Page 104 of Just Enough

I turned my attention back to the living room and sucked in a breath. She had her damn ass hanging off the armchair in these tiny black panties, and it was so fucking distracting because the need to bury my face between her legs was strong. Taking a deep breath, I slid the cold bottle between her thighs instead.

She shrieked. “Oh, my God, Benjamin, that’s cold.”

I placed her drink on the table and sat down beside her. Her face was completely hidden in the cushions, so she hadn’t yet seen the drink I had placed down for her. “Wanna talk about it?” I asked her.

“Talk about wh—” She got her answer when she raised her head and saw the wine cooler resting on the coffee table. She hid her face again. “Not really… It’s irrational and silly even to me…”

“Do you not want to drink?” I asked her. “There’s nothing wrong with that if you don’t.”

She sighed, then lifted her head just enough so that I could see her green eyes peering back at me. “No, I want to. It’s just…”

“You’re not your dad, Emily. Your dad’s not even that guy anymore.”

“I can’t help it, Benjamin. Every time I take a drink, it gets harder and harder because I have this irrational feeling that I’m going to wake up the next morning and find myself addicted even when I know I won’t be. It’s just a scary feeling.” She raised up and placed her head in her palms with another long sigh. “I get this huge knot in my stomach.”

I didn’t know what was best for Emily, but I knew I couldn’t stand her fearing something she wanted to experience. I took the wine cooler off the table, grabbed one of her hands so that she looked over at me as I placed it in her hands. “Let’s get drunk. Me and you. Morning comes, you can decide if you ever want to do it again.” She kept staring at me with doe-eyes. “If you stop at any point, or if you don’t even take the first drink, that’s okay too.”

She closed her eyes and leaned into me until her forehead rested against my chest. She took a deep, relaxed breath as I patted her back. “As I thought, you’re still the safest person I’d ever felt. You feel like home.” Her words always completed me.

She leaned back and smirked. “Even if we never get to meet drunk Emily before the night’s up, will I finally get to see you drunk?” She couldn’t help but ask.

I shrugged my shoulders with a smile as she looked up. “If that’s what you want.”

She laughed. “Only since forever… I feel a little more comfortable now that we’re alone,” she admitted. She raised up and twisted open the wine cooler. She chugged half of it down before she stopped to breathe.

I laughed. “Easy there. I don’t think it will take much to get you drunk. You had two shots at Crash’s.”

“Isn’t that the point?”

“You want to get drunk, not plastered. How are you supposed to drink with me if you pass out?”

Yeah. Somehow, I knew I wasn’t going to get drunk tonight.

______

We ended up making chili that we used to pour over nachos and cheese. She slowly drank the wine coolers I bought her, and the longer we sat around and ate and watched TV, the more relaxed she became.

By eleven, Emily was three sheets to the wind. The hesitancy and fear across her beautiful face slipped away as the night went. It could be the alcohol too.

She was cooing at the toe socks she had on. I made the mistake of encountering a dog adoption commercial as I was flipping through the channels which had her contemplating life and adopting animals.

I had a buzz myself, so her laughter had me floating on the clouds. I had stopped drinking at this point for the simple fact that I didn’t want to get so wasted I didn’t remember all these weird conversations we were having come morning.

“I’ve never seen a big toe as big as yours!” She had said at one point.

“I love you, Benjamin Helen,” she had whispered in my ear a thousand times throughout the night which had me sporting a stiffy and dry humping the hell out of her as we made out.

Then she fell back into talking about babies. “I wanna have your babies, Benjamin,” she slurred, and it sobered me up in the most intense way. I loved her drunk talking. It was doing all kinds of feel-good shit to my chest.

“Yeah?” was all I offered, because I wanted her to keep rambling like she had all night.

“I want to marry you first, though,” she mumbled as she crawled on the bed next to me and started nibbling on my ear. This raging hard-on had come full circle tonight, so when she finally crawled on my lap, I groaned. “Do you want to marry me?”

“I’d only been fantasizing about our wedding since you stole my first kiss,” I told her as I tucked her burgundy curls behind her ear and leaned up to kiss her neck.

“You were my first kiss, too.”

That made me pause. “You kissed three other boys before me.”

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