Aftermath by Nicole Larson
My head was pounding--absolutely pounding--when I woke up. A spear of sunlight had shot through an errant slat in my vertical blinds and lanced right into my eye, waking me up. The pain was close to unbearable, but I didn't have the strength to stand, or even move, other than to drape a hand over my eyes. I told myself to go back to sleep. Too early to deal with a hangover, especially one of the epic proportions this one seemed to be taking on. It was as I was falling back under I noticed movement next to me. Strange, because I've been alone in this bed for the last six months. I took my arm away from my eyes, and somehow managed to crook my head around and coax my eyes open.
What I saw was easily identifiable as a woman's hip, naked and turned away from me. Next to that another, and then another. This woke me up a bit, and I forced myself to sit upright and gauge the situation.
When I did manage to get myself upright, I noticed that I was naked too. Jaybird naked. I thought about covering myself up, but just didn't have the energy. I sighed a little bit when I noticed that it was my friend Stacy next to me, not some stranger. Stacy was also naked, and next to her, locked in a comfortable sleeping embrace were Chloe and Natalie. Chloe's hand was cupping Natalie's breast, and Natalie's hand lay limply on Chloe's hip.
What the hell had happened last night?
There were vague memories, coalescing and solidifying as I worked to remember them. First thing I remembered was that yesterday was Chloe's 22nd birthday (she was the youngest of our little group). I remembered the four of us having dinner at the sushi restaurant. The sake bombs and spicy tuna. Then the Wheel House for more drinks, then down to Broad Street for more club hopping. Dancing, dancing, dancing. Stacy, who had just lost like ten pounds on some diet she was always raving about, constantly tugging at her purple tube-top that was now a size too big for her. Natalie, in the corner with that guy that the rest of us swore she was going to go home with. I remembered how close we were dancing to the speakers. How these guys kept buying us drinks, and we gladly accepted them, but no further offers. We closed down the club, and took a cab back to my apartment, and from there, things seemed to get more and more fuzzy.
By now, I mustered the energy to swing my naked legs over the side of my crowded bed and stand up. There were clothes strewn everywhere. Not just the normal pile of clothes that always littered my room, but the other girls' clothes as well. There was the strapless yellow dress birthday girl Chloe had been wearing, and Stacy's purple tube top. There were the tight black jeans that I'd worn and my underwear were still inside them.
What in the world had happened here?
I didn't remember anything weird going on, but I didn't remember much of anything after we got back here. There was a vague, blurry image of Stacy and Chloe kissing, but that seemed to be out in the living room, each of them were holding a drink and the music was still kicking.
I tugged a fresh pair of panties on, then slipped into my pink robe and sashed the belt around my waist.
Leaving the others in the bedroom, I made my slow way to the bathroom where I gathered up my robe and sat down on the toilet to relieve my aching bladder. I cradled my pounding head in my hands, toying with the idea of going back to sleep. The bathroom was littered (I saw when I gathered up the courage to open my eyes) with further strange clues from last night. A pair of blue panties lay balled up in the corner, next to the skirt Natalie had had on, and a can of my Pure Silk shaving cream stood by the sink next to my Gillette Venus razor. The counter was an absolute mess and the mirror was streaked with finger- and hand-prints.
Had I left this out from before we'd met for sushi? Had I shaved my pits and forgot to put the can away?
I finished urinating and wiped myself. I tried to flush the toilet quietly so as not to wake up any of the others, and realized as I was about to push down the plunger how stupid it was to try to flush a toilet quietly. I kept the door closed until the toilet cycled and was again quiet. Only then did I venture out.
I delicately tiptoed past my three sleeping friends (check that--my three sleeping NAKED friends), and made my way to the kitchen, my pounding head thinking of nothing more than a debilitating need for coffee.
As I started the coffee maker, my admittedly hangover-addled mind whirled trying to come up with a solution to the puzzle in the other room. What had happened that made us all fall asleep in my bed totally naked? Had we decided to go swimming in the middle of the night and the passed out on the bed not wanting to sleep in wet clothes? Had we been in the process of changing for bed and just said fuck it, let's sleep naked? Had it been some kind of weird truth or dare thing?
The kitchen was a mess. Sticky red strawberry daiquiri residue was everywhere, and the kitchen was littered with half-drunk glasses of the stuff. I toyed with the idea of drinking off the rest of one, to test that old "hair of the dog" theory, but the idea of drinking more alcohol was so repugnant to me I just poured all the stuff down the drain.
