“You don’t have a thing for cocks?” I repeat, lowering my voice on the final word. “So…” I didn’t want to say it. I didn’t want to blurt out the question hammering inside every one of our sophomoric heads. So… why do you sleep with every guy who crosses your path?
Chelsea straightened off the back of the chair and the overhead light glinted off a whitehead heavily coated in concealer. “I suppose you’ve been having sex with Jonah because you like his penis?” She said dryly.
It was a valid point and I snapped my lips together, dropping my gaze off her whitehead and back to my salad. I was having sex with Jonah because I liked Jonah, and sex seemed to be that eventual outcome of any college relationship that survived three weeks. Jonah’s penis, out of the seven I’d seen, was the smallest—an observation I’d made to Chelsea in the back of a filthy cab, at 2:30 in the morning, drunk on tequila. An observation I’d hoped she had forgotten. She hadn’t.
“Why is his penis so pretty?” Ling tilted her head, peering at Chelsea as she speared a cucumber from her bowl without looking. “Color? Texture? Girth? Shape?”
Only Ling would ask about the texture of a penis, and Laura Pinn swooped on the opportunity, talons outstretched.
“Ling,” she sniffed. “Why don’t you take your studying into the den and let the big girls talk?” She gave a delicate and generous smile, the sort that the wolf flashed right before he ate Little Red Riding Hood.
I clamped a hand on Ling’s arm before she could move. “Fuck off, Laura.” I gave my own sweet smile. “Chelsea?” I raised my brows, urging her to answer the question before Laura Pinn blew a blood vessel.
Chelsea’s gaze darted between the three of us like a freshman jaw on its first hit of cocaine. I could tell she was torn between the potential carnage of an impending fight and the juiciness of her story. She let me hang for one painful second, then sighed, that starstruck look returning to her eyes. “Okay, so you know how some heads are, like, mushrooms on the top of a shaft?”
At Ling’s horrified look, she carried on, redirecting the next question to me.
“And how others are smaller than the shaft, like a pencil eraser?”
I nodded, though I had never examined my penises to this extent. Most of my interactions with them had been in the dark, my hand sweaty, contact minimal, the experiences short. Out of my seven, I could have potentially picked out three in a lineup, Jonah’s included. The head/shaft ratio of any of them… I had no idea.
“His is perfect, not too big, not too small.”
“Great,” Laura said dryly. “The Berenstain Bears of penises.”
“Not Berenstain Bears,” Ling interjected. “Three Little Pigs.”
“ANYWAY,” Chelsea continued. “It’s also rugged. Like, that seems like a weird word to describe a cock, but it’s so utterly masculine. He dropped his pants, and I swear to God, I wanted to just drop to my knees and worship it.”
Laura, whose bitchiness levels rivaled her devotion to Jesus, paled at the false Gods picture that Chelsea was painting. I chewed on a forkful of salad and theorized that Chelsea had probably already been on her knees at that point.
“And it’s big, obviously,” Chelsea carried on, unaware that conversations on both sides of our trio had stopped as the legend of Easton grew. Pun intended. She dropped her fork with a clink against the bowl and held out her palms, spreading them a sizable distance apart until even Laura hissed with approval.
“But honestly,” Chelsea continued airily, dropping her hands and plucking a crouton out of her salad. “It wasn’t that it was big, or beautiful, that really mattered. What mattered…” she paused for effect.
The cliffhanger worked on all of us, including me. I eyed the clock at the end of the room, aware that I should have left three minutes ago. Stuffing another mouthful of salad into my mouth, I chewed faster and waited for Chelsea’s next words.
“What mattered,” she repeated, leaning forward as if she was about to deliver the Holy Grail of gossip. “Was how he used it.”
“Used his penis?” Ling asked stupidly, and for someone with the highest GPA in our pledge class, she was painfully dumb at times.
“Yes, Ling. His penis.” Laura puffed out her cheeks and made a big show of picking up her Louis Vuitton satchel and sliding it over one shoulder. “Well, this was fun. Chelsea slept with someone else. Whoop Dee Do. I’ll spread the word.”
I saw, in the brief moment when Chelsea’s eyebrows knitted together, the pain of the impact. The evidence cleared quickly and she laughed, meeting my eyes without responding to Laura.
“Prude,” I muttered as soon as the Lilly Pulitzer-clad brunette was out of earshot.