Untitled Story About Embarrassing Consequences

Her stomach clenches and she desperately holds her mouth shut, hands clamped tight over her thin surgical mask. Some of the other passengers glance at her; she’s breaking public transit’s unspoken agreement, drawing attention to herself. It’s fucking embarrassing. It’s really not helping.

The vomit, when it finally comes bubbling up, is a thousand gooey pearls. They collect in the space between her lips and the mask, spurting out around its edges each time her throat spasms, thick slime insinuating its way through the mask’s fibers to stain her hands with filth. Her stomach is tight and insistent; her thighs ache.

Someone starts to say something as the train screeches into a station—she doesn’t know which one, it doesn’t matter—and disgusted laughter chases her out into the humid summer night. Another spasm hits her before she can get off the platform, and she falls to her knees, her hands braced against the filthy concrete. Her entire body shakes as it rejects its contents; she doesn’t hear the train doors close, but she can feel the remaining passengers’ eyes on her as it departs.

She really hopes that they can’t see how hard she is.

She’d had to yell over the music to be heard, but somehow the low, breathy voice answering her managed to slide directly into her mind—and her nervous system—completely unimpeded. She was six drinks in, a golden haze settling across her thoughts, so this didn’t strike her as unusual. Even if she’d been sober she would have overlooked quite a few abnormalities for the attention of the gorgeous woman sitting next to her, matching her drink for drink.

“Melissa, lissa,” she rolls the word, “what a pretty name.”

“Thanks! Picked it out myself.”

“Mmm,” her voice was almost wistful as she spoke, each word tugging at something deep inside Melissa. “In beauty’s fairest pride / Summer expands her heart so wide / The Sun no more in clouds enshrined / Darts all her glories unconfined …”

“What’s that?”

“Nothing, nothing,” the woman stretched; Melissa’s dilated eyes are anything but respectful. “Just feeling my years.”

The bar was too noisy for an awkward silence to linger, too full of jostling, moving bodies, fragrant with sweat and perfume, too drenched with alcohol’s golden hues. So Melissa took one last swig of her drink, slammed it down on the bar, and took her shot.

“So d’ya live near here?”

“Oh,” a sparkling laugh, a hand on her thigh, “very near. Would you like to see?”

“Fuck yeah!”

The filth clings to Melissa as she stumbles to her feet, unwilling to let go of her. Hot and alive against the scrapes on her hands and knees, cold and slimy where it clings to her skirt’s fringes and scatters in stray droplets across her blouse. Somehow it’s managed to absolutely saturate her socks; probably her shoes will be a lost cause by the time the night is done. A long, damp walk home awaits her.

She spits. It doesn’t help.

“… uh, miss? Are you okay?”

Some guy, the type her eyes skip over when she sees them. Unobjectionable. Dressed for the heat, which isn’t a bad look for him at all. A student, maybe, even if he doesn’t have the right air of unbroken optimism.

She glares at him. “The fuck do you want?”

“Uh, nothing, I just,” he gestures with one hand, holding something. She squints: a plastic bottle, half-full of water. “Do you want some? To rinse your mouth, wash your hands, whatever. I don’t need it, I’m just a block away from here.”

She snatches it, almost drops it trying to get the lid off. The slime gets everywhere; she hopes he won’t want it back after. She swirls, swishes, spits, repeats. Doesn’t help much, not with the taste and not with the texture, but it’s something. She pours the rest on her hands, and it doesn’t help much there either.

He’s still standing there, looking at her. “Thanks, yeah? Now fuck off.”

“Uh. Do you need any help, to, like—”

“No.” Her stomach growls; she tries not to wince. “Now fuck off.”

He glances back at her as he leaves and she flips him off. Better to be a bitch than risk him noticing anything more than he already has.

The woman’s place really was very near indeed.

Melissa pauses to retch every few blocks, standing in the darkness between cold puddles of streetlight. The spasms are further apart, less violent; it oozes up to coat her teeth and pool on her tongue, a far cry from the overwhelming spurts before. Alone, with nothing else to focus on, the taste fills her mind; sharp yellow bile and gym-sock ammonia, a meaty sweetness dancing over it all.

She hasn’t yet dared to pop one of the pearls between her teeth. Every possibility is distressing.

Each step leaves a slimy trail behind her. It’s almost like her shoes are getting wetter the further she goes, their dense slimy coat picking up dirt and trash and twigs. It will be a miracle if she can get them clean. She liked those shoes, too.

The slime gets on everything she touches, too. Her skirt is definitely ruined, with how she’s been kneading it between her hands, trying to keep it pulled down, perfectly flat. Thank god there’s no one out here to notice.

Her underwear is ruined too, for an entirely different but no less irritating reason.

It was hard to think with the woman’s voice humming through her body. The room was spinning and Melissa was spinning with it, long slow revolutions, and the woman was everywhere she looked, her body running like hot wax. She was all over the cheap twin bed, chest heaving, eyes inviting; on the wall her legs curled and spread, the space between her thighs split again and again, a dense river delta ushering Melissa’s eyes up towards dew-speckled curls. She was the floor, the dresser, the air in Melissa’s lungs; her hands were on her, wrapped around her, inside her, slick and demanding—

“Another drink, dear?”, she’d asked when they stumbled inside, already mid-kiss. Her hands were already starting to tease apart Melissa’s clothing, unbuttoning her blouse and tugging at her skirt, pushing up her sports bra to tug at the budding flesh beneath.

“Sure,” Melissa answered, cocky, grinding against the woman’s thigh, “why not?”

