Little Red and the Big Bad Wolf

Our game of Truth had quickly gone downhill, the questions no longer having any bite or vengeance behind them, as we continued to drink the beer after Puck had run out to his car to get another six-pack.

“Ellie,” Puck slurred with a huge grin on his face, “will you sing me a song?”

“Okay,” I agreed, twisting up my face as I tried to remember the lyrics to a song, any song. “I love you, you love me. Let’s get together and kill Barney…” My voice trailed off before I burst into hysterical laughter. “I don’t know the rest of the words!”

“That’s not even the real song, stupid,” Puck informed me, joining in on the hilarity.

“Oh…” And more hysterics. “Oh my God…oh, well! It was still a song, wasn’t it?”

“Sure it was. Your turn.”

I tried to go through every question that I could possibly ask, but I kept coming back to the thought of angels with wings. It didn’t make a whole lot of sense until I connected it to a book that I had read a long time ago. “Umm…what would you do right now, if you could do anything?”

In my totally wasted state, I expected him to say that he would want to go Jerusalem or cuss out his dad or something. But instead, he leaned forward and whispered, “I’d kiss you.”

Taken by surprise, I started laughing, again, too hard. “No way. There are way better and more interesting things to…” My brain stopped working.

“What about you?” he asked, hiccupping. Again, that was the most humorous thing I had ever seen for the second.

“I’d…” I let myself trail off, coming up completely blank. “Um…”

“Would you kiss me back if I kissed you?”

“Hey! It’s not your turn!” It wasn’t his turn, right?

“It’s a re-write, since you can’t answer the original one.”

For a second, I tried to remember if that was included in the rules of Truth, but I wasn’t remembering any of the rules, really. So, grumbling and rolling my eyes, I leaned back on my hands in a kind-of lying down position. “I don’t know.”

“Wanna find out?” He wiggled his eyebrows at me suggestively.

“Not really.” But my heart picked up pace and my stomach got butterflies. In my head, I was trying to remember that I wasn’t back with Puck, that I didn’t like him in a boyfriend way anymore, that the alcohol was just creating the feelings that weren’t really there. But I knew it wasn’t.

“What time is it?” I wondered, looking behind me and chuckling loudly when my back cracked about ten times. It was only eleven thirty, still a good couple of hours until Aileen got home and found me drunk… She was going to flip.

“Shit,” I got up and started trying to gather the cans so that I could get rid of them, but a sudden wave of dizziness came over me.

“What’s wrong?” Puck questioned, lying down on his back and staring up at me.

“Aileen’s going to be home in a couple of hours. If she finds out that you came over and I drank a ridiculous amount of beer with you, then she’s going to hang me from a tree in the backyard.”

“I don’t take her as the murdering type,” he mused.

“She could be. If she found out that I was drinking. And if she found out that…”

“What?”

“That I could have done something stupid with you, that’s what. She doesn’t know you very well. Other than you were charming, and yet you checked her out. Which creeped her out, by the way.”

“That was just to weird you out, really.”

I stared at him. “What?”

“I only did that to get you annoyed. I wasn’t really checking her out as a possible hit-on-subject.”

A grin filled my face. “You’re a jerk.”

After throwing out the bunch of cans, I settled down right back next to Puck. “Why would you want to annoy me? Don’t you know that you’re on thin ice?” It was occurring to me that I was starting to sober up a little, and my head was starting to pound ridiculously.

“Sure. But I love the look you get on your face. Frustration, jealousy, and also a little, ‘oh, well, I guess that’s Puck for you.’”

“You gave your own name to a look I make?”

“Yeah.”

Why was that sexy to me? After all the shit that he put me through, that was all it took to make me want to kiss him? Naming a face that I made?

But that was all it took. With the buzz still making its way through my body, I closed the distance between Puck and me, pressing my lips against his.

That was all it was going to be. A peck. But he wrapped his hands around my waist, pulling me closer to him and deepening the kiss.

Even as the thoughts were going through my head to stop this before it was too late, the orders weren’t reaching my limbs. It was like my body had a mind of its own, and it had only one thing that it wanted at that point in time.

Finally, my body started to listen when Puck started sliding his hands up my shirt, his hands really warm against my bare stomach.

“Stop,” I told him, pushing him off me. “Shit, what am I doing?”

“Getting back with me,” he smiled, but he backed off. “Wow, that was amazing.”

“Shut up. I can’t do this.” I got to my feet, ignoring the crippling dizziness and nausea. “Oh my God, I hate alcohol. I feel disgusting.”

“That’s why,” he leaned over to get a new can, “you should drink some more.”

“Hell, no. I’m going to do something stupid. I’ve already done something stupid. I’m not supposed to like you anymore.”

“But you do. So why fight it?”

“Because I can’t trust you!” I screamed at him, closing my eyes tightly to try to subside the throbbing in my head. Why was a hangover so painful?

“You can trust me,” he soothed, getting to his feet and placing his hands gingerly on my waist. “I won’t cheat on you again. You know I won’t. It was a mistake.”

“It was a mistake. One that you could make again.”

“I never will. I promise.” Instead of pushing the subject any further, he turned around, picked up the rest of his beer, and left.

That was it.