Ill Conceived Plans

By the book

SARAH stood in the hall outside Dane's room, a bottle of single malt whisky in one of her clammy hands.

She was shaking, nerves had consumed her.

This seemed like a good idea last night but now standing in the hallway outside her best friend's room she was getting cold feet, metaphorically but not literally.

Her feet themselves were bare, clammy - not due to the early summer weather no she was clammy all over despite having a shower just minutes earlier. 

She wiped a sweaty palm on her new green chiffon and lace negligee. It was beautiful, if a little itchy. but it didn't matter, she didn't imagine it would be staying on long. Spaghetti straps held the dress on her body, a lace bodice hid some, but not all, of her from sight. It was aimed at giving you a glimpse of the girl underneath, without being too obvious, well according to the woman in the store this afternoon that is. You could just make dark circles of her areola and nipples, which were more erect than she would have liked, making themselves known. The lace fitted around her pert breasts, which were lifted, with a swell of flesh showing at the top. It followed down her torso, stopping in a slight v just above the place that was the focus of this evening, a ballerina length skirt of similar green chiffon fell in ribbons from her hips, offering glimpses of her legs but not the v between them. She had washed with the body wash he always seemed to like. Her hair was down, but a little straightened, tendrils curling around and framing her face. Her make-up was light, just enough to add colour and definition but not enough to leave her with panda eyes in the morning.

Oh hell.

The morning.

That's what she needed - a reminder of what she was about to do - not that she could easily forget.

Sarah Huntington was about to spend the night with her best friend. Sure she'd done that before, camping or top and tailing at friends places when there weren't enough beds. But never like this, never this exposed and never in the way, they were planning. 

She felt like a virgin sacrifice - though she was making this decision all on her own. There was no forced marriage, no marriage at all. She wondered if other women, her forebears, had stood in this 400-year-old hallway on the cusp of womanhood like she was. That's what generations before believed, wasn't it? You weren't a woman until some man had been inside you and broken your hymen? Sarah had always thought that was crap, she wondered if she'd feel the same after she and Dane...........

She took a deep breath - tempted to open the Scotch and take another swig before she knocked on the door. She'd had a quite a bit of wine already with dinner, it was a good vintage - he'd gone all out to woo her and to get them both uninhibited enough to do this. 

Actually, it had been a lovely day. Dane had been his usual self, wanting to do this right and she thought they had.

They left the house around 9 am this morning to travel the hour and a half into the major town. Neville had still been in bed when they left. He'd had much more to drink than either Dane or Sarah last night and didn't need to meet up with Maddy until later in the afternoon so she let him sleep, he was going through a tough time of it at the moment with his parent's divorce. Though only Dane, Sarah, and Petra knew. Neville tended to confide in Petra, she wished he'd finish up with Maddy and realise where his heart really lay but, he wasn't the type to settle down, not yet and she wasn't naive enough to think that Maddy was the only girl he was seeing either. He was going to university in Scotland and then into the family business and Petra was studying abroad so it wasn't worth wishing for anything yet but one day maybe.

The trip had been fun though. Dane had teased her for her reading material "A Frank Guide To Sex". "Who's Frank?" he'd asked laughing at it. But he'd be glad she'd read up on the subject a little later when she knew what she was doing.