Men, Women & Children: A Novel

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Men, Women & Children: A Novel Page 21

by Chad Kultgen


  Hannah continued to exchange illicit text messages with Chris Truby. This exchange escalated to include images and videos of various forms of masturbation from both parties. Hannah did all of this in the hope that she would eventually have sexual intercourse with Chris. They attempted it twice, but both times the act turned into some version of oral sex or masturbation, the last one culminating in Chris asking her to insert her finger into his anus while he masturbated. Hannah found this request disgusting but obliged him, assuming she would be able to maneuver herself onto his erect penis. Instead he ejaculated within seconds of her finger being inserted. She was becoming discouraged with the situation, but still felt that Chris was the best candidate with whom to lose her virginity. Hannah kept her dealings with Chris a secret from any of her Olympianne squadmates. She would tell them about it once she had accomplished her goal, and she would omit any of the things that she found strange or disgusting, such as the insertion of her finger into Chris’s anus at his behest.

  Chris Truby found his interest waning in any form of pornography that didn’t involve women humiliating or penetrating men. He began to find that the only way he could achieve an erection and eventual orgasm was to at least imagine being tied down, spit on, abused, or otherwise compromised at the hand of a dominant woman. He understood that this was making his encounters with Hannah difficult, and he tried various methods to reorganize the way he thought about standard intercourse. He extensively researched masturbation techniques on various websites designed to help men associate sexual pleasure with vaginal intercourse.

  The most common of these methods seemed to involve a product called the Fleshlight, which was a latex cylinder with an opening at one end that was fashioned into the shape of a vagina. The opening was designed for a man to insert his erect penis so as to simulate vaginal sex. Not having the access to purchase such a device, Chris researched how to build his own and was directed to a website with intricate instructions. The easiest of these to build was only good for a single use, but this was acceptable to him. The makeshift device’s two main components were a Nerf ball and a cardboard paper towel tube. Chris had both of these items, and he found it easier to make the device than he thought it would be. He shredded the Nerf ball as instructed into small pieces, discarding the outer pieces of the ball that were coated in paint. Chris used a layer of duct tape to seal one end of the paper towel tube, filled the tube with the shredded Nerf foam, and then pumped a generous amount of hand lotion into the tube. The instructions on the website he read also said that, to further simulate the feeling of an actual vagina, the entire device could be microwaved for forty-five seconds. Not wanting to alert his parents to what he was doing, he omitted this step. And, to further conceal his activities, he hid the used devices in his backpack until he left for school the next morning, at which time he would throw them into his neighbor’s trash can, fearing that there might be some reason for his parents to look through their own trash and discover his makeshift vaginas.

  Once he had the first device built, he achieved an erection by watching one of his favorite videos, which included a man sealed in a latex vacuum bag, with only one opening in the material for his mouth, drinking urine directly from a woman’s urethra as she squatted over his face. With an erection achieved, Chris held his device on the bed in the estimated position that Hannah’s vagina would occupy if they were to have vaginal intercourse in the missionary position. He opened an image of Hannah’s face on his phone and set it down on his bed under his own face, in a rough estimation of where her head might be if they were actually having sex. Chris thrust his penis into the cardboard tube filled with Nerf foam and lotion, forcing himself to think about sex with Hannah. After the fourth such attempt with the fourth such device, Chris was able to achieve orgasm. He felt that he would eventually be able to have sex with Hannah.

  Allison Doss continued to implement forced vomiting in her dieting strategy. She had gained a certain amount of expertise and felt that no one could possibly know what she was doing. Although she preferred using the ipecac syrup to induce vomiting, she mastered the skill of using her own finger to trigger the desired reaction. She found it necessary in certain situations, where she hadn’t anticipated food being served but was clearly expected to eat.

  Despite the pleasure she got from eating and then forcing herself to vomit, she found it more and more difficult to control her cravings for food. She attributed this to the fact that she was allowing herself to taste so many things. When she had limited her diet to celery, tuna, and water, she’d found it easy to forget what other things tasted like and therefore simple to have no cravings. Allison convinced herself that she would eventually wean herself from forced vomiting, but not yet. She was still enjoying it and she felt that she could still control her cravings.

  She sent Brandon Lender ten more messages on Facebook. He responded to none of them.

