Just as she decided to step away from him and sip her beer, he took the cup from her, sloshing some of the liquid onto her shirt in the process—which amused, and annoyed, her in approximately equal proportions.
“Aw, hell, I’m sorry,” he said, and tried to brush the beer off the silk, although his hand wasn’t anywhere near the spot where it had actually spilled.
Oh, yeah. A true Lothario. She started to pull free—write the whole thing off as a momentary, ill-advised, alcohol-fueled loss of common sense on both their parts—but, he was lifting her up onto the desk, and moving in to kiss her some more. It was actually a good choice, since she could rest her bad leg on the chair, and as things progressed, she found herself instinctively using her other leg to pull him even closer.
A reaction which seemed to please him very much, and the whole situation began escalating so quickly that, drunk—and intensely excited—or not, she tried to lean away from him. “Jack,” she said, “I really don’t—”
He didn’t seemed to hear her—or, if he did, he either wasn’t paying attention, or wasn’t terribly interested in her opinion.
“Uh, look,” she said, aware that she was having trouble getting her breath for all of the wrong reasons now. Specifically—fear. “Let’s cool it, okay? I think things are getting, uh—”
“No, come on, this is good, Meg, this is really good,” he mumbled against her mouth, one hand up underneath her bra, the other trying to work its way inside her jeans. “Just let yourself go with it.”
She should have known better than to expect him to be content with simple making out, and it was her own damn fault for drinking so much, and for not breaking this off as soon as he had pulled off his sweatshirt and started unbuttoning her shirt. “Jack,” she said. “I don’t want to—”
“God, you’re so hot,” he said, kissing her even more deeply as he climbed up onto the desk and tried to move her down onto her back. “I can’t believe how hot you are.”
If she wanted, she could reach into her pocket for her panic button, or raise her voice a little, and her agents would come running in—but, to hell with that.
She pushed him away, violently, with her good hand. “I said, back off already!”
He stared at her. “What? We just got started.”
“Yeah, well, now we’re finished,” she said, and laboriously slid out from underneath him, almost falling over in the process of trying to stand up. Her good hand was more uncoordinated than usual, but she finally got her shirt rebuttoned, then picked up her beer—or maybe it was his—and swigged some, although more alcohol was probably the last thing she needed.
He scowled, and put his sweatshirt back on. “What’s your problem?”
“You,” she said. “At the moment.”
“What’s wrong with you? One second, you’re like, totally into it, and the next—” He shook his head, and then made such a quick move forward that, for a second, she was afraid he was going to hurt her. He saw her expression and scowled harder. “I’m getting my beer, okay? Jesus.” He retrieved his cup—or, possibly, hers—and stepped away sullenly. “Believe me, touching you is just about the last thing on my mind right now.”
It was mutual.
“You should go see a shrink or something,” he said. “You’re really screwed up.”
As insults went, she found that one pretty god-damned dull. “Hey,” she said, “you’re the one who—”
“Oh,” he said, nodding, “so now it’s my fault that you got raped by terrorists?”
What? Where did he get that idea?
He must have realized how that sounded, because now he looked guilty. Horrified, even. “I, uh—I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that, Meg, it just came out. I really didn’t mean to—”
“Is that what you think?” she asked, very, very quietly.
“No,” he said, looking even more guilty. “It just—I don’t even know where that came from, I—”
“Well, here’s where you missed the boat, Beach Boy,” she said, angrier than she could—almost—ever remember being. “I wasn’t raped by terrorists, I stood up to god-damn terrorists!” Which, somewhere in the beer-numbed fog that was her brain, she realized was true, even if she’d never quite thought about it that way before. “So, trust me, as far as I’m concerned, some little wannabe date-rapist is just boring.”
His expression changed from guilt, to fury. “Hey, I didn’t do anything to you—I stopped, remember? You said stop, I stopped. Period. Okay? Let’s just agree we don’t like each other, and forget about the whole thing.”
