Grieving through Falling

N.S.Michael


“Lady, you are one Grade-A cocksucker.”

Pig.

Sarah grinned, careful not to show her teeth, and swallowed. She forced a sultry little laugh and stood, turning her back to him. Unzipping her skirt as she went, Sarah began to lazily undulate to a beat that wasn’t there, using her hands to slowly slip the shiny PVC over her hips and down to her ankles.

She did this tease partly to arouse him again, but mostly so that he couldn’t see her lips trembling. All throughout the affair she felt as if she wanted to vomit. With the gag reflex he forced upon her, she almost did several times.

No. He didn’t force me.

Opposite the chair where he sat watching, recovering, was the bed. Facing as she was, she couldn’t avoid it. It stood both in the room and in her mind as the next stop in the progression of the evening; an evening that she had planned in great detail.

Stepping out of the slick vinyl around her ankles, she took a small pace towards the bed. Crossing her arms under her breasts and grasping the edge of the matching PVC top, she pulled it with deliberate leisure over her head and tossed it gently aside. All that was left between his eyes and those certain bits of bare flesh that she knew he lusted for were what her friend Sandy once referred to as her “comefuckmes.”

Oh gawd.

Stop thinking.

The distance between the chair and the bed was a small one and she crossed it in two more steps. Lifting a knee, she put her weight on the bed and pivoted. With a single crooked finger, she gave him a “come hither” and he rose from his seat, slipping his shoes and slacks from around his legs. His hands made slow progress over the buttons on his shirt, but his face betrayed his eagerness.

Not to mention… jeez, you could count his pulse by it.

Oh gawd.

Didn’t I tell you to stop thinking?

He was smiling at her and she returned it with a grin that didn’t reach her eyes. It didn’t matter as his gaze didn’t stretch that high. He stopped a pace away, hands pawing at the final button on his collar. It was as if certain parts of him were of two different minds; his hands a separate animal, desperately clawing at the offender that was suffocating him, an oppressive barrier keeping his skin from the open air.

Glancing down, her false grin slid a bit as one of his minds was apparently being distracted by the fiddling above and was drooping. To regain its attentions, she made a reciprocating move of her own and reached up to the small hooks holding her taut. It was her first front clasping brassiere, one of its main selling points, and was almost as odd to take off as it was to put on.

Sandy.

Stop thinking.

Still, just a quick twist of the wrist and a shrug of the shoulders was all it took to regain his concentration. She tossed the physics defying lace off to the side and reinforced her smile, this time adding teeth. He had finally given up trying to slip the plastic through its warren and just ripped it from its place. Throwing it behind him, he barked a laugh; a bit of self-praise over his primal display. Sarah smiled even wider.

“You just gonna stand there staring?”

“You’re beautiful.”

It was her own due, she thought somewhere in the fog of rationality that resided in the back of her mind, but she knew that he didn’t mean anything by it. His words were just as much a step in their time honored dance as hers were. The only difference was that his were supposed to be flattering and hers were challenging. In that haze, she thought to herself that they were a little flattering, but only insomuch as they were designed to get him what he wanted. That he was all but guaranteed that little boon in return for her own goals for the evening was moot.

He reached for her and she banished the fog, in its place finding once again the rolling, oily muck where her stomach should’ve been. It was harder to push away the nausea this time, but it eventually began to fade to a manageable feeling of distaste in the back of her throat. He lowered his head to her chest and she gasped. The sound was a little thick, but he didn’t notice or care. Again, she wished she could vomit. Instead, making the appropriate noises, she drew him down to the bed and lay there.

Is it always this easy?

Oh gawd.

Why are you thinking?

I can’t help it.

Under his frenetic ministrations, Sarah folded in mentally on herself. A small piece of her seemed to slip around the peat bog that had formed in her middle and dodged quickly by the dull throb of friction below it. From between the amorphous flesh of the two people on the yellowing down comforter, Sarah found herself looking through the window over the hedgerow. In a single moment, her position became reversed and she was on the outside looking in.

