Free Catch My Fall by Michaela Wright Page B

friends are buying your meal, the least you could do is eat it. I took a bite. It was delicious.
    Meghan didn’t let her full mouth stop her from speaking. “Hey, you considering going to the Lambert Halloween party?”
    I held my hand over my lips, cursing the law of the restaurant cosmos that someone must ask you a vital question right as you take a huge bite of your food. They then wait and watch you eat until you answer. I hate to be watched eating, let’s just be clear about that.
    I swallowed. “I was unaware of such a shindig.”
    She popped another forkful in her mouth. “You were invited though.”
    I smiled. “Was I? That was nice of him.”
    My words were sincere. After high school, Evan Lambert pursued a similar track to Stellan, but unlike Stellan, Evan’s father didn’t suffer a massive heart attack during his sophomore year at MIT, causing him to leave school to tend to his family. Evan left school for very different reasons. From what I’d heard – several billion reasons.
    I glanced at Stellan for a moment in a surge of affection. He was still watching the fire.
    Meghan her fork through a massive clump of goat cheese. “Your whole class was invited.” Well that deflated me quick. “It’s a costume party, which will be fun, and it isn’t on Halloween. I know you like to hand out candy.”
    “That I do. When is it?”
    I asked more out of manners than actual interest. I still hadn’t quite regained my interpersonal skills. Just the restaurant was practically giving me hives. The thought of going to one of my oldest friend’s houses after a decade of no contact, surrounded by every asshole we went to school with – some of whom had made Evan’s life hell – sounded almost less appealing than stumbling upon Cole and his Robo-vagina girlfriend.
    “It’s October 15 th - a Friday,” Meghan said through a chomp of carrot sticks. She watched me, and I realized I was expected to RSVP at that precise moment. I felt trapped.
    “What are you going as, Trotsky?”
    She glanced at Stellan, her perfectly tweezed brows raised.
    “I haven’t decided yet. Was going to find out what Miss Faye was going as and decide then - and don’t call me Trotsky.”
    Oh dear God, she should know better.
    “Why not, Trotsky? Whatsamatter?”
    It had begun.
    Meghan glared. “Don’t call me Trotsky.”
    “Oh, I’m sorry Trotsky, I didn’t realize I was.”
    I stopped chewing and watched.
    “How do you stand this asshole?”
    “Come now, Trotsky. There’s no need to get upset.”
    “You’re obnoxious, you know that?”
    “Trotsky -”
    “Seriously, if I could cut you -”
    “Calm down, Trotsky.”
    “- make me want to rip that mullet right out of -”
    “There’s no need to yell, Trotsky?”
    She wasn’t yelling. I stifled a laugh.
    “If we weren’t in public right now -”
    “Think of the children, Trotsky.”
    Suddenly the waitress appeared at our table, balancing two pizzas. She managed to catch the end of a nicely colored tirade from Meghan, hissed with serious tenacity. The waitress smiled at Stellan who returned it with that traffic stopping smile of his. The waitress left our food, and Stellan made quick work to snatch a piece.
    Meghan took a bite and moaned. “Oh god, I would curse the day you made me come here with this asshole if this weren’t so fucking good.”
    “I know right?”
    Stellan’s voice got bedroomy. “I tell ya, this pizza’s about to see and feel my sex attack.”
    I coughed through my food, nearly spraying it across the weathered table. Stellan smiled up at me over his pizza, having taken half of the pie onto his plate. Stellan milked my discomfort, seducing his pizza with promises of what he was going to do to it with his mouth. Then he started asking if I needed a fork, a napkin, a glass of water, all in that same husky, sexual tone, with a ‘baby’ or a ‘yeah, like that’ here and there. I hissed and shrieked at him with each word. It was only egging him on,