The Book of Masks (Vol. 4)

Party of Five, Chapter 4

Previously: "Party of Five, Chapter 3" 

DOUG LEANED FORWARD ON THE SOFA with his hands clasped between his knees as he watched Alfie. The girls had pushed him out of the kitchen when he offered to help clean up after dinner, and he was now busying himself by setting up his laptop on the tiny table they had just cleared.

It surprised Doug that Alfie had brought his laptop. Alfie was not an electronics kind of guy. Of course he had a phone and a game player at home, and of course he had a laptop too, for schoolwork. But Doug would have expected Alfie to leave everything but the phone at home. For the out-of-doors—where a wrestler and football player like Alfie usually liked to be—he only needed shorts and muscle shirts and maybe swim trunks. And the in-doors ...

Well, for inside play he'd brought Susie along. Right?

Doug winced inwardly at the crudity of the thought.

But it was the truth, wasn't it?

For as long as he'd known Alfie—and Doug had known him since seventh grade—Alfie was smooth with the girls. He'd been cute when they were in middle school, and then cute and hunky until his junior year in high school, when he graduated to handsome and hunky. And Alfie knew it. He knew he didn't have to try with them, he only had to look them in the eye and listen when the sidled up to him with a smile and a toss of their hair, and he knew that when he was good and ready all he had to do was lean over to put his mouth close to theirs, hesitate, and then close the deal.

That's what he called it, too. "Closing the deal." The girls do all the work, he told Doug when Doug asked him how he did it, and I just close the deal.

Alfie never had a girl far out of reach, not even when he was supposedly going steady and exclusively with Becca, and when she told him she was tired of it and broke up with him, Doug knew there'd be another one along soon enough. Doug even saw it was going to be Susie Parsons before he'd even heard about the change in spring break plans. But now ...

"Hey Doug," Alfie called. "I can't get the internet." He was glowering at the laptop screen. Doug, who was used to being the "tech troubleshooter" in the group, got up to go see what the problem was.

"Dude, why'd you bring your laptop?" he asked as he bent over the back of Alfie's chair to look at the screen.

"Why'd you bring yours?" Alfie retorted.

"In case I wanted to game."

"Yeah, well ..." Alfie indicated his laptop.

"What game are you wanting to play?"

"I just wanna get online!"

"You've got your phone."

"Doug!" Alfie turned his head to glare at his friend. It put them almost nose to nose. Doug pulled back.

He was too secure in his heterosexuality—he carried books through the school hallway in his hand, not a backpack, so he could hide the boners he still got unbidden—to really mind all the good-natured gibes he sometimes got about being "queer for Alfie." But putting his face so close to his friend's made him just a little too self-conscious about how conscious he was of Alfie's good looks.

"Well—" Doug pushed his heavy-framed glasses up his nose and went back to looking at the screen. He reached over Alfie's shoulder to touch the trackpad and open up details on the wifi connection. "Do you know which network you're trying to connect to?"

"No."

"Well, you need a password for all of them anyway, it looks like. Do you know any of the passwords?"

"How the fuck—?"

"I know the passwords!" a voice sang out behind them. Doug and Alfie both turned to see Scarlett grinning at them from the kitchen doorway.

Doug's heart hammered and his cock stirred as she slunk her way over to join them.

"Here." She leaned over Alfie, bracketing his neck between her arms and resting her elbows on his shoulders as she touched the track pad and tapped at the keys. "Brad told me which network it was and what the password is. Mmm!" She sniffed at Alfie's mane of bright, golden hair. "I love your shampoo! What do you use?"

Doug found himself rooted to the floor, unable to move or lean away even as Scarlett brushed up against him. She was no athlete, she was just naturally curvaceous, with large thighs, bowl-like hips, an inwardly tapering stomach, and two great melons that drooped in front. Her skin was soft, silken, and creamy to the eye, and the scent of her own body wash rose off her. Her dark hair tumbled down around her shoulders in thick cascades. She had large eyes, a wide mouth, a bold nose, and a throaty voice that "fried" when she talked dirty, which was often.

