Eight: A Prequel to Sugar Fix

III

Jon watched the joint's paper flare and disintegrate, a supernova in the dimness as he dragged on it, and realized a bit too late that a drag long enough to study the rolling paper was simply too long. He yanked the thing out of his mouth and coughed until tiny bursts of white light formed in the blurry field of his vision. A giggling groupie whose name might have been Tawny, but Jon didn't remember, took the joint from him. Much more helpful than Richie, who had just rolled onto the floor, howling with laughter.

"Fuck-- you-- man--" Jon croaked between fits of hacking, then downed half a can of beer in one go to try to calm things down.

"Dude, if you're gonna bogart it, just hang onto it, don't suck it all down at once," Richie said, as a groupie whose name might have been Justine, but whose tits seemed to constitute her entire identity anyway, slid off the couch and climbed astride Richie on the floor. "Oh, hello, honey," Richie said, before she commenced inhaling his face.

Jon watched the nameless girl grind on his best friend, the five days that had passed since he'd ended up with Richie on the hotel suite floor feeling more like five minutes to him. A sliver of jealousy needled through him, starting in his stomach and working its way up to his throat, but he wrote it off as a quirk of the beer and turned his attention to the girl who might have been Tawny.

"So what's your story, darlin'?" he asked, his words almost swallowed up in the thumping music.

Tawny lowered her overly mascaraed lashes and said, "Whatever you want it to be." She wiggled her body in closer to Jon's until her breasts were crushed against his arm, and he could feel her spearmint- and marijuana-scented breath on his neck.

Jon waited for the usual reaction from his dick, but it was taking awhile, and in the mean time, his other brain found itself annoyed at the girl's purposeful lack of personality.

"I'm serious," he said, his lips moving slowly as the weed buzz hit him full force.

"So am I," Tawny cooed, her scarlet-lacquered fingernails trailing up and down Jon's chest, parting the hair between the undone shirt buttons, lightly scratching the skin beneath.

Jon's cock finally jumped into life, and he actually sighed with relief, but his mind was still doggedly fixed on the girl's answer to his question.

"Where are you from, then?" he asked, wondering why he couldn't just shut up and fuck the woman. The lays didn't come much easier than this, and Richie did always say the best way to get over someone was to get under someone else.

"All over," Tawny said in a voice that implied 'all over' meant 'around the block'.

Pressing his lips together, Jon wondered if it was that much to ask for one of these chicks to make their pants a little harder to dive into once in awhile.

that's what dorothea's for

Fuck Dorothea, she wasn't exactly around anymore, was she?

that's what richie's for

Jon closed his eyes to prevent them from coasting toward the tangle of limbs on the floor next to him. Somebody must have slipped him something, or else laced the weed. Because that thought was fucking ridiculous. He shifted himself to face the girl.

"Wow, really? Does 'all over' have a zip code?"

Tawny laughed, but in his peripheral vision, Jon saw Richie sit up, shifting his own groupie aside like an afterthought.

"Hey, Jonny, you said you were gonna introduce me to Frank," he said, popping out from underneath the girl with the tits and grabbing Jon's upper arm.

"Who the he--" Jon started to say, but Richie yanked him up off the couch, leaving Tawny to tumble halfway into the spot Jon had occupied.