Page 382 of Dirty Discipline, Vol. 1

Audrey looked from him to the flask and then to the gym. Be cranky and grumpy in this scene, Morgan had told her. Herself, in other words. Well, Audrey certainly didn’t need any extra encouragement for that. Her hair was pinned up in a beehive, she was dressed in a corset and pink poodle skirt, with a very itchy crinoline, and her shoes looked like something she remembered, as a child, seeing in her grandmother’s closet.

She glared at Trevor as she took the flask from him. Wiping the rim with her palm, she took a deep drought from the tin. The liquor burned all the way down her throat to her stomach. It was just the fortitude she needed to keep sitting next to Trevor, butch-waxed hair and all.

“Golly gee whiz!” he said appreciatively. “I love a woman who can put it away.” Draping an arm across the back of the seat, leather creaking beneath them, he scooted closer to her. “And you sure do look every inch a beautiful woman in that dress.”

Audrey gave him a very dry look as he angled his head to see down the front of her dress. She rolled her eyes and stifled a heavy sigh as she turned to look out the window again, sweeping over the students as they drifted in happy couples towards the open doors. Morgan wasn’t among them, but she was certain he’d show up when the script dictated. With any luck, that would happen without her first having to kiss, touch, or suffer through his juvenile attempts at putting the moves on her. She hadn’t thought fifties movies this sexually graphic.

Trevor began to play with her hair, twining a thick lock of it around his finger. She took another hearty swig from the flask. She was going to need a heck of a lot more fortifying to put up with this.

“Are we going to go in and dance at some point this evening?” she asked.

“Plenty of time for that,” Trevor told her, leaning close enough that she could feel his breath caressing her neck.

She gave him back his flask. Hard. Her elbow stabbed into his gut and the flask slammed down on his thigh a half inch too low to ‘accidentally’ strike anything that would result in an automatic do-over of the scene.

Trevor jumped, grabbing both the flask and his stomach. He stared at her in shock. “What did you do that for?”

“Get out of the car,” she told him, and followed her own advice. Slamming the door behind her, she started walking across the parking lot.

“Hey!” Trevor shouted after her. He scrambled out of the car and chased after her. “What’s the matter with you?”

“Nothing,” she said shortly, and kept walking.

Trevor grabbed her arm and spun her around. “Don’t think I don’t get it,” he hissed at her. “Don’t think I don’t know about you and that geek. You’ve been together nearly every night this week, or maybe you think I’m too stupid to have noticed!”

“I plead the Fifth,” she said, pulling her arm from his grasp. She frowned, shaking her head. Of all the years to have to re-do, why oh why did it have to be the teenaged years? With pimples, parents and boy problems galore. And in the fifties no less, with big hairy spiders threatening to swoop down and destroy the town at any second.

“I want my jacket back!” Trevor yelled after her.

Audrey took it off and dropped it in the parking lot. She kept right on walking, past several gawking teen girls that were supposed to be her friends, and up the steps into the school. Let them fight over him if they wanted, she didn’t want him. And of course, the one she did want she couldn’t have. All she needed now was a terminal illness and the tragedy would be complete.

Audrey sighed. She should have been zapped into a soap opera.

For the first time in fifty years, Morgan dressed with care for the sock hop. He brushed his hair, and adjusted his clothes, not in his bedroom as young men were supposed to, but from the point that the script brought him back into the movie… in the parking lot under one of the street lamps.

He was the epitome of a geek: his trouser legs were a tad too short, his dress jacket was plaid and he wore a red bow tie. He rather hoped Audrey didn’t laugh him out of the gym.

Of course, the instant he walked into the school he realized he needn’t have worried. Audrey was where he’d always met Beth, standing at the refreshment table. Only instead of sipping her punch and chatting with her giggling schoolmates, Audrey had her back to them and she was tossing back punch as if it were hard liquor. Then he saw which bowl she was taking her fortitude from. It was the one with that little extra something added to it.

Morgan shook his head and headed for her.

“Watch out,” he cautioned as he neared her. “That stuff is spiked.”

“I know,” Audrey said without turning around. She tossed another cup back as though it were whiskey, straight up. Handing the glass back to the punch attendant, she rapped upon the table and said, “Keep them coming, my good man.”

Catching her arm as Audrey raised the next cup, Morgan took the liquored punch from her fingers and set it back on the table. “Dance with me.”

He pulled her onto the dance floor, bringing her into his arm in time for the melody to chance from Tennessee Ernie Ford’s ‘Sixteen Ton’ beat to a slow and loverly, cheek-to-cheek ‘Earth Angel.’

“You look beautiful tonight,” he said, winning an actual laugh from Audrey, who backed away enough to look down at herself.

“Poodle skirt and all?”

Morgan grinned. “Absolutely. And those bobby socks… it doesn’t get any sexier than that, baby girl.”

He pulled her close again and spun her in a gentle turn, even dipping her romantically low though it didn’t match the music, before dragging her back to him.

“So?” she asked when she was finally upright again. “Now what do we do?”

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