Slippery When Wet (A Romance Novella): Maybe Mandy 3

by Chris Genovese

  Doing some funky version of “the running man dance” on the dance floor, surrounded by a group of friends, was Antoine Jakes. He’d always been a class clown and was now using that natural goofiness of his to get the party going.

  At the table to my left was a large, manly looking black woman, with tall hair, lots of makeup, and gaudy jewelry.

  “Who’s that?” I asked Porter, nudging my head left to gesture discreetly at the woman.

  Porter pointed right at her.

  “Her?”

  “Dammit, Porter,” I said as I lowered her hand and accidentally made it point at some guy on the dance floor.

  “Me?” he mouthed.

  “No,” Porter replied.

  “Me?” he mouthed again, or could have been yelling, with booming speakers blasting Doo Wop, That Thing by Lauryn Hill.

  “Girls, you know you better watch out!” the songstress crooned through the air.

  “Oh God,” Porter said. “He’s not gonna stop.”

  The guy, who I’d started to vaguely remember as Ricky something, did that ridiculous, clichéd dance move where he pretended to cast a line in Porter’s direction. When she failed to catch the hook, he kept going anyway, jerking back on his invisible pole, pretending to lure in a big fish. Porter was supposed to be the fish. When she didn’t get up and bounce her way toward him, he pretended the fish was too strong and had yanked him closer to her.

  Finally, he stood only a foot away.

  “Dance with me, beautiful,” he said.

  “Do we know each other?” Porter asked.

  He looked taken aback.

  “I’m sorry. That was rude,” she said. “I didn’t mean it to be. I’m just having a hard time remembering people.”

  “Don’t worry about it,” he said. “I don’t remember you either. But we can make new friends, right?”

  Porter nodded and looked over at me. I motioned for her to go ahead and join the guy. I wouldn’t feel bad about it. She pursed her lips like she was being forced to do something she had no interest in doing. She was lying. The guy was kind of cute. I knew she was excited to go.

  A few seconds later, a stunning black woman and a hunky white dude sat down across from me at our table. It took me a second to recognize her. Him I wasn’t familiar with at all, but holy shit he was hot!

  “Roselyn?” I asked. “Roselyn Lewis?”

  She peered up at me and grinned.

  “Mandy!”

  Roselyn had been part of my “crew” if you could call it that. When Porter left, it took me a while to gather up a firm, trusted group of friends. That’s when I’d met Jill and started hanging out more with Ben and a few others.

  “Rose!” I shrieked and moved around to hug her.

  We embraced and shook each other like excited kids.

  “I can’t believe it,” she said. “You look stunning.”

  I sat down next to her beau.

  “Is this your boyfriend?” I asked.

  Then I whispered in her ear, “He’s fucking hot.”

  “I know,” she sang back, obviously as excited about her date as I was. “His name’s Nick. He’s a model. I own a magazine and seeing these hunks all the time is definitely one of the perks.”

  “A magazine?”

  “Yeah, after college I moved to Chicago, part of my following-in-Oprah’s-footsteps dream. I didn’t find that kind of success, but one of my school friends and I started a magazine. It’s pretty popular now. Enough for me to live off of but not enough to do much else if you know what I mean.”

  Chicago. Did everyone live in Chicago? I’d never even visited the city.

  “That’s so cool. I’m a writer…well…I fancy myself one,” I said. “I write advertisement copy right now, but not in the most glamorous of worlds.”

  I’d have to think of how to make that sound better the next time I needed to say it. With Rose, I didn’t need to play pretend. She was one of the few women on the planet I’d always felt comfortable confiding in.

  “Well, maybe you can write for my magazine sometime.”

  “What kind of magazine is it?”

  “It’s called Swirl,” she said with her hands out opening wider as she spoke, as if pitching a movie idea that I needed to truly envision. “Making Mocha Together. That’s the slogan. Catchy, right?”

  It was quite catchy.

  “A cooking magazine?” I asked.

  “A fucking magazine.”

  Like a motherfucking magazine, as in “It’s none of your damn business. It’s a motherfucking magazine, alright?”

  Or like, “Fuck that magazine!”

  Or like a sexual romp kind of magazine?

  She needed to clarify. Fucking could mean so many things and my mind was racing.

  “Porn?” I asked.

  “No, not exactly. It’s an interracial dating magazine. For men and women of different backgrounds, ethnicity…color basically. Like my date and me. Black and white mostly, but it has a little bit of all the other mixes too if you know what I mean. So it’s full of dating advice, sexual dos and don’ts, real life experiences in bed. No dirty pictures but it’s erotic as hell.”

  Well if I were going to write for her magazine, it sounded like I needed to get a few of these swirled moments under my belt.

  “You look surprised,” she said.

