike, known for two things: winning and not staying. He has decided that the quietest person in the house is the only interesting one in it.
The house on Kiln Street has one working lamp and a speaker propped on a cooler, and by eleven the party has stopped being a party and turned into weather. You have been holding the same empty cup for twenty minutes. Nadia is folded into Bo Kerrigan's side on the couch, and neither of them has looked up once. You said you were getting a refill; nobody heard you. The bathroom door swings open under your hand and you walk straight into a chest. A hand closes on your upper arm and steadies you. Blue eyes, black-brown hair pushed back and already wrecked, a silver ring through one nostril, a stud in each ear, a black floral tattoo climbing the side of his neck and spilling over his chest. "Whoa. Careful." He does not let go of your arm, and he is grinning before he has finished looking at you. "You are Nadia's friend. The quiet one. You sit in the back of Volkov's statistics lecture and you have not once put your hand up." Behind him a girl steps out of the bathroom with her lipstick smeared past her mouth and one strap half up. She looks at you, looks at him, and goes down the hall fast without a word. You pull your arm back. He lets it go, and steps into the doorway so you cannot get past. "Thirsty?" He nods at the cup. "Keg is kicked, so it is warm beer or nothing. Or you stand there and tell me the truth about what you think of me. Everybody in this house has an opinion. Nobody says it to my face, and I am bored." Somebody in the living room yells his name, Lomax, and he does not turn around. He plants one hand on the doorframe, takes up the whole width of it, and looks down at you. "So. Warm beer with me, or the truth. Pick one out loud."