I never thought I'd be so annoyed to make eye contact across the room with a sexy girl at a party.
But while I sipped from a cup of beer in the corner of the room, I locked eyes for a second with the one girl I'd been trying to avoid all night — Marie. Most guys would have been thrilled to stare into those eyes; deep brown and oddly tantalizing, they made Marie a favorite among guys in our high school class. She was relatively fit, but didn't have the usual awesome chest or butt that teen guys fawned over. But those alluring eyes drew tons of hopeless crushes over the years, who she'd flirt with — or hook up with as we got older — and then leave behind.
Tonight she wore short jean-shorts and a loose black shirt that hung over one of her shoulders, showing a black bra strap. Very hot.
Despite all that, I groaned when her eyes widened and she started to hurry over to see me.
"Stan!"
I smiled and reluctantly hugged her. I didn't want to seem like a jerk.
"Well, we have some things to talk about," she said, getting right down to business.
"Like what?" I joked.
She hit me on the arm. "Like how you and Carla broke up and I don't even know what happened."
There it was. The reason I didn't want to talk to Marie. She had been a good friend of Carla, who I dated all of senior year. Carla and I decided to try long-distance when we went off to college, going to school in different states. It didn't work — things got stale, we ran out of things to talk about on the phone every night, she started bitching at me more often than not, and we decided to end it at the start of second semester.
Now it was everyone's first summer back from school, and I had figured this day would come.
"Long distance didn't work out," I shrugged, summing it up.
"We all thought you guys were going to get married," she said, referring to their little clique of five friends. "I couldn't believe it."
"What's she said about it?" I asked. I hadn't hardly talked to her since we broke up. I was sure she was going to be bitter at me forever.
Marie rolled her eyes. "None of us have really even talked to her about it. She doesn't come to our get-togethers and we can hardly get her to answer our texts."
I knew all about that. Their group of friends was inseparable in high school and tried to make an effort to meet up somewhere once a month during the school year — "Friends Forever!" type stuff. Carla complained to me a lot that she didn't have time to keep doing that with all her schoolwork. It was one of the many things I sat and listened to her bitch about for so much of the year. She was taking summer classes, so she didn't come back to our hometown for the summer — and would go on not seeing her old friends.
"It's like she stopped caring if we were still friends," Marie said.
"Sounds like you know a little bit what happened with her and me then," I shrugged and smiled. I had been pretty sad for a little bit, but then I realized it was almost freeing not to have to spend an hour every night forcing a depressing conversation. You could say I was pretty well over the break-up by this point.
"Yeah, I guess I do," Marie looked past me, like she was thinking hard. Then her eyes lit up. "Let's go dance," she said, grabbing me by the hands.
Woah. Marie dragged me toward the basement, where a heavy bump-and-grind rap song was playing and tons of our old class-mates were having a dance party.
I didn't even know how to react. Marie had developed a pretty well-known reputation as one of the easier girls in our grade. Carla used to tell me some of the things she said in "girl talk," about how she loved giving blow-jobs and how each new guy felt like an adventure to her. I also learned that Marie liked to talk dirty during sex. Carla said she'd feel awkward doing that — I quickly pretended to agree.
This obviously aroused more than a few fantasies. Her cheery, sunny personality and those brown eyes, combined with the knowledge that she was so aggressive sexually, made her seem hot to a tied-down guy like me. But I hardly entertained the thought of anything happening. This was one of my ex-girlfriend's closest friends.
And now, like a flip had switched, she was dragging me to a dance floor. I tried to stay calm and not assume too much about her intentions.
When we got down to the basement and forced our way into the middle of the dense crowd, she wasted no time turning around and grinding her ass onto my crotch. Not sure what to do, I followed "grinding" protocol: put my hands on her hips and swayed with her.
As the song picked up speed, she tilted her head back onto my shoulder, reached behind her and grabbed the pockets of my shorts. I had a nice view down her low-cut top, and her chest was starting to glisten with sweat as we danced in the hot basement.
I felt like we had moved past the friendly-dancing zone, and started getting erect between my legs pretty quickly. When she felt it, she turned around with a shocked smile on her face.
"You naughty boy," she grinned. I had never seen this side of her before, but I'd pictured it a few times. She leaned in and whispered, "I've got some booze upstairs. Wanna go have a drink?"
I stared at her for a minute. I had only had sex with Carla going into college, and after we broke up I was so not used to picking up girls at the bar that I'd only had one drunken hook-up the rest of the year. This was out of my comfort zone. "Is this some kind of joke? Aren't you violating girl code or something?"
She gave an impossibly sexy smirk. "Not our code," she said. I had no idea what she meant. But I was too shocked and horny to care. I nodded my head, and she dragged me by the hand up the stairs.
She kept her bottle of whiskey in the bedroom of the party's host — a rich girl whose parents were out of town. We went into the room, and she closed the door behind us, the sexy smirk showing up again when she locked the door.
