Making the Hook-Up (28 page)

Her feet felt strange in the shoes, squeezed tight but sexy in a way she'd never known before.

“You look hot. Very fresh meat.” Raven's smile slowly faded until she watched Sara with grave eyes. Finally, she turned away and grabbed her bag. “My work here is done. See you Monday. And take care of yourself.”

“That's it?” Sara turned to her new friend, hyperconscious
of the way the stilettos elongated her legs under the silk-lined velvet while propping her bottom up and out.

“Sure. What else do you want me to say?”

The truth was that Sara wanted company at the party. Raven was the only person she knew on the Vreeland campus, and she often felt out of place among these people who were largely the opposite of chic, but still possessed their own sophisticated mystique.

“Nothing,” Sara finally said with the tiniest pout. “Tell Kevin I said hello.”

Even though she had never met Raven's boyfriend, the two strangers had often ended up talking to each other on the phone while Raven dashed out of the shower or ran up the stairs to their dorm from a late class.

“Definitely.” Raven quickly hugged her and breezed out of their shared room.

It was after ten, too late for anything good to be on TV, but far too early to go to a party that started at nine. Or at least that's what Raven said. Sara waited until eleven o'clock on the dot to leave her room and walk to the other set of dorms across the courtyard. A cool Florida breeze off the nearby ocean brushed against her cheeks and stirred tendrils of her hair.

Was she really going to do this?

Sara's footsteps slowed, but they didn't stop.

Her parents wouldn't approve. Definitely not her homophobic friends from high school who she'd abandoned after making the decision to come to Vreeland. Yes, the school was a place to indulge in all the excesses she'd heard about but felt too afraid to try—mushrooms, weed, alcohol, sex, skinny-dipping in the ocean under indifferent stars. But the campus also had one of the largest percentages of gay students of all the schools she'd been interested in. When Vreeland had said yes to her application,
Sara dismissed all the other universities and their acceptance letters, even Columbia, where her father had hoped she would enroll.

She wanted to be in a place where she could be herself.

She wanted to be in a place where it was okay to have crushes on other girls.

Sara drew a deep breath. Finally she had arrived at that place.

Third Court was one big party. Loud voices raised in laughter, philosophical disagreement, and general raucousness immediately greeted Sara as she crossed its invisible threshold. Bright blue Christmas lights decorated the trees in their small courtyard and twined around the cement-work balconies. Large Japanese lanterns decorated with flitting dragonflies and cherry blossoms bobbed gracefully in the breeze while marijuana smoke wove its way through the air, coming from all sides and slipping into Sara's hair, dress and nose.

Boys, and girls, watched her walk by, sliding their inquisitive gazes over her body, up her newly long legs and the shifting heat of her bottom under the dress. She smiled nervously but kept going. With the neon invitation clutched in her hand, Sara walked past each glass door on the bottom floor until she realized that 318 meant the top floor, not just the court number.

Before she could knock on the door, it opened, releasing the scent of more marijuana, and something else, something sweeter that she'd ever smelled before. The person at the door—it was hard to tell if she was a he or vice versa—smiled gently at Sara and tugged her into the room.

If the atmosphere outside was a party, this was a dream. D'Angelo's “Brown Sugar” wove its smooth, jazzy funk through the room, rocking into the bodies gathered there; the sleepy eyed women in flowing skirts; the liquid-limbed boys lying across the
queen-sized bed, passing a pipe back and forth between them; the girls who stood talking around a table filled to overflowing with food. They all seemed to rock gently to the song's beat, mellow and loose.

“Come on in.” The stranger's voice was warm and feminine.

“Hey,” Sara murmured, shyness suddenly overwhelming her.

Short spiked hair, dark eyes under slashing brows, nutmeg skin: the woman gently rubbed her palms up and down Sara's arms, smiling. “Where did you come from?”

“Um…First Court. I got an invitation.” She nervously waved the pink flyer.

“You must be a first year. Are you?”

“Yes.” Sara cleared her throat of its squeak. “Yes, I am.”

