Sideways

Spring break was just that, a break. My leg, actually.

When I went home for spring break, I met up with a few of my old high school buds, and we took a day trip to the Quebec side for some skiing at one of the nearby hills. Mid afternoon, I hit a patch of ice and went down hard. It was quite a day for falls, as the hills were pretty icy this late in the season. I tried to get up, but my right ankle hurt like a bitch. None of my friends had stopped, as we were all falling a lot today, they just assumed I would get up and follow them.

"Awww fuck!" I groaned. I lay there in the snow for a few minutes, until someone slid to a stop next to me.

"Hey, are you all right?" the guy asks.

"No, I hurt my ankle. Fuck."

"Don't move it, I'll find the ski patrol. Hang on." He skied away to get help.

30 seconds later another guy stops. Same question. "Hey are you all right?"

"I think I sprained my ankle. There was a guy here a minute ago, he said he'd send the ski patrol."

The guy turns and looks around, then waves and yells "Ici! Over here! Vien! Here they are."

Two guys with the special jackets stop and ask what's wrong. I explain, the other guy says "Good luck!" and skis away. The ski patrol guys are great, they radio for a stretcher and 20 minutes later they're loading me into an ambulance. The rest of the day was a lot of waiting and paperwork. The local hospital had a seasonal trauma unit for all the ski injuries, and they're used to dealing with inter-provincial healthcare.

I called my Dad, who said he'd fetch me from the hospital, then called my friends and told them to go home without me. They commiserated and said they'd drop by my house tomorrow and see how I was doing.

I eventually got a cast on my right leg, a pair of crutches, and a whole ream of instructions (in both French and English of course) about what to do and what not to do. My Dad showed up somewhere during this tedious process and reassured me everything would be fine.

We got home really late, after stopping at a pharmacy for pain meds, and stopping for takeout, damn I was hungry by then. I was asleep in minutes after I took one of those pills after getting home.

Next morning, I had to take another pill, damn leg was throbbing like mad. I had to learn how to negotiate using the toilet with crutches, fuck, that's pain in the arse. Then I had to figure out how to shower. They gave me a shower bag for the cast but I couldn't get the damn thing on by myself. Mom was trying to be motherly (naturally) but I was way too embarrassed to be seen naked in front of her. My Dad was a trooper, he helped me with all the bathroom stuff, and I got my shower OK.

I wasn't going to be able to drive for a while, so my folks said they'd drive me back to school. I could come home by bus and get my car once I was able to drive. Great.

"Actually, if I could have my car on campus, one of my friends could drive me around. None of the other guys have a car." Not that my rattly old car was much of a ride, but it got us from A to B.

"OK" my Dad says, "Your mother can drive you there, and I'll follow in your car, then we'll drive back together."

"Awesome, sounds like a plan!"

The rest of the day my parents helped me work out how to deal with the cast and crutches and take care of personal stuff by myself, like getting dressed, showering, shaving (yeah, ever try to balance on one foot to shave? fuckin hell), and using the toilet. My mom went shopping and bought me a bunch of baggy sweat pants, something that would go over my cast.

My old friends dropped by with some hard coolers the next day, but I had to pass on those due to the meds I was on. They laughed at me and drank it all themselves. We all had a good laugh about my predicament, and they wished me luck at school. Gonna need it, eh?

Then it was time to head back to school. I'd been texting and calling my buddies at school, told them the whole idiot story of my misadventures. They laughed at me big time, and of course they worried about their ride, what was gonna happen to my car? I told them about the arrangements and they were happy that it would still be available.

The drive to school was really tedious, seemed to last forever, because it was so frickin uncomfortable to sit there with that cast on. They got me and my stuff into my room in the dorm, and said their goodbyes. I was so happy that I was on the first floor! No stairs here but there were stairs all over campus. Sure, there's elevators everywhere but I didn't know where most of them were.

First order of business, I gotta pee after that road trip. I used the big accessible stall in the bathroom, that was great. Grab bars, lots of room, it really was made for this kind of thing. Easier than the bathroom at home, that's for sure.

I was the butt of a lot of jokes and shit for the first few days, but otherwise it was fine. Down in the dining hall I spotted someone else who'd had a fun March Break. There was a girl with her whole arm in a cast, like from shoulder to wrist, with the elbow bent at 90 degrees. I wondered what happened to her. Skiing too I supposed. My buddies said we'd make a great couple and told me to go ask her out. No way dudes, not gonna happen. I can't talk to girls, I always get freaked out and clam up.

