Did You Ever Get Stung? Ch. 02

*

After a weekend that reminded her exactly why everyone did make such a fuss about sex, the next two days passed in a weird daze that involved too long not seeing Lynsey and yet didn't really seem to amount to anything else. She could barely concentrate enough on her work to function, and spent far too much time staring out the window overlooking the river and remembering how she had reached up to undo the second bottom before raising her face into that blue-curtained gap to nuzzle between Lynsey's hanging breasts. They were so small and cute when she was lying down, it was a wonder how full they seemed like that. Jenna had only to close her eyes and she could taste them again, and hear the noises Lynsey made when she did. She was halfway to Lynsey's on Tuesday evening, striding briskly forward with her heart pounding in expectation, when she realised just how much of a daze she must have been in. She was going to ring to say she'd be there in fifteen minutes, when she realised her phone was dead flat. It must have been pipping away on its warning tone most of the day without her even noticing. Never mind, Lynsey's was bound to be working if they needed one.

She knew. As soon as she saw the woman in the stairwell she somehow knew, but her mind wouldn't accept the obvious conclusion. She ran up the stairs, telling herself that this was a communal space shared by half a dozen flats; and yet she already knew, before her thoughts even caught up with her eyes and realised how she knew.

Lynsey's voice answered her knock, telling her the door wasn't locked and to come in. She went inside and saw Lynsey crossing from bedroom to shower, stark naked save for the inevitable armband. Her voice was casually conversational.

"You're early."

Jenna felt sick. She leant against the wall for support and felt the floor shudder under her feet. She didn't need to see the tangled sheets or smell the sex on Lynsey's body, because somehow she already knew.

"Who was that? On the stairs?"

"Oh, did you bump into Sash?"

"Who?"

None of this made any sort of sense, least of all the matter of fact way that Lynsey continued about her business, turning on the shower to heat.

"Sasha. She's my girlfriend."

"And just what the fuck am I?"

The water shut off. Lynsey took a deep sigh and stepped back into the hallway, as unconcerned about her nudity as at being caught out.

"You're a lot of fun, Jenna, and I enjoy your company, so please don't be a pain in the arse about this."

"What about Sasha?"

"She doesn't mind at all, we've never been an exclusive deal."

Jenna didn't bother to ask any of the dozen hurt questions welling up inside her, didn't even bother to scream or sulk or try to make Lynsey understand any of it. She had finally caught up with herself, and the realisation made her nauseous. Sasha was alternative-looking - loud hair and nose ring and grungy jacket with the sleeves pulled back - the bracelet caught Jenna's eye because it didn't go with the rest. It was silver, and now she realised it was Celtic knotwork and a near perfect match. Too perfect a match for coincidence.

"She bought you that arm ring, didn't she?"

"Yeah, she did."

"Christ's sakes, you let me kiss it!"

"I liked you kissing it."

"Screw you, Lynsey, if you don't get what's wrong with that I'm not even going to try explaining."

Jenna walked out and slammed the door behind her, and refused to let herself cry until she was in the clean fresh air of the street.

*****

This time Lucy wasn't leaning back on the basin when she opened the door; she was standing right outside, and stepped one foot into the cubicle before Jenna had a chance to move.

"Excuse me. I already told you I'm not into that."

"Oh really..."

Jenna was angry: hurt, insulted, lied to and furious. She needed to take it out on someone and she hadn't liked Lucy from the beginning. She slammed the door on Lucy's knee, which Lucy didn't seem to notice. That was stupid, not to mention pointless unless she wanted to spend the rest of her life barricaded in a toilet. She gave up trying to break Lucy's leg and let the door swing back open.

"Get out of my way please."

"Sugar, I didn't bring us here in the first place... do you always sleep naked?"

"What the fuck business is that of yours?"

"Just curious..."

Lucy cleared her throat and waved her hand vaguely about at chest level. Jenna looked down at herself, she wasn't wearing any more than Lynsey had been in the flat.

"Oh Jesus Christ! What the..."

She wrapped her hands over as much as she could cover and shrank back into the corner. Despite the shock and violation, she seemed to find time to wonder why it didn't feel colder.

"OK, look: either you usually sleep naked, or you really want to screw me, or it's your sense of vulnerability and helplessness coming out. Flattering as the second would be, my money's on the third."

