Which it emphatically was when Cas and Nikki walked through the door late that morning. The buzz of conversation was like the hiss of a snake pit when the snakes are angry, and the fact that it stopped dead at their entrance only to resume a moment later when they had been checked out and found to be nobody only served to underscore the tension. Nikki, for one, caught on right away.
“Something’s wrong.”
“What?” Cas looked down at his zipper (a normal male reaction in the circumstances, I suppose). “Aren’t I dressed right?”
“Around here, if you’re dressed, you’re dressed right. No, it’s not you. Something else.”
“What?”
“I don’t know yet. Let’s sit at the counter. Liz ought to be around here someplace. She’ll know.”
They had spent a rather odd night together and an even odder morning. The band house, normally filled with friends, family (a few), hangers-on, groupies, significant others (“sig otts” in the jargon of the day), roadies, drug dealers, artists, computer geeks, music freaks, random pets and assorted ne’er-do-wells, had been for the first time in living memory completely empty except for the two of them.
This was not a situation they had expected to have to face, this total absence of buffers, tangents, and distractions. Cas had figured on getting lost in the crowd and ogling Nikki from a safe distance. Nikki liked Cas and had been attracted to him in high school but he was just too…weird…for a girl with her social position to think about. She wanted to get to know him slowly and figure out why she felt what she felt, why she hadn’t been able to forget him in the years between, and why her stomach started jumping like a startled spider whenever she was around him. The safety of numbers was crucial to her need to experiment just in case he turned out to be even weirder than he had been in the old days.
Left suddenly alone to fend for themselves, neither had known what to say to the other that wouldn’t give them away. Long, awkward pauses evolved quickly into uncomfortable silences of near-infinite length, and the silences into a condition close to shared catatonic paralysis. He would steal a glance at her when he thought she wasn’t looking and when she looked up, look away. She would do likewise. For two normally shy people, this behavior would have been understood and accepted for what it was, but between two people who were by nature anything but, it was excruciating.
The silence eventually reached epic proportions. Cas could have sworn he heard an ant trip over a twig a hundred yards from the back door while Nikki heard the silence as an extended hum growing louder by the second, as if a jet plane was falling on the house. Then her spine began to itch and her left ankle twitched and before she quite knew how it happened, she made a huge, almost tragic, mistake. She asked him if he wanted to smoke some really good weed.
Now, Cas’ hold on reality was tenuous at the best of times, which this wasn’t one of. On grass he became nothing less than ethereal, a whisper you couldn’t quite hear, a shape you couldn’t quite distinguish in the darkness. Why Nikki would subject a personality like that to a substance like that at a time like that is lost in the mists of abnormal psychology. Maybe the silence got to her, maybe sheer tension fried the part of her brain responsible for rational decision-making, turning it into a pool of desperation and straw-grabbing. All we can say for sure is that it seemed like a good idea at the time.