Instead of peering over the hedge, she was strangely aware of the clothes sitting on the desks and tables on either side of her. The image of the two lovers on the bed faded and she was left in a familiar room with a queer sensation. It was as if she were sleepwalking; her body was moving without her, her head swiveling to take in the various bits of cloth hanging from the racks as she unwillingly walked through the hanging beads separating the floor from the dressing area. She recognized the store immediately and wanted to sob for it, but couldn’t.

“You know, I think there’s an inverse relationship between opacity and cost.”
If Sarah’s chin had been her own, it would have dropped. Sandy was standing there, just off to the right of her vision thumbing through clothes just as she had eight months before. “It seems like ‘the sheerer the fabric, the larger the bill.’ Oh my gawd! What are you wearing?”

“You like it?” Looking down at herself, Sarah’s body did a little turn and posed rather provocatively. She was on plain view to her friend, the clerks, and her own despairing self. All that she had done her utmost to keep hidden from public view, especially from male eyes, was on display through the thin lace of the brassiere and thong.

Sandy gave her a critical look and responded, “That is so wrong for a honeymoon. An anniversary, maybe, but that… that thing doesn’t exactly scream ‘lovingly chaste and pure newlywed.’ It has more of a ‘comefuckme’ kind of aura to it.”

“Oh, come on. Where’s your sense of adventure?” To her own horror, Sarah sashayed her way across the room on the balls of her feet as if she were already wearing the heels she had bought earlier that day. “I think he’ll get a kick out of them.”

“He’ll get a kick, alright… a kick to the brain as all the blood rushes out of it. Besides, you should worry less about my sense of adventure and more about your seriously faulty sense of romance.” Sandy held a hanger from a single finger in front of Sarah’s nose as she swayed through her return trip. It held a white lace teddy and garter set that was a bit more demure. “Try it on.”

Sarah pouted. It was a strange sensation to experience involuntarily. Her arm reached out for the garment and she paced back to the boudoir with a sigh.

“Face it, Sarah. You’re probably the last person on the planet who’s still wearing her scarlet ‘V’ proudly. You’re the Bizarro Hester Prim. The least you could do is try and fit the part.”

A barked laugh worked its way quickly from the back of throat as she bent over to grab the thong from around her ankles. “Wouldn’t Bizarro Prim wear a coarse bodysuit under twelve other layers of clothes and make love through a hole in a sheet?”

“Perhaps.”

“And it’s so boring. I’m going to be wearing too much white as it is.” Sarah’s view was obscured for a moment as the white lace bunched around her neck, her arms trying to pull it down over her chest. “I wanna wear the black ones.”

“Would you prefer your parents to see those little numbers bleeding through your dress?” Sarah could hear the clerks on the other side of the store chuckling.

“God, I could just see it. Momma would just about die of apoplexy and Daddy… Daddy wouldn’t know where to look. I’m sure, once she got her second wind, that Momma’d harrumph her way through the rest of the ceremony. Hell, it’s not as if she wasn’t three months gone with me when they tied the knot.”

“You never told me that… And I sure don’t see proper Mrs.Merriweather spilling the beans to anyone, let alone you.” Sandy peeked around the corner to give her a quizzical look that Sarah’s other self, and subsequently her, saw in the mirror.

“Stop it,” Sarah giggled. “That’s not nice to say about the Merriweathers… whoever they are. Daddy let it slip during ‘The Talk.’”

At that point she turned around and felt a little vertigo from the unexpected move. Not that it showed, of course. Sandy moved out of the door and held the beads for her as she strutted past, once again on the balls of her feet.
“Oh my gawd, your Dad was the one who gave it to you?”

Again, she giggled. “Well, you don’t see Momma talking about that sort of thing, do you? Not like Daddy added much to what I already knew. You should have seen his face; oh gawd, he was so red.”

The clerks gave a polite, but enthusiastic, applause as she paraded by. In any other store, she wouldn’t have been allowed to try anything on without purchasing them first, but Sandy knew the owner and called in a favor. The store became their own private boutique and its small little office their dressing room.

Oh, Sandy. Why?

Stop thinking.

You stop thinking… oh gawd, I’m going insane.