"Are you saying this is a dream or something?"

"Well... d'uh."

"I'm not naked, alright? I'm wearing pyjamas, because they're comfy and they go with a bottle of wine and bar of chocolate and crying myself to sleep."

... and if I can say that then apparently I'm buying this dream idea of yours. Jenna took what felt as if it was a deep breath and straightened herself up. She stared Lucy full in the eye as she pushed past her.

"Really want to go out there in the altogether? Even if we both know it isn't real?"

"Oh fuck."

Lucy took her jacket off and offered it to Jenna, who wrapped it round herself. It didn't quite meet enough at the front to conceal her groin.

"Might want to put your hand there, your fanny's showing."

"Thanks for the advice. What sort of word is that for a grown woman anyway?"

"It isn't. It's silly and childish and mocks your sexuality. See, that's what I do - give you a little dignity with one hand, chop it down with the other. I told you, I like playing games."

"Who the fuck are you?"

"Oh come on, Jen, try harder. Isn't the name even a teensy little clue there? I know nobody reads Faust in school anymore, but don't be even dimmer than you look."

"I've heard of Faust. I haven't signed anything."

"I'm always in the market, if you're looking to sell. Assuming you aren't, then we're back to playing games. I like to torment souls, it's kinda my day job. There's a thought, Jen - are you quite sure you aren't dead?"

"This is not happening to me."

"Of course it isn't, it's entirely impossible. Did you not enjoy getting exactly what you asked for?"

"Fuck you very much, I'm going now."

She turned her back on Lucy and walked towards the door. Of course... she should have know. Her feet worked the invisible treadmill and the door handle remained obstinately six inches beyond her reach. She stopped walking and turned back. Lucy was wearing her jacket again, arms folded and a smug look on her face as she idly surveyed Jenna's nakedness.

"You have a nasty mouth. If you can't be a nicely polite young lady then we're going to have to take your clothes away until you are, aren't we now? Oops, that's going to turn you on, isn't it?"

"No, this really isn't very attractive."

In fact it wasn't much of anything, neither sexual nor truly demeaning nor even scary now that she recognised it wasn't real. More than anything it was irritating. She knew she was arguing pointlessly with herself, she wanted to either wake up or slip deeper into sleep, to be done with this nonsense either way. But it would not let her go.

"Why don't you tell me the truth? What do you want? Anything in the world, anything whatsoever to get you off. Are you honestly telling me it would be kisses and cuddles?"

"Would that be so wrong?"

"Be kinda boring, actually, but the real problem would be with you not meaning it. The mucky corners of your mind, Jenna, are a lot muckier than that. Go on, shine a light in the dark places for us."

"You know what, what about you?"

"Me? Oh I would go for more exotic stuff than love."

"Such as?"

"Hmmm... let me see now. I'd like a dick, just for a couple of days for curiosity's sake - long weekend, five-star suite and room service, me, fit tight virgin girl and a pretty boy who knew how to suck me dry; I'd like the university women's hockey team fighting over me in a hot tub; porn star wearing nothing but a crop-top as she drives me across the desert in a Barracuda convertible. Nasty, decadent, hedonistic things."

"Do you have any idea how pathetic and banal that sounds?"

"Show me up. Do better."

Lucy smirked as if she had cream stuck in her whiskers. It was so very transparent, she wasn't even trying to manoeuvre Jenna into saying something, she was just playing with her to make it obvious she was playing.

"Why should I?"

"Because you know that I already know. We're having this conversation inside your mind, I know what you're thinking. And I know - and you know - that you want to say it out loud, because that is the whole point. What do you want, Jenna?"

"I want... I want to be taken and dominated; to be humiliated, degraded, given the excuse that I'm being forced and I don't really want it. I want to be pushed so hard I that I admit how much I do want."

"There, that wasn't so difficult, was it now?"

