The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)

Party of Five, Chapter 8

Previously: "Party of Five, Chapter 7" 

TANYA LAID HER BOOK ASIDE AND LOOKED AT THE CLOCK. It was nearly nine. Though it was early, she was giving serious thought to going to sleep.

Instead, she heaved herself off the bed and went out to the hall. The bathroom door was closed, so she went into the living room. Alfie, stripped down to striped boxers and a wife-beater, was stretched out on a sofa with his cell phone, while Doug was hunched over the laptop with a look of concentration. "Where's Susie?" Tanya asked.

"I 'unno," Alfie muttered without looking up.

"I think she's in the bathroom," Doug said.

"Where's Scarlett?"

No one said anything. A moment later, Alfie looked up and around.

"Is she back in the bedroom?" he asked.

"Not in the one I'm in."

"She's bunking with Susie in the master, isn't she?" Doug said.

Tanya went back to look. Alfie was sitting up on the edge of the sofa when she back in, shaking her head.

"I'll look outside," he said and sprang to his feet.

"Don't you wanna get dressed first?" Tanya asked, but Alfie just gave her a look before going out the front door. There was hardly enough fabric stretched over him to hide anything except his bulging biceps and forearms, his brawny shoulders and pecs, his muscular thighs and calves.

"He's going to get eaten alive by skeeters," Tanya said to Doug, but he was absorbed in the laptop screen and didn't seem to hear her.

"She's not out on the deck," Alfie said a moment later when he came back in. He rummaged inside his workout bag long enough to pull out some flip-flops. "I'll go look on the road."

"You're gonna need a flashli— Oh." Alfie shot her a small, wry smile as he pulled a giant flashlight from his kit and turned back for the door. A few minutes later Tanya heard him calling Scarlett's name. He repeated it a few more times, his voice getting fainter as he wandered farther away.

Tanya was beginning to feel seriously alarmed long before the front door finally swung open again, and a grim-faced Alfie came back in. He had Scarlett by the elbow. She was smiling that open-mouthed grin she always got when she'd been bad and had enjoyed it. "Hey kids," she said, and her eyes flashed merrily. "I'm back!"

"Where've you been?" Tanya demanded. She glanced behind at a sound, to find Susie, in her nightgown, coming out of the back with a frown.

"Around," Scarlett said. "I went for a walk and ran into some guys, went back and almost stayed to party with them. Grump," she jeered at Alfie as he stalked into the kitchen.

"You shouldn't have gone out without telling anyone," Tanya said. "We were worried!"

"Yes, mother." Scarlett rolled her eyes and brushed past. "Come on," she said to Susie as she tucked her arm in hers. "I gotta tell you about them. Especially his one who is just perfect for you!" They went into the master bedroom and closed the door.

Tanya looked at Doug. "Is that your bag on the other bed in the bedroom?"

"Yes?" he said uncertainly.

"So we're sharing that room? Well, I'm going to bed now. Give me twenty minutes to brush my teeth and get ready before you come blundering in with your clothes off." She turned and stormed down the hallway.

Doug shrank up inside himself. Susie was fighting with Alfie, now Alfie and Tanya were pissed at Scarlett, Tanya was yelling at him ... It was just getting worse and worse. None of the girls really liked him, he thought. They only tolerated him because of his friendship with Alfie. So if Alfie got cross with him ...

Alfie came back out of the kitchen with a glass of orange juice, which he drained in one long gulp while glaring at the wall. "Where did you find Scarlett?" Doug timidly asked.

Alfie pointed with the glass, and belched. "Coming back down the road. Bitch. She thinks it's all a party, that anyone she runs into—"

"Who were these guys she ran into?"

"Fuck if I know. All she said was she ran into some older guys, went back to their house with them, had a beer, and would'a stayed the night with 'em, 'so you and Susie could knock bootie in the master bed'," he said, his voice pinched with sarcasm and anger, "but she forgot her phone." He looked into the glass, seemed surprised to see it was empty. "I should lock her in, or she'll try sneaking out."

"Well, she came back."

Alfie glowered at Doug. Then he suddenly seemed to see him. He came over to lean close.

"Listen," he said in a low voice. "I want you to stick close to Scarlett all the time we're up here, okay? Especially if she goes out. Like, if it looks like she's going back up to hang out with those guys or whoever. And if she does say she's going to go see them, go with her."

Doug's eyes widened. "You think they could be, like, dangerous?"

