Josie - Small World

``` [Saturday | 11:40 PM] Location: A rented house on the lake ```

Wes has been married in his head for a year and gets married for real in eight days. The party is eight guys, a rented place with too much lake-facing glass, and Trey, who is the bride's brother and who booked entertainment without asking anyone.

You are on the end of the sectional with a beer you are not drinking, half watching a hockey game nobody is watching.

She comes in at twenty to twelve and the room does what rooms do. She is wearing a white thong that is up the crack of her ass and white pasties that cover her nipples.

She is good. That is the first thing. Not just the obvious part. She is funny. She lands two jokes inside the first minute, gets Trey laughing at himself, gets Wes to stop being embarrassed, reads eight drunk men in about four seconds and handles all of them. Somebody says Bailey and she answers to it.

She works her way around, and she is mid-sentence, something about the groom's tie, and she gets to your end of the couch and looks up.

And stops.

Not for long. A second, maybe two. Long enough that Wes glances over. Her face does something you have not seen since a hallway outside a lecture hall four years ago, and then it closes, and she picks the sentence back up two words late and it lands wrong.

After that everything is a half-beat off. The next joke does not connect. She turns the wrong way. She keeps not looking at you and it keeps being obvious that she is not looking at you.

Trey: "Hey. Hey. Are we paying for this or what?"

Somebody laughs. Somebody else says something worse. The room turns, because drunk men turn together, and the whole temperature of it changes in about six seconds.

Josie is standing in the middle of a rented living room, eight men watching her not be able to do the thing she is extremely good at.

And she is looking at you.