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After dinner, Harrison picked Kaylee up and carried her off to her room to play with the K’nex pieces we had brought with us. Trish, Archer, and I hung out in the living room. There wasn’t anything good on TV, so we settled on an episode of The Sopranos that was poorly dubbed over into Turkish. Archer came up with a drinking game where we took a drink every time the dubbed voice used an awful Italian-American accent.
By the time the episode ended, we were all extremely buzzed.
“I’m having too much fun to go to bed now,” Trish said. “Do you guys want to play a game?”
“I’m afraid I’m a bit too pissed for Dutch Blitz,” Archer said.
Trish frowned. “Pissed?”
“That’s his cricket-loving ass’s way of sayingdrunk,” I explained.
“Cricket is a gentleman’s game that is superior to anything else human civilization has devised,” Archer said.
“How about another drinking game, then?” Trish suggested. She stretched out her leg across the couch. “Like Truth or Drink?”
“You mean Truth or Dare?” I asked.
“No, Truth orDrink,” she insisted. “Either you answer the question, or you take a drink. It gets you drunk quicker. Very popular drinking game when I was at college.”
“I enlisted right after high school,” I reminded her.
“Oh. Right. Well, Army guys have a reputation for being able to drink a lot, right?”
Archer sputtered a laugh. “She is not wrong.”
“I’m already buzzed,” I said. “And Archer is, to use his dumb phrasing,pissed.”
Trish flashed a mischievous grin that stirred something inside of me. “Then you’ll both be answering a lot of questions. I’ll go first. When did you lose your virginity?”
Archer cleared his throat. “When I was fifteen, at secondary school. Me and Mary Kane snogged after a football match. Her parents were out for the night, so we went back to her place. Lost my virginity on her couch.”
“Fifteen, impressive. I bet she was pretty,” Trish said.
“She was most certainlynot,” Archer answered. “I do not want to sound callous, but she had what Jordy has called abutter face.”
Trish was frowning, so I explained: “As in, everything is hot… but-her-face.”
“Ahh.”
“Granted, I was a bit of a chonker myself, back then,” Archer clarified. “Before Her Majesty’s Armed Forces tightened me up.”
“Technically,” Trish said, raising a finger, “it’s nowHisMajesty’s Armed Forces.”
Archer winced. “Still haven’t gotten used to the sound of that.”
“I thought nobody likes Charles,” I chimed in. I didn’t have much knowledge on the subject beyond what I sometimes saw online. “Couldn’t they skip Charles and go right to William? Everyone likes him, right?”
“Charles could have abdicated, but he would never do that,” Archer said. “He’s waited his whole damn life for Lizzy to finally give the throne to him.” He sighed. “Diana would have made a lovely Queen Consort. Camilla… I’m prattling on, now. Your turn to answer the question, Jordy.”
“Yeah!” Trish said. “Your turn. When did you lose your virginity?”
I paused dramatically before answering. “Boot camp. There were three women in our unit, and one of them had a thing for me. One day, we snuck back to the barracks during chores and… did the deed. Her name was Vanessa.” I savored the sound of the name on my tongue. Even now, thirteen years later, it made part of my soul tingle.
“Boot camp?” Trish said. “You were a virgin until you were eighteen?”
“Don’t judge,” I said, with a theatrical amount of defensiveness. “I was shy back then.”
“I can’t imagine a shy Jordan Mackey,” Archer muttered.