“With pleasure,” Meg said, and splashed what was left of her beer across the crotch of his jeans before shouldering past him to the door.
“If you were a guy, I’d knock you down for that,” he said, his fist clenching.
She stopped abruptly and turned to face him. “Go ahead, Beach Boy. Try it.”
Instead, he finished his beer, dropped his cup on the floor, too—pointedly—and walked out of the room.
She was right behind him, but instead of veering towards the keg, she headed straight for the suite exit, the stairwell—and out of the dorm.
Away from the god-damn party.
Kyle caught up to her within a few seconds, slightly out of breath. “Leaving?” he asked.
She was in no mood to answer exceedingly obvious questions.
Three of her other agents fell into step once they got outside, and she didn’t bother explaining herself to them, either. It was extremely cold without her jacket—to say nothing of potentially physically risky—but she wasn’t about to go back for it.
“You want to borrow my coat?” Paula asked, already starting to take it off.
“I like the fresh air,” Meg said. “It’s bracing.” So what if it was snowing. That, and being drunk, and not having her cane, made it hard to walk without stumbling, but—to hell with it. After all, she was already crippled. What difference would it make if she fell down and broke a few more bones?
They must have caught on to the fact that she was kind of enraged, because none of them spoke again until they had made it back—unscathed; quelle bonne luck—to Sage, by which time Meg was having trouble keeping her teeth from chattering.
“Uh, are you in for the night?” Kyle asked.
“Haven’t decided,” Meg said shortly. Although it wasn’t like she had any friends here. Any kind of normal social life at all.
He nodded. “Okay. But, if you do want to go out again, we’ll need to—”
“Don’t worry. You’ll be the first,” she said, and limped into the building.
* * *
THERE WERE A lot of people around, mostly guys from the entry, hanging out on the landings, with some of the stairwell doors illegally propped open, and she hoped that she didn’t look as angry as she felt. With luck, she just looked—distant. Unapproachable.
She was hoping to be able to escape into her room, but unfortunately, just as she got off the elevator, her knee so swollen that her brace was now too tight, Juliana and Mark came out of Juliana’s room. Mark had his arm draped around Juliana’s shoulders, and it looked as though they had had a very nice time at dinner.
“Hey, we were just heading over,” Juliana said cheerfully. “Was it really boring or something?”
Meg shrugged, avoiding her eyes. “It was okay. I’m kind of tired, that’s all.” She dug around inside her pocket for her keys, and promptly dropped them, having to bite back a deeply-felt “Fuck” in response.
Mark bent down and picked them up for her. “Come back with us. Maybe we can all liven it up.”
Meg shook her head, unlocking her door with some difficulty. “No, thanks. I, uh, I’m really wiped out. But, I hope you guys have fun.”
Before she could close the door, Juliana stopped it with her hand and came in after her.
“You all right?” she asked.
Christ, would it be too hard for all of them just to leave her alone? It was way past time to give up, call her parents, a
nd ask them to arrange to have her brought home for the rest of the year, so she could at least have some privacy, maybe. And she was god-damn well going to do just that, first thing in the morning. Meg shrugged. “A little too much to drink, maybe. So, I’m going to sleep it off.”
“Where’s Susan?” Juliana asked.
Oh. Right. Susan. Fuck, and double fuck. “Um, still over there, I think,” Meg said. “I couldn’t find her before I left.”
Predictably, Juliana came farther into the room, instead of leaving.
“How come you have snow all over you?” she asked.
Because there was a veritable Berkshire blizzard going on out there, maybe? “Forgot my coat, I guess,” Meg said.
Juliana looked at her for a minute, then went over to the door. “Hey, Mark! Meg says it’s snowing really hard now, so let’s have a party here, instead.”
“Got any beer?” he asked.
“Just a couple,” Juliana said. “But call Harry and Simon, and maybe they can bring some more. Tell them to get something decent.” She grinned at Meg. “So, this’ll be fun. You can choose half the music, even.”
What? Meg stiffened. “You don’t think I’m coming to the party, do you?”
