Page 2 of Great Sexpectations
I screw my face up. ‘It’s loud. It’s all happy house music that I don’t understand and people in scary masks so I don’t understand what they’re saying. There’s a man out there who asked me to hold his glass and I thought he said arse.’
‘Did you hold his arse?’ asks Tina.
‘There may have been light cupping.’
Tina laughs. ‘Someone take out these jelly shots now before they melt,’ she yells, arranging jelly worms into them. ‘Go out and do party stuff or I’ll tell your mum,’ she orders me.
‘You wouldn’t,’ I retort.
‘I would, especially if you’re going to eat all my food.’
‘But… I’m like the project manager, I’m overseeing everything so the party runs smoothly. I have to keep an eye on the alcohol levels and the coats. Without me back here commandeering the ship, the party would fail.’
Brett nods, not really falling for my spiel, but the truth is, I grabbed a man’s arse out there and now I’m petrified his girlfriend will come after me with her razor-claw manicure.
‘At least make yourself useful, pound something for me,’ Brett says.
‘Brett, I’ve known you for years, but that would be a turning point in our friendship. Plus, I know your wife. I was at your wedding. I made a speech.’
‘Wise-ass. Pound the basil for our spooky pesto drizzle. It was a good speech, though.’
‘It was a good wedding,’ I say, picking up some pine nuts and basil.
‘Less talking, more pounding.’
‘You sound like porn.’
We all giggle. The man rolling the sushi doesn’t get it, though.
‘Excuse me, are you Josie?’ a girl suddenly asks me, dressed like a bewitched doll. Unless she actually is a bewitched doll, in which case, don’t kill me and take my soul. Please.
‘I am.’
‘Your mum is trying to call you. She called Sonny, but he’s chatting to people and it’s his party and he told me to come and find you. He said you’d be hiding in here.’
That’s because he’s my brother and he knows what I do at parties. I’m either hiding in here or in the toilet.
‘Did she say what it was about? Was it an emergency?’ I ask.
‘It was something to do with your dad? Maybe?’
I drop my pestle. Or my mortar. I’ve never worked out which is which, but even so this countertop is granite so it survives the trauma.
‘Did he fall off the roof trying to put that glow-in-the-dark witch on top of the garage?’
A few people in the kitchen turn to look at me as I raise my voice. Dad was adamant that he could do it himself, but he’s approaching sixty and it was windy and that thing required drilling into hooks, not the gaffer tape approach that he had in mind. He’s broken his back, hasn’t he?
Brett puts a hand to my shoulder to calm me down. ‘Call her, Josie. Go.’
‘I’ll be back.’
‘To commandeer the ship, yep… whatever. Ring your mum. And this is a party. Get drunk, dance, snog a stranger,’ Tina tells me.
I don’t take any of that in. Instead, I grab my phone from my pocket and head for the door. As I open it, I swerve around a man carrying a cauldron. Of soup? Is he ladling that into people’s mouths? I stumble back as the music hits me like a wave of warm air, and I start milling through the crowd of sexy cats, sexy witches and sexy vampires, watching as a man takes out his fake fangs to take in a blini.
From a crowd of people at the door, I see my brother, Sonny, and give him a wave. He puts his hands to his face to make a phone shape and mouth the word, Mum. He doesn’t seem overly panicked, so maybe Mum’s lost Dad in the supermarket again, which isn’t a worry as she knows to head directly to the bakery. He will be there feeling up the baguettes and complaining they’re too hard for his teeth.
I head for a staircase and immediately hit dial as I climb away from the noise, waiting.
