"Cocktail and Chaser" by Seuzz

"You sure you okay?"

The cop's voice seemed to come from a long way away, and Ryan Glaser had to jerk himself out of an unwilling reverie. The effort to concentrate left him dizzy—a feeling amplified by the way the hard strobe of the club's neon lights fought with the blaze of the patrol car's flashers against the late-night urban darkness. He blinked and tried focusing on his interlocutor's face.

It was a friendly visage, though craggy and lined. The eyes were set deep, but they seemed warm and liquid with concern. Glaser was absurdly conscious of the way his own face twisted unbidden with puzzlement, and he felt as though we were falling, and he had to fight the urge to grab onto something. Not that there was anything to grab onto except the detective, and at least he had sufficient control of his limbs not to do that.

"Yeah," he said, and his tongue felt thick, like it belonged to someone else and had crawled into his mouth. He swallowed—a hard trick—and tried to nod.

"You look like you're about to fall over. You, uh, have a little something you shouldn't have?"

His heart—another foreign object—hammered inside his chest, and he stared. In fact, he came very close to blurting out that there must have been something in his last drink, and he came almost as close to begging that he be taken to the hospital to have his stomach pumped. Queerly, the hard suspicion that he had been drugged was twinned with the terrible certainty that there had been a cocktail of something's in his beer; but this sense of certainty, far from reinforcing the fear that he'd been poisoned, fought against it.

And then as he struggled another thought slipped in. A memory. "Uncle Paul," it whispered behind his ear, and he suddenly knew who the detective was. No, not a parent's brother, but a family friend much closer than the distant uncles and cousins. He felt himself relax.

"No," he said, and he was steadier now. "No, just a little freaked out that that—" He glanced over at Maxwell.

Ewan Maxwell, a lanky junior with limp hair down to his shoulders, slumped in defeat and staring at the ground as two patrolmen glowered at him. His hands were behind his back, though there were no bracelets around his wrists. Not yet, at any rate.

"Uncle" Paul Garrett followed his glance, and shrugged grimly. "It's always the small ones that surprise. Don't let it eat at you."

"I guess I'm lucky you were here too," Glaser said. He felt more in control of himself, but he could still feel the blood drain from his face. "Jake too."

"Like I said, don't let it eat at you that you couldn't take him alone. He had you wedged in pretty good in that bathroom stall."

"That doesn't have to go in a report, does it?" Glaser suddenly asked. The less anyone—at home, in the community, but especially at the high school—knew about the way a scrawny junior had pinned the captain of the basketball team inside the nightclub and gotten most of his clothes off him, the better he would feel.

"Depends on if it goes to trial," Garrett said, and his tone came freighted with several unspoken cautions, not all of them consistent with each other. "Are there any other details you'd like left out?"

"Don't think so." Glaser shook his head.

Garrett drew very close and gave the athlete—who was at least a head taller—a very penetrating gaze. "Are you sure?" Glaser felt a rustle at the pockets of his hoodie, and glanced down to find that his benefactor had drawn a large plastic bottle from it. It rattled.

Glaser turned red. "That's not, uh—"

"It's not asthma medication, I'm sure," Garrett said. He sighed. "Laws are one thing, and morality is another. You wanna screw around, save it for the cheerleaders. Don't go hitting nightclubs on a fake ID, and don't go putting shit like this in the ladies' drinks."

Glaser bit his lip; it felt a little numb, but there was more feeling in it than there had been only a few moments ago. But he bit it not from shame, but to suppress a dangerous smirk. He tried affecting shame. "Do you think you could, uh, drop those in a gutter someplace? Out of the report, and out of temptation, you know?"

The detective snorted but smiled. He backed off and took a slow tour of the sidewalk. Glaser saw a flash of white in the shadows as the bottle dropped through a grate. Without meaning to, he glanced back again at Maxwell—just in time to see that Maxwell had witnessed the same drop. As he stared at the junior, the latter turned his face slightly to look back at the ballplayer—and Glaser, despite himself, quailed under the baleful gaze of hot hatred. It only broke off when the metal cuffs finally went around Maxwell's wrists, and then a cop was pushing his head as he shoved him into the back of the squad car.

And yet though that would have seemed the best end to a nearly catastrophic evening, Glaser gave in to a dangerous feeling of reluctant fascination, and on feet that felt both very close and yet only distantly under his control he walked over the squad car. His muscles seemed to catch fire as he went. The sensation puzzled him at first, until Maxwell turned to look up through the window, and then Glaser recognized the feeling of adrenaline pumping through his powerful frame. Though Maxwell tried again to stare him down Glaser felt no new stab of terror. Instead, he balled a fist and pressed it into his other palm and stared back.

"Save it for the schoolyard." Uncle Paul's voice was close behind. Glaser ducked his head deferentially and backed away.

The police left soon after, and Glaser found his friend and teammate Jake Mercer loitering just inside the club entrance. "That was fucked up," Mercer said flatly.

"Thanks for being there," Glaser said. "It wouldn't have been any fun explaining things if you hadn't been."

Mercer shrugged. "How's your head? That shit wearing off yet?"

"I think so." Glaser pressed the heels of his hands against his temples. "The cop confiscated it, though. I talked him into dropping it into the sewer."

"They found it on him?"

"No, me. I put in his—" He caught himself and smiled crookedly. "I mean, I put it in my pocket just before the transfer started."

"Losing that stuff will piss Kevin off," Mercer said. "It'll take a month to whip up another batch, and he wanted to get inside Trier before the game this weekend."

"Piss on him. He can keep an eye on our old bodies and their new owners a little while, keep 'em from talking to anyone who might listen."

Mercer smirked. "Don't you think we can handle them ourselves?"

"Oh, we can help." The team captain balled his fist again and admired the way the muscles in his forearm flexed. "You know tonight wasn't the first appointment me and Ryan Glaser have had inside a bathroom, and fuck me if it's gonna be the last."