“Well, you’re the co-hostess,” Juliana said, “so, yeah.”
Meg shook her head. “No, I—I really—”
“Change into something dry, and bring out some tunes,” Juliana said, already on her way into her own room. “It won’t be fun without you.”
In her current mood, it wasn’t going to be fun with her. But before she could figure out a good way to get out of the situation, Juliana had come back in with two Rolling Rocks, one of which she was drinking.
Meg waved the other bottle away. “Thanks, but—”
“Come on,” Juliana said. “You don’t seem that drunk.”
Oh, yeah? Meg frowned at her. “Drunk enough to have had a really bad party make-out with some jerk named Jack Taylor.”
“Whoa.” Juliana looked impressed. “You were fooling around with him? He’s supposed to be a complete asshole, but God, he’s good-looking. Way to go!”
What? “No, it was really embarrassing,” Meg said. Unpleasant, also. And she could now personally attest to the asshole characterization. “Everyone who was there is going to hear about it, and—”
Juliana shrugged. “Hey, aim high, that’s what I always say.” She opened the second bottle of beer and handed it to her. “So. How’s he kiss, anyway?”
Well, as a matter of fact— “He, uh—” Meg grinned. “Actually, he kisses great.”
“I’ll drink to that,” Juliana said.
What the hell—maybe she would, too.
She changed into sweatpants and an old Oxford shirt—her favorite kind of party garb—then picked out a few CDs, and told Jose, who was behind the security desk, that she would be in the common room for a while, trying not to make it obvious that she was already drunk—and planning to become more so. Mark, and some other guy—Ted? Tad?—who was in her Shakespeare class and lived over in Sage A, were already in there with Juliana, drinking beer, along with Mikey from the first floor, and Quentin and Khalid, from the second floor.
“Todd, Meg; Meg, Todd,” Mark said, gesturing vaguely.
Todd. Okay. She nodded hello, and gave Juliana the CDs, which included, of course, Joan Jett.
Not that she was deeply mired in the past.
Possibly even her grandparents’ past.
“All right,” Juliana said, after examining them dubiously. “I’ll make it work.”
By the time Harry and Simon showed up with bags of chips and more beer, several other people from the entry, including Dirk, had joined the party, and everyone was in a pretty good mood.
Meg, included.
Simon looked very pleased to see her. “Hi,” he said, taking off his snowy fatigue jacket. “I didn’t know you were going to be here.”
Meg shrugged. What could she say—her life was a social whirl.
The room was crowded enough now so that she was sitting on the floor, leaning her back against a milk carton crammed full of DVDs and CDs and indeterminate junk. Simon opened two bottles of Sam Adams and sat down next to her.
“Those both for you?” she asked.
“Nope,” he said, and gave her one.
Okay. Why not. She was in college now. Time to walk on the wild side.
It was dark, except for a small study lamp in the corner, and some light coming in from the hall, and Meg found it very peaceful to drink beer, listen to music, and hang out with actual peers, even if she didn’t know them all that well. The party size fluctuated, as people from all over the dorm came in and out, and she was surprised she didn’t feel more shy.
Okay, mainly, all she felt was drunk.
Ripped.
Blasted.
Blitzed.
Simon—who she was now calling Skip, just for fun—was telling her long, involved stories about growing up in the Midwest, and Harry and Todd seemed to be swapping lurid and outrageous prep school tales, while Juliana sat on Mark’s lap, and the two of them did a fair amount of kissing and whispering. Meg just drank beer, and nodded a lot.
At some point, Juliana got up and put a collection of old Bob Newhart episodes in the battered VCR/DVD combo machine.
“Want to play a couple of rounds?” she asked.
There seemed to be general excitement about this idea, although Meg had no idea why.
“It’s a game,” Simon said, putting his arm around her. “Every time someone says, ‘Hi, Bob,’ you have to drink. After that, we can do Golden Girls, and drink when they say ‘St. Olaf,’ and ‘Sicily,’ and eat cake in the middle of the night, and stuff.”
