The Awesome (5 page)

Megan Fox was full of crap.

A hand crept around the back of my neck to pull me down. Ian’s hot breath brushed over my lips for a moment, and then I got kissed. My first kiss. I’d read horror stories about this in magazines; some guys had breath like a dragon, some guys used so much tongue it was like making out with a golden retriever. Though Ian tasted beery, he was sweet and gentle, not forceful or drooly in the slightest. In fact, there was no tongue at all at first, just this pleasant mouth massage type thing that got me pretty well acquainted with the bow in his upper lip. Eventually tongue got involved, yes, but it wasn’t a saliva fest. It was all... nice and stuff.

I slid my hands over his shoulders and concentrated on kissing him back, letting my eyes flutter closed. I figured if he glanced up to see me staring at him like he’d grown a second head it’d be a mood killer, so I went with it. My copycat approach to making out must have done the trick—he made this weird grunty noise in the back of his throat, his fingers sliding from my neck to my back, and then to my butt. Lo and behold,
I
grunted
back
. Sad but true, pursuit of The Sex made me fall off the evolutionary train twelve stops too early.

After a while he pulled away, swaying back and forth even though he sat. His breathing came hard, and I realized (much to my chagrin) mine did too. I’d liked it. In the vast scheme of my devirgining plan, I hadn’t counted on enjoying it. Courtship and foreplay hadn’t been considerations. It was a job, like a haunting or a boogie man eviction, and much like a haunting or a boogie man eviction, I dug the hell out of it, to the point I pulled off my shirt and threw it behind me. Screw it, this was a blast. If we stopped at the groping stage I was totally keen on going wherever the tingling took me.

I don’t recall how I went from standing between his knees to on my back in his bed, but that’s where I landed. He kissed me again, his hands skimming from my shoulders to my bra and over my stomach. I clenched my gut muscles partially because it tickled, partially because I didn’t want him to find me all gelatinous and Stay Puft marshmallowy. He nosed at my cleavage, and then he giggled. Giggling from a 6’4” guy was bizarre, and I cracked an eye to determine what was so funny. Hopefully the sight of my partially clothed body wasn’t point-and-laugh worthy, but if it was, I’d pretend his dong was a piñata.

“You’re all soft. It’s nice.”

“... uhh. That’s good. Right?”

“Nnnngh. Soft and warm.”

“Yeeeeeep.”

“You have a nice belly. I want to... I like your belly. Soft squishy girl belly.”

I had no idea what to say to that. Of course, my brain immediately jumped to ‘HE CALLED ME FAT’ because of the squishy thing, but he kissed and nuzzled it so much that I couldn’t muster an iota of real upset. I squirmed beneath him, and he took that for me liking it which, well—even drunk off his ass he could read the signs—and his hands fumbled with my jeans.

Oh hey. Houston, we have lift off.

T
HE INTRODUCTION OF
lady parts into our antics—drunken and horny on his part, sober and quasi-horny on mine—brought with it a new passel of worries. The primary one? What if he thought I looked WEIRD DOWN THERE. I was pretty sure everything worked the way it was supposed to work, but the only source material I had for this sort of thing was two minute internet porn clips and
The Miracle of Life
video from health class in junior high. That latter terrified me because stuff expanded and went all ovular when it should be smaller and watermelons out lemon-sized holes and...

I wasn’t like that. I was pretty sure on that. I was not like that, and thanks to the condoms in my purse, I would not
be
like that for quite some time. If ever. Babies were tiny, cute crap machines, and if I wanted one of those, I’d get a puppy. At least you can give away a puppy if it annoys you.

Ian grunted again, this time because he couldn’t get my underwear past my hips without me lifting my butt. I had no idea where my jeans were, though my shirt glowed on the floor thanks to its white pinstripes, and I stared at it as his hands skimmed from my ankles to my knees and thighs. I lifted up, swallowing a slightly panicked yelp when I felt him getting closer and closer to what was surely
ugly, weird, and malformed, and OH MY GOD WHAT THE HELL WAS I DOING?!