The end of March rolled around, and I still had weeks to go before getting my cast off. There was a party Saturday night, and I was off the strong meds now so I could have a few drinks. My floor mates were buying me drinks too, so I ended up having a few more than I would normally have. I was feeling fine by the end of the night.

One of the guys suddenly shows up with a wheelchair. "Robbo! we got you some wheels man!"

"Where'd you steal that from?" I asked, a little dubious about the idea of them scamming someone's chair.

"No No, totally not stolen, we got it for you from the Red Cross, it's legit dude!"

"All right! Let's check out my new ride then!" I hopped around and settled into the chair. They set the foot rest for me and one of them took my crutches and they started wheeling me away. "Where we goin?" I asked.

"It's a surprise." says one of them, and the pull a toque down over my head so I can't see where we're going. When I try to pull the hat off, they stop me, and then the start duct taping my arms to the chair's armrests. We're outside by now, and I start yelling, until they tape my mouth shut. Now I'm getting pissed, but there's not much I can do, except literally ride this out.

They laugh and giggle and make goofy jokes as they wheel me around campus. I have no idea where I am now, and it suddenly strikes me that it is now April 1st. The alcoholic buzz is wearing off fast under the rush of adrenaline and anger, and I wonder what kind of demented nightmare game they've come up with.

I hear more laughing, girls this time, and they make whispered comments back and forth with the guys. My chair is pushed around some more, bumping into stuff, and then a body is dumped in my lap. The giggling and laughing is cut off by the slamming of a door, and everything goes quiet.

I think there's a girl in my lap, or a small, really nice smelling guy with long hair. She's quiescent, asleep or passed out.

"Hey. Hey, wake up."

No response, she's just sitting there, draped over my lap. She's warm and breathing, so it's not a manikin or something. I wonder if she's OK.

I start to shift a bit, can't use my arms because they're taped down, but I try to shake her awake. Doesn't work, and now I'm afraid that if I move too much she'll fall off onto the floor.

"Hey, uh, miss, wake up." louder. She's out of it. I turn my head to the side so I'm not yelling in her ear and holler "Hey, enough crap, let me out of here!" Silence reigns. Well, fuck. Now what?

'Now what' is the fire alarm that starts blaring. It startles the heck out of me, but still isn't enough to wake the girl. Fuck, this is getting serious. What if it's a real fire? No, no way, it's April 1st now, gotta be a prank. I'll just wait for her to wake up, and we'll get out of here.

The alarm rings for an annoyingly long time. 15 minutes I guess, I dunno, but it seems interminable. And I need to pee now. When the alarm finally stops the need to pee gets more insistent. I shift uncomfortably under the weight of my passenger.

More time passes, and damn, I gotta go bad now. I'm gonna wet myself, and her too, if I don't get out of here right now. I've tried speaking to her, yelling, shaking her, and then there was the alarm that went on and on. She just isn't gonna wake up. Did those morons drug her or something?

I'm desperate now. "Come on, sleeping beauty, wake up!" Sleeping beauty? Yeah, fine, I'll try that before I piss all over her. I think a girl would be slightly less angry about a stolen kiss than wet pants. The toque doesn't cover my mouth, so I seek hers. I kiss her, probably a little too hard for a wakeup smooch, cause I'm dyin' here, gotta pee, gotta pee, gotta pee.

She's got nice soft lips, really quite kissable, and I kinda wished she was awake and under different circumstances. I kiss her again, even harder. No response. I try again, this time I let my tongue do the talking, and I push into her mouth. Finally, she stirs, turns into the kiss.

Surprised, I pull back, and say "Oh thank god you're awake, help me up!"

She startles, yelping at me, "Who are you?!"

"Help me, please, I'm gonna piss my pants! Untie me!"

The toque is pulled away, and in the dim red glow of an exit sign I see her face. She's kinda cute, not quite pretty, and she has a cast on her right arm. It's the girl Ii saw in the dining hall a few times.

"Hurry!"

She struggles off me, and sees the tape on my wrists. It's slow going for her to undo the tape with her weak hand, the way she's pulling at it, she's obviously not left handed.

I'm not gonna make it, and I look around. We're in a janitor's room or something. I spot a stack of small waste baskets. "Quick, grab one of those buckets and put it between my legs."

She's quick on the uptake, I'll give her that, and she grabs the bucket for me. "Pull my pants down, hurry."

"What? No!"

"Arrrrggghhh. Please, I'm gonna wet myself." I grind out through my clenched teeth.