  I had to think about that one. What was Rose like back in high school? She was pretty and semi-popular, about as popular as anyone in my immediate circle could be. We didn’t smoke out on the side of the school with the bad boys, we didn’t hang out with all the football players and cheerleaders, and we weren’t in the band. We were somewhere in-between. We were what you might call the Drama Club Geeks. But we weren’t nerds. We were hella cool. At least I thought so.

  “Have you spoken with Mica?”

  Mica, now that was a name I hadn’t heard in forever. She’d made our final summer in town the best ever.

  “Wow. Mica,” I replied.

  “The M.I.C.A.” we both said while using our hands to spell out the letters, just like in the YMCA song.

  The M.I.C.A. was what we’d all nicknamed the small community center at Mica’s apartment community. Late at night, when it was supposed to be closed, we’d sneak over to the M.I.C.A., and hang out with our boyfriends, or whatever boys we invited. That place had a pool, ping pong tables, a pool table, a Jacuzzi, a sauna, and a big back room full of stacked up chairs meant for birthday parties and community meetings. That place was our motherfucking castle.

  “The M.I.C.A.,” Rose said again.

  She’d lost her virginity there. I remember it well. We’d all been playing truth or dare in the pool. My boyfriend at the time, a guy named Michael, had dared everyone to stand up outside the pool, one at a time, strip naked, and dive into the pool with grace, like one of those synchronized dancers. We all did it, covering up our private parts of course, as we embarrassingly made our way into the water.

  Rose was the last to go. We’d been drinking those nasty St. Ides Special Brew drinks. Those suckers were fruity and delicious, but damn they were strong. It only took one. Rose was small too, so by the time she’d downed hers and stood at the side of the pool, she was more than tipsy.

  She started out removing her clothes like the rest of us, a bit shy, taking off her shirt, pants, bra, and panties, piece by piece. Then, she turned around and lifted both hands in the air, exposing her tits to the world and her unshaved pussy to every person in the pool. It was awesome. We cheered her on as she shook her hips from side to side, showing off her body like she didn’t give a shit who was in attendance.

  This was back before cell phones. Nowadays someone would have recorded it and sent it all around the school. Back then, it was only fact if you were there at the moment, and it was all only rumors afterward.

  Rose had entered the party alone, but by the end of the night, Michael’s best friend, James, couldn’t keep his hands off her. She kept drinking those St. Ides drinks, a different
flavor each time (never a good idea), and by the end of the night, she was on the floor beneath the ping pong table, with James buried deep inside her. Then she was throwing up a rainbow of special brew all over the floor. We spent the rest of the night cleaning up the mess.

  “Wonder if James’ll be here,” I said.

  Rose shot me a look that warned me not to go there. She reached out and took Nick’s hand on top of the table.

  “So have you guys been dating awhile?” I asked.

  “Dating? No. Fucking? Hell yes,” she said.

  Nick grinned.

  Rose leaned in closer to me and said into my ear, “This guy’s as dumb as a box of rocks but his dick is the stuff of legends. He’s my motherfuckin’ Beowulf.”

  “Which makes you Grendel’s mother?” I joked.

  “Oh that’s fucked up.”

  We both laughed, having heard the Beowulf story a million times in drama club together. We’d even done a short play on the story. Being around Rose and Porter felt great. It was like we’d never left high school. When you have those kinds of friends, you can go 50 years without them, then pick right back up where you left off.

  Speaking of Porter, she was holding her own out on the dance floor, shoeless and breaking it down to Intergalactic by the Beastie Boys.

  I waved one of the waiters over and asked for a strong rum and coke. I was still buzzing a bit from the tequila but it wouldn’t take long for that to wear off. Finally, Ben and Jill came to sit at our table. I made sure to save Porter a seat on the other side of me.

  “Okay, well there are definitely some fuckable men at this party,” Jill announced. “And some not-so-fuckable men!”

  Rose jumped up from her seat and rushed to hug Jill and Ben. They’d both been part of our crew by the time we’d graduated.

  They all did their high-pitched hellos and then finally sat back down.

  “We were discussing the…” I started, winking at Rose so she could join in.

  We both contorted our bodies into the M…I…C…A.

  “Oh shit!” Jill yelled. “Yes, oh man…I wonder if that building is still there.”

  “I’m sure it is,” Ben replied. “I almost had my first gay hookup there.”

  We all froze and turned our heads to hear more. This was clearly the first any of us had heard about this.

  “What?” he asked. “Come on. You didn’t know?”

  We obviously didn’t.

  “Your boyfriend?” he said. “Michael?”

  “You’re lying,” I said.

  “No, not at all. Remember that time the power went out? And we were all in that back room, the room with all the tables and chairs and stuff? We were sitting in a circle, trying to work up the nerve to do a séance. We didn’t have candles or anything. It was so stupid.”

  He stopped there. We didn’t stop staring. He needed to explain himself a little more.

  “Nothing happened. Michael touched my leg and kind of slid it up like he was considering touching my dick or something.”

  “Eww,” I said. “Shut the fuck up.”