She came to with a start, feeling as if the duvet was crushing the life from her. Her pyjamas were soaked through with sweat, and more besides. The dream might not have done anything for her whilst she was inside it but she awoke so wet it chafed. She pulled them off and tossed them far enough across the bedroom that she couldn't smell them anymore. She was hot, sticky and palpitating, and her mind would not stop whirling through a kaleidoscope of explicit images: her face pressed to Lynsey's as they ground on each other and their eyes met in what she naively thought meant something; Lucy's grotesquely pornographic hermaphrodite threesome; everything in between... up to and including that equally nasty fantasy of her own that she had confided to Liz weeks before. She hung there for hours in the middle of the night, neither truly awake nor asleep with her imagination churning through dreams that were both lucid and lurid. It was like being in a fever that gave her no rest and constantly teased her. She gave in to the nagging physical temptation and rubbed herself sore but couldn't seem to come. She saw the dawn through the window and only fell asleep in time to make her late and woozy on the way to work.

God alone knew what had got into her - which was an ironic enough way for an agnostic to think about that ludicrous dream. She was obviously not possessed and she had, equally obviously, let Lynsey make a total fool of her. Was there any connection - beyond dire timing and uncanny coincidence - between what she had said to Lucy and what had happened afterwards? Impossible. Even if Lucy and Lynsey were some sick couple who screwed lovestruck girls over for kicks, there wasn't time for them to collude in setting her up. How long had elapsed between saying it to Lucy and bumping into Lynsey? Two minutes? Surely not more than five at the very outside? It was simply not credible.

And yet she could not shake off the feeling that Lucy was in some inexplicable way to blame for her own lamentable stupidity. She needed to confront her. If for no other reason that someone needed to be shouted and sworn at, and she didn't want to break her own heart by doing it to Lynsey's face. After work she went down to Ferry Lane to pick a fight with someone, almost anyone would do.

Lucy wasn't in the pub, thankfully neither were Lynsey or even Sasha. There were a few faces she vaguely recognised from last Friday, nobody she knew at all. She was standing in the doorway, just about to go back into the street, when something caught her eye. She couldn't say what it was, but it made her turn back just as the woman in conversation over by the pool table glanced towards the door.

She must have been a couple of years younger than Jenna herself: perversely delicate in appearance despite her skinny black jeans, donkey jacket and No.2 cut. Except for her fair hair and thin eyebrows, Jenna could almost have taken her for those first childhood memories of Sinéad on her brother's wall. She seemed to lose interest in whoever she was talking to. Her hand came out of her coat pocket and very deliberately pointed at Jenna. Even more slowly and carefully, it twisted through a quarter-circle and she gestured towards herself. No doubt that it was beckoning, but it was also thoroughly blatant in its sexual implication.

Who the fuck did she think she was to stand there in front of the whole bar and mime at fingering her? Bloody cheek! She was overdue a piece of Jenna's mind.

*****

"Do you want something from me?"

"Jack. With ice, thanks for asking."

Jenna laughed, despite her anger. The combination of wide-eyed innocence and casual cockiness took the wind out of her fury.

"And what makes you think I want to buy you a drink?"

"Because you do. I'll be over there."

The woman nodded towards the most out of the way nook in the place, a round table slightly too large for the square corner it occupied, near the corridor that led to the toilets. Jenna could not say what sent her towards the bar rather than back out the door. It wasn't, exactly, attraction. Not that the woman was ugly if you liked shaved heads, which Jenna didn't particularly. Something in her manner aroused curiosity. She should be obnoxious, but she wasn't, and Jenna wanted to work out why.

She took the whiskey and an orange juice over to the table, sat down and studied the other woman as frankly as she was being studied herself. Ice-blue eyes, not shy but steady and appraising; chrome scaffold in her left ear; no visible tattoos, that was a bit of a surprise. She apparently drank whiskey for the taste more than the effect, took a small sip and rolled it slowly round her mouth. Jenna didn't like the way the woman looked at her, neither for itself nor for how it made her feel. There was just enough lingering spark of righteous irritation to point that out.

"You're pretty sure of yourself, aren't you?"

The woman shrugged, doing her perhaps best to look innocent but failing miserably.

"What, me? No I'm just shy, this is all front to cover up my nervous nature..."

It wasn't that funny, it had no business making Jenna giggle like that. She choked on her orange juice and felt as if half the place was staring at her.

"... You've got that look."

"What look is that?"

"The look that makes me feel... brrrr! You really think I'm arrogant?"

"Totally."

