you can get some action. I’d never cheat on Brandon!”
“I know! I was just making sure because we’re drunk. But I’m not getting any action; the cute one likes you and I’m not going to hook up with him just because he can’t hook up with you. That’s sad . . . for me.”
“Well, what about the other guy?”
I realized then that neither of us had called them by name, because we had no idea what their names were.
“It’s too late to ask,” Jackie said. “So what about the other guy? You can hook up with him. He’s totally into you.”
“The fat friend?”
“He’s not fat,” Jackie laughed.
“I know, but he’s technically the fat friend.”
“Okay, fine, are you going to hook up with the fat friend?”
“I don’t know,” I said, pulling up my dress and looking in the bathroom mirror to see if my rash had spread. It had. “Oh my God, look! There are more bumps. That Mexican Cortaid made it worse!”
“Just give it time, it’ll go away. Seriously, I think you should hook up with that guy, he’s really nice.”
“Lots of people are really nice; it doesn’t mean I should hook up with them.”
“You haven’t had sex in almost a year,” she reminded me.
“Good point. I’ll hook up with him. No sex, but he can finger me. And I have to keep the lights off because of the rash.”
“Done,” Jackie agreed.
When the four of us got back to the hotel, Jackie immediately cracked open the minibar and started pouring drinks. I put my iPod on and started blaring country music. The cute one asked if I had any other music, which I did.
“Nope,” I replied. “If you don’t like country music you can leave.” I said it with a tone that made him think I was being hilarious, but in reality I was being mad because he didn’t like me. Then I put Luke Bryan on shuffle and turned the volume up as loud as I could.
“Is that going to piss off your neighbors?” Fat Friend asked.
“We don’t have neighbors!” I yelled, excited about the fact that the room next to us was vacant.
“If we did they’d have to learn to love Luke Bryan,” Jackie threw in. “It’s not really an option not to when Sarah is around.”
“True that,” I said as I attempted to high-five her but stumbled and ended up slapping her in the face.
We both laughed hysterically and I began to croon “Buzzkill” while Cute Guy and Fat Friend looked on in horror.
I kept drinking while periodically disappearing into the bathroom to check on the progression of my rash. It wasn’t getting better, but it wasn’t getting worse. I tried to let that stasis put my mind at ease.
Since we only had one room, letting Fat Friend finger mewas going to be tricky. I turned up “Country Girl” extra loud and pulled Jackie aside.
“Okay, how is this going to work?” I asked.
“Easy! Cute Guy and I will go in the infinity pool and I’ll close the doors to the patio so Fat Friend can fiddle your vagina.”
“You’re going into the infinity pool with Cute Guy?” I asked, half-jealous.
“Yes, it’s fine. All I’ve been doing is talking about Brandon, and I got him to talk about his ex-girlfriend so now he’s just Sad Friend.”
“Okay, perfect.”
Jackie and Cute/Sad Guy splashed around in the infinity pool while Fat Friend awkwardly tried to dance with me to Luke Bryan’s “Do I.”
“We don’t need to dance,” I told him. I actually kind of wanted to, but he kept stepping on my feet and I had just gotten a pedicure.
He took my dance refusal as an invitation to do other things and went in for a kiss. It was a pretty decent kiss, so it turned into a full-on make-out session, with us tumbling onto the bed and me awkwardly trying to guide his hands around my rash.
“Am I doing something wrong?” he asked after the forty-seventh time I shoved his hand off of my stomach.
“No! Not at all!” I said, trying to reassure him. I was actually kind of enjoying the make-out session; it had been a longtime since
Dan Bigley, Debra McKinney