Train Wreck Girl by Sean Carswell Read Free Book Online Page A

was, to be honest, kinda pretty. Like he should’ve dressed in drag or something. Together, they looked like some Woodstock fantasy. Marigold wore a ring on her left ring finger. Christian didn’t. I took that to mean they were engaged.
    The other woman in the back was Sophie. She stared out the fogged up window as if we were on a sunny Sunday drive, not on the edge of a hurricane. She was decidedly not-hippie, so I liked her all the more.
    A drunk chick named Jennifer sat in the front seat, between Rick and me. She’d been sitting at the bar all night. I’d fed her drinks for free, and now at the end of the night, she’d volunteered to shelter us all until the hurricane passed. She told me to turn right the next time I could. I pulled the Galaxie into Jennifer’s front yard.
    Jennifer ran through the stinging rain first. She fought the pounding wooden screen door until she got the big front door unlocked. The other five of us ran from the Galaxie into Jennifer’s beach shack. We all got soaked on the run. The place was dry inside.
    Jennifer lit a bunch of candles and set them up on the hardwood floor. I went into the kitchen with one of the candles. The electricity was already out. I found a cooler and filled it with beers I’d stolen from work and dumped all the ice from the freezer into the cooler. By the time I got back, everyone was sitting in a circle on the floor. Obviously, a decision had been made.
    Sophie looked up at me with big brown eyes and said, “Strip poker, Danny.” Her voice dripped like watermelon. I started to slip. Sophie shuffled the blue Bicycle cards one last time, then dealt them. I tried my best to turn away from her and remember that I’d spent all night trying to seduce Jennifer.
    Jennifer went into her room after the first hand. She came back out after the second hand with a boom box. Rather than try to tune in news about the storm, she played a Willie Nelson cassette. Rick and Marigold complained. Sophie said she liked Willie, but she’d rather listen to the storm. I agreed. Christian said, “Willie Nelson is the perfect rainy day music.”
    Jennifer gave Christian a drunken smile. Marigold shot Jennifer a dirty look. Jennifer flipped her peroxided hair off her shoulders. Marigold turned her glare to Christian. He didn’t seem to notice. The game went on.
    We listened to Willie and the screen door banged itself into splinters and hurricane shrapnel pelted the house. We played slow games of draw poker. No bets. Just the one with the worst hand shedding one article of clothing. Rick was the first big loser. The poor kid was naked while most of us still had on shoes or at least socks. To make matters worse, when he dropped his briefs, he had a hard-on and a weird curve to his dick. Sophie said, “Jesus, Rick, you could stand at the toilet and piss in the sink with that thing.” Jennifer nicknamed him “Boomerang.” Rick lay on his belly until the hard-on went away.
    It took a while for the next one of us to get naked because, for some reason, Rick kept losing. Finally, we made the rule that if Rick lost the hand, the person with the next worse hand had to lose some clothes. This led to Jennifer’s nudity. She hadn’t been wearing a bra and had lost her panties a few hands earlier. She took off her shirt and sat on her knees. Her posture was perfect, probably because she was a little chubby and her belly looked flatter if she sat straight up. I liked the chubbiness, though. It made her full and round and that much prettier. Rick made a crack about her not being a real blond. She said, “I’d throw you out for that, Boomerang, but you’d just come back.”
    The card game went on. Sophie lost her clothes, but seemed glad to be rid of the wet rags. She was a lean girl. Not thin like she had an eating disorder or fit like an athlete. Just young and lean. She seemed real comfortable being nude, too, sitting