Tonight's The Night (Night #5)

by Lauren Milson

  “Go to your little party,” I growl down at her and break away to my office, slamming the door shut behind me.

  2

  Angela

  Oh god. The more he tries to push me away, the more I want him. I want him to growl go to your little party with his face between my legs while he’s wiping my juices off his chin. To suck me raw until my clit is bruised and then tell me to go play around with boys my own age.

  But I wouldn’t do it. I wouldn’t touch anyone else. He could tell me what he and I are doing is wrong and needs to be kept between us and that I should go live my life like any nineteen-year-old girl should, and I would still keep myself only for him. No one else would touch me. Ever.

  I squirm in my seat. I think I might be getting it wet. I still have the bikini bottoms on and they’re so wet that once we get to the party and I take my frayed jean shorts off they might just slide right down my legs at the softest gust of wind.

  “You missed the turn!” Emily whips her head to the right and follows the street I missed with her eyes. I offered to drive because I needed to do something with my hands. I white-knuckle the steering wheel and narrow my eyes at the road ahead of me with intent to turn us around as soon as I can. I guess I was a little too distracted by Joshua to pay attention to where I was going. At least I’m paying attention to the road in front of me.

  The street signs, not so much. I correct our course and apologize, turning into a driveway so I can back up and go back to where I should have been driving us all along.

  We continue to make conversation, discussing the classes we’ve both signed up for for next semester. Emily intends to go to medical school. She’s talked about it since we were kids. She was the only thirteen-year-old I’d ever met who knew exactly what she wanted to do and, even more, how she was going to get there. She didn’t just say she wanted to be a doctor. She knew she wanted to be an internal medicine generalist with a private practice and knew exactly where she wanted to go for undergrad and for medical school. Because we’re in totally different fields — I’m studying English and will probably become a teacher like my dad — we only have a few classes together.

  And honestly, we are both probably all the better for it. I love her but it’s getting hard to be around her so much because all I ever think about is her dad. It’s become a distraction. We were going to go off to college together and have so many firsts together. We were going to have real boyfriends for the first time and actually have sex with them for the first time, and we planned to have breakfast, lunch, and dinner together. But after everything that happened inside me when I saw how her dad looked at me that night a year ago, it makes me sad to be around her - not because of anything between us, but because I know she’d be devastated if anything happened between her dad and me.

  He’d already been dragged through the mud during his divorce. We grew up in a small, insular, and cliquey community here out in East Hampton, and when the divorce happened, it seemed that everyone took sides. Even our teachers had something to say. None of it was nice. And even though Emily’s mom was the one ostensibly at fault - she was the one who’d had the affair, she was the one who’d broken the vows of marriage - some people took her side. The saddest I think I felt through the entire divorce was when I was dropping some books off at a classmate’s house and went around to the back yard no one was answering the door and I overheard my classmate’s mom and her friends talking about how a woman driven into the arms of another man had to be pushed there by her own husband.

  It didn’t make any sense to me at the time and it still doesn’t.

  But it was proof that I might not be as understanding about the way the world works as I’d thought I was.

  And to think that Emily could be hurt by the whispers of our neighbors and friends if her father did something with me. I know his name would be dragged through the mud yet again.

  It was like someone else had inhabited my body back there when I was alone in his office with him. What the hell was I trying to do - seduce him? I feel disgusted with myself. I’d even planned out the whole stupid stunt with making him put his hands on me to assist with his car key. Ugh. I can’t help but shiver with cold shame.

  We finally arrive at the party.

  “Oh, yay!” Emily squeals, pushing her door open and piling out. I cut the engine and get out on my side, staring up at the massive house where the party is. Emily told me everyone would be here, and she’s right - everyone is here. I look up at second floor of the house, where there are floor-to-ceiling windows, and the lights are off but I can see the movements of shadows where people are dancing. The thudding bass of some slow R&B song is making the ground beneath me vibrate.

  “The reunion,” I observe dryly. Emily comes around and links arms with me.

  “The reunion!” she counters, getting a little closer to me as we make our way up the driveway. “And who are you planning to reunite with tonight? Are you looking to get into trouble?”

  “Trouble?”

  I came into this community as a true outsider. I was thrust upon its inhabitants when both of my parents passed away in a car accident and I had to live with a long-lost aunt. The sister of my father, and a woman he always called a “bitch on wheels.” See, he didn’t like her phony elitism and he didn’t like the way she’d had an affair and then divorced her husband and then married the man she’d had the affair with, and then was somewhat…callous when he passed away six months later.

  “I can’t come to the service,” she’d fretted to my father, putting a handkerchief to her breast. “I have to remain home and wait for the caterers. And it would be too hard for me to see my poor deceased husband lying dead in a coffin. Why do Catholics insist on having open caskets? Oh, Richard, it’s horrible!”

  I laughed at that exchange between her and my dad. She wasn’t trying to be comically moribund, but hell, I found it darkly funny, and I’d apologized to my dad for laughing at her. This was after she shot me a death-glance that made me think her eyes were going to literally pop out of her head and made me apologize to her first.