Doug, who played the third wheel with Brad and Alfie when their other wrestling friends dropped away, had had lots of opportunities to watch Scarlett in action. She liked to drape her arms over a guy's shoulders and around his neck, and to hang off him. (She herself wasn't a small girl, she had real physical weight, so this trick limited her choice of boyfriend to those built like brick walls.) She would then talk to him in that low throaty "fry" while letting her eyes play over his nose and cheeks and jaw and chin, with the occasional dart up to his eyes to confirm that he was paying attention to her, and when she got tired of being flirty she would open her mouth and cover his. She liked long, slow, wet, deep kisses with lots of smacking noises, and she would groan and whimper to voice her happiness. And when she was tired of kissing, she would drop her arms to embrace him about the waist, turn her head to rest it against the top of his chest, and close her eyes and smile and pretend to fall asleep against him while using him as a hitching post.

Sometimes, when she did this, whether in Brad's house or Alfie's, it would drive Doug into the bathroom to whack off over the toilet. He would always pretend afterward that he'd had to take a shit, and would spray deodorizing scent all over the bathroom.

He wouldn't be able to do that here. But there were woods nearby, he ruefully reflected as he watched Scarlett bury her mouth inside Alfie's hair while she slowly pecked at the computer keyboard.

Scarlett remained where she stood, arms now clasping Alfie loosely around the neck, and watching with an open-mouthed smile of delight as he tapped at the computer. Garbled sounds began to play, and Scarlett's eyes brightened. Doug went back to sit on the couch. He drew a knee up, propped his phone there, and pretended to be absorbed in Twitter.

He remained there even after Susie and Tanya, when finished washing up, came out to watch over the other two's shoulders, and he said nothing when Tanya, after fetching her own phone from a bedroom, plopped onto the other end of the sofa from him. He watched as Susie drifted off down the hallway and didn't come back, and he watched as Alfie said something about wanting to step out onto the porch, and went out through a sliding glass door with Scarlett trailing behind.

He also watched out of the corner of his eye as Tanya, pretending to read her own cell phone, watched all this as well.

Tanya was a cutie, and Doug felt himself quicken as he thought of her being near him. She wasn't as voluptuous as her sister: her hips were slimmer and her breasts smaller, so her curves weren't as pronounced. But she was slim and limber, and she wore slanty, "sexy librarian" glasses—so much more attractive than the square, thick-framed glasses that he wore. (But what would a "sexy" pair of glasses on a guy look like? He often wondered.) She also wore her tawny brown hair back in a sporty pony tail.

Would I have a chance with her? he wondered now. Scarlett is going with Brad, Susie is supposed to be with Alfie (even if they are now fighting) ... That only left him and Tanya unattached to anyone. True, she was a junior, but that was an advantage he had over her, being a senior himself. He knew that he wasn't strong and bluff and handsome like Alfie or Brad or their other friends on the football and wrestling teams. But he did hang out with them, he was ... for some reason that he himself didn't quite understand ... accepted by them. None of them were likely to pay any attention to Tanya during the last few months of the school year. But he could, starting this week. And she might be glad of it, he thought, because hanging out with the popular senior crowd through him would have to be less awkward than using her own sister as a hook.

Doug frowned to himself. Did he just speculate that Tanya might want to ... use him ... as a way to get herself in with a better crowd?

Abashed, and a little sick with a touch of self-loathing, he didn't say anything when Tanya got up and disappeared down the hall to the bedrooms.

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Only after writing and posting Chapter 4 do you yield to the urge to check the stats on the other three chapters. You're a little gratified to see that yesterday's chapter had a slightly better premiere—almost 20 views!—than the first two, and that the other two have each racked up another fifteen to twenty views. Still no comments, though.

You have the urge to write, but you channel that energy into outlining. Your plan is to introduce each of the five main characters in a chapter of their own before starting the actual story—the story as it appears in the actual webcomic—but once that part gets rolling, the point of view could get tricky. So you spend an hour reading and rereading the original webcomic and chopping it up into segments that will correspond with chapters, and assigning a viewpoint character to each.

It's not the kind of exercise you (or Sean) have ever done before, and it gives you a warm glow of satisfaction.

Next: "Party of Five, Chapter 5" 

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