by Daisy Jane
Who’d have thought a car accident would put me in the mix with three freaking superheroes?
The Prius and a leg dislocation now seems like I haven’t earned this enough.
Eli’s eyes are deep blue, the color of the tide disappearing into the sea. He is also tattooed, though I can’t see the extent of it because he has on more clothes than the other two. Wearing a gray hoodie with the words “SEVEN SALOONS” written in an ornate block font across the front, he also wears athletic shorts and has already disposed of his shoes, nothing but no-show socks on. One entire calf is covered in black inked designs, appearing to be a large portrait of… someone. Where his sweatshirt dips at his collarbone, black ink is visible. His jaw is soft and his face was young, a boyish handsome that makes me want to bead his name onto an anklet and carve our initials into a tree. I could see his mountainous frame under the sweatshirt, though, and wonder if he is even more muscley than the other two.
Eli’s eyes pin me to my seat and the longer he looks at me, the harder it is to breathe. Holy shit.
Suddenly, all of the slut-shaming the girls and I had done over the years seemed very one-sided and wrong.
“What self-respecting woman would let themselves be crammed by a bunch of dudes at once?” I’d said once, Brynn nodding staunchly in agreement.
“A slut with daddy issues, that’s who!” she’d said, and I believed we’d all clinked our damn wine glasses to it, too.
I’m considering now that maybe we didn’t have all the facts.
Maybe those girls who did gang-bangs knew men that looked like Bastian, Bodhi and Eli and if that were the case, she’d be a damn fool to not be banged by them all. You only live once, seriously.
In my twenty-six years of being an alive human being, I have literally never crossed paths with a man even a fraction as hot as any of these guys. And all three of them are here, in front of me, one of them already halfway naked.
I lick my lips, shaking away the thoughts, because three best friends slash roommates aren’t going to gang bang some lonely and desperate stranger just because she made chocolate cake.
“Thanks again,” I say, trying still to break that same damn spell I was under, “this looks super yummy.”
Eating will be a good distraction for my brain. Anything to stop thinking about being naked with the three of these guys, with me on all fours.
“Do you have extra makeup on?” Brynn leans into my face, so close that I’m sure she can see into my pores. I pull away.
“What? No,” I shake my head, stirring the color mixture in front of me. It’s my first afternoon appointment of the day with only one other after.
“Your face looks different,” she says, her eyes still pinched on my face. I can feel her analytic stare on my profile.
I’m a little flush. I noticed it in the flip down mirror of my car when I parked at the salon a few minutes ago. I can’t do much about that until my body… settles down a bit. My two-hour three-person date threw my body into a long-awaited and much-needed overdrive. By the time I got back to my house, my panties were absolutely soaked.
That hadn’t happened to me since my senior-year college boyfriend put his hand on my thigh in the theater during Lady Bird and it was the first time he touched me. I wanted him so bad that when he draped his hand on my thigh, I got so embarrassingly excited. I still cringe when I think about how much I wanted him. Because in hind sight it wasn’t him as much as it was it. The feeling of being under a man’s touch, feeling his course fingers against my smooth wet slit. It set me on fire. Planted a seed in my belly that silently grew year after year.
Leaving me here.
Fingering myself on the floor of my entryway, back to the inside of the front door. So horny that I couldn’t even make it to my bed or couch, or even take off my panties. This wasn’t an act of self-love or self-care, this was physically getting to myself before I mentally did, and ruined my own orgasm.
I’d been known to orgasm in my sleep, fairly often. I didn’t need to toss that juicy tidbit of information to the girls at girls’ night—I knew what it meant. No need to go round-table psychiatry on me.
I’d been holding back too long. My shyness had become the single reason I was sexually frustrated.
And now it was like some trap door got popped open by Bastian the day of the accident.
I was like a shark with the taste of blood.
One meal with those three and I absolutely knew I wanted them.
After I came down from my two back-to-back orgasms, I peeled myself off the entryway floor, changed my panties, touched up my makeup and drove to work. I don’t know if I should feel dirty or embarrassed, surely those three didn’t immediately go and jerk off from being around me. But for once I didn’t worry about my feelings and if they were right or wrong. I realized how I felt was important to pay attention to, rather than to judge.
I felt good.
When I’d left, Bastian invited me over to their place next week, same day. So yeah, I felt really fucking good.
“Just a little warm, I guess,” I say, leaning back from Brynn.
“Not your head though, right?” she asks, which makes me feel really guilty for kind of lying to her. I mean, I didn’t have to tell her I was flush from giving myself two amazing orgasms, but it did feel like lying to her by omitting the fact that I went to Officer Cute’s house in the first place.
“No, all good there, thankfully,” I say, never skipping an opportunity to be grateful for not having a headache.
“Hey, so listen to this,” Brynn says, her gum popping with her exited jaw. Her client is watching an episode of Real Housewives on her phone with ear pods. My client is listening to music. It’s just us more and more these days, now that phones are everything. Phones are more important than humans, it sometimes seems.
“Bryan was telling me about this girl he went to college with back at Long Beach,” she says, blowing a small bubble. She always tries to blow bubbles with her sad little Trident bricks. Everyone knows you cannot blow bubbles with Trident.
