by Violet Blue
“Alison.” The host, Russell, takes my hands with the benevolent welcome of a town patriarch. I was his son’s girlfriend in high school. “Thank you for coming. If only D.J. could see you. It’s been what, almost fifteen years?”
“Thirteen. It’s too bad he couldn’t make the party. I did hear his company is doing really well.”
“He seems to have the golden touch. Did you see Trey is here?” Russell’s wrinkled eyes are shrewd as he glances at you. No doubt he’s noticed we haven’t spoken to each other, despite how inseparable we once were. You were D.J.’s best friend. “He’s living in Boston now, like you. I don’t know if you two kept in touch.”
I don’t let myself look your way. “No, we haven’t talked since the summer after graduation.”
The caterer gestures him away. I sip my vodka tonic. You’re talking to Russell’s lawyer but you look at me across the living room in every natural pause of the conversation. We each knew the other would be here tonight. Neither of us brought a date. You’re as tall and broodingly handsome as you were in high school, with those slight circles under your pale eyes that I always thought made you look so debauched. You’re giving me looks of pained nostalgia. I’m thinking of everything I wanted from you in high school and how I only got it once. How I want to hear that I’m why you came to this party. That I’m the ghost who’s haunted you.
A tray of miniature éclairs circulates. The grandfather clock strikes ten. I haven’t long to act, this party won’t go all night. These guests are older. You and I are the youngest guests here and we’re not really so young anymore, are we?
Except that Mother Nature may be acting in my favor. “It’s really getting bad out there,” says the local orthodontist, peering outside. This is something said about five dozen times a winter in our New England hometown, but there’s a certain lunar blue to the landscape that says the blizzard gods may indeed descend on us tonight.
“I’ll bet the garden is already covered,” Russell muses. “Alison, will you take a look out back and see if the cars looked snowed in yet?”
“Of course.” This gives me the chance I’ve been waiting for all night, and I slip down into the dark hall that leads to the east wing bedrooms. Or as it was called when we were in high school: the kids’ rooms. D.J. and his brother not only had massive bedrooms but their own den, where we all hung out unsupervised. The rest of us were so impressed. “My mom would never let me have a guy in my room,” I said to D.J. the night we brought in German beer and a dirty movie. That was the night I lost my virginity, D.J. pumping away on top of me trying not to come while I bit my fist from the raw sensation of being split open. (What was really erotic about that night: showering when I got home and feeling alive between my legs for the first time; the heat and tenderness of my cunt and the cool water on top of it.)
Now I stand in the chilly dark hall that smells not of musty closed-up bedrooms, but of lemon furniture polish and money. Russell’s maid service still cleans down here. I wonder what they think of these lost boys’ bedrooms, their soccer balls long since put away, their bureau drawers emptied of cleats and uniforms and underwear. I know what I would do were I to enter this wing in the middle of the day: finger myself on the red-blanketed sleigh bed, my bare legs wide open just like one time right before graduation. I did it then because D.J. asked to watch, but I was pretending he was you.
I snap on the old hall light. Its weak illumination shows up faded wallpaper, two closed bedroom doors and the dark entrance to the den. My feet hesitate. I don’t really believe in ghosts. I believe in the corporeal body. But an odd hulky shape looms in the shadows and I’m almost afraid to go closer until I realize I’m looking at an old console TV, complete with a VCR. Everything is the same. The green couches, the leather ottoman. The fake bar in the corner.
“Alison.”
Your voice sounds deep and languorous just like it did in high school. That’s why I don’t turn around, because I’m picturing the way you looked at eighteen, your sand-colored hair and lanky six-four frame. You were always laconic and mysterious, even when we were kids. Aloof and dreamy, you seemed like a different species from the braying teenage half-wits in our gym class. You barely seemed to notice the girls who mooned after you; I wanted to fuck you partly just to pierce your reserve, to see your hazel eyes change when I swallowed your cock or knelt on the bed and spread my ass open for you. I was a volcano that spring I was eighteen, and I knew that if D.J. was the teenage boyfriend I’d leave behind, you were becoming the man who could ignite my sexual future.
