Losers: Part I

Encased in tinted glass, with the engine rumbling beneath me and bass pumping through my speakers, I felt untouchable. My mind was calm, focused, settled into meditational clarity. My constant racing thoughts and twitching fingers were calmed by the engine’s steady drone.

That, and by Vincent’s lips wrapped around my cock, gliding his tongue along my shaft.

I slid my fingers through his hair and gripped it, twisting the long brown locks in my fist. He preferred my hands tied, either tight behind my back or raised above my head with me stretched onto my toes. But it was my turn to be in charge.

I needed my hands free to force his head down, fucking into the back of his throat until he choked.

I didn’t want to come, not yet. Watching him take me all the way down and feeling his throat clench nearly threw me over the edge into rapture. But I forced myself to wait, hanging dangerously at the precipice of bliss.

I gasped, my entire back going rigid as Vincent hummed and his throat squeezed around me.

“Oh, fuck —” My mind went blank for one precious split second. One moment of pure brain-numbing pleasure, but I surfaced, gasping for air.

“Holy shit…” I went limp against the seat as Vincent slowly lifted his head, giving me a Cheshire cat’s wide grin.

“Did you like that?” His voice was husky as he reached across the seat and cupped my face.

“I fucking loved it,” I said, chuckling as I came back down to earth. He turned my head toward him for a kiss, my tired body still reacting to that obscenely skilled tongue of his.

I was thankful for the tinted windows and the privacy they gave us. Crowds made me nervous — you could never know who among them would turn on you in a heartbeat. Say the wrong thing, look the wrong way, or kiss the wrong person and you were fucked.

When people saw something that ran contrary to what they held up as right and good, things could get violent quickly. My mother had never hit me until I told her I wasn’t religious. My father had never even raised his voice until a “concerned neighbor” outed me to him, with the damning evidence of having seen Vincent and I fucking around in his Subaru. Words like “bisexual” meant nothing when a father was convinced his son was going down a life of sin.

But fuck all that. I’d embrace sin and launch myself straight into hell if it meant not having to live under someone else’s arbitrary rules for my life. I tucked myself away, adjusting my sweatpants back into place.

Yeah, sweatpants at a party. I really couldn’t be bothered trying to impress people with my looks. I was 5’7” with a messy head of blue hair that barely hid the ears I’d been told my whole life were too big. That shit used to eat me up inside, knowing I’d never be one of those six-foot-something chiseled guys with a perfect amount of facial hair and body mass. It didn’t matter to me anymore.

I turned off the engine, the laughter and shouted greetings from outside threatening to intrude on my isolated world. I glanced over at Vincent and found him watching me, a grin still curving his mouth.

“Ready?” he said.

I nodded. “Ready.”

Manson and Lucas were leaning against the Mustang and passing a cigarette between each other when we joined them. Lucas looked so serious you’d think he was there for a funeral instead of a party.

“Damn, boys, turn down the smiles,” Vincent said. Even when he was sober, Vincent was chill. A by-product of having so much experience being in the wrong place at the wrong time. He slung his arm around my shoulders and held up his THC vape, offering me a hit. I inhaled slowly, held it for a moment, and blew away the vapor into the night sky.

“You got the beer?” Lucas said.

“Yes, sir.” I moved to the back of the car and popped the hatch. My car was sitting pretty, slammed low and wide as hell with that Rocket Bunny kit I’d finished installing last weekend. I still had a few weeks before my next competition, so I couldn’t resist the opportunity to show it off tonight.

Besides, it was good advertising for Manson and Lucas, considering they’d helped build the engine. Any business we could bring in was good for all of us.

“Let’s get it started then, boys,” Manson said, holding up a twelve pack of IPAs from his trunk. The box of cheap beer I’d brought was to share, but Manson had the good stuff.

“Why do we come to this shit?” Lucas muttered, puffing at his cigarette as he scanned the faces spread among the trees. “I fucking hate half the people here.”

