The smell was the first thing to hit her.
Her first waking inhale was stenched with stale beer, cigarette smoke and an ungodly mixture of various male colognes, and much to her complete embarrassment, most of those scents were caking her naked flesh.
"Your Mother would say you're nothing more than a pathetic whore if she saw you like this," 55 year old Jean Shulman cringed to herself.
"Yeah Jean," she replied out loud into the early morning silence of her decimated motel room, "If you saw someone in the same shape as you are right now...You'd call them a whore too."
Opening her eyes was the next step.
Between the slithering weight of the sun beaming through the Eastern window and the thudding grind inside her own head, that task proved to be immense.
"OHHH...GGRR," Jean winced when the first images of the room began to filter between her barely parted eyelids. "If this is what the room looks like... I don't even want to think what I look like!"
The memory of what happened the night before slowly creeping back into Jean's mind, the 'morning after' ramifications were thankfully pushed aside for the moment by an even more pressing force, her straining bladder.
Lunging up from the bed to rush to the bathroom, Jean nearly tripped on the mammoth swirl of sheets and clothes tangled on the floor.
"Gotta go...gotta go...gotta go," she mumbled, reaching out to grab the frame of the bathroom's entrance before pulling her unsteady shell of a body through the doorway.
Looking as if she was walking on shattered glass as her feet shuffled across the bathroom's chilly linoleum, Jean openly wondered how her 55 year old body had held up under such extreme conditions, a mere eight hours earlier.
A cold wave jolted through Jean's spine when she sat down on the rim and realized one of her previous night's visitors hadn't put the seat back down. Raising up slightly to adjust her situation, once she was safely perched back on the commode, Jean allowed the vertigo sweeping through her system to settle as her bladder emptied.
Once she was able to raise her head and focus for several seconds on her surroundings, Jean caught a half darkened glimpse of herself in the bathroom mirror.
"God...Damn...," the normally religious widow mouthed from her seat on the bowl. "It's even worse than I thought."
* * * * *
Three Weeks Earlier
Jean Shulman had always hated being the center of attention. A trait unusual for someone who had spent over three decades as a school teacher. In her private life however, Jean had been married for 21 years to a car salesman who often dominated a room and over the years, she had developed a comfort level blending into the background.
When her Husband Floyd had passed away eight years earlier, Jean found it very difficult coming out of those social shadows, and instead decided to funnel her energies into her church activities and career rather than seeking out another relationship.
Jean's natural humility and concern for others had served her quite well over the years. She had made very few enemies and had the utmost respect of her peers and most of the now thousands of students that had passed through her classroom since her first teaching assignment in 1973.
That innate humility was surely being put to the test however as Jean sat under the horrible yellowish and humming glow of her school's gymnasium lights, at the head of one of several tables covered with fancy red tableclothes, surrounded by an assembled crowd of friends, colleagues, students and wellwishers.
"I shouldn't be here...not at least for another 10 years," Jean bitterly groaned under her breath, despite the vibrant smile that remained on her face as she engaged everyone in the room.
"Rubber chicken and a gold watch...that's what 31 years of service gets you," Jean's inner vitriol continued to fester as acquaintance after acquaintance came up to thank her and wish her well in retirement.
"Shame no one from the city school board could make it," Jean laughed to herself, replaying in her head the stress of the past year and why the higher ups on the Charleston school board had decided, because of the city's educational budget crunch, that she was more valuable to them taking early retirement than paying her the salary she had earned over the years.
Sensing the writing was on the wall, Jean begrudgingly accepted their offer.
Between her pension, savings and stocks, Jean knew that money wasn't the issue, she could live out the remainder of her life in relative financial comfort. The problem was she had always been a teacher. When she was married, her career was the only thing that gave her an identity separate from her Husband and her children. And after his death, with the kids all married and moved on with their lives, teaching was the one constant that gave Jean a daily purpose. All she really had left to measure her value anymore was watching those 150 or so students every year matriculate through her classroom and out into society.
And Jean had seen much of Charleston's social landscape pass through her classroom over those three decades. Several city councilmen, doctors, lawyers, policemen, shop owners, even 11 teachers at her present school had at one time been a student of hers. In fact, it was the first time one of her former students became one of her co-workers that Jean realized she was 'getting old'.
