James Games

by Rose, L. A.

  We’re near the edge of the crowd, and he gives my ass a squeeze. It makes me purr like a cat, but I still can’t let him think he’s winning. So I go full vampire and bite his neck, sucking the patch of sweet skin just below his jawbone and near his ear, leaving my mark. A mark that’ll last for days. I continue down, painting bruises over his skin so the next girl he screws will see them and wonder who put them there.

  Is he going to go for the street, to catch a cab? But he turns before the exit, carrying me along the wall. The bathroom? God, I hope he’s classier than the bathroom. But he passes by the long line. He’s looking for something, and I see it at the same time he does: an unmarked door.

  He tries the handle with his free hand. Locked. I expect that to be the end of it, but instead he lifts me slightly higher and kicks the door down.

  Okay, the lock is rusted and the door doesn’t fall, it just pops open, but there’s a kick involved and suddenly the air is ten degrees hotter.

  I meet his mouth with mine again as he brings me inside, kicking the door shut again behind him. The only light comes from a dull bulb hanging from the ceiling. There are coats everywhere—California coats, light gauzy ones, folded on the floor where the rack by the wall has run out of hangers. There’s another door leading into presumably a different room. This must be a spare closet where they stuff the extra jackets when the coat check runs out of room.

  And then I forget everything about the room except the wall and the fact that my back is up against it, the plaster crumbling over my bare shoulders as the masked stranger covers every inch of exposed skin with kisses until I wish I’d come to this concert naked. Thrill is in my blood: I’m sexy, I’m young, I’m hooking up with a random gorgeous guy in a coat closet at a concert, fuck yes.

  I shove him back and hop lightly to the ground. These shorts are tiny, but not tiny enough. Nonexistent would be better. I step out of them, twirl them around my finger, and toss them on a nearby jean jacket, thrusting my hips to the side so he gets a full eyeful of my pink lacy panties. My eyes flash. I’m daring him. Come and get me.

  He does, lifting me off the ground again, kissing me so ferociously that my head spins. I run my hands over his back and feel him: the taut muscles shifting over his broad shoulder blades, the dip and curve where his back condenses to a narrow waist, up again to touch the hard, well-defined muscles of his arms.

  I don’t want to wait. I want my spontaneous concert sex and I want it now. I pop the button on his jeans and unzip them, and he does the rest. I’m too busy doing things to his lips that will make them remember me every time he kisses someone else to look down, but I feel him spring free, harder than ever, and I hear the crinkle of a condom.

  I open my mouth, about to say something dirty, but something stops me. I don’t want to break our code of silence. I don’t want to ruin the strange, voiceless energy between us, wrapping us up, turning this whole moment into something ethereal. He hasn’t said a word yet either, and I’m starting to wonder if he even has a voice. He seems not to need one. So far, we’ve been communicating just fine.

  This is it. The culmination of our battle. He needs to prove to me that he’s been worth all this. I draw my head back, letting my eyes drip down him with disdain and doubt, a challenge that hides the burning need between my thighs. Prove that you can handle me.

  Normally I’m all about the foreplay, but that invisible force between us makes me so desperately horny that I need him inside me right now, and I don’t waste any time in making sure he knows it.

  He slides inside me with a groan. Fuck. A thousand little starbursts fizzle along my skin. I’m slick and ready, and he glides along my nerve endings, pushing forward until I’m utterly filled and utterly stimulated. He’s still holding me up. My thighs are wrapped around his waist and I dig my fingernails into his back, letting him know that he better satisfy me.

  He thrusts, slamming my back into the wall, more white plaster raining down on my head. His cock presses all the right buttons and a sea of fire spreads across my abdomen as he thrusts again and again, angling just right. I open my mouth and scream at the top of my lungs, a yell of triumph, because it’s too loud for anyone to hear me anyway, and what’s the point of sex if it doesn’t make you scream?

  He pounds into me and I’m coming already, incredible, faster than I ever have before and better than I ever have before, my muscles contracting and expanding all around as he comes at the same time. My vision goes white with it and I scream again as he pours all he has into one last thrust.