“What about the other half?” Manson said, tossing a beer to me before opening one for himself.

Lucas shook his head. “Don’t like them either.”

Manson snorted. “Right. Let’s get some alcohol in you before you start shit.”

“I don’t start shit,” Lucas grumbled. He was about to pop the top on his can, but the cigarette suddenly went slack in his mouth as he stared toward the bonfire. “Holy fuck. I’ve just seen a ghost.”

We all turned; Vincent a little too quickly because he was probably anticipating an actual paranormal incident. But there was only one ghost who would make Lucas look simultaneously furious and confused. I knew who it was even before I saw her.

Jessica sat on the other side of the fire, her oversized hoodie unzipped and a tight cropped shirt hugging her cleavage. Her long blonde hair was swept over her shoulder, her legs crossed, seated in her folding chair with all the confidence of a queen.

My perfect mental calm instantly shattered.

I’d tried to keep her out of my head, tried to forget the fantasies that Vincent took such pleasure in forcing out of me. Sometimes it disgusted me that I thought about her at all. The woman who used to demand I do her homework for her, who cheated off my tests, and taunted me for everything from my clothes, to my soft voice, to my ears. She shouldn’t have come anywhere near my fantasies.

God, but she did. She popped up into my perverted daydreams again and again.

Jessica had never been a woman to back down from a challenge, never one to let anyone know she was afraid. As we stared, her eyes flickered toward us.

The look of absolute horror on her face when she realized we were looking back was priceless. She looked just as flustered as she had when Vincent and I ran into her at the car wash.

“I told you she was back in town,” Vincent said. He was holding back a grin, and I could tell he was reading way too much into this situation. We’d now seen Jess twice in a month, which surely meant destiny, fate, or some other grand mysterious power was behind it.

“What are the fucking odds she’d be here?” Lucas said.

“Considering there’s fuckall to do in Wickeston except this, pretty good odds actually,” I said. I set my thumbnail between my teeth and bit. If I had to stare at her all damn night, I’d have no nails left at all. “Have any of you ever known Jess to miss a party?”

Manson set his beer down on the Mustang’s roof, eyes fixated on the blonde woman like a dog that had spotted a fresh cut of meat.

“We should go say hello,” he said.

Vincent nodded quickly. “We should.”

Lucas shook his head. “We should stop trying to catch a ghost.” But his words didn’t hide his interest. He kept looking at her.

My common sense wanted to side with Lucas. But the obsessive side of my brain couldn’t leave well enough alone. I still wasn’t sure what it was about her that had always kept me so fascinated. She was a massive puzzle I couldn’t figure out, an unanswered question, a problem without a solution.

She was a challenge, and God, I loved a challenge.

“She gives good head for a ghost,” I said, and Vincent nodded his agreement again. The memory of Jess begging for a taste of my cock was one I’d never forget. It was the kind of surreal moment a guy like me could only dream of, the most untouchable girl in school wanting to take me in her mouth.

“Be nice, J,” Manson said, in that tone of voice that gave me a little chill down my back. Manson had his pills, his therapy, his meditation and all that shit, but there was still something dark in him that would never quite go away. Something born because it had to be, and alive because nothing could kill it.

That thing, that monster inside him, had gotten a taste of Jess and nothing else could satiate it.

I’d known better, but I think Manson had really believed something would come out of that night at the Halloween party. Something more than just a fuck. Maybe he thought Jess would change, that suddenly she’d realize how badly she wanted us. Maybe he thought she would stick around, integrate into our fucked-up family unit as if she didn’t already have a perfectly cushy homelife.

Fat fucking chance.

“I guess there’s no harm in a little conversation,” Lucas finally said. The corner of his mouth twitched in something like a half smile, and I got a sinking feeling in my stomach. Lucas smiling wasn’t a good thing; it wasn’t because he was thinking happy thoughts.

No, that wasn’t a happy thoughts smile. It was an I’m going to start shit smile.