by Mercy Walker
“When did everyone in my life get so scary?” I mumbled to no one in particular.
“What?” Mikey said.
Natalie turned around and shot us with that super-bitch sneer again. I gulped, reached out and grabbed hold of Mikey again, and started pulling him to the front door.
“Maybe we should…”
“Pour the Mountain Dew…” he said, his voice quavering. “Yeah, good idea.”
We hightailed it into the house.
Chapter Sixteen
Tom
It had been such a good day…I just couldn’t understand what had gone wrong.
I’d gone to work at the law office and found out that I’d won a summary judgment against an insurance company with very, very deep pockets. That was a very nice win. Then I stopped by my office at town hall to find out the polls were in, and that I was up twenty percent over when I’d won the office two years earlier. More great news.
I’d come home to share the good news with Lila…I still loved her, and more than anything I loved sharing my highs with her. But she wasn’t home. Her car was in the garage, but she’d left a brief note.
Out with a friend. Gone until @ six.
No signature, no I love you, not even a “Hi Tom.”
That was weird, but then I realized what it could mean, and I texted Marcus to come over. We’d get to have a few hours all alone. Alone in the house with Marcus. The mere thought was intoxicating.
He came over. We’d played a little game with him tying me up with Lila’s silk stockings…and then I’d fucked the goddamn ever-loving shit out of him. And then I’d fucked that hot piece of ass again in the shower.
All in all, a fantastic day.
I’d hastily made the bed we’d so enjoyably messed up, and I hopped in my car and headed back to the law office. There was some paperwork on a zoning issue I needed to get filed.
And that’s when things started sliding down hill.
I blew a tire out on the car. The AAA truck took over an hour to get there, and then the Neanderthal cracked my rim and dented my bumper before he got the spare on right.
Traffic was a bear, and then I got a text from my secretary that the zoning board had decided to deny my request. And to top it all off, the summary judgment was being suspended, pending an investigation into the presiding judge.
Just what I needed…
Not wanting to push fate, I cut out early and headed home. The sun had slid out of the sky during my drive home. I found the house dark, but Lila’s purse was sitting on the coffee table in the front room. So I pulled out my laptop and logged on the internet to do a little mayoral work.
That’s when my computer crashed.
Not a full on shut off and die. No, a browser window opened up, and then another, and another, and before I could even blink twice there were about a hundred and fifty pages open. And then the damn thing kicked off, the screen fading out to white. About a minute later the computer rebooted itself, and when my desktop reloaded, it was absolutely empty. So were my documents files, my pictures, even my spread sheets and the pitiful few iTunes I’d downloaded.
Well shiiit…
Finally I shut the damn laptop down and headed up to bed. I stopped in the bathroom and popped a few Tylenol. I had one hell of a headache.
I opened the door to the room Lila and I had shared to fifteen years of our twenty year marriage, and all that stared back at me was a bare mattress.
What the…?
On impulse, I headed to Emily’s room. It was dark and neat, and just as empty as our bedroom had been. So I tried the last bedroom, the guest room.
There she was, folded in on herself, her pillow clutched to her face. He was snoring lightly, and damn if she didn’t look peaceful.
I backed silently out of the room and headed back to our bedroom. Why the hell was she in the guest bedroom? I stared for a moment at the bare mattress, and then turned around to grab a new set of sheets from the hall linen closet.
That’s when I realized there weren’t any pillows on the bed either.
That’s stra…
And then it hit me like a ton of bricks. She’d found something…but what had she found?”
Shit, shit, shit…
What exactly did she know?
Chapter Seventeen
Natalie
I’d always found Michael Long nebbish. He was tall and gangly…and even though he was in great shape, he had a deplorable lack of personality.
That was until about five minutes ago, when he’s suddenly demanded my brother stop fucking the mayor, our own Tom Sherwood—and our next door neighbor.
I’d been minding my own business, but hadn’t heard even a floorboard creak up stairs. So I decided my brother and the boy blunder had probably gone on a walk somewhere…or whatever two polar opposite gay teenagers did to kill time.
Hang out at a beauty salon and heckle the customers for their bad hair style choices? Maybe go get matching his and his tattoos?
So I trekked back up stairs, grabbed some bills from the mantle stash, and headed for the porch to await the pizza delivery guy my dim witted brother had forgotten about.
But when I got to the front door I heard raised voices. One was Marcus. The other was meek, mousy Michael Long.
“I just wanted to tell you to stop—” there was a pause, and then, “fucking the Mayor. You could really get hurt…he could really hurt you.”
More freaking silence…
What the fuck?
And then more freaking silence…
“You should be with someone better,” Michael said. “Someone that would protect you and…”
My brother said, “I told you from the start, you are not my type.”
I listened intently for a few minutes. The whole conversation devolved into my brother and Michael clenched in a somewhat homoerotic arm-lock. Michael said he “had to go.” And then Dick-Head Marc said, “You can’t tell anyone about this.”
