the time. Richard and Shelley both come from the same little town called McCallow somewhere on the East coast. They were in the same high school English class, for godsakes, and now they're living together and I'm always getting in their way. I'm little old Sid and I'm a bother. I'm half broke, single, and I have nowhere to go. Nights and weekends, I haunt our apartment like the ghost of Häagen-Dazs pints past.
Richard and Shelley used to be pretty good about it, too, but I guess I just stepped on their alone time a little too much. I sat down with them to watch a movie after dinner instead of immediately retreating to my room and closing the door like I usually do one night, and they didn't talk to me for a week. I heard heated arguments happening behind their door, but couldn't make out what they were fighting about. I could guess, though. It was about me. The Sid problem.
Then, they kinda...did a one-eighty. They stopped ignoring me. Instead, they wouldn't leave me alone. Shelley especially. It seemed like she always wanted me to sit out with her while she had a smoke, or watch something on youtube with her (in her room, where they fucked, which made me kind of uncomfortable), or cook with her. She would just walk up to me, tap me on the shoulder, tell me to come do whatever, and walk away.
I would shrug, think "what else do I have to do but stare at my computer screen?" and follow. The more quickly I joined her, the more excited she was to see me when I got there. She would give me a huge hug and tell me how great it was that I was there, doing whatever with her. It always tingled. I mostly felt guilty about that. I mean, she had a boyfriend. The last thing I wanted to do was break up a relationship. But then, thinking along those lines was just another bad thought spiral, because what do I have to offer that no one else does? What do I have to offer at all, what is there in me that would make somebody leave anybody? Nothing. Nothing nothing nothing. I'm mediocre, I'm second, I'm...hopeless.
I started thinking, whenever she hugged me, oh maybe...
Oh maybe this could turn into something more, like maybe these hugs aren't just friendly, they're more than friendly, and she would one day give me a huge kiss to match the hug, a lingering, full-lipped kiss with those pink, moist flowers of hers. And we would sit on my bed and she would push my hair back from my forehead and tell me that I was sexy and special and wonderful and she would take care of me, take care of me if only I did what she told me to, if I did what she said...And she would kiss me again, press her chest into me and start sliding it around, let me reach up her shirt, let my fingers explore her taut stomach, her smooth, unblemished skin, and my grubby fingers would somehow be good enough to reach up under her bra, to cup her perfect---
And I would get that far in the fantasy until I realized she had stopped hugging me and I was staring off into space like an idiot.
Obviously, nothing from my fantasies would never happen. It never could; Richard was so handsome, such a good boyfriend, treated her like a princess with flowers and dates and massages and heavenly sex I could hear through two closed doors. Shelley was always cumming, always loudly and heatedly. I would hear smacking sounds, I would hear moans and then the yelling, followed by contented giggles and doors opening and closing, sounds of a shower.
So there was no way she would ever have left Richard. But still...those tingles kept me hoping, kept me fantasizing, kept me doing whatever she said with exponentially increasing willingness and speed.
The first day she started asking me to hang out and hugging me, I took out the trash. I mean, I would have eventually since it was my turn, but it just looked kind of full and I figured, why not now?
A few weeks after the tingles started, I was washing the dishes every night. I picked up around the place every morning before work, and started cooking whenever I wasn't working late. Not that that seemed to matter to Shelley.
A few months after the tingles first started, Shelley started leaving messages on my cell telling me to meet her places after work. If I tried to call and cancel, her cell battery was dead and she'd forgotten the charger. So I always rearranged my schedule to meet her. What else could I do? I was already mostly used to doing what Shelley said without a moment's thought.
