Buy the Ticket, Take the Ride. Brian Sweany

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СКАЧАТЬ party is like any high school party in which you don’t know anyone, hovering between cool and alienating. Kent used to live in Empire Ridge, but he moved up to Indianapolis after his freshman year. Some of Kent’s Indy friends have been there all night—a couple of freakishly tall black dudes from the North Central High School basketball team, and a handful of girls way out of my league. Kent and Neff and their feathered heads of parted-down-the-middle hair entertain from behind the bar, serving weak drinks and even weaker jokes. As if a half-day of their music wasn’t enough, a Kingdom Come-Dokken-Metallica-Scorpions-Van Halen mix tape plays on the stereo.

      I’ve been alternating between waters and Diet Coke for at least an hour. I’m still pretty drunk. I think I already called my parents. I know I called somebody when I got here.

      There’s a knock at the door.

      Kent turns down the stereo. “Who is it?”

      Another knock.

      Not a one of us in the apartment is eighteen, let alone twenty-one. I remind myself that this is the west side of Indianapolis, a place where underage drinking ranks somewhere beneath armed robbery, drive-by shootings, and good ol’ fashioned homicide on the list of things cops have to worry about.

      “It’s Laura,” the disembodied voice says. “Is Hank here?”

      Kent throws me a look, his feathered bangs, furrowed brow, and thin mustache running in almost parallel lines across his face. He opens the door. “You about gave me a heart attack.”

      “Sorry, Kent.” Laura sees me over his shoulder and flashes me a dimpled smile. She’s wearing her favorite white miniskirt with a teal off-the-shoulder sweater, matching teal socks, and white flats. Her hair, its Florida gold taunting me still, is teased out to her shoulders.

      Laura approaches me. “So you’re the one I called?” I say, smiling a little too hard.

      Her lips are on mine before I know what’s happening. Our kiss is long, wet, and tactless, right there in the middle of the living room. Laura kisses me hard, her teeth biting and pulling my bottom lip as she backs away from me. She smells of peach schnapps.

      “Yeah, I’m the one you called.” She kisses and bites me again.

      Kent slams the front door. “Get a room, you two.”

      We force a laugh but keep kissing.

      “No, seriously.” Kent pushes us toward the stairs. “Go to my room. Top of the stairs. Second door on your left.”

      I turn to Kent, letting go of Laura. “Thanks, Kent, but we’re fine right here. Aren’t we, babe?”

      I look up and notice my girlfriend is gone. She’s already at the top of the stairs.

      Laura locks the door behind us. The room is dark. We feel our way to the corner of the room and start to sit down on what I hope is a bed. I hear a cracking sound and jump up, startled. “What the hell was that?”

      “Your back pocket.”

      “My what?”

      “Something’s in your back pocket.” Laura walks behind me, her left hand on my shoulder. She stands between me and the bed, pulling Scorpions’s Savage Amusement cassette out of my back pocket.

      “Shit,” I say.

      “No worries.” Laura holds the cassette up to me for inspection. “You just cracked the case. Tape is fine.” She throws the cassette on the bed. In one fluid motion, her lips are on my ear and her left hand drops down the front of my pants.

      Laura runs her hand up and down between my legs. She rubs it a little. I don’t know what to do next. I push her down toward the bed.

      “Not so fast.” She bites me for a third time, this time on the ear. She grabs my Scorpions tape, walks around me to the stereo on the opposite corner of the room. My eyes are still adjusting to the darkness. A mini-blind wraps Laura’s silhouette in horizontal stripes of moonlight. She pulls off her shirt and reaches back to unfasten her bra with one hand, her back still to me. She pops in Savage Amusement, presses play, and spins on the ball of her right foot to face me, bare-chested. Her breasts seem to stare at me, but only briefly. She crosses her arms in front of her chest from force of habit—hiding what she regards as more blight than beautiful.

      I acknowledge and counter her insecurity. “You’re hot, you know that, right?”

      “You’re just trying to get in my pants.”

      “Maybe, but you’re still smoking hot. I hate to break this to you, but I’m very superficial. If you were ugly, I wouldn’t go out with you.”

      That gets a smile out of her. She drops her arms by her side. “You know just what to say to a girl, don’t you?”

      Her breasts are staring at me again, like the cover of Exotic Music of the Belly Dancer. For a second, I see only my longtime headless companion. Things seemed so much easier when she didn’t have a face.

      My cock is so hard it hurts. Same with my balls. At this rate, I’m not going to even get the damn thing out of my pants.

      “Are you sure, Laura?” I ask.

      “Yes, Hank,” she answers. “I’m sure.”

      Laura approaches the bed to the tune of “Don’t Stop at the Top,” the first song on the Savage Amusement album. One of my favorites. She is already stripped down to her cotton panties and her teal socks. In my drunken and bumbling state, I’m still clothed from head to toe.

      “Allow me,” Laura says. She grabs the bottom of my Monsters of Rock T-shirt, then pulls it up and over my head. She leans down and kisses me hard on the lips, even harder than before, her tongue daring mine to put up a fight. She bites me for a fourth time, this time concentrating on my left nipple. Just when the sensation is about to become more painful than pleasurable, she opens her mouth a little wider, soothing the nipple with a dozen quick flicks of her tongue.

      Laura then guides my hands down the front of her panties. I slide my middle and index fingers in and out of her, our lips biding their time with soft kisses on one another’s necks. Laura’s hands find their way inside my boxer shorts.

      “I want you inside me.” She says this in a decibel just below a whisper, so quiet I almost think I’m hearing things.

      “What?” I feel my pockets, looking around the room like a contractor who just misplaced his tape measure. “But, Laura, I don’t know where my wallet is. I don’t have any…”

      “Protection?”

      I’m thinking “experience,” but I run with it. “Yeah, I didn’t bring anything.”

      “You don’t need it.”

      “Why not?”

      “I’m due to start my period any day now. I’m okay.”

      She slinks onto the bed and rolls over to her back. She spreads her legs. I crawl on top of her, naked and engorged, eager. My arms are on either side of her—straight, extended, like I’ve just finished a pushup and am about СКАЧАТЬ