  “Laughter is an involuntary human response just like a sneeze is,” I’d said to my dad in the car. “You can’t keep it in.”

  “You can keep it in,” my dad told me.

  “Sorry.” I’d folded my arms across my chest and slumped in my seat.

  “You apologized too quickly,” he’d said, peering at me kindly through the rear-view mirror. “I was going to say that you can keep it in, but it’s unhealthy. She’s a bitch. Don’t worry about her.”

  Then I’d had to go and live with her just six short months after that. I spent a lot of time — most of it, in fact — at Emily’s house, though, because my Aunt Anne, in addition to being a little bitchy (I don’t like the word bitch and won’t use it to describe a person, but for some reason I’m okay with bitchy and actually kind of think it can be used as a compliment), was odd. My chores around the house didn’t consist of mowing the lawn or doing the dishes. No, she had people to do that. My chores involved the strangest little things, things that maids and personal chefs didn’t do.

  Like when she needed new napkins. She got on this kick where she needed new napkins for a Good Friday dinner she was hosting (she’d converted from Catholicism to Judaism and then back to Catholicism, which I thought wasn’t possible but she insisted it was), and instead of simply buying some new napkins, she’d had me purchase a new tablecloth and then cut it into twelve identical rectangles. Don’t ask me why. I made the mistake of asking her why and was met with a silent rebuke in the form of an exaggerated eye roll.

  So my addition to this world made me an outsider.

  “Elijah’s going to be here,” Emily says, patting my hand, her eyes sliding mischievously around the front yard. We make our way up the straight walk-way to the front door and I go to ring the bell but the door opens without us having to announce our arrival.

  Inside, the house is dark and the party is raging, and the smell is strong
: weed, beer, and some vague, unidentifiable liquor. Emily reaches into my back pocket and snatches my phone and scampers away.

  “Hey!” I yell as I chase after her, nearly tripping over my own two feet. I chase her down a wide, dark hallway where people are smoking and making out in corners. We land in the kitchen as she hits something on the screen of my phone and then slides it back into my hands.

  “Oh god, what did you do?” I mutter, unlocking the phone and pulling up my texts. I should never have told her my passcode. I see a text to Elijah staring back at me.

  Tonight I want to do something I’ve never done before.

  I gulp.

  “Emily, why did you send this?”

  “You’re always saying you want to finally have sex. This is the time for it. If not tonight, then when? If not with a hot guy who is totally freaking into you, then who?”

  But you don’t know the only man I want is your dad.

  Maybe this is the solution I’ve been looking for. Does even thinking this make me a…slut? I cringe every time I hear the word used derogatorily. Emily would tell me to own it - she’s okay with casual sex. The first time she finally pulled the trigger was with someone she really liked. She told me she actually loved him. She figured out after they had sex that it wasn’t love after all — something about meeting someone who makes her heart race even more than he did — but after that first time she was okay with having casual sex.

  Even the word “sex” coming from her mouth has my clit tingling and my thoughts racing back to Joshua. Thoughts of him having me on my back in his office, with the cool blue light from the pool flowing in through the window. I don’t know why, but I always liked that light from the pool. And he would have me in his arms, and I would be safe. He always made me feel safe when I was alone after my parents passed and I when I had to do all these wacky things for my aunt. It wasn’t that they were all that bad, really, it was just that the unpredictable nature of them and the fact that I would never know what her mood would be like — and it swung all over the place — made me feel off-balance and never really able to find my footing.

  Joshua was my rock. He still is. He always made me feel safe and cared about, like I belong. I wasn’t an outsider when I was at his house, just hanging out with Emily. I was just a kid who needed some stability and I was a person with her own thoughts, feelings, preferences, and desires, and I was not subject to the whims of my crazy aunt or the cruel arrows of fate that took my mom and dad away from me.

  He made me feel good.

  And now he makes me feel other things.

  I know why he pushed me away. There was no other option for him. But still my brain keeps going to that one idea — me, him, darkness, flickering blue light around us, with me on my back and him doing anything he wanted to me. I have ideas about sex, and I’ve had thousands of orgasms — thousands, and all of them with his name on my lips — but I want him to do things to me that I’ve never even imagined. I know there are things he could do that would set my skin ablaze and make my body know pleasure from the tips of my fingers to the arches of my feet—and I know it because there is a darkness behind his eyes when he looks at me, something primal and base and something that I really don’t know how to respond to or can even put proper words to. Sex with him would not be sex. It would transform me from the person I am to the person I’m supposed to be. And only he can do this for me.

  And from stage left, oh, here comes Elijah. I roll my eyes, already knowing that he is going to address the message that Emily sent to him.

  “Got your text,” he says, putting an arm over my shoulder. I feel my heart grow cold toward him even though it shouldn’t. He’s such a good guy. He doesn’t really deserve for me to be distant. We should just be friends. But I don’t know how to be friends with someone I know has feelings for me. Would I simply pretend his feelings do not exist? I turn a pair of sad eyes up at him and give him a smile. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing, whether it’s a mark of immaturity to let this guy put his arm around me like this when I know very well that he would like to sleep with me. Maybe I’m being mature by treating him like any other person would, any other person who he doesn’t want to sleep with, that is.

