"So," I said awkwardly, leaning back against the counter for support. "Hi. Have a nice party?" Well, that was an awkward opening, wasn't it? Real smooth, Chrissy, real smooth. Greased lightning. Smooth as a cucumber. Chill as a fridge. Cindy won't notice anything.
"A nice- yeah, yeah, it was great, everybody got wasted and J.T. got horny and jacked off all over the bathroom mirror and Cassie was giving head to the bartender behind the bar for free pink jaeger bombs for all of us and I think she put a finger up the dude's ass before he came- but I heard screaming and holy shit you shaved your pubes and got your cooch inked? What the-" Her voice steadily as she spoke, and by the time I broke in she was almost screaming, her eyes wild. Guess she noticed something. Fancy that.
I grabbed my old towel from the rack, wrapped it around myself securely, and clasped one hand around the back of her head and the other across her mouth, dulling her shouts to a muffled murmur that quickly died out in shock. "Lemme get a word in edgewise, please?" I asked. She nodded, her eyes wide. Her lips felt warm and wet against my hand, and my stomach fluttered strangely at the sensation. I took my hand away, discreetly wiping the drool and lipstick off onto my towel. My hand left a black smudge behind, and I hoped that wasn't some sort of omen.
"Cindy, I love you like a sister but right now is shower time. You know, showers? Wet naked body-soaping time?" I paused, and quickly clarified, "Usually alone wet naked body-soaping time. By myself. Alone." Not that she had ever tried to take a shower with me or anything- we had, to say the least, wildly differing attitudes towards sex and propriety, but she was very strict about respecting boundaries. But still... better clarify. Man, my brain was going weird directions this morning, but I guess it made sense that it would, with all the... everything happening, that my mind was still sort of in the gutter making things awkward.
"I know what a shower is," she snapped, "and I wasn't trying to perv on you for fuck's sake, you know I don't do that creepy shit- this isn't about me, the question is: what the fuck happened to you?" Hands on her hips, she glared daggers at me. She wasn't usually this fierce, not about me, not about anything. I must have annoyed her. "Look, I'm worried about you! You just don't do this kind of thing!"
"Can we deal with this after I'm clean?" I asked wearily, facepalming. Before she could protest I quickly added, "Yes, I think we can." So saying, I gave her a firm push and shut the door firmly behind her, muffling her ongoing questions. "Goodbye, Cindy. Talk to you after I'm clean!" I called after her. "No hard feelings, please, but right now I really need to decompress!"
I locked the door, wiggled the knob to make sure it was locked properly this time, and let the towel drop to the floor and kicked it away into the corner. I looked at my naked form in the mirror. First I had to deal with my own issues before I dealt with hers- it was rude of me to talk to her like that, much less manhandle her like a spoiled child, but right now I had more than enough on my plate with all this without dealing with her concerned attempts to help.
The tattoo was just as I had remembered, save that the purple glow had died down completely- now the sharp lines were pure black; not the green-black most tattoos were, but an almost unnatural pitch-black that looked like a cutout section of void. Seen in the clear light of the bathroom' overhead fluorescents rather than the dim light of the dream, the symbol was even more clearly a tracing of my reproductive system, from my vagina to my womb and even curling tentacle-like over my ovaries, all crowned with the strange glyph Amanda had called the Mark of lauv'abrarc. I brushed my fingers over the Mark, remembering the sensations that had cascaded through my body when it was being applied. The searing pleasure, the ecstatic pain... like Heaven and Hell mixed together until they were inseparable...
Where the heck had that chamber been, anyway? I stomped firmly down on the little bit of myself that believed it actually was Hell. Couldn't have been Hell, could it? I'm still alive. No, something about that idea seemed wrong somehow- that place was far from hellish, really, as bizarre as what had happened had been. Not exactly what I'd call Heaven either, of course. Lusst'ghaa. That had been one of the words the choir had chanted. The other, lauv'abrarc, Amanda had called the 'Lustful God;' so, perhaps 'Lusst'ghaa' was the name of the world? What sort of an alien dimension was called Lusst'ghaa, anyway? Wasn't that a bit on-the-nose a name for the place you get dragged off to and sexually pleasured by an alien lesbian in? 'Lust-ga'? But then again, what kind of name would actually suit an alien dimension where you get vibrated by an H.R. Geiger alien lesbian's tentacle-tattoo machine? It's not like they could name it Alienworld, or Dimension #1138, or Universe Aleph or something equally comic book-ish, not and be taken seriously by other aliens. Not that I really read comic books- mother always said they weren't Godly- but Cindy kept talking about Marvel movies and such, and I picked up a few things. Frankly, in my time at college I'd picked up a passing familiarity with quite a few ungodly things from Cindy- films, art, comics, sex jokes...
I put the thoughts out of my head through the simple expedient of getting in the shower, unhooking the detachable shower head, and holding it right up to my head; soaking it beneath the hot spray until all the thoughts churning around inside me dissolved, amd then turning the powerful spray onto my aching back muscles. Oh, yeah. That felt good. The hot water against my flesh seemed to penetrate deep inside, relaxing muscles I hadn't even know I'd been clenching up. The tension that had been coiling in my spine slowly loosened, my back unkinked, and I did a little stretch to under the hot water to really work out the ache, moving the head up and down the length of my spine and practically purring as I could feel it unkinking.
Returning the head to it's hook, I took a moment to appreciate the delicate citrus smell of the bar soap I'd bought the other week before lathering up my loofa and giving myself a thorough scrub, trying to strip the stale sweat and other, less mentionable fluids, from my pores. I soaped myself up, briskly at first but then slowing with a wince of pain. Yeah, no, I was clearly still aching a bit too much to treat my body that roughly, especially down south.
Ever-so-gingerly, I scrubbed between my legs, trying not to agitate the bruised flesh too much, rubbing gently along the outer labia and in the crease of my thigh, trying to remove the crusted-on fluids. Huh. That... didn't actually feel too bad- kind of pleasant, really. The bruises were fading too, I thought. Experimentally I pushed a little harder, and rather than pain I was rewarded with an almost sensual friction, and I let out an involuntary moan of pleasure. Oh, my God. Whatever had been done to me had left me sensitive in an entirely different way than I had expected. Good Lord. The rough touch of the loofa almost felt better than my fingers did during the few times I'd shamefully masturbated, a deep pleasure that had just the slightest hint of pain to it. I knew I shouldn't, but I kept scrubbing even after it was clean, stroking my crotch back and forth, back and forth, feeling the rough netting slipping between my lower lips, lubricated by the water and soapy lather and quite likely by my own juices, too.
Whoo. Getting a little bit... you know, in here. 'Porny,' Cindy would call it, rubbing your privates with a soapy loofah and moaning like a... like a scarlet woman, I guess mother would say, a Jezebel. Or like the women in the videos I sometimes saw Cindy watching. It was utterly indecent, the sort of behavior my mother had warned me about over and over again, the kind she said would lead inevitably to moral and mental degradation, to homosexuality and paganism, and eventually to being forced to prostitute myself to the sinners. But really, why shouldn't I touch myself? It wasn't as if I had any purity to worry about at this point, was it? The mysterious woman Amanda had already taken every purity -except my virginity, maybe, depending on how strictly you defined it- from me. What more harm could my fingers do, when she had penetrated me so thoroughly in both lower orifices? What was masturbation compared to having orgasmed with a woman's lips suckling at my nipples? Why should I worry about preserving what I no longer had?
Fuck it.