“He heard last night that she just married her former step-dad last weekend.” Her eyebrows dance into her hairline as she nods slowly, trying to impart a greater impact.
“Oh yeah?” I say, knowing that if I ever have a hope of admitting to Brynn that I want to have a four-way with the corner house guys, I cannot be judging others. Like, in the slightest.
“Step’s not related by blood,” I say, matter of fact. I’m prepared for her to assault me over the comment but instead she says, “I know, and he said that when the guy was her step-dad, she didn’t even know him. She didn’t meet him until her mom died.”
See, that’s a full story. It makes sense and it’s okay now.
I bet the gang bang girls have stories, too, I say to myself, wrapping foil around a thin piece of hair.
“That’s quite the story they have to tell their kids,” I say, moving onto the next piece of foil. The client in my chair, Mabel, has been getting the same balayage of caramels and blondes for years. Every eight weeks she comes in saying next time she’ll try something new. But each subsequent appointment she’s still not sure. She hems and haws, holds magazines folded in on themselves up to her face, testing celebrity hairstyles. And yet we always do the usual.
The usual is inside of a comfort zone, existing to keep her medium-happy with no risks of being big-unhappy.
“That’s the other part,” Brynn says, clipping a chunk of completed foils to one side of her client’s head. “She’s twenty-two and he’s forty-eight,” she mouths the man’s age as if it’s a mortal sin she can’t bring herself to say aloud. As if saying his age bears the same impact as saying Voldemort’s name aloud.
“They better hurry,” I say, not wanting to completely admonish this couple from being parents based on their ages.
“Even if she gets knocked up on the wedding night, he will still be sixty-seven freaking years old when the kid graduates from high school,” she says emphati
cally, as if your dad’s age when you graduate high school means anything.
“So? I mean, if he takes care of himself—which I’m sure he does if he pulled a twenty-year-old girl—then he’ll live to see his grandkids. He’ll be old but,” I wave my hand dismissively, “he’ll have that. It wasn’t too late for him.”
Brynn has stopped foiling and stands, arms motionless above her client’s head, staring at me.
“What?” I ask, feeling distinctly seen. Maybe she can’t see exactly what’s going on but I know she can tell something is going on. Thank God this is her last client for the afternoon. And the rest of the girls are off for the day. I can be alone in the salon with my flushed face and dirty mind and not worry about being found out.
As if there’s anything to find out anyway.
It was just a lunch.
Chapter 6
The week between my first lunch at the corner house and the second lunch goes by so painstakingly slow. One day feels like seven days and by the time Thursday comes, I feel like I should charge those three men some damn rent for how much space they’d been occupying in my brain.
I didn’t romanticize Bastian. I didn’t fan myself over Bodhi. I wasn’t gnawing my lip when I thought of Eli.
My heart had been thumping wildly at the thought of all of them. All at once.
I’d be chopping veggies for my salad and stop, eyes wide, mouth open. I’d be caught in this holy shit I’m actually drooling over having three men have sex with me at once state of frozen, shocking confusion.
Nothing in life ever prepares you for feeling normal about wanting to be fucked by three guys at once. There isn’t a Disney movie out there that doesn’t end in a traditional, man-saves-the-damsel single partner dynamic. There are no popular songs normalizing the vitality of fulfilling your sexual urges that fall outside the normal. The most mainstream multiple partners ever got was when it was multiple women with one man and while that was slightly more acceptable to the world, still, it was judged.
I’d even judged it. I’d judged many things because I thought I could see the landscape of my horizon. Find a guy, get married, have a perfect little nuclear family.
I didn’t anticipate on having headaches steal away the best parts of my twenties. The simplicity of each day, the unplanned but fun hangouts, the sporadic nature of fading youth. Those handful of years before your thirties when you still get to claim you’re figuring it all out. Headaches took that from me, pushed me inside, locked the door and told me to wait there in case.
I’d waited so long I think something inside me had snapped. Even if I was embarking on new territory, being the girl that desperately wanted to be filled by these three men at once, I still needed this. I needed this in a way I’ve never needed anything or anyone.
The first person to get a divorce had to know they weren’t doing anything wrong, rather, doing the rightest thing they could. Taking a huge leap so that they’d be happier, despite the fact that others would judge. Hell, people still judge divorce to this day. But someone did it and then lots of people started doing it, and those people aren’t bad people.
Knowing what you need and chasing it in a healthy way that doesn’t hurt anyone (or yourself), and well, how can anyone argue against that?
Bastian had my phone number but I didn’t have his. When he’d called me before, it was from the station. I had no way of communicating with any of the men if we were meeting at the same time still but as it’s what we agreed on last week, I planned to head over at the same time.
I really didn’t know what to expect. In case we were eating, I baked two desserts, covering my bases this time by making one vegan. Wanting to try on a million outfits to see which one was most flattering on my tummy—the part of me I hated the most—I forced myself not to do that. The more I built up the engagement, the more nervous I’d get. Trying on a bunch of outfits and sucking in until my ribs were sore? That wasn’t lowkey. I knew me. If I wanted this to be lowkey, I had to be lowkey.
