Eve of Destruction

Peter sat at the bar in McGinn’s Tavern, about an hour later, with two beers in front of him. He glanced towards the door as he raised a hand to his chest, feeling for his phone on the inside breast pocket of his jacket. Sweat made his forehead shine and his pits sticky. It was one thing to talk about distracting Hannah, but it was quite another to actually be here waiting on her, riding on his ability to lie to his ex-girlfriend. He had never been good at lying to her. Hannah knew him better than anyone else in the world.

He raised his hand to his jacket again, double checking that the phone was there. He opened one side and glanced down, making sure the device was on and the battery was strong. Suddenly, all the things that could go wrong were running through his head. What if Hannah saw right through him? What if the phone didn’t work and the others couldn’t hear what was happening? Would they bail, or go through with the plan and risk getting caught? What if his stupid idea was the reason Ashley, Zack, Heather and everyone else had their lives ruined by Hannah’s video?

“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” Peter muttered to himself, looking around the bar again. “How do I even know if you guys can hear me? Maybe we should have had some kind of walkie talkie system, so that you could talk to me too. This whole one-sided phone cloning thing is just kind of-”

His phone buzzed. Without taking it from the pocket completely, Peter opened his jacket once more, and lifted his phone upwards, just enough to read the message.

ASHLEY: Shut up. We can hear you, ok? Kurt says you sound like a mad man, sitting at the bar talking to yourself.

“Right, shutting up now,” Peter breathed, not as relieved as he’d like from having confirmation that they could hear him. He looked again to the door, his eyes drifting to a booth near the entrance.

Kurt sat with his back to Peter wearing a baseball cap and a fake beard, complimented by an oversized military jacket. He watched the door too, as he played with a glass of whiskey in his hand, glancing occasionally towards the bar window, where he could see Peter’s reflection, the nervous young man looking at the door for the fiftieth time.

“He needs to stop looking at the door so much,” Kurt complained. “Who’d have thought he’d be so twitchy.”

“He’s seeing his ex-girlfriend for the first time in years. He should be nervous,” Kendra noted, opposite. She too was in disguise, back to wearing the thick rimmed glasses, though her attire was more punk rock this time, dressed in a pink dress with frills around the hem, ripped tights and steel toed boots. Her hair shimmered in the light, spray-dyed silvery grey, and pulled to one side, veiling her face. “But Peter never did take to being the leader very well.”

“You guys were friends back in the day?” Kurt asked, remembering that Peter had simply been surprised to see Kendra at the cabin, but he had known who she was.

“Sort of,” she admitted, looking around the bar. “Everyone kind of gravitated around him. Hannah was his girlfriend, Taylor was his best friend from childhood, Shawn…Shawn just kind of latched on. I’m not sure whether he thought he could convert Peter or just thought he could be more like Peter by shadowing him. I was just along for the ride.”

“Right, where Shawn went, you went,” Kurt said, as Kendra’s eyes flashed irritably at him.

“But even though Peter was the centre of the group, he mostly did what Hannah and Taylor wanted,” Kendra brought the conversation back on topic. “And Shawn would make fun of him for being ‘pushed around by a couple of pussies’, as he put it.”

“Charmi-pfth,” Kurt blew out air as the hair of his beard got caught between his lips. “I hate this thing. It itches and I keep eating it. I can’t believe you just have all of this stuff in your car.”

“Well, you never know when Shawn might ask me to follow someone, or distract them,” Kendra said with a shrug, sipping at her own rum and coke. “And he used to always sigh when I said I had to go pick up my stuff. Eventually, I just started keeping it all in my car.”

“Good thinking. That way you’re good to go if, for instance, he asks you to follow someone into a department store, let them watch you undress and lead them out into the alleyway,” Kurt noted, with raised eyebrows. “Didn’t it ever occur to you how fucked-up that was? I mean, you wanted to be with him again, exclusively, but what potential boyfriend would ask a girl to strip for another man? Or to suck another man’s cock as practice?”

“I think you’re too caught up in the hunter/predator idea of masculinity, but Shawn doesn't necessarily think of women to be conquered or possessed, like a conquest of land. I don’t think he saw enough value in most women to want to possess them. They should be subservient, not because he owned them, because he couldn't own all women, but simply because that was the natural state for a woman to a man. But I was different. I was his. And I wanted to be, I wanted to maintain that value. If that meant sucking off another guy to prove that I was still the best cocksucker he could possibly have, well, then why not?” Kendra said, disturbing Kurt by how calmly and rationally she talked about belonging to another man, how even her eyes seemed to sparkle when she talked about it. “Besides, it’d be pretty hypocritical of him to fuck other women but tell me I had only had to be with him.”

“Sure, but he got to choose. Did you?” Kurt queried, but Kendra nodded to his surprise.

“I choose to get undressed in front of you. Shawn simply sent me in with the mission to get you to come out the back. I chose how,” she explained simply, smiling as she saw the cracks in Kurt’s understanding of her relationship with Shawn forming.

