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We dressed and made our way back up to the house. Steven walked behind me, and as we got really close he dropped back even further, so I stepped in through the back door by myself.
The scene inside was about what I would have expected: people everywhere reeling with cups in their hands, and Ashleigh in the middle of it all looking like she would have put her face in her hands if she wasn’t too polite to notice her guests were a mess.
Almost nobody took any notice of me, but Callie was soon staggering towards me, wide-eyed. Terrified, not drunk. “Tamara, where have you been?”
“I’m fine, Callie, what’s all this drama about?”
“I thought that Steven—” She bit her lip and looked around at our audience, who might be mostly wasted but were probably capable of picking up all the popcorn-worthy details we were dropping.
Steven walked in then, took in everyone’s eyes on him, and walked right by me smirking.
“Did you have a good time, Steven?” someone yelled.
“Tamara?” said Callie. “Are you all right?”
Aileen grabbed Callie and me and dragged us both off into a corner, not quite fast enough to escape a round of mocking cackling.
“What is up with you, Calista?” I demanded. “Are you the only one allowed to have gross hook-ups with guys? I thought you knew—” I stopped too, because Aileen probably knew nothing and I wasn’t even sure what it was Callie was supposed to know.
“Sorry.” Callie seemed more embarrassed than genuinely sorry. “He just… he disappeared with you.”
“And I told Aileen I was fine.”
Aileen shifted on her feet too. “We didn’t exactly have an extended dialogue on it. I couldn’t really say for sure everything was totally fine.”
Well, this was probably just what I got for trying to keep what was going on quiet even when it was obvious something was going on.
I wobbled a little, clinging to Callie to keep my balance. I felt sore and sick and desperate to just be alone. Certainly not keen to be sharing my current state with a whole bunch of drunk near-strangers.
Callie held me up. “Let’s just go, okay?”
Aileen recoiled. “Wait… Lucas? Um… that other arsehole?”
“I’m sure Steven can take care of them,” Callie said. Aileen seemed content enough with that answer, and if I had my doubts about whether Steven would be available, I was pretty happy to keep those to myself.
We were serenaded with catcalls and lewd remarks as we hurried out of Ashleigh’s house, which somehow still managed to be utterly exquisite even when full of drunk people. Ashleigh glanced at us as we passed her, but didn’t excuse herself from whoever she was talking with to say goodbye.
When I flopped into the back seat of Callie’s car with Aileen, I hurt again, but I felt more relaxed being away from all of them. Callie roared off in the car in a way she never used to drive before: I guess she never used to have to go to these sorts of parties, either.
“So, um.” Aileen didn’t exactly sound like she was eager to break the silence, but she didn’t have the excuse of driving not to, either. “Do we want to know what happened tonight?”
“The answer to that is definitely no… and you’re about to get a brainful anyway. What do you do if you think there’s a risk of being pregnant?”
Callie groaned. “Oh, Steven, you fucking did not. Your mother is going to lose it, Tamara.”
“Actually I’m sort of hoping not to start out my adult sex life by discussing my sex life with my mother.”
“It might be a bit late to find a pharmacy that’s open right now,” said Aileen, who was apparently going to take the very weird unlike-Aileen step of being very practical about this. “We’ll have to find a way to sneak you to one tomorrow.”
“Assuming you’re okay with that,” Callie added.
“Because… I might actually be secretly religious and have issues on those grounds?” Religion was one thing I didn’t have to worry about holding me back. I’d been too young to remember, but my mother had attended a church for a while after we left my father, had apparently really appreciated their support while she was trying to rebuild her life. Until she thought she figured out that churches were actually pretty keen on keeping women imprisoned in their own ways. Ryan told me once about how she’d staged a dramatic unbaptising ceremony for the two of us to clear the remaining taint from our brush with religion.
But she would still flip out if she got wind I’d needed to resort to emergency contraception.
“I don’t judge these days,” Callie said.
I sighed. “How do you rate my chances of keeping all of this from my mother, anyway?”