You step up behind me and peer into the dark den. “It’s exactly the same.”
I don’t step aside so you can go in. I want you to touch me to get by. Once again, though, you’re in the role of D.J.’s best friend instead of in the role of pursuing me.
“I didn’t think Russell would have changed anything,” I say. “It’s not like D.J. or his brother ever visit.”
You’re standing so close to me. My heart is a rabbit trembling in a prison. I want you to slide your hand under my dress, this winter-inappropriate dress I wore tonight with just this hope in mind. Because then I would know you were remembering a forest keg party so long ago when you followed me into the trees and put your hands up my shirt and groaned into my ear with such heartfelt longing that my heart and my pussy seemed to merge into one thudding organ of need. Just for a moment, and then you were gone.
“Weird being here,” you mention.
No kidding. Now I know you’re off your game.
I look at you over my shoulder. While most people’s eyes give them away, with you it’s your mouth; your full gorgeous mouth, with your teeth set in your bottom lip just like when you fucked me into a frenzy. I used to secretly watch your mouth in calculus all senior year and on that day I finally had you, you bit your lip with every thrust. I was flattered by your savagery until I realized D.J. was fingering your ass and driving you crazy, too. But I was too delirious to care.
I make my own banal mention: “I’ve been wanting to come back here all night.”
“Is it your first time? Since…then?”
I smile. “Yes. Since ‘then.’ Yours?”
“Yeah. D.J. and I didn’t…” His voice trails off.
I figured as much. At first when they stopped talking to me after our threesome, I thought it was a boys united thing. But the silence extended between all three of us and when D.J. went off to college without saying good-bye, I realized how serious the breach was.
“I get why it ruined your friendship with him.” My voice is embarrassingly strained. “What I never understood is why it affected things with me.”
You look ashamed. “Alison, come on. It wasn’t okay back then for straight guys to—do that. And you were there. I think kids today are more flexible about that kind of thing….”
We both smile because we’re not old enough to talk about kids these days! And yet so much has changed in the last thirteen years and so have we, sort of.
“I get it now. He was your best friend, I was your best friend’s girlfriend. I just…” I look up at you again but can’t say what I need to: that no sex, no man, not even the threesomes I tried to duplicate it with, have ever come close to the supernova burning through my body that day. That nothing has equaled the electricity of when you watched me and D.J. have sex and then your self-control collapsed and you crawled over both of us with a groan of pure hunger.
“The butler did it in the library,” says someone with a nasty laugh. We turn. Russell’s lawyer is standing in the hall. “Christ, this old house is spooky. I’m waiting for Vincent Price to walk out of a room. What are you two doing down here, anyway?”
“What are you doing here?” you ask with that cool imperiousness that was able to intimidate even teachers once. The teenage girl in me quakes.
“Oh, Russell sent me to get you. D.J. showed up, if you can believe that.” He rolls his eyes and heads back down the hall.
It’s amazing how many thought
s can travel through my head in the move from one room to another: This is like fate; wait, it’s been thirteen years, he’s going to look different. I wonder if he’ll think I look different; wait, he’s almost thirty-two, he’s got to be married. Rich guys like that always have the trophy wife. I wish he wasn’t here, he’s going to ruin everything.
You and I walk into the living room side by side like a couple. That’s how it feels, at least, when D.J. turns around from his father’s friends and his eyes go first to you, then me. He looks good in a polished executive way, his black hair tucked behind his ears and his eyes harder than ours. Apparently owning a successful software company is wearing. You guys greet each other like the old high school friends and former teammates you are: smiles, claps on the back, banalities.
“Alison.” Now his eyes fill with real emotion and he hugs me. So there’s still a little twinge after thirteen years, that’s nice. I look over his shoulder for a date. He seems to have come alone.
