Page 1 of Tonight's the Night
Prologue
Angela
I’m sittingon something hard. There are also two hard somethings to my left and my right. Emily called this a “make-out party.” She is into the idea of experimenting.I’m not interested in experimenting because I already know what Iwant.
I’m realizing now that this party was a mistake. There’s no getting over the man I want with some stupid make-out session. The idea that I have some other dude’s hands on me right now is making my skinscrawl.
“Elijah,” I whisper, his fingers digging into the flesh of my hips. His fingertips slide just inside the waist of my skirt. “Elijah, I’msorry.”
The music in here is loud and the bass is so overbearing that I assume it must be making the pool water ripple. We’re in the guest house of my best friend Emily’s father’s massive home in East Hampton, New York. If you looked for it on a map I’m fairly certain the regulation-sized tennis court and the big swimming pool would be eminentlyvisible.
“Should we go find someplace more private?” Elijah whispers against my hair, tucking it over my shoulder and putting his lips near my ear. I exhale as my eyelids flutter closed, the beat from the music and the beer I drank making me feel distant from it all. Elijah’s fingers find the buckle on my belt and he slides the end through the metalloop.
Slowly.
I can feel the faint clicking of the button and zipper of my skirt coming undone — the music is far too loud for the clicking to register as anything more than a feeling — and the next breath I inhale is a delicate whine of panic and excitement that catches in my throat and weaves its way through my veins. I gulp. There’s only one man I’ll let undress me, and it’s not this guy. His fingers are playing against the hyper-sensitive skin below my belly button and if I don’t stop him now, they’ll be down inside my panties soon. My eyelids flutter open lazily and catch the gaze of two jocks in the corner, their eyes driving through me with precise intent, the barrels of their chests rising andfalling.
They want Elijah to get his fingers down my skirt and they want to watch as he does it. That’s wrong, isn’t it? Voyeurism? There’s always been a little bit of a voyeuristic streak in my best friend. This is an expression of it. But what I want isn’t this. It’s so much more wrong than this. The man I want is off-limits in a delicately balanced way, as though a gust of wind could knock me off my axis and send me careening straight into theforbidden.
“I can’t,” I whisper. He acquiesces and my head falls back against his chest and I slide down between his massive thighs until I’m sitting between them. The leather under me squeaks and his hard-on is against my back now as I quickly fix my clothes and belt. But despite the speed with which I get myself properly dressed, everything around me feels slow-moving like quicksand. I stand up between Elijah’s knees and turn to face him. He puts his hands on my waist, squeezing where it narrows and exhaling deeply, a growl rumbling from hischest.
“I wish you’d shown this side all along,” hegrunts.
I lean forward and kiss his cheek. I’ve had a taste and decided this isn’t going to happen, and I don’t know if the kiss is a consolation prize or just confirms that I’m a tease. We aren’t going to be seeing much of each other this summer. He can do this with someoneelse.
“Sorry,” I say against his cheek. I thought this might be for me, but I waswrong.
He hooks a finger into the waist of my skirt and I let him. He pulls me closer, my bare belly at his eye-level. He slides his thick finger back and forth between the material and my bareskin.
“You’d like it,” he whispers, trying to tantalize me. “And I always make sure the girl comesfirst.”
Oh…that should pique my attention. It should send a thrill up my spine. This is a sure thing. I could sink down into his lap and hold on to the back of his neck as I hovered above him a little, let him put his hand between my legs and then sink down onto it, impaling myself on a pair of fingers. He’s a football star. His hands are course and rough. It might be nice to have his fingers there. I could look over my shoulder at his two massive friends in the corner and watch them as their dicks got hard, knowing that I was responsible for it. That should be sexy,right?
“Shit,” Emily says from my right. I turn my attention to her as she leans back in her boyfriend’s lap to look out to the driveway. A pair of headlights sweeps through the guest house and someone turns down the music. Emily dismounts to her feet and puts a finger over her lips as she begins to corral everyone toward the door. I just hope she doesn’t turn a light on. “By the door, everyone by the door, let’sgo.”
I walk over to the window and peer through it out to the driveway and see Joshua’s cashmere white Benz pulling on to the property through the tall, wrought-irongates.
