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I take a deep breath. We didn’t get caught. I look over at Caleb, who’s looking at me, and I button my vest and pull my jacket on and sidle over to him, his face still flushed, his eyes still bright.
“Take me home?” I murmur.
Before he can answer, I hear my name.
“Thalia!” Margaret shouts and I glance toward the crowd of people, my heart sinking. I step away from Caleb, anxiety swirling in my chest, and then the three of them come through the crowd one at a time.
“There you are!” Harper is saying, dodging a guy wearing a cardboard robot suit. “I was afraid you were…”
Margaret and Victoria are already standing there, silently looking at me, then at Caleb, then back at me.
“Oh,” Harper says, and that’s all. The hum of people talking and shouting and laughing rises around us, but none of the five of us say anything for a long, long moment.
I’m positive that what I just did is written all over my face. I’m positive that my three best friends can guess, probably almost verbatim, what just happened and with whom.
“You ready to go home?” Margaret asks pointedly, shooting a glance at Caleb.
“Yep!” I say, about ten times too excitedly. “Sounds great! Let’s do it!”
Victoria says nothing, but I know the press of her lips, even the disapproving cock of her hips in her half-football-half-fairy outfit.
I don’t want to go with them. I want to go home with Caleb and I’m pretty sure I want to ride him like a race horse, but what choice do I have?
I can’t tell them sorry, I gotta go bang my professor.
I glance over at Caleb, catch his eye. He nods, ever so slightly. There’s a half smile and then Margaret clears her throat very obnoxiously and I turn away and follow them out of Scarborough Hall.
The entire way home they talk about how bummed they are to graduate and how still, no one has guessed my Halloween costume, and how they have so much homework to do tomorrow because they got nothing done today.
And I walk and chat and I’m half afterglowy and half cold because I love my friends but I’d rather be elsewhere, with someone else.
Someone who I didn’t even manage to give a handjob to.
It’s something I’ve never felt guilty about before, but I guess it’s a fun new experience.Chapter Twenty-EightCalebI jerk off twice when I get home. I don’t think I’ve done that since I was sixteen, but I lay on my bed with the lights off and I can’t stop thinking about Thalia, about the noises she made when I rolled her nipples between my fingers, or about the way her hips bucked when I found her clit, or about the way her eyes rolled shut and she moaned when I sunk my fingers knuckle-deep inside her.
I come hard, just thinking about it. Then I think about it ten minutes later and take care of that, too, because apparently she’s made me a teenager again.
But even after that, I can’t sleep. I can only lie awake, looking at the popcorn ceiling that I’d like to redo, thoughts of Thalia and transgressions swirling in my head.
I think, black-hearted, oh God, what have I done?
I think, I’d do it again in a heartbeat. Half a heartbeat.
I wonder if her friends are going to turn us in and I wonder if anyone else saw us and I wonder if we can possibly keep this up without getting caught.
I wonder if it matters that she’s a virgin. I wonder if it matters that I’m not. I wonder what she’s done and I wonder with whom and I think about what I’ve done and with whom, and I wonder if I should tell her that our encounter on the stairs might be the peak sexual experience of my life.
Finally, hours after getting in bed, I go to sleep.* * *“Okay, but — hear me out, dammit June don’t even open your mouth, you don’t know what I’m going to say — a drone is the ring-bearer.”
My soon-to-be-sister-in-law stares at her brother with an expression so stone-faced I start to worry.
Finally, she lifts her drink to her mouth, still regarding her older brother with a mix of wariness, contempt, and plain bafflement.
“Who’s piloting the drone in this scenario?” she asks.
Silas just shrugs.
“Nope, wrong answer,” June says. “You can’t just come up with these half-baked ideas and then not have thought them through. You want a drone ring-bearer? You tell me who’s piloting that shit. You tell me their skill level and you tell me who’s catching it and you tell me who’s troubleshooting this mess and you tell me who is bandaging up Grandma Enid when the drone inevitably hits her and then, maybe then, I will consider your moronic idea.”