“This is quite a surprise. Your father said—”
“I flew in from Singapore.” He probably doesn’t intend this to sound braggy, the globe-trotting executive, but it reminds everyone of the differences between us. “So! You look great! You both look great. What have you…been up to?”
His voice fills with strain and we all know why: that last “you” targeted us as a couple. He doesn’t know that we haven’t spoken since that day. So I tell him.
“I can’t speak for Trey because this is the first time I’ve seen him since then.”
He goes silent. Then laughs awkwardly. Neither of you are looking at each other. Did I ruin it? I don’t care. There’s been enough silence.
“I need a drink,” I announce. “Why don’t we all catch up?” And that’s how I take the night into my hands.
We wind up on the green settee in the library. Okay, we don’t wind up there, I deliberately steer us there because it will force us to all sit together, me in between you and D.J. He has a hand on my knee and keeps squeezing it, yet it feels avuncular and his eyes are mostly on you. Maybe he’s gay now and you’re the only one here he cares about. Maybe this is going to end in forty-five minutes with awkward good-byes and separate walks through the falling snow to our cars.
“I’m never here, I usually just fly Dad out to wherever, so I thought this would be the ultimate surprise,” D.J. is saying. “It’s been years since I’ve been back. And nothing ever changes. Small-town America.” He shakes his head and sips his drink.
Small-town America. Like you and I are some younger version of Ma and Pa Kettle, waiting to be regaled with stories of corporate royalty. Your eyes meet mine and we understand each other perfectly.
“It’s great that you’ve done so well,” I say. “No wife, no girlfriend?”
“Ha, no. I work day and night. Don’t know anyone who’d put up with that.”
“Your room is exactly the same,” you say. “The den, at least. Alison and I were just down there.”
This startles D.J. “You were? Oh.” Tense laugh.
“Your old TV is quite the relic,” I tell him. “The whole place is like a time warp.”
D.J. peers over at the bookcases like he’s trying to read the titles. He’s struggling with something. You and I both scent it the way we scented each other’s craving when I walked into the party tonight. For him to be this ungraceful, this unable to smooth the way into neutral safety, says he’s ours for the taking if we want him. Or rather, if we want each other in this specific, bittersweet nostalgia.
Russell pops his head into the room. “Look at the three of you,” he says. “Just like old times.” He smiles emotionally. “You know, it’s really coming down out there. I don’t know if you’re going to be able to dig your cars out. Alison and Trey, you’re welcome to spend the night if you wish.”
D.J. looks down at the carpet. Maybe he wishes we would go. Maybe he wishes we would take his clothes off and gag his mouth and do everything we did to him that day and more. Next to me, you lean into my leg just enough to send an electric current through me.
“That would be great,” I say. And then the three of us are traveling through an oriental-carpeted wormhole to the past.
You don’t turn on the lights and so the bluish glow of the blizzard spills through the windows. We’re not in the den. We’ve gone into D.J.’s bedroom instead. It’s empty tonight, devoid of the dirty socks and glass dragon bong and soccer trophies I remember. The big wooden sleigh bed is tightly made up as it never was back when D.J. and I would practice our adolescent love here. This is the bed where I first slept naked with someone. The den couch is where I choked over my first blow job, D.J.’s cock huge and ungainly in my mouth. That couch was probably the site of your first blow job, too.
“I think the lightbulb has blown,” D.J. offers, which is a ridiculous justification for not turning on the lights, but we can keep it dark for him. The room was brilliant with sunlight that July day when we fucked and tongued and came on each other, all three of us eighteen and so earnest in our lust, and utterly clueless of how beautiful we were. Thinking about this makes me want to see you both naked. We’ve crossed into our thirties now; we’re seasoned, skilled and graceful, in theory. The cartographer in me wants to map the fault lines of our transitions.
