The Lost Night

Except that Mom was coming to visit the next day and that was pretty sick. She’d look horrified and make a lot of disgusted noises, but then she’d know how to fit all my gear in my room, away from my weirdo roommates, and she’d probably drive me to IKEA to get a desk way less shitty than the one the dude before me left here, with its stash of expired condoms leaking and gross in the back of the second drawer. Sorry you couldn’t get laid, brother.

It was almost late afternoon and Kevin and I were just hanging around the apartment, trying to get his turntable to work and switching on more and more fans as we sweated our balls off. We hadn’t talked about it, but I could kinda tell Kevin hated the other two people in our apartment, too. They were shut up in their tiny rooms doing god knows what.

“So how do we find out what’s going on tonight?” I asked at one point. First Friday in the new home. Seemed critical.

“Shit just goes down,” he said, pulling a beer out of the fridge. Pretty sure it wasn’t his. “People just keep their doors open.”

Like the dorms. Okay. I’d liked the dorms enough. Hot girls wandering in and out of our room in search of vodka or pot or whatever. Just had to make sure the evidence was buried by the time Mom arrived at noon tomorrow.

Around eleven Kevin and I heard a booming dubstep bassline coming into our apartment from the left, so we ducked out in search of the source. It was three doors down with a bouncer out front collecting cover, but some girls in jorts arrived right when we did and grinned and giggled and did whatever it is girls do to gain free entry, and we kept our heads down and got waved in with the group, a Brojan Horse, if you will. Inside there was one of those stupid green light machines shooting beams like a sprinkler over a bunch of sweaty dancing people, and whiskey all over the kitchen with a short creepy guy watching over it and collecting five bucks a pour. Kevin spotted a ripped dude in nothing but sequined shorts and wandered off, and I leaned against the wall, waiting.

I saw a chick from the hallway pointing me out to her friend and I turned away, pretending to look for someone. They both moseyed over.

“Hey, did you sneak in with us without paying?” one shouted over the music. Her hotter, freckled friend stood behind her, smirking.

“Maybe,” I shouted back. “Are you going to tell on me?”

“Not unless you piss me off,” she yelled jokingly. Then, “What’s your name?”

“Alex. What’s yours?” I watched as her friend turned and left. The retreating girl had long, mermaidy red hair that swung as she walked, and I pictured myself running my fingers through it. This girl gave me her name, but I promptly forgot it.

“Wanna dance?” She put her hands on my wrists.

“Let’s get a drink,” I yelled back.

We took shots of off-brand whiskey, her grimacing and looking around for a chaser. She already seemed pretty drunk, like falsely confident; you know those people who pack all their ballsiness behind the safety of booze? When the creepy bar-guard wasn’t looking, I took another pull straight from the bottle. The girl giggled delightedly. She was wearing a crop top and neon-green shorts. She didn’t totally have the stomach for it, but she had a pretty nice ass and legs. Kind of a big nose and brown bangs scratching at her eyes, but cute. She asked if I wanted Molly, which was a form of X I’d heard of four hundred times that week and not at all in the twenty-two years before; she said it was clean, but I said no. I didn’t feel like bothering. The electronic music was already getting less annoying, anyway. She told me she knew where to get it if I changed my mind. We danced for a bit, her pulling me over by her friends. The redhead was gone.

The whiskey started to wear off and it was still early, so I said I had to piss and left the apartment in search of something new. A floor up, I found a bunch of people in a circle toking up. Someone had bongos, fucking stupid. I ignored their stares and moved on. The hallway hit a fork and I spotted people standing around outside a door with the shraaaaaw of electric guitars coming out of it, so I headed that way.

I stopped in front of two girls and glanced around like I was lost, then smiled at the one who’d noticed me.

“You looking for someone?” she asked me, cutting off her friend.

“Oh, just my roommate. I live here.”

“Here?” She gestured inside with her beer.

“No, just in the building.”

“Us, too!” She introduced herself. I said hello and tried to remember her name. It was something dumb like Dallas. Not Dallas but something like that. I suck at names.

“I’m Alex,” I told her. “Where’d those come from?” I grasped at the can, letting my fingers fall over hers.