  The wall behind us gives way. Suddenly I’m tangled in broken plaster and white powder, a wooden beam propping me up, my masked stranger pantsless and sideways across my legs. He blinks in shock and it’s startlingly cute, like a wolf doing something puppylike. He probably wasn’t expecting to fuck a girl through a wall tonight. Or was he? I start laughing, high off the after-effects of my orgasm. I wasn’t expecting to be fucked through a wall tonight.

  And we still haven’t said a word to each other.

  He stands up, brushes himself off, and takes my hand, pulling me out of the Fiona-sized hole in the wall. I cough, plaster dust in my lungs, and grin at him, expecting him to return the smile. It takes him a good few seconds, but there it is: a sexy quirk of those luscious lips that makes me want to jump him all over again. “That was incredible,” I declare. “Best sex I’ve had since coming to California. What’s your name?”

  Instead of replying, he bends and passes me my shorts. Maybe he really is mute.

  My panties are crumpled on the ground and covered with wall dust, so I tug on my shorts sans underwear. Let the building staff find my undergarments next to the hole and draw their own conclusions.

  He pulls up his jeans. Now that I’m not overwhelmed with lust, I’m overwhelmed with the kind of curiosity I don’t usually feel about my hookups. There’s just something about him. And it’s hidden beneath that mask.

  Moving as if magnetized, my fingers drift to the edge of his mask. He’s motionless, his eyes never leaving my face. “Who are you?” I murmur, brushing its hard edge.

  But before I can lift it from his skin, he takes a step back. He holds my gaze for one last long moment before opening the door, slipping out into the crowd.

  “Hang on!” I shout, but I trip over a dust-covered coat, and by the time I leave the little room and embed myself in the crowd again, searching through the darkness and smoke, there’s no sight of a tall tousle-haired man in a black mask.

  ~3~

  “And that,” I announce, drawing a neat slash through the four marker lines on the whiteboard, “makes five.”

  Iris, seated on her bed with her long pale legs kicking slightly—which is ecstatic energy for her—raises one cool eyebrow. “The first one didn’t count.”

  “We sixty-nine’d!” I yell at her. After a night of getting drunk at a fray party, mostly out of annoyance for losing Mask Boy at the concert, and then getting drunk at a different party out of annoyance that I dealt with my annoyance by getting drunk at a frat party, I feel surprisingly energetic. Even the walk of shame home, past the other freshman housing building where early-riser nerds were surely goggling at me out their windows with equal parts disdain and envy, didn’t put a damper on my mood.

  “Did he stick his dick in your vag?” asks Iris with her trademark disinterest. She could be announcing the discovery of aliens made entirely out of boobs on national television and the country would still fall asleep.

  “No, but…”

  “Then it doesn’t count.” She returns to her knitting. Iris is always knitting. I don’t know why, since she wouldn’t be caught within a ten foot radius of a cozy autumn garment, but she’s never in our dorm without a half-finished scarf or a bobbly hat between her needles.

  I circle the first slash for emphasis. “Fuck you. It counts. Now let’s go over them. There was the brown-eyed baby-faced sweetheart, the long and lanky guy with the Arcade Fire T-shirt, the one with the pirate earring, the dude
who only spoke Spanish, and now sexy masked wall-destroyer.”

  I pause and write Fiona’s Board of Sex at the top of the whiteboard. A gift from Aunt Caroline, ostensibly to keep track of my homework assignments. If she visits, I’ll have to tell her that sex stands for Stupendous Education Xylophones, since nothing starts with X. Then I cover it with smiley faces and hearts, and at the bottom I scribble a close approximation of Masked Guy’s face.

  “You forgot to tell me you fucked Sonic the Hedgehog with face cancer,” Iris deadpans, halfway through a fluffy pink sweater.

  “That’s not face cancer, that’s his sexy mask.” I label it. “God, he was good. Definitely my favorite so far. Did I tell you he broke the wall?”

  “You may have. I was probably asleep,” she yawns.

  “Well, he broke the wall.”