Despite her financial freedom and all the free time not having a roll to call every morning would create to do some of the things she'd always wanted to try, taking away that routine in her life was going to create a massive and uncertain void for Jean.
* * * * *
Financial comfort and free time, two of the Devil's best friends.
When her Husband had been alive, Jean's home life was taken up with her household chores, tending to the kids and after all that was done, grading her homework and making lesson plans for the next day. She really didn't have time for much else.
After Floyd died and the kids moved out however, Jean was forced to find new outlets. Even though she still had a productive career keeping her busy during the day, Jean tried a myriad of things from church and social groups, taking up new hobbies and every year or so a new exercise fad to keep her free time occupied. More times than not however, she found herself home alone, content to live the same simple existence she had come to love.
One of the things that had changed significantly from the time Jean began teaching to the time she was forced to retire was the use of computers in the classroom. Even though she had purchased one for the house to help keep up with her in curriculum, the computer was mainly used to help with her finances and occasional word processing needs.
As she became more comfortable with it however, Jean's late night research and dabbling gradually began uncovering many of the same pitfalls all well intended novices eventually stumble upon. Mainly that there was something inherently sexual at every turn, no matter where she tried to go online. And like a temptation too alluring and guilt free to fight, in those lonesome hours in front of the illuminated glow of the screen, Jean would be repeatedly shocked, and often left numb, by the various things her fingers typed into those beckoning 'search fields'.
Eight years widowed, Jean had swore she wouldn't re-marry after her Husband passed, knowing she would always measure Husband Number Two to the man she'd given everything to for most of her adult life. In her early 50's however, with half a lifetime still left to live out, Jean could feel loneliness gnawing at her soul with each passing year, along with the more unspeakable urges that went unfulfilled without a man in her life. And it was those late nights alone in her bedroom office space where Jean allowed her mind, and often times her body, to wander.
By modern standards, Jean and Floyd had been a relatively conservative couple. They had sex two or three times a week for the duration of their marriage until Floyd took ill. It had been a fulfilling relationship and Jean never once seriously thought of straying. Her connections with the local church scene combined with the expectations that came with her career, Jean knew she could never contemplate such an action, even if she had wanted to.
The free time and void of losing her career only added to Jean's frustration however, and the isolationist lifestyle she had painted herself into made it difficult to find other human outlets for her feelings, not that she would have felt comfortable discussing many of them out loud.
Like most people who fall under the sway of the internet when lonely, Jean occasionally had trouble pulling herself away from the glowing light of the screen, with nothing but time on her hands and curiosity in her fingertips as she gradually came to discover many hidden hungers that her lack of fulfilment fed.
* * * * *
The original germination of Jean's idea had its roots over a year earlier. In all honesty, the first few threads of it had seeped into her thoughts many years before, but it wasn't until her Husband's death and the subsequent lack of affection that the idea seemed tangible. Even then while still teaching, imaging going through with it was merely an easy trigger for her to use when the pressure burning in her loins began to be too much.
It wasn't until Jean's forced retirement and all the angst and free time that came with it that she consciously made the leap to put the perverse plan on paper, and into motion.
A few weeks later, dozens of letters with no identification or return address began showing up in mailboxes scattered around the greater Charleston area, with a simple and succinct note included saying to be at the Budget Inn on I-26, room 133, on the night of August 5th, after 9pm.
* * * * *
The first invitee to arrive at the motel that night was a 41 year old brokerage firm manager named Clint Gray, North Charleston High, Class of 1981.
Sitting behind the wheel of his Audi at a quarter to 9 that night, Clint studied the relative calm of the parking lot surrounding him as dusk gave way to dark, his mind still running in circles trying to figure out why he had been invited there.
"You know...this has to be a trap," his conscience chided, just knowing his wife had found out one of the chain of extramarital affairs he'd had recently.
"Bet this whole thing is being taped from somewhere right over there," Clint muttered, tapping the perfume scented invitation between his fingers against the top of the steering wheel, more than a little nervous to make the next move.