But you’re the one who starts it. You push D.J. down on his bed with easy dominance and pin him there by the biceps. He shifts in what seems at first to be a protest until he arches his back. You’re smiling kind of evilly. Oh, Trey. So this is who you turned into, a masterful bastard who knows how to command. I kneel on the bed next to D.J. and he looks up at me with hope and hunger: I’m still wanted here. That’s gratifying. Together you and I undress him until he’s naked and open for the taking. His chest is broader now, a line of hair on his stomach that wasn’t there in high school. My smooth, snake-hipped soccer player is gone.
He twists toward me to kiss my pussy through my dress. My nipples fill with heat but he stops as you step back from the bed and take off your clothes. You do this in a way that says you mean business. D.J. watches you with the same voracious fascination I’m feeling, and I understand then that you probably dominated his adolescent fantasy life as much as you dominated mine.
You take out your cock like it’s a weapon. It’s as smooth and long as you are, and you stroke it rather menacingly. Then you spread D.J.’s thighs wide as if you’re going to fuck him just like that, no condom, no lube.
But you don’t. Instead that sinister smile returns and you trace your swollen crown around his balls, up to his navel, then crawl on the bed and taunt his mouth with it. “So what have you been doing all these years, D.J.?” you ask with a laugh. But it’s rhetorical. We’re about to find out who’s been doing what all these years.
D.J. is breathing fast. He looks up at me, as if for permission. I scratch one fingernail across his bottom lip.
“Fuck his mouth,” I tell you.
Your cock splits his lips and plunges all the way in. He chokes a little and you laugh and pull back, just enough for him to adapt. I adjust his head, slightly jealous that I won’t get that first dusty taste of your dick freed from its confines. You straddle D.J.’s face with an academic frown, moving this way and that until you find your rhythm and settle into a controlled and steady groove.
You look up at me. A wry smile spreads across your face. We look at each other for a few wordless moments of confirmation, and then you reach forward to take off my dress. I unhook my bra for you because I remember how my tits were the first thing you went for at that party in the woods where you finally let me know my insane crush was mutual.
“Oh, Alison,” is what you say right before we kiss, a devouring, cannibalistic kiss that’s too full of teeth and jaw to be good in the romantic sense, but is everything I need. Your hands are on my tits, my hands are in my underwear. D.J. struggles to keep sucking you as you pull me close. This is what I’ve wanted tonight, for years, forever. You naked and consuming me.
Br
usquely you run your fingers over my slit, then smear the wetness on my nipples before sucking them clean. Then you push me on my back next to D.J. and bury your face between my thighs. Your tongue feels strange and invasive and warm on my clit, an incubus robbing me of control. I’m almost scared to succumb to this hot new glory rising through my blood. All I can think of is getting your cock inside me, your arms around me, but my nerves are tuned to such a fever pitch that as soon as you work two fingers into my pussy, I lose it for real, coming and flooding the bed.
We didn’t do this before. It was so spontaneous that day of our threesome, the way you climbed between my legs to replace D.J. and fucked me with an urgency he never had. I looked up at you in such a frenzy of white heat that I could have sworn there was a halo around your beautiful face, but then I saw D.J.’s face next to yours, kissing your jaw and biting your neck. You were groaning and I realized both of us were making you come. You collapsed on me and kissed my collarbone but D.J. took over—pulled you up by your neck and forced you on your knees to suck his still-hard cock.
I lifted up on my elbows to watch, too amazed by the incredible sight of my boyfriend getting head from my secret crush to demand that you come back to me. I’d never seen you submit to anyone before. So it was half miraculous to watch you hesitate and struggle over his cock. Gradually you found your method and started sucking him fast and tight—and I watched your face change from intimidation to power as you took D.J. under your spell deeper and deeper with every stroke, your own cock growing stiff again. You didn’t even let him come. Instead you pushed him back onto me and as he pumped out his final throes inside me, you took his ass from behind with a determination that I wanted so badly to be aimed at me.
