&&we made a [HELL] of a team back THEN, [ISO Roger]

[Nick Mancini]

With one last kiss Nick waved his girlfriend back into the halls of Diagon Prep, catching her eye and winking as she turned back one last time before she slipped through the heavy entrance doors. It had been only a year since he had graduated and he already didn’t miss it, didn’t miss for a second the old halls and highly-strung Professors and the waste of a stack of paper they had tried to convince him was homework supposedly requiring actual completion. Mildly entertaining as it was high-school had really been a waste of time better spent chatting up girls or worshipping his car, not that he had really attended many of his classes in any case. Much more intriguing had been the thrill of the adrenalin rush in his veins as he hotwired yet another unsuspecting Professor’s car and upped the mileage, the adoring gaggle of cheerleaders ready to listen to every single second of his football match replay, christening almost every classroom and closet and hidden alcove in the school. Classy? Not particularly, but then, it was boarding school, and anyone who had been subjected to that horror would know perfectly well that just because they lived in segregated dormitories didn’t erase the hormones, in fact if anything the whole boarding school environment in general just escalated them, what with the added bonus factor that there were no parents around to complain when their good girls had a taste of life on the wild side, found it irresistible and realised that there wasn’t really any going back.

But Nick wasn’t the sort to go all nostalgic and want to go back to his old school and see how everything was going and talk to all the old Professors and kick around a football for old times sake, as far as he was concerned graduation was graduation for the love of Christ, and if it weren’t for his sister and all the bloody hot girls and Tracey he would never have bothered laying eyes on the building ever again. He didn’t miss it. Not when there were girls hanging off him left right and centre who were actually old enough to buy their own drinks and save him a load of cash. Oh, yeah, that’s right, he had a girlfriend. Sometimes he needed to remind himself. Like when a 10 walked past and smiled that coy smile and practically undressed him with her eyes…now that, lads, was an exercise in fucking self control. Especially when they stroked the hood of his car. His car! That was almost as good as getting a blowjob, right there on the spot. And how the hell did anybody resist that?

Not that he hadn’t improved vastly with regards to the whole self-control thing, but then of course when there was a girl ready to shag you twenty four hours of the day one’s wandering eye tended to settle down at least a little. He hadn’t been intentionally trawling for girls in clubs for what seemed like ages, and that was more than enough whipping for him. No shagging other girls. Yeah, he sort of maybe got that rule, but he drew the line at no flirting or looking or tucking bills in the lacy g-strings of the pole dancers down at Club Platinum; a man had to draw the line somewhere and if he gave up those he might as well kill himself now for being a disgrace to manhood. Of course, that wasn’t quite how he had explained it to Tracey, his sucking-up words of choice having been more along the lines of, “You’re more than beautiful enough for any man to handle,” before proceeding to distract her in the best way he knew how.

Heading back to his car, he winked unabashedly at a couple of giggling girls situated under a large tree to shadow them from the harsh, warm sun that currently beat down on his back. As the first phrase of ‘Fat-Bottomed Girls’ began to play, loudly, Nick flicked his eyes skyward briefly in annoyance, before tugging his phone out of his jeans pocket. “Hey…yeah, hey Josie…yeah….yeah…no fucking way…no, sort it out yourself…Jose, just tell him to go fuck himself…yeah, he’s a fucking bastard…look, just cry to someone else, okay? Too busy for this…yeah, okay. Risque tonight, yeah? See ya babe.” Possibly he was too pleased to hang up on that particular conversation than was strictly sympathetic, but then, he’d never really been the sympathetic sort. Leaning back against his car, he stretched against it before pulling out a half-empty pack of cigarettes. He had a couple of hours to kill, anyway.

[Roger Davis]