“Psst!” I hiss, throwing my hands over my head and waving them back and forth. I whisper-shout. “Everyone get in the back corner. I’m going to run interference. Blow these candles out and shut off the music and everyone just stay the hell where youare.”
I crouch down near one of the big windows and curl my fingers over the sill, lifting my gaze to watch Joshua intently as he cuts his headlights. I nearly feel my heart float away as he gets out of the car and slams the door shut behind him, rubbing his hands together as though he’s drooling and starving and looking at a piece of meat. I can’t see the passenger side of the car but it looks like there might be someone withhim.
His smile is brilliant and the curl of his lips accentuates his diamond-cut jaw with its peppering of a slight beard. I feel my lungs empty as the tip of my tongue glides across the curve of my upper lip. What football star? My heart is racing because of Joshua. When he leaves my line of vision I turn around, still crouched in the corner, and signal to my friends that I’m goingin.
My exit is quick and the mission is clear. I just need to get across the lawn and inside the house to create a diversion while my classmates pound sand. I crouch low to scamper across the vast lawn and put my back against one of the columns that lines the broad walkway at the back of the house, imagining that I am a very glamorous woman with a tiny waist and broad hips in a white bikini and a flowing Pucci coverup in Monaco or Greece and maybe I’m carrying a pistol. Peeking over my shoulder, I sense some movement from inside. A lick flicks on and I rise to my full height, walking toward the house like I belonghere.
I take a deep breath and reach out to grip the handle to the back door that leads into the kitchen. We left it unlocked for just a situation like this. Emily had told me and our girlfriends by group text earlier that her dad would be out this evening and that we should skip the dance’s first few hours and show up fashionably late. Though, as Emily pointed out, her father would likely come home at an unpredictable time. I would be the perfect candidate to show up in the middle of him coming home because I spend enough time over here for my walking from the guest house and into the main house to beinconspicuous.
I make my way inside. Yes, even if I hadn’t seen his car, I would know he was just around a corner or on the other side of a wall from the heady, masculine scent that I have visited high-end department store after high-end department store to seek out. And I found it. My heart glowed and I followed the notes of depth and freshly-cut grass all the way to a special counter. I tingled all over when I sprayed it into the air in front of me and walked slowly through it the mist, and on the bus ride home I nestled my nose against my sweater and breathed in deeply to make that scent part of my DNA. They can genetically engineer crops, and so I’d become convinced that I would be able to engineer my own sense of smell by making every follicle in my nose and every pore in my body feel Joshua Stevens’scent.
His scent, fresh and woodsy and so remarkablyhim, makes my clit tingle and nearly sets fire to my heart. It makes it beat faster, makes my breath shallow, makes me nearly squeal with delight every time I’m in its presence because it means that he is not faraway.
I want him, but things have been so strained between us for the past few months. Ever since my birthday. I’m eighteen now. He used to be so nice to me. He said I was the responsible one in our friend group and teased his daughter for not being more like me. I admired him. I liked the attention he gave me. I haven’t grown up with all of the privileges that Emily has. Her parents are wealthy. Her dad has an amazing job. It all seems so glitzy and fancy. He works in the city some days and from his home out here on Long Island some days. I’ve always thought it was so special to have two places to work from, as though your career was more important than the averagejob.
His jobliterallytakes up more space than anyone else’s. And he has clients all over the world - here, London, Hong Kong, Madrid. He speaks three languages. Three! I can count on one finger how many languages I speak: one. Just the one. I’m okay at this one, but still…yeah, it’s just theone.
I don’t get attention from many people, let alone many men. It felt like I grew up overnight — at least that’s what Emily tells me. One of her guilty pleasures is those teen movies that came out in the eighties and nineties and she always says I am like the girl who suddenly traded in her glasses for contacts and took down her curly ponytail to reveal a long, silky mane of flowing hair. She says my hair looks good for pulling on. IthinkI know what she means, but dammit, I am a late bloomer and I demand whatever the hell’s supposed to be blooming inside me to get along with it and bloom and growalready!
And it is. It’s starting. I keep moving through the kitchen so I can intercept Joshua before he catches on that there’s a full-on make-out party in his guesthouse.
