“What do you mean?” I asked, talking loudly over the music. “It’s a party.” Sam was no stranger to strippers. We’d had nights like this a thousand and one times back in New York.
“Mac, I’m getting married. In five days!”
“So? You’re not married now.” I slapped him on the back, trying to jump-start some life into him. “Come on, your Bachelor party isn’t even on yet. Were you not going to have strippers there?” I asked sarcastically.
“That’s different,” he insisted. “One ceremonial stripper at my Bachelor party — that Beck knows about — is very different from— from this!” He waved his hand at the scene.
“Are you serious?” I asked. “So, what? Beck needs to know everything you do now? Is that just how it’s going to be? Do you want that?”
His face hardened. He didn’t look drunk at all anymore. “I’m getting married,” he repeated slowly with the exaggerated patience of someone talking to a mental patient.
“That doesn’t mean you have to get boring.”
Sam squeezed his eyes shut. “Dude, what is your problem?”
“I don’t have a problem!” I insisted. “I thought it’d be nice to have a party. Sue me. I didn’t know. Christ.”
He shook his head and rubbed his eyes with his hand. “We need to get these girls out of here before the girls, our girls, are back in the hall.” He turned. “All right!” he shouted over the music. “Shut it down. You ladies have to get out of here.”
“Awwww,” the girls chorused, including the one who was still spinning fully nude around the pole, crotch to the wind, like she was stuck on a mechanical track.
“Do they have to?” Henry asked around the two girls managing to share his lap.
“The girls will be down on the beach for a while,” added Keegan.
“I don’t care! The girls can never find out—”
Just as the words were leaving his mouth, two things happened simultaneously. The first was that the red-haired stripper, listening to Sam, flipped the music off. The second was that, as the last EDM note faded to silence, the door opened. And, in the doorway, were the girls.
There was a beat of stunned silence from everyone on both sides. Even the girl on the pole kept going around, frozen, eyes wide and looking out between her legs with every rotation.
Then Sam lunged forward saying, “Beck, it’s not what it looks like.”
“Ditto,” said Keegan to Jules, peering around the large breasts of the stripper straddling him.
And after that it was just general chaos. Beck turned, pushing through her friends, and ran, Sam chasing after her.
The strippers started grabbing their things and trying to flee as Jules pushed her way in and started hitting Keegan with her purse and yelling at him.
Sarah waded through the people supporting a fabulously drunk Kylie, not seeming to give any of it a second glance as she led her to the bathroom.
In fact, the only angry one, other than the girlfriends, seemed to be Alice.
She stormed over to me. “What the hell, Mac?” she said. “I thought you weren’t going to do anything!”
I was already feeling pretty lousy about how it all went down (why do these things always go better in my head?) and wasn’t in the mood to be lectured by a chick.
“I just threw a party. It’s not my fault you barged in. And why the fuck is Kylie puking in my bathroom?”
An odd look crossed her face. “Are you telling me…” She shook her head. “No, tell me you’re not so stupid that this was unintentional?”
“What was?” I asked.
“What’s your room number?”
“Um…”
“I’ll give you a hint,” she said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “It’s the one not on the door to this room.”
Oh. She laughed bitterly at the look on my face. “This is our room. You took my keycard off the table and left your own. So yeah, nice going. If this is what ‘not getting involved’ looks like, then I’d hate to see you actively trying to break them up.”
I didn’t have a response, for once. She left out to the hallway, presumably to find Beck.
I sank onto the couch with Mason and Henry. The strippers were gone, the room in shambles. Mason had a hand over his eyes. Henry’s expression could only be described as wonder — at the situation and probably at my own stupidity. He’d picked up the Johnnie Walker and was drinking it straight from the bottle.
“Well,” I said. “That wasn’t how this was supposed to go.”
Henry wordlessly passed me the scotch and the open bag of gummy bears.
8
Alice
The rest of the evening was spent sweeping glitter off every surface before I could sit down and listening to Jules and Keegan fight in Jules’ bedroom. I wasn’t sure why they didn’t just take it to Keegan’s end of the hall, where they’d have an entire suite to duke it out across.
They’d also, more importantly, get a bit of privacy, though with every shouted insult, it was clear they didn’t really care if we heard them or not. Our proximity in the living room didn’t stop Jules from accusing Keegan of giving her crabs (something he adamantly denied) or of him asking how many of his teammates she’d fucked before she got to him.
A slightly-more-sober Kylie, Sarah, and I sat side-by-side on the couch, trying not to listen and also trying not to make eye contact with each other. It became much more difficult once the fighting abruptly ceased and was replaced with the undeniable sounds of frantic foreplay. That was when the three of us fled the living room just as the moaning began and hid in Kylie’s room on the opposite end of the suite.
Beck never came back to the room. I’d tried to find her after I yelled at Mac, but she was nowhere to be found. I texted her asking if everything was all right and eventually she replied that they’d figured it out, but they were going to bed, together in Sam’s penthouse. At least one disaster was avoided. The wedding was still on, and there hopefully wouldn’t be any long-term fallout from Mac’s idiotic decision to bring a host of strippers into our living room.
The sight would stay with me until my dying day, I was sure of it. Sam frozen, standing in front of the couch with glitter swiped across his face and clothes. Six big-breasted strippers crawling over every inch of Mason, Keegan, and Henry. One going round and round the pole, completely naked. The sight of all of them, staring in horror at the door just as the music cut out and seeing that we’d arrived, late for the party but there all the same.
The ensuing chaos had been something to behold as bare titties bounced in fear, their owners fleeing before any angry girl decided to put the beatdown on them. Jules going in on Keegan, the slight model backing up the six foot six pro athlete with a palpable rage. Kylie one step from throwing up all over herself and Henry laughing hysterically.
And Mac! The culprit. I’d known it immediately. I was justified, completely justified. I should have been more suspicious when he’d dragged all the guys back up to the room early. But somehow I’d slipped up. I’d wrongly assumed that even an idiot like Mac Walsh spaced each potentially wedding-destroying mistake out to one a day. First Mariana (who I still hadn’t seen nor was looking forward to seeing) and now a collection of glitter-spattered professional ‘dancers’.