“In here. There’s a band that kinda sucks, but no one’s watching the kitchen.” I followed them inside and took in the three guitarists on the makeshift stage, one bassist and two dudes both convinced they were the lead. One wasn’t bad, but they kept vying for solos. Embarrassing.

Dallas leaned against the counter with her back arched and asked me when I’d moved in and how I liked it and where I was from until her friend felt sufficiently left out of the conversation and made some pissy announcement that she was going home.

I was buzzed. Dallas had helped herself to another beer but seemed fine. I asked if she wanted to dance—there was another party down the hall with ridiculous house music. She grabbed my hand as I led her down a floor. I pulled my hand out and put it on her back, then just as we got to the door I slid it down for a quick squeeze of her ass. She looked surprised, then grinned.

I tried to convince the door guy that we’d already been inside, but he wouldn’t hear it and I hadn’t brought any money, so Dallas paid ten bucks for us to enter, which I felt pretty bad about. But she said she didn’t care and yanked me out to the dance floor and pretty soon pulled my face in to make out. I was having a great drunken time until I opened my eyes and saw the Molly girl from earlier giving me the stink eye from like ten feet away, so I put my mouth up to Dallas’s ear and asked if she wanted to get out of there.

“WHAT?” she shouted back.

I tried again, louder this time. She pulled my face in with her hand, closed my ear with her thumb, and purred into it, “Try it this way.” I heard perfectly through the vibrations and also instantly got hard. I slid my palm around her jaw, pressed my thumb against the little piece of cartilage over her ear, and asked one more time. Hot.

We were both sort of sloppy by the time we staggered into my place. We kissed inside the doorframe and she enthusiastically pushed her tits into my hands. When she looked around and I blinked a few times to figure out which identical bedroom door was mine, I could tell she was a little grossed out. Animal looked at her and actually let out a long yowl. I pulled her toward my room and kinda yanked us both inside, closing the door behind me.

Standing there, she pulled off my shirt, belt, and jeans, like, really fucking fast. In the same few minutes I only got as far as unbuttoning her top. I started climbing the stairs to my loft bed, thinking she would follow, when she froze and said, “I actually have a full-size bed, cool if we go there?” Which sounded kind of awesome, a bigger bed where we wouldn’t bonk our heads on the ceiling or die of heat as the night wore on. I kind of hated my room anyway. So I said sure and started to look around for my keys.

Which were, of course, nowhere to be found. I hadn’t grabbed them before because I was just wandering around the building, and anyway, when did my three roommates lock the door? Did anyone in this fucked-up building? Keys were for outside, I told myself drunkenly. And her door was only a few down from mine and everybody else was in bed. So fuck keys. And fuck clothes. If I waited too long, she might think better of the offer. I grabbed her waist and told her we should run, run, to her room.

We made it there without seeing anyone else and were both laughing, doubling over, by the time we got inside her apartment and closed the door behind us. She led me to her bedroom—floor level, big bed, natural light—and I congratulated myself for the good move of getting away from my own miserable space.

The next morning, half asleep, she wanted to cuddle and cuddle and cuddle, and thinking vaguely about morning sex, I made no move to leave. “I have to gooo,” I told her at ten thirty, but of course I was too comfortable-yet-hungover to fight it.

Ten forty-five. Eleven. At eleven twenty-five I finally stood up and asked to borrow some pants.

“For the twenty-foot walk of shame?” she teased, tossing me some plaid pajama bottoms.

I approached my door and tried the knob. Locked. So I knocked loudly, waited. Knocked again. Rang the buzzer. Leaned on the buzzer. And started to panic. Because my mom was on her fucking way.

I didn’t have my phone. Dallas had the super’s number in hers, so I tried calling, but he didn’t pick up and she warned me he didn’t work weekends. Or really ever. Dallas demonstrated that their door could be kicked open when it’s locked, so we tried it on mine. Of course it didn’t work and I got worried about breaking the door.

Panic. My mother was zipping off the highway by now, barreling down Flushing Avenue in Dad’s Subaru. I started coming up with crazy schemes. I could just hide out until a roommate came back, worry my mother sick. I could knock on neighbors’ doors, borrow some stranger’s clothes, tell my mom I got locked out trying to get the mail. Dallas’s suggestion was to just act like I had absolutely no idea what had happened the night before. I looked down at my way-too-small girl-size pants. “Uh, it’s pretty obvious what happened.”