“I forgot this was a sex party,” Jake said when the couple walked off. His voice was nonchalant, and I made my face match it. “But we don’t have to do anything, I just think the house is dope.”

“It’s dope,” I said and went straight to the memory of Leah and me, belly down on my bed with her new laptop. Incognito mode, Pornhub, the main page peppered with America’s most watched videos: real teen anal, teen orgy, multi-squirt orgasm, extra small ten teen body. “Gross,” we said of these, even if in private, and with time, we would watch, inure ourselves, learn. But together, we made a game out of safer search terms. Delivery guy, big boobs, blow job, each one punctuated by Leah’s throaty laugher.

Costumes was the word that found us “Masked Medieval Fuck Fest,” a vintage orgy we watched under the guise of a joke and returned to so often we could recite its language. Forsooth, thy cock is rock hard and what a bounteous bosom m’lady. The film was good-humored raunch, a joke and a fantasy; but it had been viewed twelve thousand times, which meant it was also a possibility. Surely someone out there would make it real.

Jake led me outside. I posed in the backyard for him. There was a koi fish pool, stepping-stones across the water. I walked halfway out, teetering, and remembered reading somewhere that the males were biters, and dangerous. Jake said, “Tip your left hip, turn your head to the right.” He said, “Do that again only don’t smile.” He said, “You look cold,” and we went back inside. The house was empty.

“They’re all upstairs,” he said and ordered a shot, took it.

“I want to see,” I said.

“You want to see, baby? You sure?”

I was sure. I wasn’t a prude, wasn’t a square. “Okay,” Jake said, “bump up.” He passed me the coke and we both did more. I put the vial in my clutch and he let me. When he wiped my nose, I felt his fingers tremble. “Let’s just stick together,” he said and I took his hand, which stilled in mine. We climbed the stairs.

Upstairs was wide open, a room not a hall, and nowhere a door. The room was strewn with mattresses, tissue boxes, bodies like forgotten toys, arms and legs tangled. I felt my hand go wet in Jake’s. The bodies were moving. They were fucking, awkward in their conflicted rhythms. There was the man with the paper bag inside a girl I hadn’t seen downstairs. There was his date, reverse cowgirl and the shape of a body beneath her in the shadows. The party was like “Medieval Fuck Fest,” only no masks or minstrel music, no laughter, just moans and wet skin slapping; the party was just another club, stripped of another layer.

“Want to get out of here?” Jake whispered.