  Mature, immature, I feel like neither of these labels apply to me. I’ve been told I’m mature and responsible but I don’t feel mature or responsible. I feel reckless and out of control and with no acceptable way to express myself except with Joshua.

  “Hey Elijah,” I say, lifting his arm from my shoulder. I put it down at his side and he flashes me a cool smile. Cool guy, cool smile. He’s a gentleman no matter what condition I present myself to him in.

  “So I heard you are up for some experimenting tonight,” he says, tilting his chin up at me. The music around us suddenly shifts from a smooth R&B melody to something more aggressive with crunchy guitars and a faster beat. My heart kicks up a little and I squeeze my eyes shut, then spring them open.

  “Hold on a second,” I say. I pass through the large kitchen and find the refrigerator in the dim light, only because the door is made of glass and it’s stocked with row after row and column after column of cans and bottles of beer. I pull the door open and grab a beer for myself and a guy with a green mohawk and black nail polish slides past me. I grab a bottle opener from his hand and thank him as I pluck the cap off my bottle and give the opener back to him.

  Then I scamper back over to Elijah.

  “Elijah,” I say, then pour some of the liquid courage down my throat, “I did not send you that text. Emily sent it to you.”

  “From your phone,” he counters. “How do I know you’re not lying?”

  He narrows his eyes at me.

  “Have you ever thought of going to law school?” I peer back at him. “You’d make a skilled litigator.”

  I take another long sip of my beer and grab his hand to tug him toward the source of the music. I find the stairs in the corner as we squeeze around people dancing.

  “Something you’ve never done before, huh?” he whispers against my neck. “A girl or a boy?”

  I swallow thickly as adrenaline surges through me. Adrenaline. Not the good kind, either.

  “What?”

  “I’m thinking a girl,” he says, “that way I can hold your legs apart and watch her go down on you. I’ve always wanted to see that. Or if you want it could be a dude. I’m not going to suck any dicks but I don’t mind being in the same room as one if you wanted it.”

  “Woah, woah,” I say, spinning around and putting my hands up. I make a “T” for time out. “What makes you think I want to have a three-way?”

  “Uh.” He hooks a hand around the back of his neck and shrugs meekly like he’s been caught with his hand in the cookie jar or sneaking an extra mini fun-size candy bar from a bowl on someone’s front porch on Halloween. “You, or Emily, or somebody said you wanted to do something you’d never done before. Threeway? E? You wanna do some ecstasy tonight? What is it?”

  “Get the hell out of here,” I laugh, shoving him squarely in the chest. He doesn’t budge. “You thought that? No, God, no.”

  I cradle my forehead with my fingers. Apparently he thinks I’ve been deflowered off at college, which is a fine assumption for him to have made. I was about to go upstairs with this guy and try to force myself to make out with him and he’s trying to induct me into varsity-level something when I still have the training wheels on.

  And I can’t help but think that what I was about to do would have been a betrayal. A betrayal to myself, a betrayal to Joshua. It’s not right to kiss someone when you want to be kissing someone else. Again - is this an immature or a mature stance to take? I don’t know.

  “Sorry for doing this to you again, Elijah,” I say, giving him a hug. “You’re a good guy. You’ve always been nice to me. I don’t want to act like some tease or something, but there was a little bit of a miscommunication here. I’ve got to go.”

  He bends down and I think he’s going to give me a kiss on
the cheek, and I prepare to pull away from him but he just offers his hand to me to shake.

  “I hope you find what you’re looking for,” he says. Then he turns around and grabs the hips of a girl walking by him. I recognize her vaguely from…around. She giggles in his arms and he assaults her mouth.

  Okay, this is just not for me. This whole scene. I may be nineteen, but I’m not into the party scene, now it’s confirmed, and whether it’s because I’m totally hung up on Joshua or because it’s just not in my DNA, it’s not happening. I take my beer outside and sit at the edge of the pool, letting my toes skim across the water and forgetting the hot tub. I look out past the pool at the stunning ocean with the moon low in the sky and making everything sparkle. Out in the distance on the beach there’s a bonfire and the crackling wood and fire smell fresh and renewing. A salty, warm breeze tangles through my hair and I feel myself shiver a little. It’s a stunning evening.

  I slide my phone out of my back pocket and bite my lip, hesitating for a moment before pulling up the contact for a girl who was my manager at the restaurant I waitressed at in high school. She owns a catering company now and she told me to reach out any time I was looking for a little extra cash. My aunt keeps tight control on the meager sum of money that my parents left to me—and will until I am 21—and rules her own finances with a tight fist. The moment I turned 18 she told it was time for me to get a job. She didn’t pay enough attention to me to know that I’d been waitressing on the weekends and evenings for three years prior to that and already had a small savings that I’d been able to amass for myself. She didn’t even know that I’d planned to go to college in California. My good grades even landed me a scholarship — another fact she was unaware of.

  But I’m calling my contact now not for extra money, though that’ll be a nice bonus, but because I need a little diversion. Maybe an ongoing gig that’ll last all summer. That would be nice.