5. Molly
Dinner lasted for hours, and there was so much socializing that I should have been exhausted by the time I headed to the bedroom. But I still wanted to have quality time with Olivia and Jenna.
The weekend would fly by quickly, and I didn’t want to miss out on the chance to reconnect with my best friends. We settled on the plush rug on the floor in front of my bed, sipping wine coolers and sitting with our legs crossed as we played Truth or Dare. It was a little childish, sure, but we weren’t ready to go to sleep yet.
“Truth,” Olivia said. We’d been playing for about twenty minutes, trying to keep our laughter subdued because the rest of the house was quiet, everyone else asleep. Olivia and I had chosen truth for the first two rounds, a little too scared to be dared to do something embarrassing.
Jenna was the brave one and had so far been dared to send a steamy text to her ex and drink hot sauce for five seconds, which I snuck downstairs to get. She was a good sport about it, but now, her grin was predatory as she focused on Olivia.
“Okay, if you want to stick with truth, we’re going to get real. Tell us what happened with Trevor and Jay on prom night.”
Olivia bit her bottom lip, hesitating. We’d wondered about this for two years. Senior year of high school, Olivia went to prom with Trevor, her handsome date. But there was another guy in our class, Jay, who went to the prom alone. Jay was good friends with Trevor and hung around them the whole night. When the three of them skipped the after-party, Jenna and I were surprised and curious about what they all did that night. Olivia blushed every time we asked, but she never told us anything. We didn’t have many secrets from each other, so Jenna and I were dying to know what she was hiding.
“God,” she groaned, tossing her head back and looking up at the ceiling as if silently praying for some kind of way to get out of answering. But we took the rules of the game seriously. “I should’ve known you’d ask about that.”
“Answer, bitch,” Jenna commanded with a grin.
Jenna was twenty-one, a year older than Olivia and me, so she could buy alcohol and had brought along some wine coolers. I finished my first one while I waited to finally hear this story. Olivia needed a moment to gather her courage, and when she spoke, she didn’t meet our eyes.
“I was planning to go to the after-party with Trevor,” Olivia said. “But he insisted we give Jay a ride home. He was in the back seat, and I was a little annoyed that it felt like he was crashing our date. But then, we got to his house…”
“What happened?” Jenna asked eagerly.
Olivia hesitated, which had to mean she was embarrassed. She knew she didn’t have to worry about spilling her secret with us. No matter what she told us, it would never leave this room. We were all loyal to each other.
“Before he got out of the car, Jay leaned forward between the front seats of the car and said he wanted to thank me for letting him hang out with us at prom. He kissed me.”
My eyes widened. “Right in front of Trevor? Was he pissed?”
“No, because he kissed me, too. Then, both of their hands were on me, and the next thing I knew, I was being led into Jay’s house. I guess his parents were out of town because I was told I didn’t have to worry about being quiet.”
Jenna’s smile was wicked. “Why? Were you making a lot of noise? Moaning and screaming?”
Olivia’s blush turned her pale cheeks a deep red color.
“Oh, come on,” I said, nudging her arm playfully. “You can’t tell us you had a threesome and then act all shy about it.”
“Yeah, if I fucked two guys at once, I’d brag about that every day for like a year,” Jenna said, making us both laugh.
“I didn’t fuck them,” Olivia said. “They just both…pleasured me. You know, with their mouths and hands.”
“Lucky bitch,” Jenna said, popping open a second wine cooler for me and handing it over. “Your turn, Molly. Truth or dare?”
“Uh…truth.”
Jenna scoffed. “You two are driving me nuts.”
“I’ve got one,” Olivia said. “Tell us about the two guys you’ve slept with in college. Which one was better?”
I felt a shiver run down my spine at the mention of the murdered men, but I tried to hide my reaction. As tragic as it was that they were killed, it would bring down the mood if I refused to compare them just because of what happened to them. I slept with them both months before they died, anyway.
“I don’t know,” I said, thinking about those encounters. I’d spent one night with each guy, each time in their rooms at the frat house during a wild party. “Neither one was great, honestly.”