The good news was, on the off chance I was a freakish anomaly with the strangest looking pants bits in the world, Ian either didn’t care or he was too drunk to notice. His cheek pressed against my stomach as he touched me. It was weird at first, weird enough that I almost chickened out and told him I couldn’t do it, but that wouldn’t accomplish anything except leave him with a boner and me with a whole lot of self-loathing. Ninety percent of the women in the world had been or would be in the same place I was. People had been having The Sex since the beginning of time, and they would continue doing so right up until the sun died and took Earth with it.

It was okay. I’d be fine.

For some reason, thinking those things made me feel better. Admitting that
it was okay to be nervous
made me feel better, too. I was probably the only remaining virgin among all of the girls at the party, which meant every single one of them had gone through a similar experience and survived. I was infinitely cooler than they were, and so much more bad-ass it wasn’t even funny. If those chicks could get laid without it becoming a catastrophic freak-out, so could I.

There was only one problem.

“Whoa, dude. It’s not your enemy. Holy shit.” Ian’s touching had turned to pawing, and pawing apparently meant strangling my most sensitive part like he hated it and wanted to punish it forever. His finger stabbed at it like a battering ram laying siege to a castle door.

“Huh? Are you okay, Maggie?” He looked up, his hand stilling. I forced a winning smile. In the black light, winning smile meant ‘smear of evil glowing fangs’ but there wasn’t much I could do about that.

“Yeah, it’s cool.”

“Sorry. Do you want me to stop?”

“No!” I practically yelled it into his face, but there was no way I psyched myself up this much to have the whole thing fizzle out. By the way he recoiled, I knew I’d been too emphatic, and I ran my hands over his shoulders, bunching the cloth of his jersey up in my fists. “No please don’t. It’s okay,” I said, trying for soothing when I wanted to scream at him to do it already, I was losing my nerve. He nodded and lifted his arms, letting me pull off his shirt. I could barely make out the number tattooed on his shoulder, a big, blocky 58, before he moved up over me, tongue sliding from my stomach to the valley between my boobs and then to my neck. “I like you. Okay?” He whispered against my ear, slurring worse than ever. I turned my face to kiss his cheek mostly to keep myself from saying anything stupid.

Get it done
, I said to myself.
Shut up and get it done
.

“You’re okay, Maggie?” He said, and I realized he expected me to answer. This wasn’t drunken rhetoric.

“... yeah. I’m okay. I like you, too.”

“Cool.” I heard him fumble with his belt, and was about to offer him a condom from my purse, but he pulled open the drawer of his nightstand and got one of his own. He shifted, there was a snapping sound, and I braced below him, going rigid in anticipation of... well. Sex. I guess I figured he’d ravage me like some rutting tribal beast. If the way he’d pawed me was any indication, he assumed his penis was the Hatfields, and my vagina was the McCoys, and we were at war. It didn’t bode well for the actual deed.

The truth was, he was gentle, and slid a tiny bit inside of me as he rained kisses over my ear. I closed my eyes and forced myself to relax, sweeping the tips of my fingers over his shoulders and upper back for encouragement. He liked that and murmured, going deeper, moving over to capture my mouth in a kiss that, under any other circumstance, would have been sweet.

For a moment, I believed it was good, that everything was good and we’d be okay, that I’d done all right by finding Ian and tomorrow I’d be a journeyman hunter.

And then he collapsed on top of me, totally passed out.

CHAPTER FIVE

I
DIDN’T KNOW
if I should laugh, cry, or put Ian in a sleeper hold. No, he
already
slept, that’d exacerbate the problem. I shoved his shoulder, at first to see if I could get him to wake up and finish—he was clearly capable by the feel of things—but when that proved futile, it was to get him off of me. I only half-managed the second, oozing out from under his weight so he sprawled across my right side. I stared at the wall, incredulous that what should be a simple thing had somehow managed to go so wrong.