As I poured, I caught a whiff of the stuff, and like magic, like being smacked in the head with a tennis racket, an image came to me. The four of us dancing to loud house music in my living room. Natalie grinding against Stacy, hands on hips, and Chloe dancing behind me with her hands on my breasts. I remembered the feeling of her caressing me. How it felt kind of weird and bad and yet really good at the same time.
Then: the unthinkable thought. The perfect solution to the puzzle in the other room, the one that had been staring me in the face the whole time, but I hadn't wanted to see it.
We'd had sex!
All four of us? Together?
It was the only logical explanation. But how had that happened? I never remember wanting to be with another woman, or even being curious! How had we gone from sushi and drinks to a four-way lesbian orgy on my bed?
The coffee maker hissed and gurgled, signaling the completion of its cycle, and I turned dreamily to shut the machine off. I poured myself a cup in my favorite coffee mug (it has a picture of Garfield on it looking cross, and a caption that reads, "I don't do mornings." I sipped blankly at the coffee, relishing the bitterness and the aroma, trying not to think any further about what had happened last night.
But the harder I tried to deny them, the more the images kept floating back at me. Chloe and I kissing. Natalie and Chloe kissing. Stacy with a hand down the front of Natalie's skirt, Natalie craning her neck backward to kiss Stacy. Chloe getting bold and putting her hand down the front of my tight black jeans. Me--Oh, God--realizing it was too tight for her and unbuttoning my jeans to give her easier access.
The sound of the toilet flushing broke my reverie, and soon, Stacy came around the corner, strawberry blonde hair an absolute mess. She was holding her head in a way that said her hangover was as bad or worse than mine was, and she was clad in the hockey jersey Tad had given me before we left high schools for different colleges. "Hey," she said, tucking a loose strand of hair behind an ear.
"Hey," I said, "want some coffee?"
"I'd kill for a cup of coffee right now," she said, her voice slurred with sleep and hangover. She sat down in one of the three barstools at the kitchen's breakfast bar.
"Well," I said, "luckily it won't come to that. I have a nice big pot right here."
"Well stop yammering and pour me some."
As I poured, I wondered if Stacy had remembered anything from last night, or if she was still in a hangover fog. Would she ever remember? Or would it come to her some time this afternoon? Would any of us remember? Would I be the only one who knew what had happened?
"Some night, huh?" she said.
I handed her the mug of coffee and she breathed deep of the steaming black liquid. I raised my eyebrows and nodded non-committally while she drank.
"How much do you remember?" I asked, immediately regretting that I had.
"I remember dinner, I remember the club. Not much else."
"Nothing about after we came back here?"
"No," she said and sipped at her coffee.
Pushing myself past a sudden fear, I asked, "Did it seem strange to you that we were all naked in bed together?"
"Yeah," she said. "I did wonder about that a little bit."
"Do you remember dancing in the living room?"
She turned to look behind her at the living room, probably hoping it would spark some kind of memory. Obviously it did. She turned back to me as realization slowly washed over her face.
"Oh, my God," she said simply, and raised a hand to her mouth. "Oh, my God!" she repeated, then, "what did we do?"
I shrugged.
We sat there in silence for some time while we sipped at our coffee and had our own private thoughts. After a long time, during which our eyes had locked and then turned away a few times, she stood up and came out into the kitchen to refill her coffee mug. "It wasn't bad, though," she said finally.
I had been thinking about this very thing. Shocking, yes. disturbing, yes. But bad? No. What I could remember of it, nothing bad had happened at all.
A naughty smile crept over her mouth. "Especially when you and I were..." She trailed off as if she wanted me to finish her sentence.
"Were what?" I asked. "I don't remember much after the living room."
She waved off my question and sipped at her coffee. "So you don't remember Big Red?" she grinned wolfishly as she said this.
Embarrassment shot through me. "No!"
"Yep," she said. "We were all on the bed and you leaned over and reached into your nightstand and pulled out Big Red."
Big Red was, of course, my name for the dildo that I kept in my nightstand. My sister had bought it for me when I was still in high school because she was old enough to go into the porno shop and I wasn't. It was kind of a gag gift at first, but after a while, it turned into my regular date. But I had never told anyone about it! I had even told my sister that I'd thrown it away! I was mortified to think that the other girls knew about Big Red. Almost more than the idea that I'd had sex with them!
"Jesus!" I said, hiding my face in my free hand.