“Come on, you’re still his little girl. He knows you’re gonna give Rog the key to the tower… he can’t help but be a little squeamish about that.” Sandy reached over to the desk where the black lingerie was tossed and proceeded to return them to the hanger. “Especially if you wear these.”

“To be honest, I was toying with the idea of not wearing anything underneath.”

“You little slut.” Sandy was hugging herself to keep from laughing. “What happens if you trip over your train?”

Guess we’ll never know.

Gawd, why can’t you shut up.

We really are insane.

“Well, Momma’d look like a beet with constipation. Daddy’d stare for a few seconds, then look skyward and forget to help me up. The rest of the party would gasp in shock. And Roger… Roger would just smile.”

“And hopefully cover your shame.”

“Yes, and hopefully cover my shame.”

Ducking back behind the beads, Sarah removed the white teddy and changed back into her street clothes. The garters were still neatly in their package; she hadn’t put them on. In the haze of memory, she recalled thinking that it wouldn’t have done to tear the hose.

I can’t cry. She won’t let me cry.

Sandy sighed from the other side of the beads, the black number on its hanger over her shoulder. “Please, for the love of all that is good and holy and the honor of your put upon Maid of the same… Oh, the hell with it. If you promise… promise not to go commando, I’ll buy you this one.”

“Deal.”

“But I’m also buying you the white one and you have to wear it under the dress.”

“Tch… fine. But I don’t want to hear another word about it.” Sarah felt guilty about that last. So much so that it almost overpowered her grief. Even though Sandy bought them both, she still intended on going bare, just to do something wild before she was officially a kept woman.

The clerks came over, each with a box in hand. Apparently there are no secrets in a lingerie store. They made a show over how lovely Sarah and Sandy’s tastes were and congratulating Sarah on her impending nuptials. Removing the garments from their hangers, they folded them neatly and placed them within the soft paper of the boxes, handing one each to the girls. With that, they all turned and began moving through the racks towards the register kiosk. Sarah remembered feeling happy with herself, if still a little guilty over the partial lie she had told her friend.

It was only partly a lie because I never got the chance.

Stop thinking about it.

I can’t.

Then just go away.

I already am away.

“Oh god, Sarah. I’m so sorry.”

Sarah found herself with such a powerful feeling of vertigo that, if her body was her own, she’d have tumbled head over heels and landed flat on her back with the room spinning. She wasn’t walking down the store aisle anymore. She was sitting. The racks had disappeared and were replaced with familiar pictures on familiar walls. A coffee table was at her knees and a television was perched in an alcove across the room. She was staring at it.

Well, her other self was staring at it. She was just along for the ride. Sarah could feel someone pressed up against her and something wet and lukewarm snaking down the sides of her neck. That same sensation was running down her own cheeks. Inside, she was screaming. The wail wasn’t coming from this her. It was coming from the real her, echoing off the walls of her imagination. She wanted to turn to Roger and slap him, over and over. She wanted to hug him tightly to her, to crush the pain out of him and herself in an embrace she didn’t want to end. She wanted to do many things… but she couldn’t.

Instead, all she could do was sit there, staring into the television with her other self, watching the closed captioning scroll by under the repeating video of Sandy on the screen. A little superimposed box with the station’s call letters in it was blocking out the home video’s timestamp. It was from Sarah’s own wedding shower.

“Where did they get this? Did you give it to them?”

Roger didn’t answer. He just held onto her as the little white letters in the blacked out boxes jerked across the screen. The body found by fisherman last week was indeed that of Sandra Coleman of Long Beach, missing for thirty-eight days, disappearing just three days before she was to be the Maid of Honor in a wedding. Her identity had been confirmed early the day before, but withheld until the family had been notified. Sandra Coleman was twenty-eight. Sports scores, commercial break.

Sarah hadn’t been notified; she didn’t get a single phone call. Sandy’s family hadn’t thought of her in all their grief. She called them everyday. Hell, she’d called them just the day before and nobody mentioned it. Granted they were busy and brief and… who was she, really? Just a friend. She had postponed the wedding, pretty much indefinitely until Sandy was found, and that’s all she was. Just a friend.

