Carmen

lying to herself

it landed on the cheeky guy from earlier, and they kissed sloppily right next to my face. it was gross but it was better than her landing on me and having myself smell the alcohol on her breath while we kissed cheeks.

second spin. it was one of his friends, who landed on a guy across the circle from her.

third spin. amount of people before me was slowly shrinking and i was terrified at the thought of giving the drunken strangers the strange satisfaction of kissing "ms perfect". next was an evenly tanned boy with curly hair who landed on the blonde girl who dragged me here.

fourth spin. another boy but with blonde hair landed on another guy and argued with the blonde girl for about a minute before deciding to just hug him. 

fifth spin. a dark-skinned girl who coincidentally was my lab partner landed on me, i smiled at her as we both kissed each other on the cheek.

sixth spin. another girl with long black hair spun and landed on the boy with the curls, clearly embarrassed, kissed him quickly and sat down.

seventh spin. the one that sent the two complete strangers into a dark closet for ten minutes to drunkenly make out, and unfortunately my spin. i crossed my fingers and did a long, hard spin, watching the bottle slowly land on the girl with the long black hair. she blushed in embarrassment and knocked it gently towards the boy with the messy curls.

i looked towards the guy in fear, and he looked at me with about the same amount of terror in his eyes. 

"come on, give us a kiss before you guys do the do," one of the girls exclaimed excitedly.

i pretended to take the whole thing as a joke and rolled my eyes, kissing him slowly, enough for them to get off our backs. the boy tensed up, but still let me anyway dispite his obvious discomfort.

the rowdy teens cheered and whooped before opening the door and gesturing wildly for us to go in.

the boy grabbed my hand and led me towards the closet, holding the door open for me saying, "ladies first,"

i laughed and shook my head as i walked into the dark room with him following close behind.

"so, my name's carmen," i shrugged, leaning on the wall opposite from him.

"and i'm aiden," he answered.

we stood in silence for a moment and the thought of asking him to kiss passed my mind before i shoved it to the back of my head.

"do you ever feel like these parties are fake?" he asked suddenly, out of the blue.

i pondered the question for a minute, "like people come here to seem cool or to keep up a persona they made for themselves? if you mean that then yeah," i wondered.

"do you have one?"

that was the question that felt like it had sucker punched me in the gut. i took the jack daniels bottle from his grasp and chugged a whole ton of it to make the strong emotion go away. 

"what was that for?" he exclaimed, as he was probably going to drink it later.

"do you want answer to your question or not?," i challenged, one eyebrow raised.

he shrugged but didn't say anything, gesturing for me to start.

"i feel like the most amazing girl in the world that no one can help but to love because all i've been taught to do is to make people love me and i've forgotten to actually love people and most of all myself in the process. i mean what am i, really, the whole world could love me but i still can't love myself, pathetic, huh? so what about you dan?" i blurted out fast, slurring my words as the effects of the alcohol deeply affected my lightweight body, after already being kind of drunk.

"forget about me, how can you not love yourself? you have everything, you're rich, you're popular with everyone, you even won a pageant for christ's sake how could you-" he started to rant before i had lazily checked my phone and noticed that our time was almost up, and grabbed his shirt collar and kissed him hard.