“Do it, do it,” Bodie slurs.
It’s the boys. They’re back from wherever they’ve been.
They line up in a row and start singing words that I can’t understand. “Ah, Macarena.” They all jump to the left and start doing the Macarena dance.
“They all want me. They can’t have me,” they sing.
Oh god . . .
Christopher and Basil have no shirts on. Bodie is missing his shorts and wearing underpants with his shirt open, and Christopher has a traffic cone on his head.
“What the hell?” I moan. Oh no . . . my head. It’s broken.
“Ah, Macarena.” They jump to the right and keep doing the dance.
“We’re fucking good at this,” Christopher says as they sing. “We should be strippers.”
“I know, right?” Bodie agrees.
They keep dancing to their off-tune singing, and I smile into my pillow as I keep dozing.
“Ah, Macarena,” they call as they jump to the left.
“Shut up!” I throw a pillow at them. I look up to the top bunk, and Bernadette is out cold. How is she sleeping through this?
“Ah . . . my number one favorite grump waited up for me,” Christopher slurs. He holds one finger up and raises his eyebrow. “Number one.” He drops to his hands and knees and crawls toward me until he’s millimeters away from my face. “See what I did there?”
I stare at him deadpan.
“One.” He widens his eyes as if making a great joke. “Get it?”
“I get it,” I snap. “And you’re going to get it if you don’t go to sleep immediately.”
He chuckles and then flops down, his face resting on my mattress, his body on the floor beside my bed. His eyes close in exhaustion. His traffic cone digs into my pillow, and I take it off him and hurl it at the other two fools who are still doing the Macarena. “Where are your pants?” I bark at Bodie.
“They got caught on the fence.”
“The fence?”
“The kebab man chased me, and I had to jump over the fence.”
I sit up onto my elbows. “Why did the kebab man chase you?”
“He stole his sauce bottle.” Basil hiccups. “Fucking funniest night in history.”
Christopher stirs, and I push his head back down hard. “Go back to sleep, you.”
“Go to sleep,” I tell the two Macarenas.
With more singing and lots of grumbles, they finally undress and get into their beds, and ten minutes later the room falls silent as they drift off.
The morning light is just creeping through now, and in the filtered light I can really look at him without anyone knowing.
A secret-spy kind of mission . . .
I stare at the face beside me, his body on the floor, his face on my pillow. He has dark wavy hair and stubble that’s nearly a beard. Big red lips and perfect olive skin. My eyes roam down over his shoulders and muscular back. His long dark lashes fan across his face. His forearm is strong with thick veins that course up onto the backs of his hands. They have a dusting of dark hair in all the right places. Just his close proximity swirls something in my stomach.
He’s a beautiful specimen of man; there’s no denying it. Large, virile, and playful.
I get what they see in him.
Even after seven hundred drinks, a traffic cone, and kebab-sauce thieving, he still smells good. How, I don’t know.