“I thought you were leaving, Devi.” An unmistakable, throaty murmur emerged from deep inside the room.

Devi, who still had her hands lightly grasping Sara's arms, didn't look toward the voice.

“I was, and now I'm not,” she said.

Looking past Devi, Sara saw Rille in the bed. She wondered how she'd missed her presence before. She sat at the head of the bed, leaning back against a wall draped with a plum purple Om tapestry. A woman smoking her own pipe, a bone-colored antique with silver accents gleaming in the low light, lay across Rille's lap. Thick white smoke hovered over them, growing thinner as it swam toward the rest of the room. The fourth year caught Sara's eye and winked again just like she'd done in the cafeteria that Monday afternoon.

Rille nudged away her girl to slide across the bed and emerge from the slow-moving wave of bodies in the room, a compelling vision in low-rider jeans and a tiny tank top advertising shucked
and raw oysters. “I was the one who invited her, not you,” she said to Devi.

Sara shifted in Devi's arms, suddenly uncomfortable. Everyone at the party, at least those she could see, was casually dressed in jeans, shorts, or vintage frocks. Nothing approaching the formality of Sara's dress.

“I like your outfit,” Rille said. “Red velvet. How appropriate.”

“Does that mean we'll get the chance to eat you up, too?” Devi asked.

“If we're lucky,” Rille answered for Sara.

Sara blinked at the two girls, watching the game between them like the spectator she was.

“You have to learn to share,” Devi said.

“I always share with you, all of a sudden you're complaining?”

Rille linked her fingers with Sara's, while on the other side of her Devi gently held her hand. “You're just in time for spin-the-bottle,” Rille said.

The two women guided Sara to the food table with everything sweet her heart could desire—devil's food cake, chocolate-covered strawberries, baklava, and sparkling plum wine. Devi briefly relinquished her hold on Sara to cut herself a slice of cake. Looking at Sara suggestively, she sank her finger deep into the cake and then, after it emerged coated in velvet brown crumbs and sticky chocolate frosting, sucked it clean. Rille watched her antics with a cool smile.

“Don't try so hard, baby. It makes you look the opposite of fuckable.”

Soft color washed beneath Devi's cheeks and Sara reached out to squeeze her hand. She glanced at Rille, surprised by her casual cruelty.

“What?” Rille asked as if she'd done nothing more innocuous
than blow her nose. “It's true.” She turned back toward the other partygoers.

Everyone seemed to be doing his or her own thing, smoking, talking, lingering over the table of edibles. That was until Rille made an announcement, tapping a spoon that had traces of sugar on it against a gigantic glass bong.

“Gather round, one and all. It's time for more festivities to begin.” Her gaze swept the room. “Those who want to watch, can. Those who prefer to play, let's play.”

A few of the two dozen or so people gathered in the room and arranged themselves in a circle on the floor. At least five chose to stay out of the game, including the girl who had been lying in Rille's lap. She sat back in the bed, still puffing on the pipe with its sticky-sweet smelling smoke, making herself comfortable against the pillows to get a good view of the show. A girl on the floor nearest Sara, with her hair cut close to her pretty head and a wealth of dark skin exposed in very short shorts, sucked her teeth.

“I wish Thalia would take her damn opium pipe somewhere else. She can be such a poser.”

But the words tumbled past her lips without any real heat. A few people laughed, but the girl on the bed paid them no attention. As Devi drifted away from them, Rille tugged Sara down on the floor next to her.

“I'm not sure if I'm ready to play this game.” Sara had heard of this on television and even whispered about in middle school, but she thought that people in college, especially those at the party, were way past such childish games. Apparently not.

“You have to play.” Rille's eyes were heavy-lidded. “I promise you'll have fun.”

Devi dropped an empty beer bottle in the center of the circle and dropped herself between a soft-looking boy with pretty, full
lips and another butch girl directly opposite Rille and Sara. A boy with a thick Afro leaned over to start the game.

