More nodding and some cheers. The crowd’s happy, we’re happy. We aren’t the only ones who threw a pre-party. “All right! Let’s do it! Where’s my whistle girl?”
Somehow, Bridget has the whistle. The first row of takers pays their money and gets down on their knees.
“Hands behind your backs!” Bridget yells.
I tuck my fingers into my back pockets, just so I won’t be tempted.
Krishna winks at me.
“Suck them down, girls!” Bridget cries, and blows the whistle.
I dip my head. It’s awkward just getting my head down to the level of the tracks, and I have to open my jaw wide to fit my mouth around the shot glass. Wide enough to make it ache. As I sit up, something flashes in my peripheral vision, a camera or a flashlight or just light gleaming off the tracks.
I see myself from the outside. Head thrown back. Eyes closed. A parody of exploitation.
The shot slides down my throat—Baileys, Kahlúa, whipped cream. Burning and cold at once, foreign and alarming. I stifle my gag reflex. My eyes tear up. It’s impossible not to remember hands in my hair, pulling too hard. Nate’s dick shoved farther down my throat than I wanted it, and this same sensation right at the borderline of gagging.
It’s not funny. It’s not.
But when I swallow and lift my head, nobody’s got their hands on me. I have Quinn on my right. Bridget with her whistle, smiling. Krishna across from me with whipped cream all over the front of his black jacket, wheezing with laughter. “That is fucking gross,” he says.
“You lose!” Quinn taunts. “Back of the line.”
It’s the strangest thing, because I’m not drunk, and I’m not traumatized, and I’m not crazy.
I’m not a dumb cunt.
I’m not a slut, I’m not frigid, I’m not a disappointment.
I’m just a girl who did a shot off the train tracks, high-fiving her friends, savoring the warmth spreading down her throat and into her stomach.
It’s stupid. But I’m okay. I’m actually kind of happy.
The next couple of shots are guys I don’t know. I get the second one down but choke on the third, and that guy waves off the money when I try to give it back. I let him buy another round even though he’s not supposed to. He chokes and dribbles whitish-yellow fluid all over his chin, which is sufficiently disgusting that we both bust up laughing. “I’m Aaron,” he says, offering me his hand.
I take it. It’s sticky. “Caroline.”
He smiles. “I know.”
I decide what he means is exactly what he said. He knows my name. Nothing worse than that.
“Maybe I’ll see you at the party later,” he tells me when he gets up, damp patches on the knees of his jeans.
Maybe he will.
There’s another guy. After him, the thighs that plunk down in front of me belong to Scott.
Rugby Scott.
“Hi,” he says.
“Hi.”
“Fancy seeing you here.”
I laugh at that. Actually, I kind of snort. I’ve had … uh-oh. Some drinks. Five. Or six? They’re not very big. Quinn taught us to make them with a lot of whipped cream and not so much of the hard stuff, because a few years ago one of the ruggers had to go to the hospital with alcohol poisoning. We’re supposed to get rotated out every so often, but I’m still fine. I’m better than fine.
“Did you think you wouldn’t see me?”
“Um …” His eyes flick to mine. “Does that question have a right answer?”
“Pay up, people!” Bridget shouts. Scott extends his hand, a ten-dollar bill sticking out between his fingers.
“Where am I supposed to put this?”
I’ve got money sticking out of my pocket, and the twenty plastered to my neck is poking me in my ear. I look heavenward, feigning exasperation. “Anywhere you want, big boy.”
That cracks us both up.
He puts it in my pocket.
I wonder if he’s been drinking, too.
I wonder why he’s here. If he came thinking he’d see me. If he was looking forward to it.
One of the players sets a shot in front of me and plunks another down in front of Scott.
Bridget blows the whistle. “DRINK!”
I open my jaw wide. Put my head down, suck up my shot, knock it back. My eyes don’t sting anymore. My lips are sticky and sweet, my hands cold from being out of my pockets so long. Scott gets his shot down, too, and pulls another ten from his wallet.
“I’m supposed to do this again now?” he asks.
“You’re allowed.”
“Oh, it’s a privilege.”
I beam at him. “It’s definitely a privilege. And it’s for a good cause.”
This time, he tucks the money in my coat. It’s zipped up to my scarf, so when he wraps his fingers around the collar, just for a second, he’s touching a perfectly innocent bit of chest real estate about five inches north of my boobs. And even that through a couple of layers of clothing.
But our eyes meet, and I know what he did, and so does he.
Whistle. “DRINK!”
This one goes down funny. I start to choke, and I have to grip the train track for a second, cold iron through brown leather, sucking air into my nose. In my peripheral vision, I notice a disturbance. Movement. A ripple of aggression.
“Not your turn, dude,” I hear Krishna say.
“I get to go again.” Scott.
“I don’t care.”
I know that voice.
I look up and see West, down on one knee across from me.
He must have shoved to the front of the line. Barged right in and removed Scott, which is totally not allowed. If anyone else had done it, Krishna would have had them kicked out, but West is West, and they’re friends.
West is West, and he’s got some kind of point he wants to make. God knows what it is.
His jaw is tight. There’s a line between his eyebrows, a hardness to his mouth. I wonder how long he’s been watching and what kind of right he thinks he has here, anyway.
The muscle in his jaw flexes, his teeth grinding together.
“You’re here for a blow job?”
“No.”
I cross my arms, pouting. “Well, blow jobs are what’s on offer. Are you in or are you out?”
Someone slides a shot down the tracks to the space in front of him. Bridget shouts, “Pay up!”
West frowns, opens his wallet, takes out a bill.
He extends it to me.
“You’re supposed to put it on me.”
“I’m not doing that.”
“Everybody’s doing that.”
He hesitates, and I think he won’t. He seems troubled by all this, not sure if I’m being exploited, exploiting myself.
I’m not sure, either, but I want to tell him that sometimes you just have to trust the way it feels. You have to believe that happy things can make you happy and wrong things feel wrong.
I want to tell him that tonight he has to trust me to know what I want, instead of making up my mind for me.
He’s not in charge of me. He never was.
We were never going out. We weren’t friends. And I haven’t spent every hour since I last saw him two nights ago feeling brokenhearted, furious, betrayed.
Behind him, Scott is waiting. Hopeful Scott. Nice, ordinary, possible Scott. A guy I could take home to meet my dad. He must have driven all the way from Carter tonight for me.
It’s a shame Scott’s not who I want.
I reach out, grab West’s wrist, and drag his hand to my chest. “This is a good spot.”
Our eyes meet. He stuffs the bill inside my coat, down into my cleavage, his long fingers tamping it like an explosive.
I haven’t been this close to him since before break. Only in my dreams. Only in my bed in the dark, remembering the sound of his voice in my ear, the heat of his body, the slide of his tongue.