The hosts were on the roof when Lisa walked through the door with her partner. Someone else might have scanned the kitchen for a familiar face, but Lisa leaned on a chair and fixed her smile on the person directly in front of her expectantly. Between the smile and the ruffled red skirt she was wearing, she seemed to take up more space then the whole horde of twenty-somethings in front of her.
Foremost in the mass of jean-wearing people clutching beers, and the target of Lisa's attention, was Meghan. "They're on the roof," she gestured with her bottle. "But there's beer, uh, soda, gin, bourbon..."
"Aren't you sweet, and you don't even live here! They have vodka?"
Meghan was pushing aside frozen peas before it struck her as slightly peculiar that she was making this stranger a drink. She was handing Lisa a vodka cranberry before she noticed the tall guy with the grey hair who was apparently attached to the smiling vodka-drinker. Meghan felt a strange impulse to take the woman's purse. Instead, she heard "food in the back" come out of her mouth, and Lisa brushed past, tapping her glass against Meghan's shoulder in a toast and then drinking deeply. Grey-hair followed her and Meghan stood there, having been left behind by whatever conversation she'd been having, feeling the condensation from the glass drying on her shirt and an electric tingle on her shins where the woman's skirt had swept across them.
Behind a curtained door in back of the food nook, Lisa was lounging on a futon while Frank rolled a joint, perched with his knees practically around his ears on an oversized cushion across from her. It wasn't clear whether the room was meant to be open to the party, and they had it to themselves.
"Girl was a doll," she remarked.
"Hm," said Frank. He looked up long enough to furrow his eyebrows at her amusedly.
"...all fresh-faced and helpful. I thought she might manage to trip over herself standing still."
"That girl was an infant. You got a lighter?" Lisa handed it over from her purse, and he lit the joint and passed it over the coffee table. "Her body was... cute enough, but how much you wanna bet she just rounded legal drinking age?"
"Oh please," Lisa protested, "older than that, not that that's here or there, and all pert and tall and lanky. You know how I like that."
And then Meghan herself was warily pulling the curtain half back and sniffing at the smoke. "Hello again," she said. She addressed herself entirely to Lisa, without thinking about it. "I hope it's not horribly uncouth of me to ask if I could hit that?"
Lisa let the question hang in the air for a moment. What luck not to have to go find the girl later. Then she blinked and said, "Yes, of course, sit down here." She motioned to her left on the futon. "How old are you?"
"Uh... Twenty-four."
"Oh, my friend here thinks you look younger."
"Well," Meghan replied.
Lisa drew her fingers across the back of Meghan's hand as she handed her the joint. Meghan seemed to forget what to do with it for a moment, before she shook her head and inhaled in one sharp, fluid movement.
"Frank's just wrong this time, isn't he?"
"Wouldn't be the first," Frank said gruffly.
"Oh, so you're Frank, then?" Meghan asked. "Meghan." She attempted to make eye contact, but Frank's eyes were buried in the carpet. She turned to Lisa, whose eyes, by contrast, were startling open and focused directly on her. "Pleasure, Meghan. I'm Lisa."
By the time they'd finished smoking, Lisa's legs were lying across Meghan's lap. Lisa did most of the talking, occasionally using Frank as her straight man or asking Meghan a getting-to-know-you question and then bouncing off into her own observations and opinions. All three of them were laughing: Lisa wide-mouthed and exuberant, Meghan with a chuckle that drove her to coughing, and Frank had a grinning sort of snort.
"So," Meghan's hand rested on Lisa's bare calf, then began to slip to its underside and down to the ankle, "why were you wondering about my age?" She was holding Lisa's foot now. She squeezed it gently and began to rub.
