Chapter 48: Search Party

I looked at the alarm clock on the nightstand because looking at the clock was the first responsible thought I had had since I opened the bathroom door naked.

“Oh, my God.” “What.”

“It is after six. We have been gone three hours. Your mom is going to call a search party if we do not hurry.”

He laughed. The laugh went through his chest and into my back. I laughed too, helpless, the pair of us sticky and stupid in a pink bed while Sue was probably looking at the clock over a cooling kitchen.

We kissed. It was sloppy and happy and did not have any extra meaning loaded onto it except that we did not want to stop yet and we had to stop anyway.

“Go shower,” I said. “I will get clothes.”

He rolled out of my bed like a person leaving a place he already wanted to come back to. I sat up and felt him run down my thigh, and I had to take a second before I could stand. My legs were not convinced they still worked. I made them work.

The closet was a museum of a girl who had been talked into things. I packed a variety because I did not know what the next days were going to ask for. Outfits for hanging around. Evening things. The only sexy bra and panty set I owned, black, still with the tags-off stiffness of something worn once and then hidden. Thong panties I had bought and never put on because the idea of a thong on this body had felt like a dare I would lose. The sexiest outfits Carrie and Amber had made me buy, the ones I had paid for and then buried behind jeans because I was too embarrassed to wear them in actual air. Two regular swimsuits. Then the last one. I held it up. In reality, it was a modest thong bikini. To me, it looked obscene. The bottom was a triangle and a string and an argument. I stood there in my own closet, sore, full of him, and had the debate anyway. You cannot wear that. You are still the girl with the vines. You are also the girl who just fucked a man awake. I threw it in the bag before the first voice could finish its paragraph.