  “Your heart’s up next.”

  “As if,” I laugh, spinning and placing a hand on my hip. “None of these boys are invited anywhere near my heart.”

  Our dorm room is split exactly down the middle: black and pink. Her ancient Evanescence poster is taped above her bed, there’s dark artwork framed everywhere, and even her blanket is a near-black dark blue. My side is sunny and bright, with a shirtless firemen calendar and a fluffy pink unicorn comforter. Once my big stuffed owl, Ursula, slid onto Iris’s side of the carpet and she curled up on her bed and hissed at it like a cat. But other than that, we manage to coexist pretty well. I tolerate her nightly angst-music and she tolerates my Katy Perry. Her version of tolerating is to threaten me with lighter fluid and a match, of course, but I think she’s learning to love and respect our differences.

  Iris rolls back on her bed. “I’m going to laugh when you’re a disease-riddled washed-up stripper with ten accidental kids and an ex-husband who watches pro-wrestling.”

  “I appreciate your love and support, as always.” I beam at my sex board. Each one of those five slash marks represents an utterly spectacular night. There would have been six, if the guy with tattoos and a buzz cut hadn’t been lackluster. As if I’d sit through bad sex.

  “Do you even remember any of their names?” Iris asks.

  I scrunch up my nose and ponder. “I think the first one was named Daniel. No, Darius.”

  “Sam. He’s in my Intro to Economics class.” Iris drops a stitch and swears before finally setting down her knitting and looking at me. “What do you hope to accomplish by fucking every guy at UCSD, Fiona? You’re not going to get an achievement badge.”

  “I do too get achievement badges. They’re called orgasms.” I flip my long brown hair over my shoulder. “And you know why I’m living it up. I poured my heart out to you over first-night-at-college drinks.”

  “What was it you told me again?” She puts a finger to her perfect chin in mock thought. Iris is beautiful. In a gothic vampire, ancient European church kind of way. Her skin is ivory, her hair pin-straight and jet black. Her almond eyes would be soft and gentle if she didn’t harden them with liquid eyeliner. “You used to be…”

  “Don’t you dare say the A-word,” I squawk, nearly throwing Ursula at her, but stopping as Iris waves her knitting needles threateningly. “You signed a contract. A contract of the soul.”

  “I’m just trying to remember what it was I wasn’t supposed to say.” Her lips curve. I swear, the only time Iris looks happy is when she’s spreading misery. “That you used to be A—”

  “Don’t you dare say it.”

  “A…”

  “Don’t say the A word.”

  “A big dork,” she finishes, and cackles like the evil witch she is while I glower at her.

  I used to be Amish.

  What are you picturing? A white bonnet, a high-necked blue Little House on the Prairie dress? Long black stockings? Shoes caked with horse shit?

  I wish I could make fun of you for being so stereotypical, but you’re right.

  When Amish kids turn fourteen, they decide whether or not they want to become permanent members of the church. Leaving means deserting your family and community. Most people stay. I didn’t. I changed my last name from Stoltzfus to the much sexier Arlett, and went to live with my Aunt Caroline in Philadelphia, who’d left the community just like I had but retained a hell of a lot of the strictness. No sleepovers, no staying out on weekends, no dating, no hemline above the knee.

  Three weeks ago, when I came to UCSD, I was suddenly free. The first thing I did was go out and spend an insane amount of money on crop tops and little skirts.

  The next thing I did was glue myself to the nearest hot boy’s face.

  Now I’m living the life I was always meant to have—a life of fun and sex and crazy wild antics—and nothing is going to stop me. Not my family, not some skewed sense of morality, and not my heart. Yuck.

  I make the executive decision to change the subject. “So I heard a rumor that initiation for Phi Delta Chi is tonight.”

  “Yippee. I’ll go put on my best cocktail dress.” Iris sets her sweater down and groans.

  “They keep the details a secret,” I press, trying to drum some excitement out of her. “Maybe we’ll each have to sacrifice a baby goat.”

  I thought for sure that would up her eagerness, but she just rolls her eyes and puts her face in front of the fan. Our AC’s been broken ever since we moved in. Freaking freshman housing.

