Total pages in book: 110
Estimated words: 103530 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 103530 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 518(@200wpm)___ 414(@250wpm)___ 345(@300wpm)
That’s right. I did exactly what you told me to, like an obedient little plaything.
I passed close by him as I moved toward the front of the room and warned him with a nudge from my elbow an instant before I “tripped” and collided with him more firmly.
“Oh, I’m so sorry!” I said, pretending to stumble off my feet. And in the riskiest move of my life, I whipped the panties from my pocket and pressed them into his hand when he tried to help me.
His eyes widened and his fingers closed around the wad of wet fabric, but he played it off like an accomplished slight-of-hand magician, slipping the panties into his own pocket while “steadying” me.
“That’s all right,” he assured me. “Long day, tall heels?”
“Something like that.” I laughed it off and walked away, struggling to conceal my smirk of satisfaction.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
(Matthew)
Putting together a bachelor party for Scott hadn’t been easy. There had been so many rules. For example, no strippers and certainly no escorts. We couldn’t be out partying until dawn, either; we were well past that age, and we couldn’t show up to the ceremony looking like the bloated corpses of ourselves, having biologically died the night before.
But the entire point of a bachelor party was to feel young and single and carefree one last time, before marriage locked you down into misery forever.
The straights were very much not okay.
Still, a tradition was a tradition, and I wasn’t about to let my best buddy down.
We’d skipped out almost immediately after the rehearsal dinner, leaving the rest of the guests to drink and dance into the sensible hours. As I’d left, I’d spotted Charlotte. My eyes had been immediately drawn to her, the way they had been all night. She’d been on the dance floor, cracking up while voguing badly with her equally not graceful father, and something in my chest had melted at how sweet the entire thing was.
Then the danger alarms had gone off and I’d led my buddies perhaps too quickly through the resort, to the deserted conference facilities. Now, we stood in front of the double doors to the main conference pavilion, a huge octagonal building on the outskirts of the resort, my less physically-inclined friends sweating and red-faced.
They would see that it would all be worth the hike in a minute.
“Gentleman!” I announced like a ringleader. “We are about to experience the most outrageous night of our lives.”
“Can we experience it in the air conditioning?” Scott asked, wiping his brow.
“Shut up. This is pageantry, okay?” I cleared my throat. “Tonight, we are going to party like it’s freshman year. Picture it. New Jersey. Two-thousand and three. Drink of choice? Diet Mountain Dew. The soundtrack? System of a Down. Our mission?”
“To protect the world from the threat of fascism,” Shawn said, his bespectacled face lighting up with recognition.
I pointed enthusiastically to him. “Exactly. Gentlemen, I give you...” I pulled open the double doors with a flourish. “Call of Duty.”
“No way,” Scott breathed reverently.
Inside, a ring of tables bore some truly ancient hardware, still far better than the computers we’d lugged to the internet cafe off campus. None of these machines had cardboard boxes for a case, but I’d made sure they all had the tube monitors and wired mice we’d considered state-of-the-art twenty years ago. It was like a time machine.
All around the room, servers—the human kind—waited to bring us drinks and snacks at our request, so no one would have to leave their seats. Truly, it was the LAN party dreams were made of.
“Dude,” Dan, our camping store owning friend, said to Scott. “I’m sorry, but we’re gonna miss your wedding.”
As our friends rushed in to claim their conference center desk chairs, dutifully avoiding the humps of taped-down wires on the carpet, Scott clapped me on the back. Actual tears shone in his eyes. “This is... the perfect bachelor party.”
“I know.” I gave him a hug and, stepping back, said, “Come on. Let’s kill some Nazis.”
****
I didn’t know why I called Charlotte.
It was three in the morning. She would be asleep. And she’d never given me permission to put my number in her phone. That had been a risky move that had paid dividends. I pinched the silky fabric of her panties between my thumb and forefinger and rolled it idly. But I’d intended that text message to be a one-time thing. A quick little joke and we’d never need to contact each other that way again. One and done, delete her number.
But I hadn’t deleted her number and now I was drunk and alone and, after reliving most of freshman year of college all in one night, I was oddly depressed.
I didn’t know why I called her. But she picked up before I could change my mind.
“Matt?” She sounded awfully awake for this time of night.