That’s when I opened the door and shooed the big dummies back in the house before they broadcast my brother’s scandalous dirty laundry to the entire neighborhood.
The fucking morons!
*****
So that’s why we’re all three sitting in the kitchen eating pizza and drinking Mountain Dew. My big dumb brother had yet again allowed his penis to get him in deep shit…well, this particular pile of shit was by far the biggest pile of shit he’d ever stepped in.
So I decided they needed someone with actual brain activity to sort things out and keep the big, steaming pile of shit from hitting the fan.
And that person of superior intellect and good judgment would have to be me.
I still hadn’t figured out how I was going to get a six foot three, straight basketball player to let me chain him to my basement ceiling, and also let me fuck him with a double headed dildo.
But compared to my brother’s truly heinous lack of common sense, it was the only sane choice.
“So did you and the mayor at least wait until you were legal before getting all…jiggy with it?”
“What?” Marcus said, incredulous.
I just stared at him like he was the moron he really was, until it occurred to me that he just didn’t get the reference.
“Before you got all thrusty with him? You were over eighteen before you two started fucking, right?”
“Oh,” Marcus said, looking all too relieved. “I’d been eighteen a while…two whole weeks.”
“Wow,” I said, deadpan. “That long?”
“Asked and answered,” Michael groused.
I shot him with my laser beam of death look, and he didn’t even flinch. I was starting to like the loser.
I moved on. “And as far as you know, the running man here is the only other person that knows about you two?”
Marcus looked to Michael. Michael rolled his eyes and said, “I swear I haven’t told a soul.”
Marcus looked obscenely relieved, and then I saw a thought pass over his face.
“You didn’t take any pictures or anything, did you?” he asked.
Michael’s face turned beet red, and if that wasn’t the guiltiest look a human being has ever had, I’m Bigfoot!
“I videotaped it.”
Oh great! So the little pervert had actually watched the whole thing...and had made himself a home movie of it—just a little something to remember it by.
“Tell me you didn’t post it on YouTube,” I said.
“No,” Michael said. “I just have it on my laptop…and on my cell phone.”
He still looked fucking guilty.
“Where else, peeping-tom boy?”
“I-I…I hid a copy on all my social networking sites…and my email accounts…and on my Amazon Wish List.”
“You did what?!?!” Marcus and I shouted at the same time.
“No one can access them without the pentagonal access code.” he explained. “I even encrypted the code key pad.”
“That’s good.” I said, feeling relieved. “So how hard will it be to…” and then a thought struck at my nervous system with the delicacy of a runaway train. “Did you say you hid a copy on your Amazon Wish List?”
“Yeah,” Michael said, unease in his voice.
Fuck me…fuckmefuckmefuckme…
“Then we have a big problem.”
Chapter Eighteen
Danni
I was having an aggressively bad day. First I accidentally flushed my cell phone. Then I backed into a light-poll in the parking lot of the Walmart I’d gone to before school to pick up a new cell phone. My back bumper fell off and I had to lug it to my back seat, seeing as my trunk was full of cheerleader materials. Pompoms, banner paper, paints, brushes, five bullhorns and twenty pairs of spanks.
So since my car’s license plate was bolted to the bumper, I was pulled over and cited for driving without my license plate properly displayed.
And somehow during all of this, I forgot my shower tongs.
Cheer practice is long and hard, and one absolutely has to shower afterwards. So I slipped and slid on my bare feet as I exited the showers. I skidded when I took the corner leading back to the lockers, and about took out an underclassman. She was a freshman and a member of the auxiliary cheer squad. But having to explain why she had been injured would have been just bitter frosting atop an absolute horror of a day.
So I sat down on the bench bolted to the floor right in front of my locker. That’s when I saw Lana. She was, as usual, deliciously beautiful…
Her long blond hair was pulled up into a not on top of her head. Her skin was dewy soft looking, and every last inch of her was coated in a luminous sheen of moisture from the shower.
Lana’s maybe two inches taller than me, and has about fifty percent more curves to her fabulous body…so to be showing as much naked flesh as she was showing with a towel wrapped around her, she would have had to have them custom made for herself.
All that skin, those luscious breasts over flowing from the top, those perfectly toned, super long legs flowing out from underneath. All that creamy smooth goodness, just sitting out there on display like…like an ooey, gooey chocolate chip cookie, fresh from the oven and left out on a table all alone and defenseless…
She was headed my way with her chic little carrying case for her shower supplies. And those hips were swinging with their usual graceful confidence.
Good lord, she was spectacular…
I gritted my teeth and forced myself to look away as she opened her locker and started to pull on her panties under her towel. Wanton lust or no, this was my oldest and dearest friend we were talking about here. No matter how badly I wanted to lose my virginity to her—and her heart-stoppingly gorgeous boyfriend—and I so wanted to do just that, I was risking losing that friendship.
I gulped just thinking about what my life would be like without Lana…
I’d known that sooner or later we’d part ways: going to college, getting jobs anywhere that was far away from our home town of Tempe. But what if by shoving sex into the equation of our long friendship, I somehow poisoned it, or made it go off balance, and then our friendship would just…fall apart?