Her hands were too busy kneading the woman’s ass to take the can, loving the way the hot flesh spread and split under her touch, so she made space between their lips to pour lukewarm beer directly into Melissa’s mouth.

“Wha—”, she sputtered, “fuck, warn me first!”

The next splash mostly missed her lips, ran down her cheek and dripped onto her half-open blouse, her nose full of its acrid, hoppy scent. The woman laughed, not unkindly. “Aww, but you’re cute when you’re startled! Besides,” she grinned, “now I get to lick you clean.”

Melissa is not the first to admit that she’s a bad navigator. Several of her exes have made this point to her, often while trying to find their way out of an unpaved back-roads detour or a labyrinthine network of alleys that absolutely would not be permitted to exist in a sane city. Even so, following the train tracks seemed like a good idea—they run right down the middle of the street, and her home was only, what, five stops away? A few miles. Easy. Just walk in a straight line.

Getting lost would be profoundly embarrassing.

So, obviously, Melissa is lost.

She must have gotten turned around one of the times she paused in the dark, walked down a side street instead of right ahead. A stupid, embarrassing mistake to make, but she’s distracted by pointedly not thinking about what happened a few nights ago. It was just another drunken hookup. A good one, sure, maybe even, now she has hindsight on her side, a profoundly weird one, but just that.

And whatever stomach bug she’s dealing with can’t be related. It doesn’t even taste like the woman’s come.

Never got her name, did I?, Melissa thinks. Not even her number. Damn.

Memories swirl across her skin. Soft, slick fingers, wet mouths, something pressing into her, stretching her, feeling the woman’s heartbeat through her entire body. She’d been unable to move by the end, held aloft, wrapped in those tight, soft arms—

She shakes herself, flinging the phantom sensations off into the darkness, and abruptly realizes exactly where she is.

She’d been an absolute mess the morning after. Woke up to find herself wet and sticky all over, reeking of sweat and musk, sprawled out on a sheet mottled with stains both old and fresh. The room smelled like stale sex, she was leaking cum, and her stomach felt swollen.

When she’d finally stumbled out of the bedroom, naked except for her rapidly staining underwear, the woman was reading in a small dining nook, a bowl of oatmeal cooling in front of her. Her smile was more like a leer; Melissa could see the way her eyes crawled over her body, and where they lingered.

“Good morning, ’lissa. Want some breakfast?”

“Morning. Uh, where’s your bathroom?”

“Door on your right.” Her nose twitched. “Feel free to shower, I suppose.”

“Yeah, thanks. Sorry about, uh.”

“The mess? Don’t worry, dear, it’s entirely my fault. It’s so nice not to have to control myself, you know?”

Melissa grumbled something noncommittal on her way to the bathroom. The hot shower didn’t solve all of her problems, but for a few moments it seemed to come close.

It got late while Melissa was walking. Later than it should be, really, even on a Tuesday. The bar—not quite her neighborhood bar, but close enough to be her usual haunt—is already closed for the night, not that she’d have gone inside if it was open. Its shuttered windows and the warm lanterns dangling on either side of its door are just a landmark, a pin pressed into her map to hold its shifting lies in place.

So. Either she walks a mile to get home, or …

Or …

She blushes as she considers the other possibility. Showing up at a hookup’s door on a Tuesday night, looking as fucked up as she does, with whatever is going on with her stomach …

It would be rude. It would be intolerably embarrassing. She’s not that down bad, no matter how good the sex was, and even if she was she’d

No.

She’ll walk straight home, and hope she has enough energy left to get clean before she passes out.

After the shower, a long time sitting hunched on the toilet, and a cup of the strongest coffee Melissa had ever tasted, she found herself lingering by the door, as dressed and ready to go as she seemed likely to get, putting off her walk home.

“So. What are you, anyway?”

It wasn’t the best question. It wasn’t even really the one Melissa wanted to ask, just the one that shoved to the front of her mind as she was opening her mouth; embarrassing, even if the woman’s startled expression and burst of laughter tugged at something inside her chest.

“… uh. Sorry?”

“No, no, it’s just been quite a while since anyone last dared to ask. I slept too long, I suppose.”

“… uh,” she said, tilting her head and starting to wonder if she was being wound up, “what?”

“Mmm. How about this, dear ’lissa; I’ll tell you if you find me again.”

“Yeah? That’ll be easy,” she waved her phone, “got GPS and everything on here.”

The woman’s warm laughter followed Melissa out the door.

Melissa’s 90% sure she has the right door. It’s an old-looking one, decorated with elaborate carvings, utterly out of place on the matte-white, newly-gentrified cube that she’s pretty sure the woman lived in. 70% sure, minimum.

She’s down to 50-50 by the time the light inside flicks on and the woman opens the door, resplendent in an old t-shirt that reaches down just far enough to leave it obvious that it’s the only thing she’s wearing. She yawns, mouth demurely covered, as she blinks at Melissa.

“Who is … oh! ’lissa, isn’t it?” A smile tugs at her lips. “I wondered if you’d …”

She trails off as Melissa steps into the light proper; she’d been lurking at the edge of it, ready to flee if she’d picked the wrong door. Her eyes flicker over the disheveled woman; the iridescent stains all over her clothing, the little pearly beads clinging to her hands, the squishy mess of her shoes, the erection tenting her skirt. Concern and confusion flicker across her face; her lips purse, her shoulders slump.

“Oh. … oh! I forgot to wear a condom, didn’t I.”

“What, you have some weird STI I should know about?”

“No, nothing like that, just, uh. I should make sure none of them have implanted, dear, I don’t think you’re ready for that.”

“… WHAT?!”