Read Online Objectify Me: A Fireworks Novella (The Fireworks Novellas) by Bibi Rizer - Free Book Online

stairs. “Let me guess, you’re hungry?”
    “I’m that predictable?”
    “Ivy Grill. Two blocks down.” He does that ‘away with you’ gesture again as Charlotte and I giggle out the door and onto the street.
    The Ivy Grill is hopping. The soundtrack to Dream Girls blares out of an old jukebox, the giant bearded cook lip-syncing along with it. He’s wearing a sparkly tiara and pink lipstick. Drunk people of every possible gender expression sip multi-colored milkshakes along the spotless Formica counter.
    Charlotte and I slide into a booth just as a skinny freckled waiter in a tutu greets us. “How y’all doing tonight? Wanna hear the specials?”
    I zone out and watch Charlotte listen to the waiter say things about pulled pork and soft-shelled crab. In the florescent lights of the café, not only is she just as pretty as in the dim light of the club or the street or my hotel room, she’s beautiful. Her hair is messy and her eyes are smudgy and the skin on her neck and cleavage is red from where I rubbed my face. It’s almost like the further away she gets from that perfect plastic doll thing she had going on at the club, the more I…like her? Do I like her? All I know is that thinking about her breasts and soft tummy makes me grow hard under the table. I shift my weight uncomfortably.
    “And for you, boss?” the waiter says.
    I have no idea what the specials are, so I go with something safe. “Uh…burger and fries. Do you serve beer?”
    “Sure. ID?”
    Charlotte pulls her ID out, too, as the waiter checks them both and leaves us. I catch a glimpse of the year on the card. She’s two years older than me.
    “I’m trying not to sober up,” I say to Charlotte when the waiter drops two bottles on our table a minute later.
    “You don’t seem very drunk.”
    “No, I’m not. I’m just nursing a low-grade buzz that’s been going on for three days. You’re not drunk, are you?”
    She shakes her head, sipping the light beer she ordered. “I don’t like to drink much. I had some champagne at the club, but that drink I had on Bourbon Street was virgin.”
    “That makes one of us.”
    She snorts and dabs her nose with a napkin.
    “It’s good that we’re not drunk,” I say. “I’m wary of drunk sex. I don’t think it’s healthy.”
    She puts her beer down and stares at me while I hope she doesn’t notice I’m blushing. “You might be the first college boy in America to ever say that.”
    “Oh, I don’t think so. There are whole student clubs dedicated to sober sex out west.”
    “How…liberal.”
    I make her laugh by listing some of the odder clubs at UW. Like the one dedicated to Anime. Or the one about nothing but Beyonce. There’s a cat club and a dog club of course, and who could forget the My Little Pony club, or the one about Rubik’s Cubes? By the time our food arrives, she has tears streaming down her cheeks.
    “Did you go to college?” I ask as we dive into our meals like starving orphans.
    She finishes chewing a giant bite of club sandwich before answering. “UNO. I did three years of engineering.”
    I have to set my burger down to process that. “Engineering? Really?”
    She nibbles her sandwich daintily. “Don’t I seem the type?”
    She doesn’t, but what do I know? Life is full of surprises. “You didn’t finish?”
    “Nah, my dad got sick and I couldn’t take care of him so he needed a nursing home. I already had huge debts and…yeah. Whatever. Sob, sob, sob.” She sighs.
    I know I’ve led a sheltered life. I freely admit it. But in this moment, it seems wrong that I’ve never met an American who had to quit school to take care of a sick parent. I mean the world is full of people like Charlotte. Where are they all hiding?
    “So I take perverts’ money now,” Charlotte says, biting into an onion ring. “That pays for dad’s care home and my rent and debts etc. Maybe I’ll finish school later.”
    “You should.”
    “Yeah? What about you? You’re in