When I reached the grim milestone of my 30th birthday, my wife and I decided to break the tradition of us spending birthdays together, just the two of us, and instead have a proper party.
With some planning, we managed to get most of our friends, a bit of music and a lot of alcohol into the house on the same Saturday night (which is not as easy as you think it's going to be when you're in your teens). As Cathy and I had got older, we had found more and more excuses to do less and less. Work stress and boring grown-up commitments had kept us both content to limit our horizons. But we were only 10 minutes in the evening when I decided that it had been worth it; the group of friends I had through my teens and early 20s might not have seen each other very often now, but as soon as we got them in a room together, the chemistry was still right there.
Each of my friends had chosen a different path in life but were each happy in their own way. The corporate accountants and computer scientists drinking beer with painters and sculptors and handymen and teachers. I have always been lucky to have a fantastic gang of girls mixed in with the boys. I had had the odd fling with one or two of them as is normal in a group of friends as they grow up together. Several of the girls were my firsts for things like dances, kisses or blow jobs. Despite this, my wife moved easily amongst the girls; she had been friends with them in her own right for years and knew that no one had any designs on her husband, decades after teenage hormones had dissipated.
I joined my wife in a conversation with three of the girls, Kim, Amy and Dinah as they swapped stories, caught up on each other's lives and told jokes. It was pretty clear that Dinah was drunker than the rest of the group. She had always been a bit of a wild child and had not settled down in quite the same way as the rest of us. She owned a business selling cannabis products (legally) and a side business selling actual cannabis (illegally). It had been her that had given me my first blow job all those years before. She had acted like it was no big deal and that was entirely in keeping with her style of carefree living.
"Hi, sweety." Cathy said as I joined them, kissing me on the cheek as I slipped an arm around her waist. "The girls were just telling me the story about you dressing up as Britney Spears for Amy's birthday when you were 18. Something about getting hit on by a teacher in the local pub?" I had a lifetime's worth of embarrassing anecdotes, known to the participants of the party, and it would've taken hours to share all of them. Amy had obviously launched into one of the better ones that involved me, in drag, fending off the advances of male teacher who hadn't recognised me outside the gents toilets. It was not my finest hour.
I shared a look with Dinah; I was pretty sure she was thinking the same thing as I was, something not known to anyone else in the room. That night, after I'd escaped the clutches of the mathematics teacher, Dinah and I had ended up back at her parents' house having clumsy, drunken sex. She had had a boyfriend at the time, and I have been unsuccessfully trying to date Kim so we had agreed we wouldn't talk about it with the others, but it was something we had hinted at to each other whenever we were being flirty.
I left the girls to their anecdotes and went and joined a group of boys over in the kitchen who were discussing 1990s film and TV, particularly whether Gillian Anderson is more attractive in series 1 of X-Files or 30 years later in The Fall. A consensus seems to be forming that Gillian Anderson had somehow defied the linear nature of time and was getting more attractive with every day that passed (not something that could be said for most of us). Dinah came over to join our group and slotted easily in the conversation. She was bisexual, or at least a little bit curious, and so had some interesting observations on Dana Scully's influence during her formative sexual years. Just as she had been for the boys. I looked over Dinah as she talked and was impressed by how she, herself, had aged. She was a bit older than when we'd fucked for hours after Amy's birthday but more than any of us, she had kept her youthful, carefree appearance.
While we were talking, Dinah proved she could still shock me as she set up, and then did, a small bump of coke, offering the same to everyone else in the group. Everyone said no. None of us were puritans but Dinah was the only one that had continued with anything like regular drug use. I didn't really judge her for it, but if you were the only person doing a particular drug, maybe you shouldn't be doing it at that party. As the conversation continued, Dinah moved closer and closer to my side, first resting her hand on my shoulder and then putting it around my waist. I could see Cathy across the room, who had missed none of Dinah's activities. She gave me a mock-serious look and wagged her finger at me. My wife had always intuited that Dinah retained a bit of a crush on me, but I knew she trusted me and her faith was well placed. That said, I never missed a chance to fuck with her...
While making eye contact with my wife, I reach down and rested my hand on Dinah's firm, round butt cheek. Cathy pulled a scandalised face, so I stuck out my tongue at her, which earned me a sexually charged scowl. Dinah, unaware that I was making eyes at my wife, did a shimmy and wiggled her bum under my touch. Although I was doing it to wind up my better half, I took a lot of pleasure from feeling the thin line of Dinah's G-string through the flimsy material of her dress. Dinah had always had a fantastic butt, and the chance to grab a sneaky feel was too good to miss. But once I had satiated myself, I decided I had taken that particular joke far enough so I let my hand drop back to my side. Dinah, however, kept her arm around my waist. Cathy rolled her eyes and went back to her conversation.
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Towards the end of the night, once everyone was more than a little drunk, I was in the kitchen refilling the ice bowl when I got cornered by Dinah. She was a short, curvy, exotic looking girl with olive skin that seemed tanned all year round, making her stand-out amongst the pale English Roses of our hometown. She stood close to me, well within my personal space, but I was enjoying the view and the scent of her shampoo and perfume so I didn't mind.
"You know, I'm not sure I've actually wished you a happy birthday yet." she said, with a slight breathy tone to her voice.
"It's not technically until tomorrow but I think I got the message anyway." I said. I wasn't really a big one for making a fuss of such occasions which was why we had not been holding such in parties previous years -- doing an event 'just for me' made my self-depreciating skin crawl.
"No, no, no." She said, wiggling her body in time with the words. "I need to say happy birthday to you." She insisted drunkenly.
"I think you just did, didn't you?"
