She did a clearing shake of her head. “Just head out of the main road, and when you find the freshmen with water balloons for boobs puking in the front yard, you’ve found the place. Make sure you wear latex gloves if you touch anything. It turns out some new-found STDs devised in that house can be passed from surface to skin contact.”
My stomach clenched envisioning Emma in a place like that. I was halfway down the hall when Julia called down at me. “You called me Jules,” she said, her voice girly like I never imagined it could be. “Only my truest friends call me that.” Sticking two fingers in the air like a thin peace sign, she said, “There’s two things you have in common now.”
“Hey, that’s got to be better than one, right?” I called back to her, continuing down the hall, in a hurry to get to Emma.
Before I hit the stairs, I remembered my manners. Or at least what few I possessed.
“Jules?” I hollered.
Her dark head popped out the door.
“Thank you,” I said, my tone of sincerity hopefully demonstrating what two meager words couldn’t.
She grinned down at me. “I’m going to break tradition and make an expected, contrived response.” Pausing, she cleared her throat. “You’re welcome. Now, shoo,” she instructed, shooing with her hand as well. “Watch your back in there, Hayward. They’re animals,” she added as I charged down the stairs.
“Good thing I’m a hunter,” I said to myself, wrapping my fingers around the Mustang’s steering wheel a wink later.
It took me all of thirty seconds to hear the place once I’d pulled onto the main road off campus, but it was another thirty before it came into view. I shook my head, realizing that if these were the Ivy League youth of our future, I was going to be kept busy as a Guardian.
Julia had under-exaggerated. The front lawn was smothered with the puking “girls” like she’d said, but even more were passed out cold and, thankfully less, girls having clothed sex with guys spewed over crippled lawn furniture.
I was tempted to snap a picture and forward it to father to thank him for insisting I be put through the whole college experience thing, but calling upon a vast amount of willpower, I refrained. No father of a daughter should have to see another father’s daughter in such a state of disgrace.
Classy joint.
I wouldn’t have left my Mustang anywhere within a drunken mile of this place, but Emma was in there. My stomach twisted into an advanced yoga contortion when I pictured her in a place like that. Against every car worshipping bone in my body, I punched the Mustang over the curb and rolled it up on the grass since there was nowhere to park on the street. A fire marshal would have had a heyday if he’d been invited.
I couldn’t get out of the car fast enough and, once I made it through the maze of girls whose makeup had melted to Joker-scary, I bound up the stairs in one leap. The kid who was supposedly admitting would-be party goers was passed out cold on his stool in the doorway. A few phallic-esque caricatures had been sharpied on his face. Poor guy was going to wake up with more than a headache.
Squeezing by him, I took a survey of hedonism on earth. I couldn’t even imagine Emma squeezed into this seedy joint that was vibrating from the tasteless music and the bodies more-pounding-than-gyrating to the music. I had to find her and get her out of here, the mission impossible trained part of my mind repeated.
This wasn’t going into a country of hostiles armed with semi-automatics and desperation, this wasn’t infiltrating the world’s most dangerous Alliance of Inheritors, this wasn’t even going up against a man twice my size in a hand-to-hand battle, this was weaving my way through a bleary-eyed brood of Stanford’s finest and escorting a woman I cared about away from here.
This should be the easiest mission I’d undergone—in fact, it was laughable to consider it a mission, but something about the electric edge surging through me—like I was ready for a bullet to be fired at me from twenty different directions—was roaring to life.
I tried to coax my fists flat, my muscles smooth, my mind calm, but I was unsuccessful at any calming endeavor. If anyone tried to mess with me tonight, they’d be wearing a body cast for the better part of the year.
Tucking through the entry and into the room where most of the fumbling bodies were congregated, I wished I would have heeded Julia’s warning and worn gloves or, better yet, a radioactive resistant body suit. The place stunk of vomit, that goes without saying, but vomit that had been baking in the sun during the apocalypse and right alongside the tantalizing scent of puke was a tangy scent of undeodorized armpits. The hideousness of this stench would haunt me to the end of time.
Realizing my white-blond surfer hair, chiseled by the hand of God physique, and outfit that took a dump on the mall store jeans and branded t-shirts around me stood out, I knew I needed to make an effort to blend in with the rest of the genetically-impaired. Plus, I didn’t doubt that however drunk Ty was at this time on a Friday night, he’d have no trouble picking me out of the crowd.
Grabbing an un-manned red plastic cup teetering on a windowsill, I plucked a red Phillies baseball cap off a guy who was college boy bouncing his head to the wrong beat of the music. I was already halfway across the room when I heard him holler out, but I knew even despite the hat’s overt color, he wouldn’t be able to identify the thief. I was the Dalai Lama of blending into a crowd when I needed to be.
Not finding Emma in the main room, I slipped into a dark hallway. Between the coupled bodies and choppy breathing, I saw her. It was like the dark hallway was pointing at her, as if I needed any other hints that I needed to get her out of this place. She was sitting on a sofa arm, legs crossed, hands twisting around each other like they didn’t know what to do, shoulders slumped, eyes in that faraway place again.