I cringed at the thought…and where the hell had that horrible little analogy come from? I was shit with math, and here I was trying to liken my relationship with Lana to a freaking math problem.
It was Natalie Wilkes fault. I was paying her to keep me from flunking Algebra Two, which meant a C+…maybe a B-. But no, little miss perfectionist was flooding my poor, usually under-stimulated brain with so much useful information that I was teetering on the edge of an A-.
Fortunately my little mental tangent had afforded Lana enough time to dress completely. All she had to do was fix her hair and put on her shoes, and she’d be all set.
Lana’s makeup never seemed to get smudged; not by sweat, not by rain or showering. And then one day I’d really looked at her skin. It was flawless. Her complexion had this perfect smoothness to it, not a zit or acne scar to be seen, and her eye lashes and lips were thick and naturally colored already.
The lucky bitch didn’t even wear makeup usually.
I grimaced again just thinking about those full, nearly red, pouty lips. I wondered what they would taste like. I’d kissed some boys before, though I’d never let it go past the initial first grope. And I’d liked it a lot.
But girl’s lips had to be…well, sweeter, right? Girls were made out of “sugar and spice” and all that crap.
Okay…no more Lana lips…no more Lana anything…
I took a deep breath and tried to get myself out of this mess.
“I don’t think I’m going to be able to make it tonight.”
Lana slipped her sketchers on and took her and her hair brush to the long mirror that practically stretched the entire span of the locker room.
I stood up and followed her, my feet skating around on the slippery tile floor as I tried to catch up with her. My towel almost fell off, coming loose as I tried like hell not to fall on my ass.
When I finally caught up with Lana, she had her waterfall of blond hair free of its bonds, and was majestically sweeping the brush through it.
Damn…she had beautiful hair.
I shook the throbbing, hot pangs that looking at Lana was inundating me with and tried again.
“I said,” I said in a stage whisper, “I don’t think I can make it tonight!”
She stopped brushing her hair, her eyes closed and she smiled as if she was tasting a particularly delicious bite of chocolate. The look was decadent, and utterly to die for.
Her eyes opened and she looked at my reflection in the mirror.
“What are you talking about? Of course you’ll be there…where else would you be?”
I gulped. She was playing dumb…or maybe she was being her usual, confident self.
“I-I…” I suddenly didn’t have any more words to use in my defense.
She turned and playfully scoped out the locker room. It had thinned out, and most of the girls were already heading for the doors. We were practically alone.
Damn…
Lana sauntered closer to me, so close I could smell the scented soup on her skin, and feel her warm, minty sweet breath on my face.
Double damn…
She reached out her hand and slowly dipped a single finger in and grazed it over the outside of my ear. I shivered. Her gaze never left mine as that finger traveled down the side of my neck, over my collarbone, and then oh…so…slowly caressed lower, the silky soft, naughty little digit tracing down the slope of my left breast. I trembled, and something rang out in me as if she’d plucked the strings of my very soul.
I felt something pull tight deep down in my lower body.
And then Lana pulled her finger way and smiled. The sudden lack of contact made me dizzy, as if there had been an electric current running between us through that finger, and it had been the only thing keeping me animated and alive.
Now I felt shocky and drained, as if my life batte
ry was fizzling out.
Maybe Lana’s touch was narcotic…and with just one touch I was addicted.
The thought was chilling, but somehow comforting. All I had to do to feel that good again was to touch her…
When I could finally focus my eyes again, I found Lana still achingly close, and staring at me like she could see straight into my soul—which she’d just plucked like the strings of a harp, so why wouldn’t she be able to see it too. She leaned in even closer, until our lips were so close I could feel them tickle against my own. And then she changed her motion, swerving to the side until her lips where brushing against my earlobe. I was shaking like I was suffering from hypothermia.
“Midnight, tomorrow…” she whispered into my ear. “In my room…don’t be late.”
And just like that she turned on her heel, swept the fall of silky blond hair over her shoulder and stalked off to grab her purse from her locker; leaving me shaking and practically naked, all alone in the girl’s locker room. And I was breathing like I’d run a hundred laps around the gymnasium.
My mouth was dry, and I gulped that dryness down my parched throat. I needed a drink…maybe I’d hit my parents liquor cabinet when I got home…but that would be stupid. I’d puked my guts out the one and only time I’d tried it, and had sworn off the shit ever since. And anyways, with the choices I had looming ahead of me tonight, I needed all my wits about me.
I turned to return to my locker—and my clothes—when my feet slipped right out from under me, and I sprawled, spread eagle, on the stinking tile floor.
Luckily I didn’t hit my head, but my ass sure did hurt. I lay there for a few defeated moments, staring at the ceiling and the shiny metal water sprinklers. This day just seemed to get worse and worse. There was no way that going to Lana’s bedroom tonight wasn’t going to be just as disastrous.