The summer started out normally enough, I guess. I had just finished my second year of law school at Penn, and was lucky enough to secure a prestigious Summer Associate position at a Chicago law firm. At first I thought about finding a summer sublet for the ten weeks I would be in the Windy City, but in the end I decided that I would stay with my Aunt Paula and her family. It wasn't the most glamorous plan, but it would definitely save me money and the living arrangements themselves were actually probably nicer than anything I could have afforded on my own.
Paula, my mom's younger sister, lived with her husband Gary and their three daughters in the heart of Lincoln Park. Their house had an open-plan living room, dining room, and kitchen on the main floor; two bedrooms upstairs for Gary and Paula as well as their youngest daughter, Eve, who was around ten; and two more bedrooms in the finished basement for their older daughters. Melissa — or Missy, as most of us called her — graduated from high school a week before I arrived; her older sister, Kim, was spending her last summer of college bumming around Europe with friends, leaving me her room. There was a large hangout room downstairs with a large flat-screen TV and some overstuffed sofas, and our own bathroom.
As excited as I was about the job, I was also excited to spend the summer with my younger cousins, whom I hadn't seen since the last big family reunion five years ago (I wouldn't see Kim at all while I was in Chicago, but since she was studying at Bryn Mawr we saw each other pretty regularly in Philly). I figured a lot had changed, but I wasn't prepared for what I saw when Missy got home from her job as a counselor at a day camp.
The last time I saw her, Missy was suffering the worst of being thirteen years old: pimples, braces, bad hair — really bad hair, and an awkward body that was not quite a woman's but definitely no longer a girl's. I distinctly remember my deep sense of pity for what her life must have been like at the time, so when the door opened and a tanned, smiling, nicely-proportioned beauty breezed in, it took me a moment to recognize her. Missy's light-brown hair was just a little wavy and fell loosely around her shoulders; her green eyes sparkled as she smiled. It was hard to see her exact figure beneath the bright green t-shirt with the name of the camp written across the chest, but it seemed like she had filled out decently. Her legs, muscular and toned, extended down from her shorts. She had grown to 5'7", just a bit shorter than me.
"Jake!" she squealed when she saw me, running over to give me a big hug. "It's so great to have you here! We're going to have
the best
summer!"
I laughed. "You do realize I'm going to be working all the time, right?"
Missy made an exaggerated pout. "Weekends?"
I shrugged. "Who knows? I might end up sleeping under my desk!"
Now Missy laughed, and we headed into the kitchen to catch up over snacks.
*****
There's not a lot to report after that first day — my expectations were all too accurate, and I found that my regular schedule involved getting home well past midnight, throwing my clothes over the back of Kim's desk chair, and collapsing in bed for a few hours before dragging myself out of bed, into the shower, and back to the office.
Still, I managed to find time for family. Gary, Paula, and Eve I saw mostly on the weekends — Sunday brunch, barbecues, that kind of thing — but usually once or twice a week Missy was still awake when I got home at night and we'd sit on the basement couches or in one of our rooms and catch up. As late night conversations will, things got personal, so I wasn't surprised when, a few weeks after I moved in, Missy was waiting up for me when I got home.
"Hey, kid," I said with a smile, setting down my bag and shedding my tie and suit jacket. "What's happening?"
"I wanted your advice on something," Missy replied.
I flopped down on the far side of the couch. "Shoot."
"There's this guy, one of the other counselors at the day camp. He's a couple of years older — a sophomore at DePaul — and he asked me to go with him to a party on Friday night."
"So far, so good..."
"That's just the thing — I'm not sure if I want to go."
"Like not sure if you want to go at all? Not sure you want to go with him? Or you want to go out with him, but not to this party?"
"Like not sure what I'm not sure about. He's a nice enough guy, and good looking, but I don't know if I really want to hook up with him."
"So don't. Or do you think that's his expectation in bringing you to the party?"
"I'm not sure about that either. I wasn't like Kim in high school, I didn't really date much at all and I don't have a lot of confidence around this stuff."
"Have you done this kind of thing before?" I asked.