"I promise you, hand on my heart, I didn't feel it until you walked in. And now... maybe, a little. OK seriously, no kidding around - some people you can just tell, straight off, and you're one of them. I think being around you could make me feel really arrogant, and I think you might get a kick out of that too. If I'm wrong, tell me now and no hard feelings. I'll buy you a drink and I won't misbehave any more. Well?"

She sat back, settling herself in the corner so she could put both arms up on the seatbacks, letting her eyes wander over Jenna's plain black Debenhams suit. Wasn't somebody who looked at her like that very near the top of Jenna's fantasy list?

"I... umm... I've just done something really stupid..."

"I know, that's written all over you. Come here tonight to throw a glass of wine in her face?"

"More or less."

"You haven't answered my question."

Her voice was surprisingly soft, reassuring. She didn't seem to be pushing for an answer so much as nudging the conversation away from a painful topic. Nor did she make any empty promises. Lynsey's mouth hadn't either, she left that to her eyes and her touch. Jenna had let herself misinterpret hints and spin them into something she wanted but wasn't there. This new face offered no such illusions, she wasn't looking at Jenna like that because she wanted them to make love. The honest clarity in her eyes did promise that being fucked by her might be very hot indeed.

"Alright. I'm -"

"No. I'm Fran. If you ever feel uncomfortable, you just say 'stop now, Fran' and we'll stop and talk about it. Other than that, you call me Frankie, and I don't want to know your name. You don't want me to want to know it, do you?"

I'm going to use you, impersonally and anonymously, because that's what you desire from me. What exactly had she said in that dream? To be humiliated and degraded, wasn't it? To be made to admit that's what she wanted...

"No, Frankie."

That gesture again, beckoning her closer. She bent her head forward, bringing her ear to Frankie's mouth.

"I suppose you're wearing something sensible and practical under that skirt?"

She couldn't find the voice to answer. It felt as if Frankie could already see them, as if her underwear was displayed as obviously as all of her transparent dirty little secrets. She nodded.

"Go to the ladies', take them off, put them in your pocket and come back here. If you keep me waiting too long, I'll confiscate them."

Dreams and confrontations and drunken musings, it seemed she had done every variation on sex in these loos short of the act itself. Best not to think about that. Best not to think about Frankie catching up to her with the door half-closed, barging in and pushing her legs apart from behind... No, best not to get sidetracked by that fancy when the real thing was so temptingly near. She found she couldn't do it, it was too much to nip quickly into a cubicle just to pull her pants down to order. She had to sit down and will herself to pee just a little as she did her best to fold them flat enough not to make an obvious lump in her jacket pocket.

She walked back on trembling legs, acutely aware of the way the front of her skirt hung against her. This was so much worse and dirtier than total nudity had felt in the dream, but of course that was only a dream and this was actually happening. Her head was full of ridiculous possibilities: catching her skirt on something; a sudden impossible updraft doing a Marilyn on her; that her pubes were somehow making themselves obvious through the cloth.

Someone had put music on in her absence. It was pounding out of the speaker above their corner, almost too loud. She sat back deep in the seat, smoothing her skirt demurely down over her knees. Frankie just beckoned to her again; nod of the head and gesture of the hand drawing her closer. She obeyed, bum sliding forward to drag her skirt up her thighs. Frankie shuffled up beside her until their legs touched under the table, denim to skin. It was a secluded corner, and the table was concealing, and Frankie's was hardly the only hand in the pub to drop casually down and rest on a girl's knee.

She rested her chin in the other hand and looked into Jenna's eyes with her head tipped a little to the side, looking for all the world like a sweet lovestruck teen.

"So tell me about you. Tell me why you came storming in that door all dressed up and looking for aggro?"

Degradation and humiliation. Jenna let Frankie's hand ease her knees apart and slip up her thigh, and proceeded to tell Frankie what a stupid simple-minded tart she had been.

"I met this girl on Friday night, just outside. I was a bit pissed, and she was really sweet. So she asked me back to hers..."

Her thighs parted for Frankie of their own accord, as if her body knew it was Frankie's property and didn't need any instruction from her brain about making itself available. It was so casual and artless that she realised someone would have to be really watching them closely to know. That didn't make her feel any less exposed. The fact that Frankie must have had practice at working round backhanded like that just made her feel cheaper. She was very obviously not the first to get touched up like this. That was more of a thrill than it should be.