“Wait a minute,” Jenna said, pinning me with a serious look. “Are you saying that they didn’t get you off?”
Now, I was embarrassed. “Well…the first guy, Mark, was pretty drunk. He fumbled around a lot and didn’t last long. The second one, Brian, was a little better. I mean, he didn’t struggle to get it in like Mark did, but he… Well, he was small.”
“So, neither of them got the job done?”
“I think I might have with Mark right at the end?—”
“No, girl,” Jenna interrupted. “If you think you might have come, you didn’t.”
I hated that she was looking at me like my sex life was a tragedy, even though I kind of thought so, too. I needed to pick better guys, I guess. At least I could get myself across the finish line pretty successfully.
We went through another round of Truth or Dare, and when it came back to me, I didn’t want to risk being asked anything else about my sex life. I didn’t want my best friends to look at me with pity in their eyes. So, I chose dare.
Jenna’s eyes lit up and she let out a little squeal of excitement. “Yes! I was hoping you’d pick dare. I came up with an idea for you during dinner while your creepy-ass brother was staring at you.”
My stomach twisted with unease. I’d caught him staring at me several times throughout the evening, and I kept trying to ignore it, but it was impossible. His gaze burned into the side of my face when I was talking with anyone, and when I looked over at him, he didn’t bother to look away or pretend he wasn’t staring at me. It was unnerving as hell, and I didn’t know why he was being such a creep. Was he trying to get back at me for how I treated him? I’d always teased Atticus, giving him a hard time because he was so strange. There was just something about him that got under my skin and made me lash out. It had always been that way, and he used to just ignore my barbs.
Tonight, his dark eyes burned with such intensity that I just couldn’t understand. Maybe he was done letting me get away with treating him poorly. But what was he going to do about it?
“What’s the dare?” I asked.
“Go to your brother’s room and a take a picture of him.”
I frowned. “A picture?”
That wicked grin was back, and Jenna’s eyes glinted. “Find some way to embarrass him. I bet he sleeps in Spider-Man pajamas or something ridiculous like that. I mean, he’s in his thirties, and he’s still obsessed with that stuff.”
I rolled my eyes at Jenna, but Olivia frowned, looking uncertain.
“I don’t think that’s a good idea. Going into his private space in the middle of the night like that is kind of crossing a line, isn’t it?”
If Jenna was the reckless and wild one in our group, Olivia was the voice of reason. She never did anything without thinking twice about it, which was why her scandalous threesome story was so shocking.
Normally, I gave Olivia’s cautious attitude a little more consideration, but I’d had a little to drink, and I was pissed off that Atticus was here at all. Why couldn’t he just skip the birthday dinner again?
“It’ll be fine,” Jenna said, laughing. “Maybe he’ll have Ninja Turtle sheets or something. That’d make this our best humiliation stunt that we’ve done to him.”
“I’ll do it,” I said.
Olivia looked uneasy, but she didn’t argue further. Leaving my friends behind, I slipped out of my room with my phone in hand. The second floor of the house was dark, and I walked along the hall next to the railing that allowed me to look down at the huge dining room where we’d celebrated my mother’s birthday just a few hours ago. There was a soft light illuminating the table where my two uncles still sat. They had a half-empty bottle of whiskey between them, and they were both sipping from glasses while chatting quietly. If that bottle was full in the beginning, they’d feel like shit tomorrow.
They didn’t notice me as I crept quietly down the hall. There were plenty of bedrooms on this floor, including my parents’ master suite and the two large guest bedrooms that my aunts and uncles would be using this weekend. Finally, at the end of the hallway, I came to Atticus’ room. My heart was racing with equal parts nervousness and excitement as I gripped the doorknob and turned it slowly.
The door opened silently, and I stepped into the dark room, closing the door behind me. My blood rushed to my ears as my nerves got the better of me. It was too dark to see anything, and I fumbled with my phone for a moment before turning on the flashlight feature. Raising it, I cast a glow across the room where the bed lay, only to find it empty. Frowning, I pivoted toward the bathroom attached to the bedroom, my breath catching in my throat when the light hit the nude form of my brother standing there with a towel in his hands.