“If that’s true…then why help me?” Kurt said, frowning in his confusion. “If he’d been with other women, what was it that made you betray him to keep Victoria away?”

“Victoria…is different…” Her smile faded and her eyes became hard and cold. “There was something about the way he talked about Victoria. He had let her into his heart, a place where I thought only I was allowed. He’d fucked girls before, toyed with them, but he always came back to me, and he’d fuck me while he told me all about how he broke them and made them beg for his cock. But after that night in the apartment, he didn’t come back to me. He just told me to clean up the mess. The moment I saw his eyes when Dustin told him he was coming back to town to win back Victoria, I knew everything was fucked.”

“Kendra…” Kurt didn’t know what to say. Getting off on hearing her partner fucking other people sounded like a cuckold, or whatever the female equivalent was. He knew there was a word for it but couldn’t remember it. All this time he’d assumed that Kendra was a pawn and Shawn was using her, but the reality was much more complex. It almost sounded like Shawn did actually care for Kendra, perhaps not love, but she was special to him.

Yet, he’d given it all up for Victoria. That made Kurt afraid. If he’d sacrificed this much to get her the first time, how much more invested would he be now? And what lengths would he go to in order to reclaim her? Shawn may not think most women were worth conquering and possessing, but Victoria was definitely an exception that he wanted to stick his flag in.

Unfortunately, the conversation was cut short by the buzzing of Kurt’s phone. As he checked the message, Kendra looked over at Peter to see him peek inside his jacket again, indicating the text had been sent to both men. The message read:

ASHLEY: SHE’S ON HER WAY!

“He’s not wrong, you know,”

Gavin, Chloe and Ashley sat in Zack’s car, parked on the roadside opposite Ravers’ Palace Hotel. They were slumped down, out of sight, though just enough so that they could still see the front entrance where a doorman stood. Just looking at it brought back memories for Chloe, of spending the night in Hannah’s apartment, being introduced to the joys of a strap on. The nostalgia was almost enough to make her second guess what she was doing, but she resolved herself. It was going to get a lot worse before it got better once she was actually inside the apartment.

Gavin sat in the passenger seat, beside Ashley who had drove, while Chloe occupied the back seat, though careful not to sit where she’d soaked the cushion with her squirt last night. The nerdy young man twirled a flash drive between his fingers, the small rectangular device containing all the coding he would need to search and destroy all traces of the video. His words lingered in the air. When no one replied, he continued.

“A two-way system would be better. We wouldn’t have to send messages and we could respond a lot quicker if something went wrong,” Gavin noted, as he stifled a yawn. The mission was important, but the wait was boring. “Pity we couldn’t swing by home. I have a Bluetooth earpiece that would be perfect for this kind of thing.”

“How did you get something like that?” Chloe asked, glancing away from the entrance, though only for a second.

“Why did you get something like that?” Ashley corrected, keeping her eyes trained on the door.

“It was a birthday present from my mum,” Gavin answered both questions. “And because it’s cool.”

“You are such a geek,” Ashley chuckled. Though she couldn’t forget that this ‘geek’ had made her cum the last two nights in a row.

“Sometimes it comes in useful.” Gavin raised his hand, emphasising the flash drive rolling around in his fingers.

“And sometimes you leave all your cool toys at home, where they’re no use to anyone,” Chloe teased him.

Gavin shrugged. “It wasn’t my fault. Zack wouldn’t even let me bring my laptop. He said I needed to experience the world offline.”

“And aren’t you glad you did?” Ashley asked with a sultry, knowing smirk. “Think of all the things you might have missed if you were on your laptop.”

The teen smiled to himself, his dick hardening as he thought of losing his virginity, threesomes by a waterfall, drinking games and fucking both the girls in his car and the girl whose apartment they were about to break into, late night sixty nines and getting fucked in the ass, twice. Experiences perhaps that he could emulate on a computer, but it was nothing like the real thing, as he’d discovered.

He held the thought as Chloe eagerly pointed out the window and said, “Isn’t that Hannah’s car that the valet is pulling around?”

“Could be,” Gavin said thoughtfully. “Or could be anyone driving a Ravers’ company car.”

“No, it must be her,” Ashley insisted, pointing herself now. “Look, here she comes.”

Chloe and Gavin walked the blonde college girl descend the steps and take the key from the valet, while Ashley sent the message to Peter and Kurt. Once the text had been released into the air, Ashley reached for the door handle, as Hannah’s car pulled away from the hotel and began merging into traffic.

“Wait,” Chloe called out, Ashley pausing with the handle mid-pull. “She has to turn at the next junction. Let her get out of sight in case she happens to look in her rear view and sees her sister heading into the hotel where she’s staying.”

“…good idea,” the blonde cheerleader admitted, following Chloe’s advice and waiting until the business sedan turned right and disappeared out of sight. With the coast clear, Ashley’s hand completed the pull, opening the door as she announced, “alright, this is it. Go time.”