Nikki froze, her body a tense bundle of worries and fear, and raised her eyes to meet the stranger’s, but found that the location of the staircase and the angle he was pushing her from made it nearly impossible to see much more than a faint outline of tousled hair and lithe body. She allowed herself a small sigh of relief after realizing he wasn’t one of the two muscle men she’d been running from, but realized this newcomer could easily be their accomplice.Her eyes attempted to sift through the darkness which was interrupted erratically by lights, trying to connect that voice and those hands with something more than a vague shape and outline, and trying to gather the bits of herself that kept fighting to escape into the shaded atmosphere.

On any other night, Nikki would have flirted her way out of the situation, but tonight was not any night, and she was in no mood for sweet talk.

'Get your hands off of me, asshole,' she said softly, desperately. Inwardly she knew she was mostly trying to convince herself that hers was not a situation to be enjoying, despite her suddenly flighty stomach and strangely interested musings. You were almost kidnapped as payment for some psychotic drug deal from hell gone horribly wrong. This is not the time to be crushing on some strange ass.

'Sweetie, you're in a fucking club. You're not dancing and you're not drinking - what kind of a vibe did you think you gave off?' The voice, although infuriatingly arrogant and low, sounded so inviting.

Nikki stared at him incredulously and attempted to walk away, but his arms remained motionless and instead, his face came closer. The voice, calm as water and deceiving as any magician's best trick, continued languidly,

'In any case, you really shouldn't flatter yourself so much - It's not becoming. I was only trying to get by.'

The body gently brushed by her, and as quickly as he had appeared, the stranger was gone up the flight of hidden stairs. Nikki stood immobile, dumbfounded at his words, wishing her encounter had turned out differently.

Why should I even care? I don’t have time for this. As if she were suddenly snapping out of a dizzying trance, Nikki spun to face the club once more. Suddenly, and in a very distinctly hopeless manner, Nikki wondered what she was doing in such a depraved place, and asked herself why she had trusted the likes of Ben and Marshall, the two guys who had abandoned her like cowards. She had wanted fun - Instead, she'd been fucked over.

She shook her head and made her way towards the club’s cave-like entrance, wondering why it suddenly reminded her of the sort of dark void only to be found in sickening nightmares. She passed through it silently with quick steps, the muscles in her body tightened in insecurity as she stepped outside. Her eyes shut in a quick moment of silent reprieve before she became aware of the reality she had nearly forgotten amongst the blasting notes and dancing bodies. She ignored the bouncers who, with nothing better to do, had taken to leering at her obnoxiously, and instead focused on the people walking the cracked and dirty sidewalks and streets. None of them looked familiar.

'What the fuck am I supposed to do now?' she mumbled to herself as she slowly made her way towards a street corner to her left. She looked down the eerily quieter street it lead to, briefly wondered how much of a threat the drunken stragglers stumbling blindly along it would pose, and decided to take her chances. At the very least, this should be quite an interesting adventure - Nikki wasn't all that sure such an optimistic mentality would last her.

Despite her nagging fears, she continued walking in what she hoped was the general direction of the bridge back to the U.S. She made sure to avoid the grizzly beards and busty girls who wandered the streets almost aimlessly, most of them looking for someone to save them from themselves, all of them knowing they weren't going to find that someone on a dirty and darkened lane at almost midnight on a muggy May evening. Most of them were too lost in themselves to care about the teenaged girl walking by them furtively.