I wasn’t sure what I should do with myself then. Julie’d been drinking, and she told me when we made the plans that we’d be staying overnight. I wasn’t such an ass that I’d ask her to risk a DUI so I could sulk in the comfort of my home. I supposed I could socialize with other people, maybe salvage something decent out of my failed hookup, but being the lone sober person in a nest of drunken idiots wasn’t my idea of a good time.

Screw it, I was going to bed.

I wriggled out from under Ian to slide under his blankets, uncaring that I hogged both them and the pillows. It was his penance for failing to properly hump me. I hoped he got frostbite on his butt crack, or at the very least slept poorly because he was cold. I growled as I pounded on his pillow and rolled over, away from him, willing the sweet oblivion of sleep to distance me from what happened.

Falling asleep quickly was a relief and a surprise. I had a hard time with it whenever my mother wasn’t around. A stupid thing to admit considering how old I was, but we’d moved around a lot when I was a kid. We didn’t go far, mostly bouncing from one house to another in the same town so she could maintain her hunting territory, but that didn’t mean I didn’t know a lot of different beds over the years. Mom was my one stable thing—my fleshy night light.

That didn’t stop me from drooling my dreams into Ian’s bed like it was the most natural thing in the world. Maybe it was having a body right there beside me. He’d be a pretty big human shield if something went bad, and I wasn’t such a peach I wouldn’t hide behind a veritable stranger to save my hide. Or maybe it was that people who didn’t seek out monsters didn’t have to deal with them. Everyone knows monsters exist, of course, and are aware of the dangers they
can
present, but monsters keep to themselves. If they didn’t, the DoPR (and by association the hunters) would be after them. Terrorizing norms flew in the face of a very basic self-preservation tenet.

Whatever the case, I slept like a fat drunken baby, waking up feeling pretty good in spite of the previous night’s antics. I tried rolling over to get out of bed, but a long wiry arm held me tight, anchored around my waist. A bare leg, all furry and full of boy cooties, rested between my calves.

“Wake up. I need to leave,” I said, deciding I no longer needed to be polite. Ian failed his quest to do me, and that meant instead of impressing him, I could be more of an ass. Well, more me-like anyway, which tended to be ass-like.

His answer was to mumble and nuzzle at the back of my neck.

“No, really. I have to pee. I could pee in your bed if you want.”

It was amazing how the threat of rampant urination got people moving. “Don’t have to scream, Melissa. M’right here.”

My breath caught in my throat. I shouldn’t have cared that he’d called me his ex-girlfriend’s name. It wasn’t like I hadn’t used him, or tried to use him, when he was drunk and vulnerable after a break up. Of course, he’d climbed into bed with the first girl that threw herself at him, so that didn’t make him a champion of all that was rainbows and unicorn sparkles, either.

“Maggie.”

“Mag... oh shit. Right. I... shit. I’m sorry.” He lurched upright behind me. I craned my head over my shoulder to peer at him. He looked like he’d been shot at and missed, shit at and hit. His carefully-gelled spikes were limp atop his head. Plum-colored circles shadowed his eyes, his skin washed out and sickly green. “I’m really... really sorry. Like, I don’t... I usually don’t do this so...”

“I bet you say that to all the girls.” I scooted down to the foot of his bed to search for my panties. Somehow, they’d ended up hanging from the front of his dresser, and I snagged them from the knob, wiggling into them as discretely as possible.

“No. I don’t fuck people I don’t know. I’ve only... there was only Melissa so I... “

“You don’t owe me any explanations.” I grabbed my pants from the floor and tugged them on, uncaring that I was pointed butt first in his direction. After someone’s played around with your no-no parts, ass shots didn’t seem like such a big deal anymore. “And we didn’t fuck so much as pretend we were going to and then you passed out on me, so... yeah.”

It was cruel to say it like that, and by his near-pathetic groan, I knew I’d struck a nerve. It’s what I’d wanted, to let him know exactly how badly he failed me, so then why did I feel like such a dick for saying it? “Sorry. I more mean it’s cool, we didn’t get that far so you’re off the hook.”