"Don't be embarrassed!" Stacy said. "We had a lot of fun with it, as I recall."
She could have told me seven hundred times not to be embarrassed, and I still would have. "How did it all start?" I asked, eager to change the subject, although not sure I wanted to know any more.
"Hmm," Stacy said, putting her finger to her temple and thinking. "As I recall, we got back here and you started making daiquiris, and the rest of us started dancing."
"Yeah."
"We started drinking more, and we were all kinda dancing together, then we kinda paired off, and..." she trailed off and I rememebered enough to piece some of it together.
Stacy and Natalie had been dancing together, facing each other, grinding their crotches on each others' legs.
"Did Nat kiss you first or did you kiss her?" I asked.
"I think I kissed her, but she wasn't exactly putting up much resistance." This was strange because if I'd picked anyone I know who was less likely to end up in a drunken night of passion with three other women, it would have been Natalie. She was always railing on and on about family values and how same-sex marriage was against God's law, and all that. To hear that Stacy kissed Natalie, and that Natalie hadn't pulled away at the very least says something about the strange energy in my apartment last night.
Chloe and I watched them kissing, while we moved together, her hand on my hip, my arm over my head, groping in her hair. The air was dense in the room, the sexual energy mounting. I recalled Chloe putting a finger in the waistband of my jeans and pulling out the strap of my thong, hooking it over a finger and playing with it while she kissed my neck. I remembered watching Natalie and Stacy kissing. By now, as I'd recalled earlier, Chloe's hand was all the way down the front of my pants, struggling against the tight material, and I was unbuttoning and unzipping my jeans to give her an easier time of reaching in.
Stacy continued, "Then I took off Nat's top, and she pulled off mine."
I recalled the looks they were giving each other, standing in front of each other in their bras, Stacy's black strapless and Nat's yellow lacy Frederick's number. Furst in surprise that things had gone so far, thrilled that the excitement was mounting.
Chloe had one hand in my pants pushing gently but firmly on my clit, and the other feeling my breasts, and I realized I'd had enough, and I wanted to join in. I turned around and kissed Chloe, and immediately my top was off as well, and I was pulling Chloe's strapless yellow dress down, exposing her naked breasts, and then my mouth was on them, and she was fingering my nipples.
"You guys were really going at it," Stacy said, dreamily. "We didn't want to be left out."
Yes, it was about that point that Stacy and Natalie came over to us and joined in. The four of us stood there, each in some state of undress, kissing, groping, fondling.
"Then, someone said lets go to the bedroom, and all of a sudden, we were in your room. You were pulling Chloe's dress off, and I was taking off Natalie's skirt, and Chloe was trying to pull your jeans off."
We heard the toilet flush, and within seconds, Natalie appeared, fully dressed in what she'd had on last night, her frilly black skirt and black top with the little silvery highlights. Her hair was a mess, and she looked like she was in as bad a shape as Stacy and I were. She saw us standing in the kitchen, and gave us a dark, accusing look.
"Hey, Nat," Stacy offered, taken aback a bit by the look Nat was giving us.
Nat, who not six hours ago, was on her elbows and knees, commanding Stacy to pound her harder with Big Red.
She stood there, fixing us with that look. That half-disgusted, half accusing look. She looked--and maybe this was just me--like she'd aged about ten years overnight.
"Coffee?" I offered, holding out a mug.
By way of answering, she turned and ran out of my apartment, slamming the door shut behind her.
Neither Stacy or I could find the words to say. Natalie's accusing stare had kind of put us out of the moment. I wondered if she'd ever talk to us again, I even allowed myself to wonder what would happen if she brought rape charges against us. By the look on Stacy's face, I could see that was where the direction of her thoughts was taking her as well.
There was a long moment where Stacy and I sat there silently, thinking about the consequences of last night. It never occurred to us that things might get wierd between us. It never entered my mind that friendships might end over it. But, it wasn't anything we could deal with now. Stacy broke the strange moment by asking, "Do you remember when we were on the bed?"
I struggled to think, but couldn't come up with anything, so I shook my head.
"You and me? On the bed?"
"Where were Nat and Chloe?"
"In the bathroom."
I did recall an image of looking at the bathroom door, where the light was on. I seemed to think I was on my back, and Stacy was on top of me, whispering something, but it was all too fuzzy and hard to resolve.