"Which kind of thing? Go with a guy to a party? Or hook up?"
"Either?"
"I didn't go to a lot of parties. Not my thing, I'd rather stay in with some girlfriends and a movie. And I didn't hook up so much, either, which is probably all related." I nodded.
"I had kissed a few boys," Missy continued, "At smaller get-togethers — not ones you would call 'parties,' just a few kids in someone's basement for the evening. I let one or two feel me up, but the only time anything really happened was after prom, when I blew my prom date in the limo."
I raised an eyebrow in surprise. "A boyfriend?"
Missy sighed. "No boyfriends for me. Just a guy from class, Kevin. We were sort of in the same circle of friends and he asked me out, and he had a reputation for being a nice guy so I figured, why not? He was good friends with my friend Jessica's boyfriend Max, so we ended up sharing the limo with them and our other friend Anna and her date, some guy from a different school none of us knew. Anyway we had this limo, and it was like a flat rate for the night, and we didn't really have anywhere to go — some of the kids had hotel suites but there was NO way my mom was going to allow that."
I nodded, knowing how Aunt Paula could be.
"I think she would have flipped her shit if I had even gone to someone else's suite," Missy continued, "And Anna's parents are also really strict, which is kind of ironic because she's a really big slut despite how psycho they are about keeping tabs on her."
Missy stretched out her legs and went on with the story. "So basically we just told the driver to take us around the city, nowhere in particular, and we put up the privacy screen and there we are in the back of the limo and Anna is all over her date — we had all pre-partied pretty hard, but knowing her she probably also dropped some E — they're kissing, and groping, and we're all sort of sitting there, watching but not wanting to look like we're watching, and not really sure what to do. So Jessica reaches into her purse and takes out a joint, lights it, and takes a drag. She passes it to me and immediately kisses Max, exhaling her whole hit into his mouth. I'm definitely nervous so I also take a big hit on the joint, and then I take another one and I figure I should just relax and follow the other girls' lead, since they were the more experienced ones. Which was probably a mistake in retrospect, but between the booze and the weed and it was like 2 a.m. already, I wasn't thinking so clearly.
"So now this joint is going around — Anna stops humping her guy long enough for them to get some weed too — and Jessica and Max are getting making out pretty intensely, so I start kissing Kevin, and he's feeling my boobs through my dress and honestly I still feel pretty awkward about fooling around with all these other people there, even though the lights are way dim, but at this point to stop would be worse — because what are we going to do, just sit there and make conversation while everyone else is messing around? Get out and take a cab home? So when Kevin slides his hands up my legs and under my dress, I just let him do it."
"Did you want him to be doing that?" I asked.
"I don't know," Missy answered honestly after a brief pause. "I mean, I don't think I would have asked for it, but once he started touching my..." She cleared her throat. "Once he started rubbing me down there, I certainly didn't mind how it felt.
"Then he starts kissing my neck and the tops of my breasts (and I'm a little mortified because I'm all sweaty from dancing), while he's doing that I can get a look over at the others and I almost freaked out — Anna's dress is crumpled on the floor, her underwear is on the seat next to her, and she is full on having sex with this guy, who's still wearing his tux, right there in the car across from me, and her boobs (she has
really
big boobs, like 38Es) are bouncing up and down inside her black lace bra, which is literally the only stitch of clothing she has on now. Her back is to him like she's sitting on his lap and she is completely shaven so I can see his thing going in and out of her as she bounces up and down on him."
I shifted slightly and tried to discreetly adjust my pants; Missy's story had given me a half-chubby. Spying a blanket folded over the back of the couch, I grabbed it and spread it across my lap to head off any further embarrassment.
"Meanwhile Jessica has Max's pants open with his junk out and she's moving her hands all over it while she keeps kissing him, so I decide that the best thing for me is to follow her lead, figuring that she might be going farther than I thought I was willing to go, but at least she won't go as far as Anna. So I reach down and unzip Max's pants, and try to fish his stuff out through the fly. But it's not so easy!"
I laughed. "No, not always."