Olivia’s Party – Chapter 9—An Unexpected Party
4am. Not an hour most people see on a daily basis. However, sometimes the first wavering glimmer of the pre-dawn sun, graceful curves of grey drifting across a black room as the net curtains blow in the wind, can be a more beautiful sight than the ostentatious spectacle of dawn. Especially when the faint traces of shifting light illuminate a beautiful face enjoying a well earned rest.
I opened my eyes in an unfamiliar bed, and cast my eyes from side to side. There were two beautiful faces on the pillows today. Two women beside me, something I’d seen far more often in fantasy and on the TV than in the real world. I couldn’t believe they both wanted to be with me, as much as they wanted to be with each other. Olivia looked so sweet and innocent. Yesterday she’d only just been old enough to legally do all the stuff she’d been dabbling with for years. She still looked so sweet, nothing to give any sign of the dirty mind she harboured. Alex was an extreme punk, the kind who’s pushed all the limits and transgressed every boundary. But I think in reality, Olivia had been the only girl she’d been with, and now I was the only guy. Both of them were the opposite of their public persona once I’d got to know them, but in ways you’d never expect, and in both of them I found that kind of endearing.
It took more than a little acrobatic skill to get out of the bed without waking either of the two girls. They were even more beautiful when they were sleeping, and I finally got a chance to look over Alexandria’s tattoo. She just had one, but it was a lot of ink; a celtic dragon stretching from her shoulders down one arm to the wrist. There were letters along the body of the creature, but the words weren’t in any language I recognised. Another mystery about the muscular punk girl.
I left them, smiling like angels, and padded barefoot down the stairs towards the bathroom. I grabbed a robe from the hooks by the door, but couldn’t distinguish the colours in the darkness. It wasn’t until I turned the corner from the attic stairs onto the landing that I saw I was draped in an uncharacteristically feminine lilac with embroidered roses. It didn’t seem the kind of thing Olivia would choose, but it could have been a gift. Probably from her grandmother, Maud, who had a depressing tendency to buy anything hand-made regardless of taste or style.
“It suits you,” I jumped at the voice, simply because I hadn’t realised anyone else was awake at this hour. Britney and Marten were probably as exhausted as me and my girls; Hannelore and her school friends would still be in her room even if they were awake; and Kiva, Kevin, and Delancey were expected to be crashing in the lounge after their late-night porn marathon. I didn’t recognise the voice, which was kind of odd. But my real concern was that whoever she was, she probably knew that I’d not been pacing the hallway, keeping teenage boys out of the girls’ rooms as I’d promised. A guy my age, brought in by their father to be the party’s token responsible adult, could get in serious trouble for fucking the birthday girl and one of her best friends on the same night.
“The dressing gown, I mean,” she clearly took my silence for confusion, which I guess it was in a way. “Well, it doesn’t suit you that much, but I figured it’s nicer than anything else I can see to comment on.” I looked down. The thin silk robe didn’t reach down to my knees, so there was probably quite a lot of pale leg on display, with a little more hair than average. There was also a smear of dried blood evident on my leg, though in my half-awake daze it wasn’t quite clear how it had got there. By the time I looked up again, my eyes had acclimated to the light enough that I could see who I was talking to.
“Hey, Lauren, isn’t it?” I gave an inner sigh of relief. She had been one of the first to go to bed, and probably wasn’t aware of all the arrangements that had been made later about who was supposed to be sleeping where. Seeing me stumbling down the stairs wouldn’t be grounds for any kind of suspicion. “I was just going to the bathroom. You too? Or just can’t sleep?”
“No, no, and not quite,” she answered with a whimsical grin, her head tilting to one side. She checked that the door to Hannelore’s room was properly closed behind her, then stepped closer as if to whisper in my ear: “I’m not called Lauren. I can understand the mistake though, everybody except Cassie gets my name wrong. And you’re Mr Norton’s friend, Doctor Darkside, right?”
I froze at the mention of that name. Though I technically held a doctorate, I’d never used it as a form of address. Everybody here should know me as Jim, or Mr Bicksteen. The only places anyone seriously called me Doctor were all on the Internet. Doctor Darkside was my name, but only on a couple of very specific sites and mailing lists. Specific places that someone as young and naïve as Lauren had no place even knowing about. I didn’t know how I’d ever explain my presence on those sites to someone who wasn’t active there; when I’d first arranged to meet another member of one site in the real world, I’d simply told my college roommate that I’d met Justine “on the Internet”. These days that was less of a novelty, so I’d have to answer more questions, probably using words like “bondage”, “fetishistic,” and “mind control.”
“Oh, don’t be so uptight, Doctor,” she rolled her ‘r’s a lot more than was strictly necessary, adding a syllable in length to most words. I was sure I hadn’t heard that distinctive accent in the lounge earlier, but I couldn’t imagine how someone who looked so much like little Lauren Birch would get in without anyone else spotting the oddity. She seemed to take my silence as a sign of confusion, or maybe of guilt, and continued: “You’re thinking of me as a kid again, aren’t you? I’m older than Olivia was when you started chatting with her. How is she now? Have you been helping her to explore her newly earned adulthood?”
“I haven’t… I mean, this isn’t…” I actually gasped in surprise and took an involuntary step back, like some character in a third rate TV movie who can’t express emotion without dramatic physical responses. I was that surprised; but not as shocked as I was when she nimbly stepped forward in the pause to steal a kiss. I gaped, lost for words yet again, and more than a little disgusted with myself for not reacting quickly enough to stop her.
“It was good to meet you at last, Doctor, and I’ve been wanting to do that practically my whole life. They don’t let me do things I really want often enough. No, don’t worry, I won’t disturb you again, and I won’t bother anyone else. Take care of whatever you need to, and I’m sure I’ll see you around.”
I’m such a coward. I didn’t know what else to say, so I just darted into the bathroom, making sure the door was bolted before stopping to drain my protesting bladder. I thought, and tried to come up with some explanation where the kid might have heard that name. Olivia couldn’t have mentioned it; even to her life partner Alex, she’d only referred to me as “Master” in order to protect our dangerous secret. Could Lauren – or whatever she preferred to be called – have found the site on her own? It was possible, but the odds were almost beyond belief. The chat groups where I used that name only had about two hundred members worldwide, and most of those I’d talked to intensively had shared their real-world age and gender. The dating site boasted 35,000 profiles, but I suspected less than one in a hundred was actually a real person, so the numbers were probably the same on there. Maybe she could have lied, as Olivia had when she originally recognised my pictures. But one underage girl who I turn out to know was an incredible stroke of luck, whether you thought it was good or bad. Two would be almost impossibly unlikely. Could that coincidence really happen, with girls close enough to be present at the same party?
In any case, Lauren was gone by the time I wandered quickly back to Olivia’s bed. I wondered if she’d been sleepwalking. Maybe she wouldn’t even remember speaking to me in the morning. But that was wishful thinking; that would explain her irrational and out-of-character behaviour, but not where she’d heard that name. I could have spent the night lying awake in worry, but it was hard to keep a negative thought with these two beauties beside me. I brushed a strand of Olivia’s hair aside from her face, and quickly found myself more relaxed, and proud, just watching her. I loved her – I loved them – and until it threatened to stop their smiles, it couldn’t be a problem.