Throwing on a black tube top and some short-all’s, I put my hair into a messy bun on the top of my head and slip into some Birkenstocks. Minimal makeup with just light mascara and lip gloss completed the easy, I didn’t think about this once a minute for the last ten thousand-plus minutes we’ve been apart look.
Easy peasy, low-key Sloane.
My legs (and everywhere else) are shaved, though.
I feel good. Confident but not overly so (though that had never been a problem for me), excited but controlled (no expectations, despite my wants seemingly growing like a wild vine inside me), and ready.
Pushing the glass Pyrex dishes to the corner of the kitchen counter so they’re easy to grab when I’m by the door, I shove my phone in my back pocket and take my keys off the counter. Then, in the crushing way it always happens—unexpected and when I want it the least—it happened.
I pull the front door open, the light of mid-day proving too strong and as it shines brightly against my face, my head reacts.
Immediately I feel the tiny pinpoint of pain, somewhere behind my left eye. It is deep in my brain, so that I can never point to where the pain is at. I could tap on my skull and grunt through the pain that it was in there somewhere, but somewhere was always too distant to find and fix. Pushing my shoulder into the door to close it, immediately I hold my hands up in front of me, my eyes still closed protectively. As soon as I feel that first moment of pain, I close my eyes. Instinctively, fearfully, because before every really bad migraine, my vision goes weird.
Doctors had told me it’s called an ocular migraine, causing an aura of light or blindness in one or both eyes. Taking a breath, I whispered please to myself once, quietly, before slowly opening my eyes. My heart pounds frantically in my chest immediately making me dizzy, a halo of fog around my brain. Blinking, once, twice, I try to make my brain connect to my eyes, to process what I am seeing.
Or rather, what I am not seeing.
Looking at my hands in front of me, I can see the fingers on my right hand but the fingers on my left hand seem to be gone. Not all, I can see the pinky and thumb faintly. This exact position, me alone staring at my hands, afraid—no, fucking scared as hell—had become too familiar to me. I’ve done it too often.
My thoughts slam into each other with a clanging. The momentum is there, just from the first trigger, and it won’t stop now. Not for a while at least. The anxiety and panic coming right behind the slamming pain takes no time in further rattling my already quaking brain.
I need these appointments.
What will I do if I need to go to the hospital?
I cannot cancel on clients again.
I worry about work because I know that these migraines can swallow whole days. After the work worries, another worry strikes. The panic that floats down over me, hovering and remaining a silent fear until the pain dissipates and my vision returns—the one question that always haunts—what if it kills me this time?
The pain is so extreme, so fast, physically crippling me. Each time I get these headaches I question if it hurts so bad because it’s not just a migraine. What if it’s something else and these migraines have been episodes, precursors, signs I should go get an MRI or see a doctor?
What if?
In a cruel twist of fortunate fate, I’m alone and therefore don’t have much time to panic and worry. At least not for a few minutes. Right now, I have to get my medication in me and get to a bathroom because this is already feeling like a bad one.
“Okay,” I exhale, trying to get a grip on my panic because I know with all certainty that if I have a panic attack, the head pain will be that much worse and that much harder to get over. “Five, eight hundred sixty-two, nineteen, thirty-four, sixty-three,” I count out loud, out of order, the trick making my brain work hard enough to release or at least soften its death grip on anxiety. With a slight calm washing over my body, it allows me to feel the pain starting in my head. The ripple of pain moving through the left side of my brain, making my skull a
nd face go numb. I will not be able to see a phone screen with even a slight bit of recognition in a few minutes, so while I’m still able to see things in a smear of color, I flip from memory to my recent calls.
“Hey girl,” Brynn says, the hurried movements of the stylists filling the line. She’s at work because she hasn’t lost clients and friends to debilitating headaches that cause her to miss work. That cause her to miss life. I swallow, speaking low and slow, not wanting to have to repeat myself.
The pain is already intensifying, which scares me. When they move fast like this, they’re usually the worst ones.
“I got a migraine. I won’t be able to come in today.” I stumble forward, knowing that I have only minutes to do anything important. I flick the lock on my front door and with my spare hand feel my way around into the kitchen, moving my palm up the cabinet door. Reaching around slowly, trying to avoid turning my house into pure chaos, I feel for my medicine.
It’s a small, slightly rectangular case, smooth everywhere but for the ridges where you pop it open a quarter of the way down. Inside is a plastic pen-looking tube, which twists into a covered vial. Once you twist the pen into the vial, the top opens and the medicine engages with an internal syringe, filling it. There’s a button on top of the pen that requires force to click but once you do, the button releases the needle into your skin, and you’re filled with medicine. Sumitriptan, to be exact.
I hate taking the injection. I only do it on the really, really bad ones. Because while it slows down the rolling boulder of pain that gathers momentum in my brain, it doesn’t bring relief to the already existing pain. And it gives me a pain in my neck so intense that I always have to lay down and count out loud for however long it takes until my body gets through it. Ten minutes sometimes, other times much longer.