Page 15 of A Very No Strings Halloween
But Grace is eyeing me, like she’s expecting me to bring someone in particular. I shift around in my seat. “Do you…think I should bring someone?”
She clears her throat, looking just as uncomfortable as I currently feel. “It’s entirely up to you, sir. It’s just…I need to know the…um,typeof person you’re bringing so I can properly plan for…”
“Oh. Oooooohhhh. I hear ya. You’re concerned about Murph.”
Grace furtively glances around at her colleagues for support before saying, “Not concerned, exactly, no! Mr. Murphy brings a tremendous energy to any event he attends, but it can be?—”
Once again, I hold up my hand, silencing an employee. I’m sure she’s thinking of the last time I brought my boy Michael Murphy to a Locker Room event. He dressed as the mascot for our city’s occasionally great football franchise—a tomcat. There were a bunch of other mascots for other football teams at the event because we were hoping to expand beyond New England posthaste. But pictures turned up online of a big, furry, angry, man-sized cat wrestling with various other man-sized animals, and from certain angles it did look as though he was humping them. So we collectively decided to take a step back until those images are but a distant seventhor eighth page Google search result. And it was a good thing too—made more sense to get a foothold in New England before dominating the nation and then the world anyway.
Still, the last time I saw Murph, he was riding the winning horse, Jeepers Creepers, across the finish line at our impromptu midnight derby and then off into the sunrise, so…Grace is not wrong to have concerns. “I will not be bringing Murphy as my plus-one, Grace. I will be attending said event with a date. An unnamed female woman date of the highest order.”
“Wonderful!” she exclaims, typing something into her iPad. She seems very satisfied with my response, and the meeting continues without requiring my attention or input.
Myself, I am less than satisfied. I mean, I’d be happy to bring my ma, but it would be nice to have, like, one other option who’s not Murph. The girls I’ve hooked up with in the past have lived in the land between 10:00 p.m. and 4:00 a.m. Part of my epic, drunken adventures. My love life, if one could even call it that, is like a vampire. It’s a creature of the night, destroyed by sunlight.
I pull out my cell phone, thinking about finally downloading a dating app, but I find a text from Donna. A daytime text from Donna.What do ya know.
Red:Hi. I have the day off. What are you doing right now?
Me:Hey. That depends. What would you like me to be doing right now?
Red:I need you to meet me at the following address ASAP.
She sends an address in Middleborough, which is, like, a forty-five minute drive from here.
Me:Should I bring anything?
Red:Just come as fast as you can. Be Mark Wahlberg from the movie Fear. I’m a virgin and my parents are out of town. I am inviting you to come to my house. I will probably be lying in bed, virginally, waiting for you. Know what I mean?
Me:Fuck that guy. Fuck all the Wahlbergs. I’m cooler than all of them.
Red: Just please get over here and take my virginity ASAP okay?!
I grab my jaunty hat and excuse myself from the unfinished meeting—another perk of being the boss. I do a quick change in my corner office. Various wardrobes are now kept in variouslocations, including the trunk of my car, mostly for Donna reasons. Because I never know who I’ll need to be at a moment’s notice.
Speaking of—I swipe a Sharpie pen from my desk. Gonna need that for later.
Within ten minutes of Donna’s last text I’m in my Volvo and on the road to Middleborough. Traffic thins out the farther I get from Boston. Buildings give way to clusters of trees. In no time my GPS tells me I’ve arrived, and boy, have I ever. This property is beautiful. The house is too. Well, the landscape is a little overgrown and the house is a little neglected. There’s some peeling paint, and I can tell those windows and doors need to be replaced. But this place has character out the ass. It’s a little rough around the edges, but it’s bursting with potential.
Like me.
Just waiting for the right person to see that potential and take it to the next level.
I really do feel at home in the world wherever I roam, but I have the strongest feeling that I could live here someday. I mean, not now. This place isn’t the party. It’s a vacation from the party. The quiet trip to the bathroom where the music is muted and you splash water onto your face and look at yourself in the mirror to ground yourself.
That’s this place—a place to ground yourself, so you can go back and face the party again.
When I get out of the car I see Donna watching me through a downstairs window as she paces back and forth. She looks anxious. Impatient. Hopefully she’s just super horny like I am since we didn’t get to finish what we started last night.
I take the Sharpie pen out of my pocket and turn around so Donna can’t see what I’m doing. I pull my shirt up so I can write on my stomach, using the car window as a mirror. When I yank my shirt back down and turn back to face her she looks confused. I wink at her. Her expression goes blank, and she acts like she hasn’t just seen me. Like she’s just an innocent, superhot, buxom teenager padding about the house, unaware that a virile, ripped young man who’s totally obsessed with her is about to break the door down and take her virginity. Or something.
I stalk up to the house in my super tight shirt and baggy jeans and bang on the door. “Let me in the house!”
Donna frowns at me through the window next to the front door. “What are you doing?! That’s from the wrong part of the movie!”
“You didn’t specify which part you wanted to play out!”
“I very specifically said in the text!”
