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It’s fifteen minutes after midnight, and my chest tightens. I sit up, a throbbing between my legs reminding me of the beast that just tore through my virginity and I look around the room, remembering all our clothes and my purse and backpack are still downstairs.
I’m an adult, and it irritates me that my father keeps tabs on me like I’m still a teenager, even though I’ve been away at school four years without him coming unraveled every time he doesn’t know where I am for more than a couple hours.
Chewy’s voice comes from down the hall. “Takes a while for the water to warm up. Stay there, I’ll come get you when the shower’s ready.”
“Okay,” I answer, taking a long breath as I tiptoe toward the door and head down the steps to retrieve my cell phone and assuage the messages from my father I know must be waiting.
My purse is sitting on the table next to the Mustang and I root around inside looking for my phone but find nothing. I figure it must be in my backpack, so I switch gears and gather up all the remnants of our clothes scattered on the cement floor of the garage.
When I pick up Chewy’s black vest, something slips from the pocket and hits the floor, lighting up at the impact.
It’s my phone and on the screen are two calls and a few texts from my father, all in the last half hour because my unspoken curfew is 11:30.
Before I can read them all or listen to his voicemails, my phone rings and it’s him again.
“Hi, Dad.” I answer keeping my voice low. “Sorry, I forgot to tell you—”
“Tell me? Where are you?”
“My car had a problem. I called for a tow. You said you were going to be with your car club tonight so I didn’t want to bother you.”
“That garage he owns…Off the Line towed you,” he says and it’s not a question.
He? That garage ‘he’ owns what does that mean?
“How did you know?”
“Doesn’t matter. I’ve told you who those guys are. That club of theirs. There are things you don’t know about them, especially that Charles “Chewy” that owns the garage. Where are you?”
“I’m…” I turn toward the stairs but don’t hear anything. “I’m still here. They just finished with my car,” I lie, but I don’t want him coming for me. I have sex seeping from my pores and whatever the tension is between my father and Chewy, midnight after I just lost my virginity to him is probably not the time to try to work it out. “I’m on my way home now.”
I hang up, holding my phone, wondering why Chewy it was in Chewy’s vest to begin with.
My mother’s words come back to me as I slip into my bra and clothes, handing my phone from one hand to the other as a knot of guilt builds in my gut.
Lust is just a synonym for stupidity. One turns into the other no matter how hard you try to not let it happen.
“What am I doing?” I whimper to myself as a self-loathing regret makes the air feel cold and heavy. The drunken desire is starting to ebb, replaced by a harsh sober reality that descends around me. Whatever this mad chemistry experiment was tonight, it’s over.
Horror bands around me. I not only fucked him, not only gave him my virginity, but without protection. Something else my mother and father both drove hard into my skull from the time I was old enough to even think about boys.
Their own one night of lust filled reckless abandon led to me and bound two people who were nothing alike together out of sense of duty. In her misery, my mother finally snapped when I was nine, left a note and disappeared.
Went out for milk.
She never came back. She didn’t even have the decency to come up with something more original.
“Damn it,” I swear, walking over to the wall where I see keys hanging. I find mine on the table below, taped to a piece of paper scrawled with black marker.
Was just a loose hose. All fixed. Leaving now, hope you’re having fun. I know how you like a challenge.
I rip my key from the paper, walk over and slam my fist on the red button next to the overhead glass door as I hop in my car, turn the ignition and spin in reverse, praying to heaven and hell that my one night of stupid doesn’t end up the way it did for my mother and father.
Chapter 6
Annie
I’m bleary and in a fog from a sleepless night and the wild memory of losing my virginity in a reckless fit of passion with a guy I know isn’t right for me.
What made it worse was when I walked into my dad’s house and found him sitting there on the sofa in his robe like I’d stayed out after curfew on prom night.