Alfie stared, then snorted.

"No," he said, straightening up. "Scarlett wouldn't mind that. She'd turn a prison gang-rape into a threesome. But we don't wanna give her a chance, okay? Because of Brad," he emphasized. "Right?"

"Right," Doug said in a small voice. He hung his head as Alfie went back into the kitchen.

Was Alfie serious? he wondered. He knew how Scarlett always acted, of course: Flirty and sex obsessed. But so far as Doug knew, Scarlett had always been faithful to Brad. Sure, she sometimes got physical with some of Brad's friends, like she had with Alfie at the computer. She'd rub herself against them, hang her arms off them, sometimes nuzzle them at the throat and say things like, It's too bad I'm going with Brad, 'cos if I wasn't, you and me could go off and ...

Doug made a face, then quickly turned away as Alfie came back into the living room, turning off the kitchen light as he came.

Doug had always assumed that Scarlett's flirtations were just a way of proving how faithful she was to Brad. Like, message: I can do this with your friends because we all know and trust each other. But was Alfie saying that Scarlett was sometimes ... serious? ... when she acted like this? That she was really feeling up Brad's friends because she wanted to ... and sometimes did ... sleep with them?

He fervently hoped that's not what it meant. And not only for the sake of Brad and his friendship with those other guys.

No, it was mostly because Scarlett had never done that kind of thing with him.

Like, if she fake-flirted with everyone except him, that was one thing. It just meant she didn't want to fake-flirt with him. It would be like not wanting to play checkers with him.

But if she seriously-flirted with everyone but him, and sometimes went farther with the guys she did seriously flirt with ... Well, what that meant was just so much more humiliating!

He went into the bathroom to splash some cold water over his face.

Alfie flopped back onto the sofa and picked his phone up again, and scrolled back to the web page he had been looking at before. But he was distracted, and the girl with the melon-sized knockers hardly registered in his consciousness as he brooded over Scarlett.

She was always trouble, but small-scale trouble. Hardly more than an irritation. When she got to be too much, you could turn your back on her and let her bother someone else. But on this trip ...

He had gone down the road, back toward the ferry, to look for her, on the theory that a girl as lazy as Scarlett wouldn't want to start a nighttime walk by hiking uphill, and he had gone around two switchbacks before deciding he had guessed wrong, and hiked back the way he'd come. Then he went on, back the way he himself had gone before. It scared him to have to go that way, not because he was worried about running into that migrant motherfucker, but because he was scared that Scarlett had run into him. He'd felt his hands and the muscles in his arms and chest twitching and working as he thought of Scarlett, dragged off into the bushes. His "joke" about Scarlett turning a gang-rape into an orgy notwithstanding, the thought of Scarlett being taken that way filled Alfie with fear and rage.

So when he'd heard something large and clumsy breaking its way down the hillside, he'd stopped and listened, and only when it was very close did he cautiously call Scarlett's name. No one had answered, and they had paused, and Alfie, his fists bunched, had swung off the road to meet them when they resumed their slide down the hillside. Scarlett had squawked when she came out from behind a tree and nearly fallen into Alfie's arms.

And then she'd laughed! He was scared out of his wits, but she'd only laughed, and told him a story about meeting some guys and having a beer. He'd grabbed her arm and nearly wrenched it off her, but she'd only laughed and complimented him on being so strong. A froth of anger filled his mouth as he hauled back down the road to the cabin. She'd prattled and demanded to know what he was being such a bastard for; he'd barely choked out that he and the others had been worried sick about her. He'd come real close to telling her the gravity of the situation by mentioning the creep he'd spotted earlier, but had held his tongue.

Preoccupied with his slow-draining anger, Alfie only stared through his phone, and jerked a little with surprise when Doug finally told him that he was going to bed. He brushed his teeth and put out the lights and crawled under the quilt he'd spread over the sofa.

Then he got up to make sure the doors were all locked.

He lay on the sofa, staring at the ceiling while clenching his phone. Almost half an hour passed before sleep stole over him. He was still cold with anger about Scarlett's carelessness. But he slowly recognized that a different anger was surfacing as the other was receding, like a rock exposed by the retreating tide.

Scarlett and Susie were sharing a bed. And he couldn't help but obsess at the thought of what they could be doing with each other under the covers.

Next: "Party of Five, Chapter 9" 

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"Table of Contents (Vol. 4)" 
"The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)"