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“Get your cravat off.” Ed’s voice is breathy, like it’s clawed its way out of her throat. She grabs at the lace. Tugs. Stede chokes a little. She doesn’t seem to notice. His arm flails a bit and knocks over a cup of toothbrushes on the sink counter.
If Stede’s going to be honest, he’s really quite out of his element here. With Ed he’s just sort of in a constant state of being out of his element but it’s so apparent here, at a real college party, the kind he’d never thought he’d go to, the kind in American movies with keg stands and boys slipping things in your drinks and all kinds of great things like that.
And he thought it’d be easier because it was a Halloween party, and everyone would be dressed in silly little outfits, but it turns out that all the girls went as sexy animals (as indicated by the ear headbands) or TV show characters, and all the boys went as athletes or McLovin.
“What are you suggesting, you shagadelic little minx?” And — well — forgive him. He’s nervous. He dressed as Austin Powers and that’s his blueprint for the night, his fallback plan: he gets anxious and he starts just quoting the movie, all groovy baby this and shagadelic that. It’s a nervous habit. He isn’t sure what else to do.
Ed went as a fembot. Which was just an excuse to wear lingerie, which Stede still is a little bit blown away by. His girlfriend — girlfriend! They’d talked about it and everything after they’d been on a few dates and given each other blowjobs — just strutting around in lingerie in front of everyone. Lingerie with toilet paper tubes masking-taped onto her bra to represent the guns, but lingerie nonetheless. And just a few minutes ago she insisted they go to the bathroom together (To hook up!) (At a college party!!) (At a frat house!!!).
He wants, of course, to say something, anything, different. Something, anything, sexier. What he really feels: God, you slut. But nothing wants to come out except for oh, behave! Stede breathes shallowly into her mouth.
“Are you having a panic attack?” Ed asks. “Do we, like… have to stop, or…?” She sounds turned-off.
“No,” Stede lies.
“Can you —” And her voice morphs, it’s really almost creepy, the way she careens from annoyed to concerned to horny in the blink of an eye and the way her voice conveys that, and Stede doesn’t know what he’s done wrong — “can you buy me a pretty little pearl necklace, Agent Bonnet?”
“If MI6’ll foot the bill.” Does Austin Powers work for MI6 or some fictional agency? It doesn’t matter. He isn’t even sure if Ed has seen Austin Powers: he quoted his favorite scene when they’d first slipped into the upstairs bathroom together (“who does Number Two work for?”) and she laughed along in a way that was just a little too agreeable, in a sort of “I-don’t-want-to-get-into-this” way where she didn’t really know what he was talking about.
He likes that despite himself. When she gets like that. He’s dating a hot girl, and hot girls don’t quote Austin Powers. Hot girls (he’s realized the nuances of this from dating Ed) wear lingerie at frat parties and date douchebags even though they know they’re douchebags.
Not Stede, though. It’s so refereshing, Ed has told him, that he’s not a total douchebag.
Ed laughs. He loves her laugh. It makes him feel bad to admit but he likes the fake laugh she does better than the real one. When she’s trying to get people to like her.
“Totally, babe,” she says. “Oh my God. You’re, like, so funny.” Her cock doesn’t get particularly hard but she wants it; it’s in her voice, the coy tilt of her head. She deploys the fake laugh again, the please-like-me laugh, so desperate, so — Stede hates admitting this — so erotically pathetic, so self-debasing. She turns so that she’s bent over the sink, her face smushing against the mirror.
“D’you like what you see?” she asks. She lifts up the sheer slip she’s wearing over the soft curve of her ass.
“Oh, behave!” Stede’s hands are very sweaty right now. He wipes them on his coat, which is velvet and a very unpleasant texture. Everyone else is in t-shirts. Bras and panties, some of them; others, boxers. Throw him a frickin' bone here.
“You’re still doing the voice,” Ed says.
“Sorry,” Stede says. “I’m nervous.”
Ed leans back against him. Grinds onto his dick. “Don’t be,” she says.
“We don’t have protection.”
She leans forward again, this time tugging her lacy underwear to the side. She looks back at him, her eyes made up heavily with glitter and eyeliner and weighed down with fake lashes, half-lidded, so he can barely see the whites. “I want to feel you.”
Stede unbuttons his trousers so he can figure out how to do this. He’s hard, naturally, and he wants to, he just isn’t sure how. He’s no Austin, of course, but even against the guys in his classes and at this party, he’s pretty mojo-deficient. But when he takes his cock in his hand, slicking it up with his own spit, and runs it down the cleft of Ed’s ass, she seems to like it well enough. His other hand presses flat against her back, creeps up her bony spine.
So nice. You’re so nice, Stede. Not a douchebag. Not like her ex, a guy named Jack who cut his shaggy hair into a mullet for a Joe Dirt costume, whose eyes Stede has felt boring into the back of his head all night. Stede’s hand twitches at Ed’s nape. It wants to close around her neck.
When she moans, it’s exaggerated. Stede has been with her enough times to tell when she means it: she gets all quiet and breathy. When she’s loud, it isn’t real. But it’s like the laugh. He likes it better. When she makes herself look stupid, when she needs him, of all people, to need her.
“Groovy, baby,” he whispers.
“Don’t do that stupid voice,” she says. But he’s going to do whatever he wants.