  “Can I ask you something?” I pick myself up and plop myself down on her bed, rubbing the fuzzy sweater. She just groans again in response.

  “Why are you interested in getting into Phi Delta Chi? They’re a big party sorority. Lots of drinking, lots of sex. Doesn’t really seem like your thing. I practically had to threaten you with pink and sparkles to get you to come out with me last night, and you left halfway through the concert. Yet you’ve been coming with me to every single pledgeship meeting for Phi Delta since the first day of school. Is it the booze cruise they have in November? A lot of people try to get in just for the booze cruise.”

  “Can you go shower?” she grumbles. “You smell like alcohol and sex.”

  “That is the smell of life, my dear. Breathe it in deeply.” I wedge myself between the fan and her face, waving my pits under her nose. When she’s done alternating between fake-vomiting and fake-almost-real strangling me, I wait expectantly, but she fumbles for a new topic instead of answering my question.

  “Have you seen James Reid yet?” she finally says.

  “Who?”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Yeah, a little.” I stretch my arms over my head, relishing the way the crop top pulls up to expose my ribs. “He’s some celebrity on campus that everyone wants to bang, right?”

  “You sound like you don’t care.” Iris pokes my stomach disdainfully. “I don’t care about anything, and I care about James Reid. Don’t you remember him in All About Us? He was huge when I was a kid.”

  “Funny thing about growing up Amish: you kind of don’t pay much attention to celebrities. Or actors. Or TV shows, seeing as you don’t have a TV. Believe it or not, I don’t even know what this guy looks like.”

  “I thought we weren’t allowed to say the A-word.”

  “I’m allowed to say the A-word. You are not.”

  She repeats the word ‘Amish’ about fourteen times and finally gives up when I tug a little too hard on one of the loops in her sweater.

  “Okay, okay,” she says, yanking it away from me. “I guess that explains why you don’t know about him, then. He was every preteen’s wet dream and then he dropped off the face of the earth—out of the press, out of Hollywood, everything. His show was canceled. He just quit, and everybody wanted to know why—but he wouldn’t tell. He was totally off the grid until he came to UCSD.”

  “Why would I bother with an ex-cool celebrity who’s probably as stuck up as he is washed up? I don’t care what boys looked like on a screen four years ago, I care what they look like in my bed now.”

  “You haven’t seen him,” she says simply.

  I pat her s
houlder. “You can have him. I prefer to get with guys who aren’t obstructed by a mountain of girls with unfulfilled preteen fantasies.”

  “Go shower,” she glowers. Note to self: don’t badmouth James Reid in front of Iris.

  In the shower, I take stock of my body. I’m still sensitive where Masked Boy touched me. The musky smell of sex slips off my body and goes down the drain with the water, and I immediately miss it. It smelled like him. All tall, strong boy body and silence and the most intense eyes. No wonder he didn’t speak. With eyes like that, other forms of communication are redundant.

  Forget James Reid. There’s no way he’s as hot as my masked stranger.

  The concert was mostly students, but it was off campus, so the chances are fifty-fifty that the stranger goes to UCSD. If only I’d gotten his name. Or his major. Or any details at all. The experience was so surreal that I’m starting to wonder if someone slipped LSD in my first drink of the night and I imagined the whole thing.

  The thought makes me slightly sad. I don’t want him to be imaginary. But I don’t have to worry about it, because I have a shitty imagination, and there’s no way I could have come up with the cold, cutting line of his jaw…the lift of the muscles in his stomach…or the typhoon in his eyes.

  My hands drift lower. I hesitate—it’s hard not to feel a shadow of guilt when you grew up Amish—but when I close my eyes, I see him, and all hesitation disappears.

  ~4~

  That night, I’m shaken awake in my bed by a hooded figure.

  I immediately assume it’s a Dementor, scream, and throw Ursula at it in lieu of a Patronus. My stuffed owl friend bounces off the apparently corporeal head, and a girl’s voice hisses from beneath the hood: “Shut up and come with me.”