Once again, we heard the toilet flush, and knew that this had to be Chloe, the birthday girl. She emerged from my bedroom a few moments later, clad only in the black g-string thong she'd had on under her yellow party dress. She paused by Stacy, and put her arms around her. Her voice was thick with sleep and hangover when she said, "God, I thought I smelled coffee. Gimme!"
I turned to pour her a cup, and she and Stacy shared a good morning kiss. "How was your birthday?" Stacy asked.
"Fucking amazing," Chloe said. "We should do that every year." As I handed her her coffee, she amended her previous statement. "Every WEEK." She carefully sampled the coffee, and then put it down, and made her way around the breakfast bar into the kitchen, where she put her arms around my neck and kissed me. "You didn't get a good morning kiss," she explained.
We sipped at our coffee more, and then Stacy said, "So Nat left here in a big hurry."
Chloe nodded. "I wondered how she was going to take what happened last night."
"Yeah, not too well," Stacy said. "What were you guys doing in the bathroom? You were in there for a long time."
"Jeez," she said, gathering her thoughts. She sidled up against me, swaying back and forth as she thought. I put my hands on her hips and noticed Stacy looking at my hands. Was that jealousy I saw in her eyes? Suddenly, I remembered what Stacy had been whispering to me while Chloe and Nat were in the bathroom. Stacy was on top of me, grinding into me, whispering in my ear, "I love you, I love you, I love you," over and over again. "I've wanted this for the longest time."
"Well," Chloe started, while I tried to process that little memory. "We were in the bedroom, and you were taking off Nat's skirt, and sombebody--was it you Stace?--said something about how they were glad they'd just shaved this morning and Nat said, 'Sure I shaved my legs too,' and you said, 'Not my legs, my pussy,' and Nat said something like 'Oh God, you shave your pussy?' and we all looked at her like, 'You dont?' and then I was pulling her into the bathroom and I hoisted her up on the sink and found your shaving stuff and I pulled off her panties and I spread her legs wide apart and started shaving her."
This, while Stacy and I were on the bed, Stacy whispering in my ear how much she loved and wanted me.
"I shaved her bald, and then I started eating her out, and let me tell you this: she loved it!"
Difficult to imagine this from Nat, the most reserved person I'd met the whole time I'd been in college, but not impossible, given her eagerness earlier in the evening.
Chloe continued, "She started pouring her daiquiri down her front, so it would dribble between her boobs, and it kinda pooled in her belly button and then dripped down into her pussy, and I licked up every drop of it. At one point, she said something like 'What would you do if I pissed in your face right now?' and I said, 'I'd stop eating your pussy,' and she said, 'Okay, then I won't'"
Stacy nodded. "You guys were in there for a long time."
"Yeah," I added, "but whatever mood she was in last night sure didn't last. She all but gave us the Evil Eye when she left this morning."
Chloe waved her hand in the air. "She'll be fine," she said. "I'll have a talk with her, and she'll be back to normal on Monday."
I certainly hoped so. Apart from the idea that Nat might say we raped her, I didn't want to lose her as a friend.
Chloe finished off her coffee and detached herself from me, saying, "Well, I got a paper to write, I should get going." She kissed me again, and said, "Thanks for the best birthday ever." She stopped by Stacy and gave her a kiss as well. I had a sudden image come to me from last night: the top of Chloe's face peering out from the top of my pubic mound, our eyes locked, and our fingers knitted together.
Chloe left the kitchen to get dressed, and Stacy and I sat silently. I couldn't get her voice out of my head, repeating over and over in time with her movements, "I love you, I love you, I love you."
"I should go too," Stacy said, suddenly, and stood up to leave.
"You don't have to," I told her. "We could sit and watch TV and nurse our hangovers."
"No," she said, "I think I should." She moved toward the bedroom, but I reached over the counter and grasped her arm.
I love you, I love you, I love you. "Please stay," I said.
Our eyes met and she was the first to break contact. "Okay," she said.
Chloe left, and I noticed the look she shot Stacy. Something between "Check you out!" and "Go for it!" Once she was gone, Stacy and I sat back on the couch, and settled in.
Soon, she rolled over on her side and lay back on the couch. Then, I was behind her, spooning her. Then, I was kissing her neck and venturing my hand up the hockey jersey she'd borrowed from me. Then, she rolled over, and we kissed face to face. Then, she was on her back and I was between her legs, and she was moaning with pleasure. Then, we were naked, and I was using Big Red on her. By sunset, we lay spent on the couch, huddling together.
The next morning, we woke up in my bed and got ready for school. Walking to my car hand in hand.
The End.