She reached out with that uncoordinated left hand of hers and fumbles with my sweat pants. I try and lift my hips a bit to help, and they slip down, exposing my briefs.

"You gotta help. Pull me out, aim for the bucket. Please?"

I can see she's not happy with the situation, and she's fighting with her distaste at touching a man, a total stranger at that, in such an intimate way. But she perseveres, and that delicate hand fishes in my shorts for my cock. She flinches as she makes contact, then pulls me free.

I groan as I let loose, oh god, finally! The relief is incredible. The poor girl looks shocked as she dutifully aims me at the bucket, and she even nudges the bucket a bit closer. I piss on and on, holy fuck there was so much, and eventually I run dry.

Her look is no longer shocked, but instead she appears to be curious. "Oh thank you, you saved me so much embarrassment. You can put me back in there now. Thanks."

She blushes, and tries to stuff my cock back through the fly, and after a couple of tries I'm all set. And of course now my cock is growing fast in her hand, as I no longer have to pee, and there's a girl handling that most sensitive part of my anatomy. Something that's never happened before.

That last drop of pee gets on her hand, and she looks a bit frantic now, "Ewww" she says.

"Just wipe it on my sweats, it's OK." I tell her, and she scrubs her hand on my thigh. That doesn't help with my ever increasing boner of course.

She looks up at me, and her brow wrinkles. "Do you smell smoke?" she says.

It's my turn to be startled, and I look at the door. Oh Fuck, there's smoke coming in under the door! That alarm was real! Why wasn't it still going off? "Quick, help me get this tape off!" She starts trying to pull up my sweats, but I say "No, leave that, just get me undone!"

She starts working on the tape on my left arm, and it takes a few minutes to get me free. Working together, my right arm is unstuck in less than a minute. "Check the door." I tell her as I look around the room. No other doors, just shelves, a big sink, a floor pan for filling and emptying mop buckets, and stacks of boxes and stuff.

She tries the light switch but it doesn't work. Great, my idiot friends probably unscrewed the light bulb. Then she tries the door. "It's locked!" she says.

"From the outside? Why the fuck would it be set up to lock people in? Sorry. I swear when I get nervous."

"Is there really a fire, do you think?"

"I guess so, there was an alarm that went off when you were out."

"What do we do?" She starts frantically searching her pockets and says "I can't find my phone!"

"I didn't even being mine to the party. No pockets."

The smell of smoke gets stronger. I wheel up next to the sink, and run some water. Grabbing a package of paper towels, I rip it open and dump them in the sink. "Here, block up the crack under the door with these!"

I hand her wads of soggy paper, and she kneels down to stuff them under the door. The smoke stops coming in, thank goodness. "Now what?" she says.

I shrug, "I guess we wait and hope."

"I'm scared." she says in a small voice.

"Come here, sit on my lap here. Oh, uh, maybe pull up my pants first." She helps me with that and sits on me. I think the gravity of the situation is hitting her pretty hard, I know it's got me freaked out. She burrows into my neck and wraps her good arm around me. "We're OK for now." I tell her.

I smell her hair again, as she's crushed against me. Damn that feels nice. Shit, I don't even know her name. "I'm Robert by the way. Robert Green."

"Suzanne. Suzanne Shelton."

"I'd say pleased to meet you Suzanne, but under these circumstances, maybe the sentiment should be I'm ecstatic to meet you. If I was by myself I would have pissed my pants and suffocated."

She giggled, my goofy sense of humour somehow helping in this situation. "I'm glad to meet you too, Robert."

"So how did you get here?"

"I don't know, I was at the Quad party and felt dizzy, then you were kissing me." She blushed again.

"Sorry about that, I tried to wake you for like 20 minutes, but you were really out of it. I finally thought I would try the sleeping beauty trick, and it worked. Did you drink something someone else gave you?"

"Oh. Shit. I think so. One of my floor mates gave me a coke. I had to take some of my pain meds for my arm earlier, it was bothering me. I keep trying to do too much with it all the time."

"Oh, yeah, you don't want to mix booze or anything with that stuff, I know! Sorry about the pee episode. I really was going to wet my pants in another few seconds. Wet both our pants."

She blushed and giggled. "I never saw a guy like that, like your, thing, before."

"Wow. Okay, well, I never had a girl touch my co-, um, thing, before."

"It changed when I was putting it away. Was that, um, like...'

"Yeah, well, when a pretty girl touches me like that I'm bound to get aroused."