All of the sudden she felt the urge to do something, to be somewhere, just as she had felt that day. She realized it and was horrified. Sarah had fallen into herself so completely that she’d almost lost it, unable to tell the difference between the self that she was now and the self that she was inhabiting, the self of her past.

Oh gawd, Sandy. I miss you so much.

"I have to get down there. I have to be there. We have to go," she heard herself, felt herself say. Getting up off the couch, she ran into the hall to grab her shoes. “They didn’t mention where to go…. Her parents; we’ll go to her parents. Someone’s bound to be there.”

“I can’t.”

Sarah crossed back from the hall through the living room and into the dining room, wishing she could shut her eyes, plug her ears. To her dismay, unable to change anything, she found herself saying, “We’ll go, help out, cook dinner or something… wait, what?”

The bastard.

“I can’t.”

“It’s not like I wanted it to end this way, either, but--”

He cut her off, “No. You don’t understand.” He looked right at her from the couch, careful to enunciate each word. “I can’t marry you.”

Sonofabitch.

Oh Sandy.

Sarah froze immediately. She wanted to throw things, hurl all the pain and frustration of loss and betrayal at him in some tangible way. She wanted him to hurt as she did, but her other self just stood there, immobile, halfway in the act of reaching for the jacket that was draped across a dining room chair. Sarah almost wished she were back in her bedroom. For a brief moment, she almost felt motion and smelled a musk of sweat and body odor, but it was gone as soon as it came and all she had was herself, Roger, and their apartment.

“Wha?”

“I just can’t. This is… it’s just too much. I can’t deal with this. She’s dead,” he said and Sarah felt herself flinch. “She’s dead and she’s not coming back… not coming back.” He drew his knees up to his chest and began rocking back and forth on the couch, drawing in on himself.

"You… the two of you?”

“Of course not, she loved you like a sister; more than a sister. She would never…” he trailed off, still rocking himself. The wood frame of the couch creaked with each motion.

Jesus-fucking-Christ.

“But you loved her.” It wasn’t a question, then or now; just a statement of fact put forth in a hollow voice. She hadn’t seen it coming. Where were the signs? What signs? “And you don’t love me.”

He nodded and it was almost as if she could feel the despair of her then-self as well as the pain she was feeling as her now-self. Her head shook and she began to run throughout the apartment.

“Keys, keys, where the hell did I leave the keys?”

As she raced into the bedroom, she threw a glance at the closet and saw two plain white boxes sitting prominently on the suitcases that had been sitting they already packed for well over a month. She didn’t have time for what was inside those boxes then; the keys were on the dresser.

Coat, keys, and shoes either in hand or already on, Sarah watched the worst day of her life continue as she stepped back through the hall. She was halfway out the door when the sound of Roger’s mantra came drifting through the haze of her then-self’s senses.

“She’s not coming back. She’s not coming back.”

Sarah remembered that, in that exact moment, she realized that neither would she.

Is this ever going to end?

Oddly enough, it did. All of the sudden, she was back in that dim room, lying on the bed under him. She was crying when his focus left the subject of his own orgasm. The tears were pooling in the wells of her eyes, but she didn’t blink them away. Despite the fact that her body was once again her own, she didn’t want to move; she didn’t want to see past the blur that they were causing in her vision.

“That good, huh?”

Pig.

Apparently the false smile was still loose upon her lips. She forced another laugh, and was hoping to add some bite to it, but there wasn’t any sting. There was nothing left. It mightn’t have mattered anyway as he seemed to take even her half-hearted chortle as an affirmation of his prowess. He bent down to kiss her and she allowed it.

Not wanting to even see the blur of him, she turned her head and continued to tremble. Sarah wondered why he couldn’t push her pain right out along with everything else, but a part of her was thankful. She wanted the pain. She wanted to wrap herself in it and writhe in the agony it gifted her. She deserved that much. In less than a year, Sarah had lost her fiancé, her best friend… and now, to crown her in all her misery, she had just lost her virginity.

“So what was your name again?”