  “I’m serious,” he said, holding out a pinky. “Pinky swear.”

  “Pinky swear? Whatever. Maybe he thought it was me he was feeling up.”

  “I had on shorts, hairy legs, and his fingers grazed my cock. And I was hard because, well, I was gay and couldn’t tell anyone yet.”

  “But you were there with June Bug,” I reminded him. “Your girlfriend. You fucked June Bug there, remember?”

  “I did,” he agreed. “I had to pretend it was a dude, but I did fuck June there.”

  “Oh that’s sick,” I said. “My boyfriend felt you up? Why didn’t you ever say anything?”

  “I don’t know. I just figured he was as lost as I was and it didn’t mean anything.”

  Everyone burst out laughing, including Beowulf Nick. Everyone except me. Then, finally, I realized it was pretty damn funny and joined in with the rest.

  “I wonder what happened to Michael?” Ben asked, winking at me.

  “You can have him.”

  “You can have June Bug,” he said followed by a hoot.

  “We don’t all turn gay after high school,” I reminded him.

  “Honey, I was gay long before high school ended…long before it began actually.”

  My drink came and I ordered another before I started it. I wanted to get rip roaring drunk so I could be the me I’d always wanted to be in high school but didn’t have the balls to be. I’d paid for my entry like everyone else and that included drinks, so I was going to get my money’s worth. Plain and simple. Plus, I neither knew nor liked anybody at the party who wasn’t seated at my table. They’d all become strangers to me.

  I downed my rum and coke and it went straight to my head. I’d ordered it strong but damn. The next drink came and I sucked it up through the stirrer straw.

  “Slow down, honey,” Ben warned me.

  “No, drink up!” Jill cheered.

  “Yes, let’s,” Porter agreed as she too downed a drink.

  Then we downed another drink. And another one. And another one. You get the idea.

  Before I knew it, I was on the dance floor with Porter and her new friend, and he was loving life. Especially when Porter leaned in close to my ear and said, “Let’s sandwich him.”

  Sandwich. Wow.

  Hadn’t heard that in forever. It was a sandwich that had led to my first ever blowjob. We’d been at a dance. It was a get-to-know-each-other dance thrown by a community rec center, not by our school. So the rules were almost nonexistent and it usually ended up looking like one of the scenes from Dirty Dancing.

  A guy I liked, who happened to live a few doors down, and ended up being the guy to steal my virginity, Craig Shivers, moseyed up to me on the dance floor and kind of spooned me from behind, rocking his pelvis to the same rhythm as my body. Porter kind of liked him too, and before I knew it, she’d taken up the spot behind him, and the three of us swayed to Candyman’s Knockin’ Boots. It was epic.

  Later that night, I attempted to give Craig a blowjob out in his car. He was older than I was and much more experienced. He held my hair back in a ponytail of his creation, while I gagged on the tip of his cock, and tried to do the things I’d seen in my father’s old VHS porn video I’d found a year before. The tracking always fixed itself whenever the blowjobs started so I had to kind of guess how to begin.

  I was wise enough to know that the spitting on the head maneuver I’d seen in the movies probably wasn’t the best idea. That seemed messy and downright disrespectful. So should I nibble at it? Just open up and shove it in? Finally, I closed my eyes and went with my gut, meaning I took it slow, and focused on taking his cock in my mouth, little by little.

  It seemed I was doing okay, because his moans filled the car. I remember thinking he was so fucking salty, like I’d taken a Rold Gold out of the pack and practiced fellatio on it. He was salty, and slick, and when the first bead of pre-cum seeped out, I thought I might puke. I tried to move off him, but he held my head down, pulling at my roots as he squeezed my ponytail.

  I guess I kind of got lucky but unlucky both at the same time.

  Just as I began to feel uncomfortable and like I’d made a mistake and wanted to get out of the car, some of his pubic hairs got caught in my braces. We both learned this as I pulled up on his cock and pulled the wad of pubes with me. He screamed, I gagged, we both hollered, and I ended up yanking the hairs clean off his body.

  I remember staring at him, mouth open, in total shock. I’ve always wondered if I had that wad of pubic hairs clenched in my braces, sticking out like I’d gotten food in my teeth at a restaurant. Had he seen his own furry treat stuck in my dental tool?

  As I drifted back to reality, I realized I had my face buried in my hands, embarrassed, and Porter asked me what was wrong.

  Nothing was wrong, but I couldn’t seem to control the flashbacks that kept flooding over me. I wanted to have a good time and all I kept remembering
were the great times…and bad that always seemed to follow. I had to wonder if it was Porter who brought the bad luck to me, or if I’d been the culprit all along, exposing her to my unfortunate events.

  “You okay?” Porter asked.

  A rush of energy came over me. No more sad thoughts today. I was going to have the time of my life tonight. Maybe Mandy was going to get fucked, somehow, by somebody, before the night was over.