I didn’t need a psych degree to diagnosis her with a bad case of get-me-the-hell-out-of-here. I’d shoved my way through most of the bodies when an arm snaked around her neck. An arm I wanted to dislocate from its socket.
Ty handed her a red cup. “Here, drink this.” Perhaps the only good thing about having heightened senses in a room like this was that I was able to zone in on his voice through the deafening drone surrounding me. “Is it too much to ask that you try to look like you’re having a good time? These are my friends, you know. Maybe you could show them the same amount of enthusiasm you like to show your asswipe friend.”
Emma took the cup from him, but made no other show of acknowledging him and, to my relief, he made no more attempts at acknowledging her presence. In fact, he turned to the girl glommed a little too close to him given his relationship status, the epitome of girl-you-don’t-take-home-to-mama, and bent his mouth down to her ear, whispering something in it that made her flick a wink his way.
Through this entire trash hits on trash transaction, Emma played oblivious, but Emma was not one of those oblivious girls. She was choosing to ignore it, for lord knows what reason, but it made me want to claim her girlfriend rights that she wasn’t and bitch-slap one and knee the other in the balls.
Ty got pulled a few feet away into another stimulating conversation on the finer qualities of beer pong, or where you could find a size xxxs-near-non-existent jockstrap, or whatever lame brain things his brand of losers gravitated towards, and I took full advantage of his distraction. Crouching against the wall at the end of the hallway, I slid my hand between her fingers and the cup that turned out to be empty save for a swig.
The jackhole handed her a cup of backwash.
She looked at my hand, a smile already in its early stages when she looked up into the face of the hand’s owner. Her eyes bulged when she saw me ducked in the shadows, but the smile stayed in place. Taking a nervous glance Ty’s way, she leaned towards me. “What are you doing here?” she asked one level above a whisper.
Returning her grin, I pulled at her hand. “What are you doing here?”
She didn’t budge from the sofa arm, like she’d been crazy glued to it. “Having a great time,” she answered.
“Sure looks like you are,” I said, giving her hand another tug. I’d pick her up and carry her out of here if I had to, but it would be a helluva lot easier if she’d work with me. “Why don’t you keep the good times rolling and come with me?”
She stalled, biting at her lip. Throwing one more glance at Ty’s back, she set the cup on the ground and ducked into the hallway next to me. She was pressed against me so close, we took up no more space than one person.
“Well, are we just going to stand here?” Emma whispered against my neck. Holy goosebumps, Batman. “I flew the coop with the promise of good times to be had.”
I angled my face down towards hers, so close my nose was skimming her forehead. I lost purchase of the comeback I was prepared to deliver, but when she tilted her face higher to mine, so the breath coming off her lips flowed against mine, I lost purchase of all twelve languages I knew fluently.
Wordless, I pulled her up with me and led her down the hallway. She followed me, weaving her other hand through my elbow, and together we cut our own path out of the darkness. Spilling out onto the middle of the expanding dance floor, I turned and pulled her against me. Harder than I should have, closer than I should have, but I didn’t give a damn.
“Dance with me,” I said, my whisper breaking against her ear.
She answered me every way but verbally. Her hands slid up my arms, settling onto my shoulders, her body swayed against mine until we caught the beat of the music and each other, and her eyes gripped mine, warm, inviting, and scared.
My hands worked over the curve of her back, pressing her closer, trying to memorize every dip and curve of her back.
“Why are you here?” she asked after we’d danced in silence through an entire track. “Really?”
Doing a quick survey of the room, glad to find it Ty-free, I answered, “Well, it isn’t for the cheap beer or ear-numbing music I can assure you.”
“That’s why everyone else is here,” Emma replied, doing her own scan of the room, her fingers constricting into my shoulders a little deeper.
“Yeah, well, I came to this about this one girl,” I said, easing my way into laying it all out on the line.
“Did you find her?” she asked, her eyes latching on the ground.
Stilling us, I did another scan of the room, but this time, instead of looking for douchebag extraordinaire, I paused on a couple dozen women, earning a sigh from Emma.
My eyes ended on her and stayed on her for so long a blush crept up her neck and her eyes couldn’t hold mine any longer.
But they didn’t stay away long. As if thinking the better of it, they veered back to mine and she held mine harder she ever had, a smile spreading into every plane of her face. The Emma smile I missed. The real one that made me feel like I was the only person on the face of the world she cared for.
“Ah, there you are,” I said, part mesmerized, part hypnotized, but mostly just falling in love. “Nice to see the Emma I remember. Where have you been?”
Her smile warped into the sad one I hate to see as she sighed. “That Emma you want to believe I am—the smiling, carefree, world at her fingertips girl you see when you’re around—that’s not who I am. I’m the girl who’s insecure, pessimistic, runs away from her problems, or when that doesn’t work, ignores them, and spends most of the present terrified of the future,” she said, trying to keep her voice level. “I know, I sound amazing, don’t I?”