Stumbling backward, I dropped my phone, the clatter of it hitting the hardwood deafening in the quiet room. I couldn’t stop, couldn’t think. I just had to get the hell out of here. My thoughts were a jumbled mess, and all I knew was the instinct to flee. I ripped open the door and ran, my panic eliminating the urge to be quiet and careful. I fled down the hallway, shocked to my core by what I’d just seen.
I was panting as I got back to my room, rushing inside and slamming the door shut. I leaned against it and stared at my friends, my mind replaying what I saw in that room over and over again.
Oh my God. I just saw my brother naked.
Olivia and Jenna stared at me in concern as I tried to calm myself down. I was so shaken that it took a moment to even register that they were speaking to me.
“Molly? What’s wrong?”
“Are you okay?”
“What happened?”
“Did he hurt you?”
I blinked at them, trying to gather my thoughts. I rarely kept secrets from these two. They were like sisters to me, but that, I couldn’t explain. I hesitated to tell them exactly what had happened.
“He was awake,” I said. And naked. “H-he was awake, and he saw me.”
Jenna winced. “Oh damn. I didn’t think he’d be up so late. It’s after midnight. Was he pissed?”
He was naked!
“I don’t know,” I said. “I panicked and ran off. Oh, but I also dropped my phone.”
That realization made me slap my forehead and groan. What the hell was I going to do now? I needed my phone, but I couldn’t possibly go back in there now. My mind conjured up the image of him naked once again, but my glance had been so fleeting that some of it was a blur. Mostly, I didn’t get a good look at his cock.
Not that I wanted to. Not at all.
“We’ll have to go get it,” Jenna said.
“I can’t.” My reply was too quick and the edge of panic was a little too obvious. She narrowed her gaze at me, suspicion in her eyes. “I mean, I’m embarrassed. It was stupid to go in there in the first place. I just want to wait a while. Until he’s definitely asleep.”
“Okay, I guess. But you need your phone. We’re going back in a little bit.”
I wanted to say no, to argue against going back into that room at all. But if I did that, my friends would want to know why. I wasn’t sure what held me back, but I just didn’t want to tell them he was naked. I didn’t understand it, but I felt an urge to keep it to myself. As if seeing him like that was an experience that belonged to me.
Maybe I was just too rattled to think straight.
So, we waited an hour. I didn’t want to keep playing Truth or Dare, and my friends picked up on that without being told, so we drank the rest of the wine coolers and hung out until we were sure that Atticus must have gone to bed.
Even then, I was reluctant to go back. But I needed to. I couldn’t function without my phone. No social media? No texting? No access to my school email? It wasn’t something I could do without.
Olivia could tell I was nervous, even if I didn’t specify why, so she came with me when I went back to Atticus’ room. This time, the house was truly quiet. My uncles had gone to bed, so there was no one around. Olivia opened the door to Atticus’s bedroom when I stood there staring at it for a moment, unsure of what I would find on the other side.
What was even more disturbing was that I wasn’t sure what I wanted to find.
But there was nothing. The room wasn’t dark this time. A lamp had been left on, illuminating the room in a golden glow. The bathroom door was also left open, so it only took seconds to realize that Atticus wasn’t here.
“He’s gone?” Olivia’s eyes met mine, filled with confusion. “Where could he be in the middle of the night?”
I shrugged. “Who knows what he’s up to? Nerd convention?”
Olivia chuckled and shook her head. “One of these days, he’s going to get sick of your snark.”
I scoffed as my eyes scanned the floor near the door, looking for my phone. “What’s he going to do?”
Olivia didn’t answer. Instead, she got down on her hands and knees to look under the dresser. “No phone. You’re sure you dropped it in here?”
“Of course I am.”
I looked around the room and realized that there wasn’t luggage in here either. No suitcase or duffel bag. Atticus had taken off, and if I had to guess, he had my phone with him.
But where did he go?