“By the way,” Rille said, leaning close. “Gender doesn't matter. Whoever the bottle lands on, that's who you have to kiss.” Sara had already figured that part out on her own. “You can decide to kiss here in the circle, or in the semiprivacy of another space in the room, balcony included.” Rille grinned, the perfect picture of a charming fourth-year lecher.

Sara sat at Rille's side watching the game, mesmerized. This was what college people did? They spun and kissed, leaning toward each other in the circle, bottoms high in the air, wriggling with pleasure if their kisser was doing it right. No one took the activities away from the circle. When it was Devi's turn to kiss, the boy with long dreads down to the middle of his back and the scent of sandalwood on his skin, neatly cupped Devi's head, sliding his fingers through her short hair and down to the back of her neck. She shuddered when he touched her and they drew back, finally, to catcalls and whistles.

“Very nice.”

The D'Angelo CD segued to Johnny Hartman, sinking the room deeper into sensuality with his strong rich voice and words of yearning. When someone lit a joint and passed it around, the game got even slower, with couples taking up the circle to form their own make-out area. The girl next to Rille passed the joint and she took it, holding it between her index finger and thumb like it was something surprising she'd just found. Sara watched her take a hit, drag the smoke slowly into her lungs, her eyes squinting against the sting of smoke. Rille leaned close to Sara, to tell her a secret maybe, pressed her lips to hers, and probed with the quick flick of her tongue, until Sara, caught off guard and still amazed that people did such things in public, opened her mouth.

She coughed and sputtered, the smoke burning behind her face and in her lungs.

“Open. Suck it deep inside,” the gravelly voice licked at her ear.

Sara blushed, still coughing, still reeling from the sound of those words so close, and at the feeling they sparked in her body, the electric shock under velvet, the startling zing in her lap.

The people who saw what happened laughed. But the couple in the circle, bored with waiting for their turn at the spinning bottle, earnestly made out, reaching tongues and hands in places where Sara could not see. She blushed again. And this time, Rille laughed. She put the joint to her lips again, inhaled deeply before holding it to Sara's mouth.

“Just one,” Rille said, smoke trailing from her nostrils.

Sara inhaled, coughed, pushed the joint away.

“Good girl.” Rille kissed her quickly as a reward then passed the weed down the line. “Come on,” she said and stood up to lead Sara away from the circle toward something Sara wasn't sure she was ready for but wanted to taste anyway.

“Are you a virgin?” Rille asked with her lips a whisper from hers.

They were out on the balcony now, squeezed in next to another couple already half undressed and moaning into the warm Florida night. The lanterns dipped in the air near them, providing a pseudo light. Light to seduce and smoke by, to say and believe anything by. Sara closed her eyes, convinced suddenly of the magic in the night and in this girl by her side.

“Yes.” She felt rather than saw the older girl's smile.

“We can take care of that for you tonight, if you like.” Rille's breath teased her lips and Sara felt herself leaning closer to initiate contact.

“I'd like,” she murmured.

Sex was a surprise for Sara, but no miracle. Even with the hazy high blown into her by Rille's careless mouth, the promise of fulfillment turned out to be just that. The older girl tried everything on her—tongue, fingers, the firm pressure of her thigh, until finally she found an old dildo with a condom already on it from previous use. Rille stripped it off, looking only half apologetically at Sara as she went quickly inside to rinse the dildo in the sink before putting a fresh rubber on it.

“This will be better,” Rille said.

With her jeans discarded and wearing only her skin and the dildo harness, she pulled Sara down on top of her in the couch. Hot delirium of her mouth, hair exhaling the scent of marijuana smoke as she nuzzled Sara's throat, encouraged her to touch, whispered sweet filth in her ear. Rille seized the new territory of Sara's flesh. Opened her for intrusion.

She bled and called out in pain, straddling the green-eyed dream in the semiprivacy of the balcony sofa. The couple next to them came and went. Rille soothed her until she almost forgot that pain, until she found some sort of rhythm with the red velvet shoved up around her waist and down below her breasts and Rille sighing how beautiful she was. On the inside, Sara felt battered.

“That was really nice,” Rille said when they were finished.