I put my palms up, saying, “It’s all right. I was just joking. I’m sure he has a relatively low body count.”
“Oh, shut up,” she says, playfully hitting me on the arm.
“Well, not knowing his name or anything about him, I really don’t know how much I can help you,” I tell her.
“I guess I could try texting him,” she says, “but Alec said he might not make it, something about bad clams or something.”
“That kind of sounds like something Alec could have omitted from the conversation,” I tell her.
Even though I was relatively certain that it was her, actually knowing it for a fact and talking to her about myself in the third person has got me wanting to draw this out as long as possible.
“I’m going to send him a text,” she says. “If nothing else, at least I can find out if he’s going to be able to make it tonight.”
She pulls out her phone, and I’ve really got to get out of here. The jig is up if she hears my phone go off right after she sends her message.
“Hey, I’m going to go check on Irene,” I tell her.
“I thought you—well, it sounded like you were implying that they were—you know what?” she asks. “Never mind. It’s really none of my business.”
“No,” I start, “it’s not that—”
She’s texting at a rate that would be impressive if it weren’t so threatening, so I just walk off, taking a right turn toward Alec and Irene’s bedroom.
I get halfway down the hall, but stop as I hear the bed creaking.
It’s never really made sense to me how she could go from looking like she was about to refund to the conclusion that sex was what the doctor ordered, but it’s not really something I spend much time thinking about.
I pull out my phone and, as I go to turn the notification volume down, the text comes through.
Unless Jessica followed me, which I feel pretty safe in saying she didn’t, there’s no way she could hear the sound.
The message reads, “Hey, I’m at the party. Just wanted to know if you were still coming.”
Think, Eric, think.
I have a couple of options here. I could send her a text in line with what Alec had said and start sowing the seeds of distaste for that version of me, but that doesn’t really seem like the right thing to do.
I could tell her that I’m on my way to the party, but again I’d run into the problem of either having to tell her that it’s been me the whole time, or “not show up” and make her think that I’m a flake, but neither one of those options really put me in any different a situation than I’m already in.
Finally, I settle on what seems to be the best version of damage control available to me at the moment, and I write, “Hey, sorry I’m late. I’ve had a bit of a family thing and it’s taking me a bit longer to get out of here than I thought.”
There: no bad clams, no “I’ll be right there,” just a plausible excuse that’s going to let me tell her that I won’t be able to make it with little to no fallout.
Maybe that’s the key. Maybe I just need to keep convincing her on both fronts that I’m a standup guy then, when the moment’s right, I can tell her the truth about everything and it’ll all come out perfectly.
That’s exactly what I need to do: Just keep my plans vague enough that I never actually have to act on any of them and I can just stay here in limbo while I try to figure out just how much I like this woman.
I know that I like her, but that’s about all I know at the moment. Well, and that she constantly looks so good. Every inch of her.
My phone chimes and I look down.
The message reads, “Okay. Well, Kristin and I are going to be here for a while, so just let me know when you’re here and we’ll meet up.”
“All right,” I write back. “Hopefully I shouldn’t be much longer. I’d hate to miss the chance to meet you.”
“Hey, what are you doing?” Jessica asks just as I’m sending the text.
“Waiting for the bathroom,” I tell her.
She cocks her head to one side. “It’s upstairs.”
I keep forgetting that she actually knows Irene.
Her phone beeps and she checks it.
“Right,” I tell her. “I must be thinking of my place.”
What the hell kind of excuse was that?
“Oh yeah, fuck me, baby!” Irene shouts from behind the closed door at the end of the hall.
“Well, okay,” Jessica says laughing.
“What are you doing?” I ask.
“I was going to give you and your—ahem—friends a little privacy,” she answers as her eyes plead for me to let her leave the hallway.
“It’s really not like that,” I tell her. “I just wanted to get a little bit of privacy so I could make a phone call, but it sounds like this really isn’t the best place to do that.”
“I thought you said you were waiting for the bathroom,” she says.
“Yeah, I guess I…” my brain utterly fails me right in this moment where I need it the most. “To be honest, I don’t really know why I said that. I guess I was just looking for a plausible excuse so you wouldn’t think I was just back here to get an earful of whatever it is they do to each other in there.”
“Next time,” she says, “maybe just go for the ‘wanting to make a call’ thing first. That might make it a lot more plausible.”
I’m humiliated, but Jessica gives me a slight, but sincere smile.
“Why did you come back here?” I ask as she turns again to leave the hallway.
“Oh,” she says, “no reason.”
“Well,” I tell her, “you seem to know this house as well as I do and, with what I started to tell you about Irene’s post-keg-stand ritual, I think you knew what you might be walking into if you came down this hallway.”
“No! It’s not that, I was just—you know, I sent a text to that guy and, well, I wanted to be able to hear it when he texted me back, that’s all,” she stammers.
“Uh huh,” I tell her, “and I just wanted to come back here to find a bathroom.”
“I thought you said you were here so you could make a phone call,” she retorts.
“You, my dear, are blushing,” I tell her.
“Oh, I am not,” she says, crossing her arms.
She wasn’t blushing when I said that, but I didn’t really want to answer her question and, in my experience, telling someone that they’re blushing is about the quickest way to get them to blush.
“Really?” I ask. “So, why are you really here in the hallway?”
“Right now, I’m here because you keep stopping me to talk to you,” she says.
“Oh yeah!” Alec shouts in the bedroom and Jessica and I can’t stop ourselves from laughing out loud.
“It was the morbid curiosity, wasn’t it?” I ask her.
She turns her head, but shifts her eyes back toward me. “Yeah,” she says. “I don’t know. I guess it’s just been a while, and I wanted to try to convince myself that it’s really not that big of a thing.”
“What a weird justification,” I smile. “Do you want to place a bet?”
“A bet?” she asks. “What are we betting on?”
“How do I put this delicately?” I start. “I was thinking we could bet on who finishes first.”
“Ten bucks says it’s Alec,” Jessica says without any further encouragement.
It’s a reasonable bet.
In a regrettably large portion of sexual relationships, you can bet that the man’s going to come first and most of the time, you’re going to be right.
What Jessica doesn’t know is that Irene won’t let Alec come until she’s gotten hers at least twice.
I take a moment to reflect on how unsettling it is that I know that, but today wasn’t the first time that Irene and I have had a conversation after she’s gotten a few drinks in her.
“Deal,” I tell her and put my hand out to shake it.
“Wait,” Jessica says. “You seem too confident.”
“What do you mean?” I ask.
“I made a bet and you’re just ready to go for it? No haggling, no pressing for odds or anything. You obviously know something that I don’t,” she says. “He’s one of those tantric guys who can have sex for hours, like Sting, isn’t he?”
“I really don’t think that there are any similarities between Alec and Sting,” I tell her. “I can promise you that to the best of my knowledge, Alec doesn’t even know the definition of the word Tantra.”