Meg thought about that, since she had wasted hundreds upon hundreds of hours of her life slouching in front of Nick at Night, TV Land, and DVD compilations of long-ago canceled television shows with her brothers. “They say ‘Hi, Bob’ constantly.”
Simon nodded. “That’s why it’s a great game.”
Okay, what the hell. “The State of the Union is strong,” Meg said, and drank.
Everyone else laughed, which surprised her.
“The President wrecked our game,” some short guy with glasses—Jerry? Gerard?—from the first floor said, and almost everyone in the room nodded, and laughed again.
“‘Global community,’ though,” Andy, who lived on the second floor and was a very good-looking drama major from New York, said. “She was good with ‘global community.’”
Whereupon, there was more nodding—and drinking.
So, they had all watched the speech. She had been curious, but never would have had the chutzpah to bring it up directly.
And even being drunk wouldn’t make her brave enough to ask if they had all taken a drink every single time the First Family was shown.
The game was pretty hilarious—especially when three or four characters in a row said “Hi, Bob!”—and by the middle of the second episode, she was maybe a little smashed.
Bombed. Snockered. Wasted.
It would be very bad timing if the campus police suddenly burst in, and found a room full of mostly underage, intoxicated people. With luck, her agents would give them a heads-up, first.
When she finally staggered up to go to the bathroom—they were watching M*A*S*H now, and drinking every time someone’s rank was mentioned: Corporal O’Reilly! Captain Pierce! Major Houlihan!—she almost fell, and Simon grabbed her and held her upright.
Which seemed very, very funny.
“Excuse me, Skippy,” she said, extricated herself, and lurched out to the hall.
On the whole, she was noticing that alcohol worked almost as well as the painkillers the doctors so grudgingly doled out. Many more side effects, but so what? She knew better than most that life was short.
She was on her unsteady way back to the party, when Simon intercepted her on the landing. Big guy. Massive, even. Scarily so, if he weren’t so clearly the sensitive type.
 
; “You all right?” he asked.
How often had she been asked that in recent months? “Well, now, that’s the real question, isn’t it, Skip,” she said.
He looked worried. “You aren’t sick or anything, are you? Because, you know, you aren’t very big, and well, maybe you’ve been drinking too much.”
Maybe? She grinned, and tried to get past him. “Excuse me, while I go get my car keys, okay?”
He pulled her back. “Unh-unh. No way. Even if you hadn’t been drinking, the snow is—”
Jesus. “They don’t let me drive, Skip,” she said, still grinning. A little. “I mean, come on. I don’t get to do anything regular people do, I just—someone’ll probably leak me getting drunk to the tabloids, know what I mean?” She reached up to pat his cheek. Or, anyway, his beard. “Relax.”
“I really like you,” he said, sounding very serious.
Had she inadvertently put on some kind of super-concentrated male-attraction scent tonight? This was just nuts. Pheromones run amok. She nodded politely. “Well, I like you, too, Skip.”
“I mean it,” he said. “A lot.”
Christ. He didn’t even know her. If someone was going to say that sort of thing, she would infinitely prefer that it was, in some way, based in reality. “Simon,” she said, “I really don’t want you to get the wrong—”
He kissed her, and like a very stupid and promiscuous drunk, she automatically returned it. Had she ever kissed anyone with a beard before? Then again, truth be known, she really hadn’t kissed very many people, and they had all definitely been boys, as opposed to men. So, yeah, beards were new. It seemed fine. A little distracting, maybe. Slightly scratchy. But—fine. Just fine.
And, of course, she had always been a fan of tongues, and hands, and hips, and such. Except, why was she fooling around with someone in whom she had absolutely no romantic interest? Christ, she was as bad as Jack Taylor.
“Want to go to your room?” he whispered. “If you’d feel better, we could even just hold each other.”
Which, given what a considerate guy he seemed to be, he probably meant.
She felt like letting him keep going, to see what might happen—why not?—but then she heard someone coming up the stairs.