“Come on, Claire, it’s no big deal, just answer it,” Jenny begged with a laugh.
“Come on, Claire,” Drew argued while I sat there with my arms folded glaring at him.
“Answer the question, Claire!” Drew and Jenny said sternly at the same time while trying to reign in their laughter.
“Yeah, because I’ve never heard the Breakfast Club reference before,” I muttered.
"Awww, don't feel bad, Claire. Everyone's got an embarrassing sex experience. Hell, Carter here had sex with a virgin when he was drunk one time in college and never found out her name."
Somewhere in heaven, baby Jesus is weeping. Or maybe that’s just me and the sound of my dignity dying. I'm sure Jim, Liz and I looked like we just witnessed a horrific car accident. And technically, we kind of did. I felt like blocking off the table with crime scene tape. "Keep it movin' folks, there's nothing to see here - just my self-respect being flushed down the crapper."
I’m pretty sure I stopped breathing and Liz smacked Jim in the chest so he’d close his mouth which was currently stuck in the “holy shit, did that just happen?!” wide open position. I wondered for a minute if this whole thing was one big elaborate plan to trip me up and get me to confess and that everyone at the table was in on it. My eyes glanced over to Carter to see his reaction and he looked embarrassed, not like he wanted to wring my neck for keeping a secret from him that he knew and he knew that I knew that he knew.
Aaaaack!
I started tapping my foot nervously, my leg bouncing up and down. Liz reached over under the table and put her hand on my knee.
"Drew, Jesus, man," Carter muttered, shaking his head.
"Claire…"
I interrupted Liz. She was giving me a look that clearly said now was a perfect opportunity to come clean, but I wasn't ready for that yet. This was not something you blurted across the table in front of people. Instead, I let the word vomit flow.
"So, I used to work with this guy Max at the bar. We were pretty good friends and seemed to have a lot in common.”
I conveniently skipped over the part that our primary mutual interest was that we were both single parents at the time.
“We tried to tack on a friend with benefits thing a few years ago. His recently widowed father had just retired and moved in to the apartment above his garage. It was the middle of summer and we were all in the house watching a movie. His dad decides to get up and go fishing for a few hours. So, he leaves and we start going at it on the couch."
Everyone at the table stopped eating and stared at me as the story flew from my mouth in one long, continuous run-on sentence.
I can't believe I'm doing this. I'm covering up one humiliation with another.
"So, we're naked from the waist down and he dives right in. Exactly two seconds later, the front door opens and in walks his dad. He's too busy trying to get through the door with a fishing rod and a tackle box that he doesn't notice us scrambling around on the couch trying to throw a blanket over the bottom half of us."
Drew’s shoulders were shaking in silent laughter, Carter looked sorry for me and everyone else just nodded their heads up and down since they had heard this story before.
"So, his dad walks right into the living room, sits down in the middle of the floor with his back to us and starts organizing his tackle box and rambling to us about how the lake was closed for fishing. Meanwhile, we're under a heavy, wool blanket on the couch behind him in the middle of July."
"Totally not suspicious at all," Carter joked.
I finally looked at him and when I realized he wasn’t outright laughing at me, I took a deep breath to go on.
"Yeah, not at all considering Max didn't have air conditioning and it was about ninety-eight degrees out that day."
Drew shook his head in amusement. "So what the hell did you do?"
"Well, I sat there horrified and Max started digging in the couch cushions for his boxers. The more he dug, the more the blanket was threatening to get pulled right off of my naked lap. I was holding on to that thing for dear life while his dad continued to mumble about lures and bait three feet in front of us. Max finally finds his boxers and shorts and starts shimmying into them under the blanket. Meanwhile, I'm still trying to hang onto the blanket and dig for my underwear at the same time, but can't find them anywhere. I found my shorts though so I yank those on and almost scream in victory when Max flings the blanket off of our lap because I was sweating my ass off under that thing."
Everyone was thoroughly amused by my story, and I didn't mind too much at this point since they weren't talking about me getting myself off or Carter’s cherry popping blunder.
"You're forgetting the best part, Claire," Jim reminded me.
"Oh yeah. So when Max yanked the blanket off of us, my underwear must have been stuck somewhere in there. It went flying through the air and hit his dad in the back of the head."