On the phone to Molly.. no, Mandy.. no, perhaps it was Mary.. alright, 'girl with the nice ass', Roger was reminded just how unsuited the tag of 'the fairer sex' was to women. Did they never shut up? "Yeah, Mindy, Milly, Maggy, whatever the hell your name is, what we had going was great and all, I think, and I'm sure you probably do have an actual personality, but I'm not interested in finding out for sure right now. I'm busy, so be a nice girl and fuck off, yeah, baby? Yeah, yeah, I know I'm a bastard, hell, who doesn't? Later." With one languid movement he clicked his phone shut, the index and thumb flexing together to snap the damn thing shut and cut off the nagging female voice from the other end. The part about his being busy was something of a white lie; there was always college, and Roger was fairly sure that that was where he was driving very slowly to now with one hand placed casually on the wheel and the other tossing the phone onto the seat opposite him, but hell, it was a sunny day, the girls were scantily clad and their boyfriends distracted, and he'd be damned if he'd waste it cooped up listening to some old jerk waffle about a bunch of other old jerks in a book written by, hey presto, yet another old jerk. As he turned the corner, Roger surveyed the leafy green suburb through the slight darkening tint of sunglasses, everything appearing more intense and dangerous and, hell, just plain sexy than it had without them. Now, this was what he liked to call living life to the full. Watching as a gaggle of tanned girls walked by and stared at first Roger and then his car, he made to wink and remembered that it couldn't be seen through the shades. Damn it, even looking cool had its downsides.

Still, Roger loved the summer, and not just because it gave his poser self a cast-iron excuse to wear sunglasses without looking all metrosexual. It was that time of year when, hello, no-one actually gave a damn about pretty much anything, and that was how he liked it. As a decided bonus, no-one half decent wanted to commit in the summer, you could have a new girl every week and no-one would think any the worse of you.. hell, you could have several at once and no-one would mind, as long as you had the decency to at least pretend to try and hide it, a little. High school girls were the best overall, since they were just plain innocence combined with sex on legs, it had to be said. A few of the ones in college seemed to think he was 'immature' and needed to 'settle down' and maybe even 'not feel free to very publicly hit on one girl when on a date with another'. Roger could be sly about that kind of thing, he just didn't see why he should bother. He'd made a stab at commitment a few times before if the girl was something out of the ordinary, but high school girls just plain weren't. They were so interchangeable it hurt. They were pretty, all of them, but you couldn't tell one from the other so why restrict yourself to some random choice who was as replaceable as a condom? Still, even though they were by no means worth fidelity, Roger had to admit they had their uses, and a reasonably attractive college guy with a car always had major pulling power around high schools.

In fact, he was fairly sure he was driving towards his old place, Diagon Prep. Yeah, it was a worthless dump and Roger had been glad to see the back of it, but high school had a major component that college didn't: cheerleaders. Adoration of the pop-pom wielding vixens was by no means a Davis family trait, but as far as Roger was concerned, membership of the cheerleading squad was like an ultimate badge of having passed the hotness and, ahem, flexibility test. It wasn't that he was some perverted old guy looking to pick up a younger girl or two; it was that he was some perverted young guy looking to pick up a younger girl or two. It wasn't an especial priority of his, though. The girls could wait, for now, because after phoning Jessabelle, no, Jessica.. and Stephanie, and what's-her-face-began-with-M-ended-with-y or whatever it was, he'd had quite enough of their annoying voices. Roger deigned to just drive past, go where the wind took him, or something along similar old hippy saying sort of lines.. but then he spotted Nick. The guy was cool, as car-obsessed people went, purely because Roger had been friends with him for years but yet never seen him hitting on Tracey, so partially out of boredom and partially out of friendship, he pulled over and rolled down the window of his car and pushed down his sunglasses a little to get a better look at Nick.

"Dude, can I have a smoke?" he asked in an ever so polite and refined greeting, cutting to the chase by holding out a hand through the window upon noticing the pack. Despite the abundant money his parents had always provided him with, Roger was nothing if not a free-loader, more because it was just plain fun than anything else. "So what the hell are you doing in this dump, anyway, you crazy bastard?" Roger scanned the crowds for a moment, dismissing each and every person with a flick of eyelash. Nothing out of the ordinary, girl-wise, and the underclassmen guys just needed to go fuck themselves, plain and simple, so they weren't cool for hanging out with by a long shot. "Dropping by to relive the memories?" he suggested sarcastically, knowing full well that the day Nick fondly remembered high school as anything other than a place to pick up girls was the day pigs flew. "Nostalgia, dare I say? Well, ain't that touching."