Her eyes went wide at that statement. "Oh" she said. She stared at me a few seconds, then put her head back on my shoulder. There was that scent again. "So. Um, you think I'm pretty?"

"Well, yeah, of course. You're what I think my grandpa would call 'fetching'."

She giggled again. Damn, that sounds nice, and she smells really nice. Little Robert stirred down below. I heard a sharp intake of breath. Uh On. I may have just ruined what might have been a moment.

"Am I pretty enough to make you, uh, aroused, then?"

"Oh, Suzanne, I am so sorry about this. Please, don't be offended, it's just circumstances, you know?"

She pulled back again and looked at the door. Still no smoke. Then she looked at me with a sad smile, saying "I didn't think so." Suzanne started to get up, and I realized where our wires had crossed.

I put my arms around her and said "You're very pretty, and definitely arousing."

She looked surprised, but settled back down. "Oh." she said. "Thank you."

Just then we heard a muffled sound outside the door. We both yelled, and I grabbed a mop handle and rapped it against the door. The door opened, and a cloud of smoke poured in. A firefighter stood there, looking surprised behind his breathing apparatus. He hollered for help, and we were soon extricated from the building.

I was parked next to the ambulance, where Suzanne was sitting on a gurney. We both had been given oxygen and been checked over for injuries. We told campus security about how we came to be there and they got really grim. I named names, because I could've died there, we both could've died. It was a prank, but it went sideways pretty fast when that fire broke out. Suzanne named a couple of girls who she thought were in on it too. Now we were finally cleared to go.

"Can I walk you back to the dorms?"

She laughed, "Don't you mean wheel me? You can't walk."

"Can too, if I had my crutches. My idiot friends left me with this chair."

"Okay, then, let's go."

Off we went. She couldn't push me with just one hand, and I was crap at navigating that chair, but we eventually got back to the residence. We chatted amiably along the way, getting to know each other. She was really easy to talk to, unlike most girls I've tried to talk to. Maybe that was it, I wasn't chatting her up.

She was 18, a biology major, living in V2. I told her I was in second year Computer Science, in V1, so I had a single room.

I told her how I broke my leg, skiing in Gatineau, and the really long day I had as a result. "How did you break your arm?"

"Skating. I'm usually a good skater but sometimes you just fall wrong. I spent most of that day in the ER, just like you. It's really hard to get dressed and shower and stuff with this thing."

"I know, believe me, I know all about it."

We were both so fired up on adrenaline after our ordeal there was no way we could sleep. "Would you like to, uh, come up to my room, for a bit? After all this, I'm not tired, and I'd be bored doing just nothing. We could talk for a while." Oh, nice, I thought, smooth man, very smooth. NOT.

She blushed, and it must've been a good one, to be visible in the dim light along the sidewalk. "I, uh, yeah. Yes. Yes I will." she stated with a bravado she didn't appear to have.

I smiled up at her. "I promise to behave, Okay?"

"What if I don't want you to behave?"

"Then you're going to have to make your wishes known. In no uncertain terms. I don't do the pushy guy thing very well."

"I want to go to your room with you."

Luckily for me I was on the ground floor, as my residence has no elevators. I had my key on a lanyard around my neck, and I unlocked the door. I let her precede me inside, and I shut the door once I got in. She looked around the room, which I usually keep fairly neat, but lately it's been immaculate. I am not as active with crutches, so I've stayed in a fair bit the last couple of weeks. And I clean when I get bored.

"Your room is so neat. I expected, um, sorry, a pigsty. You know, 'guy'."

"It's not usually this nice, but I've been staying in a lot recently." Tapping my cast for emphasis.

She looked at my leg, then asked "Can I sign your cast?"

"Only if I can sign yours."

"Deal. Got a pen?"

"Desk, top drawer." I responded, and suddenly thought. Oh No. "Uh, I'll get one for you."

She was too quick, you know, having moveable feet and all, and she pulled the drawer open. First thing she sees is the Big Box O' Condoms my best friend gave me for Christmas. Her eyebrows rose, and she put a finger on the box. Then she turned bright red, and picked up a sharpie.

"Your cast is covered up, I can't get at it." she said in a slightly quavering voice. She looked nervous and fidgety. I know I was nervous as all hell. That box of condoms was a joke, as I was notorious for not getting anywhere with the ladies. I'd kissed a couple of girls, but that was as far as I'd ever gotten. I just wasn't able to pursue them the way other guys did. I always backed off. Just couldn't put myself forward like that.