I awoke groggily with cotton-mouth, and then had an intense start. Have you ever woken up in a strange place - a hotel room, on a drinking buddy's couch, the in-law's guest bedroom, etc. - and you experienced a momentary jolt in the lower registers of panic that subsides almost immediately upon remembering where you are and how you got there? This was similar, but instead of a wave of relief, as I looked around, my panic rose toward some elusive crescendo.
I was in what seemed to be a polycarbonate - that strong clear plastic - box that was suspended, who knows how, so as to allow bright light to be projected in from all six sides simultaneously. Because of this light, I could not see anything outside the box despite the material's transparency. The box was both a little taller and a bit longer than a coffin, but was about twice as wide. This extra space contained a woman lying next to me in the box still unconscious.
The woman was completely nude, which, I should note, mirrored my own state. As a gentleman, I will note that I made no efforts to see her most intimate parts and my cursory glance resulted in seeing nothing private besides the outline of her overall form. Though the woman faced me, she was positioned partially curled up and laying halfway between being on her side and her stomach and she had an arm tucked into her chest and the knee of her closest leg was stretched up and between us so as to touch the bottom of the box with the inside of the bent knee. This leg obscured her nether region. I was, in fact, quite pleased that the woman was covered up because I was myself mortified to be in the presence of the naked stranger. I didn't know her, and she didn't even look familiar - except to the degree that many people look vaguely like someone else you've seen. She was about my age, which is to say in her thirties, had short dark brown hair, and smooth skin that was neither darkly tanned nor pale. The outline of her curves was admittedly graceful and pleasing to the eye.
I heard a faint noise outside the box. It was like a cough, but not precisely. The apparently "biological" nature of the sound reminded me that, though I could not see out, anyone outside the box would have an excellent view of the inside. This realization startled me, and I immediately reached down to cover my nether region while unthinkingly moving to sit up. Of course, I didn't get more than half of the way to a seated position before my forehead careened into the almost invisible top of the box. This resulted in my unknown "coffin-mate" suddenly regaining consciousness. Needless to say, she had the same panicked reaction as mine, but multiplied by some factor explained by the two-fold disadvantage she suffered. First, I awoke with an unconscious person next to me, and, therefore, the threat factor within the box was minimal even while the weirdness factor was off the charts. She, on the other hand, awoke with a conscious and moving person next to her in this confined space who had made a loud and reverberating thump for a reason unknown to her. She had no time to determine what the objective of my motion was. Second, at the risk of sounding sexist but intending only to be objectively truthful, a delicate woman finding herself unexpectedly naked with a strange man is quite likely to be more fearful than a man finding himself naked with a strange woman, all else being equal.
I tried to reassure the woman as she started to scream bloody murder and thrashed about to keep me at bay, not realizing that I had no intention of doing anything other than keeping my distance. She was immediately at a loss as to whether she should use her limbs to try to lash out at me, no doubt reasonably assuming that I was the cause of her current predicament, or to cover herself. There were a series of thuds as heels, elbows, and knuckles bounced off the box as we both awkwardly alternated between covering while she attacked and I defended. Ultimately, I kept my open palms facing her direction to fend off blows while showing her my hands in an attempt to put her mind at ease.
As she started to calm down there was a series of three loud electronic beeps that her perplexed expression showed she did not know what to make of any more than did I. Now I would like to think that, with pride in my species, what happened next was exemplary of humanity's advanced rapid capacity for rational problem solving. However, the pure fact of it was that it was an example of conditioned response learning - like mice and mazes or rats and feeder-machine levers.
A severe pain began building in my head, and, I could see by her reactions, my co-captive was inflicted in the same manner. It was clear we were both experiencing the same type of pain because we both took our hands to our heads instinctively, and were no longer worrying about covering up, attacking, or defending. The pain became the one and only threat. Putting our hands on our heads, of course, did no good whatsoever. The pain just became more intense, like the sound does as someone gradually turns up the volume on a stereo. I cannot even convey the nature of the pain except to say that readers experienced with migraine headaches might be able to comprehend the pain, but only if they ever had their skulls in a bear trap simultaneous to a particularly bad headache. Eventually, writhing in pain and completely incognizant of each other's presence, we each rolled toward the middle of the box. As our outer thighs and arms touched, the pain subsided dramatically. Of course, the touching of naked flesh combined with the reduced pain caused us to become aware of each other once more, and we each pushed away to opposite sides of the box, but, as we moved apart, the pain again became excruciating.
Now this was the point at which I would like to be able to say that I reasoned that we needed to be closer to avoid the pain, but I honestly couldn't think with that pain in my head anymore than a goldfish can solve partial differential equations. Yet we both reflexively migrated toward the middle of the box again, and, when we ended up in the awkward kind of embrace of strangers caught up in the same tragedy, the pain was momentarily completely gone. It was an uneasy instant of pressed flesh. We started to break apart only to find the pain increasing once more. It may have been at this point that it became apparent to both of us what our mutual tormentors were after. We embraced again in a more committed manner and experienced another instant of peace before the pain resumed at low but steadily rising intensity. The mystery woman kissed me in a furtive shy manner. It was clearly an experiment. Again the pain disappeared. However, after a few seconds the pain resumed as the most minor of discomfort but gradually and steadily climbed. This time the pain was turned down by my hand cupping the side of the woman's breast. I used my palm to caress her nipple and then ran the hand down her side, over her hip, and then rubbed her butt. In this way we were lead to progressively more intimate acts by rising tides of pain that would, in time, become so uncomfortable as to overcome our natural reluctance to be sexually familiar with a stranger and would lead one of us to experiment with the other's body.