[Nick Mancini]

Exhaling slowly, nicotine-laced smoke coming up in a cloud around him, Nick view the world through the tint of expensive sunglasses, the darkened vision the glasses offered being no impediment to his girl-watching activities. Apart from allowing him to ogle all he liked in comparative anonymity and without any threat of slapping by the more hypocritically feminist chicks who practically burst out of tight-fitting halter tops with necklines plunging down to their navels yet had the audacity to throw hissy fits at ‘chauvinist pigs who stared at their breasts’; the sunglasses looked undeniably cool and were part of the whole package, practically mandatory when one was wearing black denim jeans as tight fitting as Nick currently was. And of course, almost everything was about image, Nick had learnt that from a very early age when he had watched the family chauffeur open the door for his father, dapper and formidable in a tailor-made Armani suit, and realised that the limo and the suit and even the expensive leather of the briefcase had more purpose than simply looking good, but were part of his father’s means to intimidate and impress his business rivals. No, Nick fully understood the power of image, had spent his entire high-school career perfecting his outward persona (as if there was anything remotely near as constructive to be doing during class, this was after all the boy who had managed to con his then girlfriend to give him a blowjob during English), and he knew perfectly well that his image worked exactly the way he wanted it to, did exactly what it was intended to. What, you might ask, was the purpose behind Nick’s careful construction? Well, the answer was fricking obvious. It got him laid.

And, in all honesty, high-school wasn’t the worst place one could go in this shit-hole of a town to pick up one-nighters (not of course that this was his intention, he knew full well he had a girlfriend he against all odds actually cared quite a bit about). Sure, the girls were annoying and pathetically flirty and half of them were so inexperienced as to be completely boring in the sack and they had the irritating tendency to insist in believing that just because he’d shagged them meant he was going to stick around, but there was a flip side. What had always been irresistible to Nick was that remnant of wide-eyed innocence tinged with a burgeoning sexuality, that intricate balance between sweetness and rebellion that brought out all the primal instincts and upped the switch on his charm. And there was nowhere better to find that sort of thing than at high-school- college girls tended to be smarter, more world-wise, and just as likely to use you as you were to use them, not that Nick really minded being used- Nick Mancini, veritable Sex God and number one sex toy, didn’t sound all that shabby at all. But back to the point. High school girls were all the same, leggy and starved-thin with push-up bras to maximise cleavage, skirts hiked up far enough to provide a decent view of arse, low-slung jeans tugged so far down the tease of a g-string was visible up top. And completely, utterly, amusingly desperate, requiring not so much as a look in their general direction before they were practically begging to get to the bedroom. And, even better, Nick had found that high-school girls did exactly what he wanted them to, their self-esteems shot so low they’d turn to all manner of deviant things just to ensure his interest for a couple of pleasure-filled hours.

Yes, he knew he was an arrogant, sex-obsessed bastard, he wore the sledge ‘wanker’ like a badge of pride, because really, what sane college guy was actually going to reprimand him on achieving such an impressive history of sexual exploits? Nick had long past the point of gaining notches on the old bedpost, because in real terms there was no longer a big enough bedpost to bear all the notches; really it was all manner of surprising he had never picked up any sort of STD’s, but then that was the beauty of life, which had decided to bless him a thousand times over. As he caught a couple of decent looking birds doing a fairly abysmal job at pretending they weren’t blatantly staring at him or his car (didn’t really matter either way, both of them were so goddamn gorgeous) he stretched slightly, the fabric of his shirt tightening, taut against well-defined muscles, before taking another slow drag from his cigarette. The girls giggled behind their hands, something Nick had always hated because it not only looked but sounded incredibly stupid, and he lost interest immediately, just in time to hear the purr of a motor as a car came up beside his. Nick didn’t even need to look to know exactly who it was, having known Roger for years and being the absolute rev-head he was, he could identify the sound of Roger’s car with no difficulty at all. Smooth, well-oiled, but nowhere near as beautiful as his own.

"Dude, can I have a smoke?"

Oh, the beauty of friendship, it was one of the universal constants of the world that Nick could depend on Roger to be a shameless scabber, to snitch cigarettes and booze and leftover girls from him, probably because he simply wasn’t cool enough to be able to get his own. Turning his head slightly to look directly at his old mate, through his awesome shades of course (again, far cooler than anything Roger would ever own), his lips twitched into a smirk, before holding up the box. “Fucking free-loader,” he said, amiably, not that he had ever minded at all. As Roger retrieved his own cigarette, Nick snapped the box closed, thumb running over the rough cardboard, not bothering to put it back in the glovebox yet while he knew that one or both of them were going to need another one soon. “Dropping by to relive the memories? Nostalgia, dare I say? Well, ain't that touching." “You’re so full of shit, man,” he replied amusedly, turning back to check out a couple of girls on the lawns with their skirts practically non-existent all in the name of tanning. “Does that sentimental crap work on anything?”