  Brandy Beltmeyer viewed Tim’s suspension as a sacrifice he made in the service of protecting her honor. It made him immensely more attractive to her, and in the weeks that passed, she spent as much time as she could with him. But her mother, Patricia, made it virtually impossible for her to find more than a night a week and some extra hours after school. She told Tim about her mother’s overbearing nature and made sure he understood that he should only ever communicate with her through her Freyja Myspace account. All of her other methods of communication were monitored by her mother. Tim agreed to keep their relationship a secret from her mother, if only because he wanted it to continue.

  Brandy began to use her Freyja account almost exclusively to communicate with Tim, abandoning most of her other Myspace friends and neglecting her blogs and posts. She came to understand that she’d created the account at a time in her life when she felt very alone and it had served its purpose. It found friends for her and gave her interaction with people who valued what she had to say. Tim had replaced these people, and he had replaced them in a more meaningful way. He was real, and the things they discussed were not lies or based on a false identity. She didn’t feel as alone as she had when her parents first moved. Eventually, she even removed some of the friends she had gained who were interested only in having sexually explicit conversations with her. She deleted all of her e-mail conversations with these friends and all of her own blog entries as well. She even removed all of her photo albums and replaced her profile picture with an image of a painting of Freyja she’d found online.

  She and Tim shared their first kiss in the Goodrich Junior High School south parking lot one day after school, and after that they agreed to consider themselves an official couple. This designation included many behaviors they had already adopted, such as sitting together at lunch and leaving notes in each other’s lockers. But it also included new behaviors, such as holding hands and publicly recognizing each other as boyfriend and girlfriend.

  They were content to kiss from time to time and do nothing beyond this. They each found happiness in the other’s company, and they felt no need to push what they had into a level of physical intimacy that neither of them felt comfortable with yet. And although Tim might have felt some sexual urges at one point, he found that they were waning. It was a side effect of the Anafranil. He was aware of it and not altogether disappointed. He assumed a sexual relationship would only complicate his life, and he was happy with the level of simplicity he had achieved.

  Patricia had gained a few new members in her Parents Against The Internet watch-group. She used her relationship with her daughter as an example of how parents and their children should interact with regard to the Internet and its use. She remained unaware of her daughter’s secret Myspace account.

  Don Truby saved enough money to purchase a Girlfriend Experience with Angelique Ice and considered himself lucky that his wife was leaving for another Saturday night so soon after the trip that had allowed Don his first encounter with Angelique. Once again, however, Rachel did not visit her sister. Instead, she made a second rendezvous with Secretluvur,
and this time she spent the entire night with him, just as her husband did with Angelique Ice. Don and Rachel both found their experiences with their respective partners fulfilling in ways that the same experience within their marriage never could be. When they returned home the following morning, after each of their acts of infidelity, they were surprised to find that their relationship seemed to have improved somehow. They were more cordial with each other and happier in general. They each realized that sexual encounters outside their relationship made their relationship itself far more tolerable. They resigned themselves to living lives of constant infidelity, perhaps with Secretluvur and Angelique Ice or perhaps with multiple partners. Rachel had been receiving responses to her profile on AshleyMadison.com from several potential partners. As well, Don had performed several more searches on TheEroticReview.com and found a moderate number of prostitutes that offered the Girlfriend Experience, each of them unique and interesting to him for reasons that included varied hair color, tattoos, piercings, breast implants, and so on. For both Rachel and Don, the exact natures of their new adulterous lives had yet to reveal themselves, but they had found some happiness that didn’t exist before in their relationship.

  After two weeks of his wife, Tracey, withholding sex, Jim Vance agreed to schedule a vasectomy. He made the appointment as far in the future as he could, giving himself ample time to prepare psychologically for what he assumed would be a terrible ordeal.

  Danny Vance and Brooke Benton had been content to scale their physical relationship back to where it was at the beginning of the year. As a result, Danny found it much less difficult to concentrate on football. In addition, Coach Quinn realized that no matter how much he wanted to teach Danny and the rest of the team a lesson about obeying their superiors, he was in contention for another head-coaching job at a high school in a neighboring district. His record this season would mean more to the athletic director of that district than any lesson he could teach his players. So he allowed Danny to pass and pass often. This decision fueled the Goodrich Junior High School Olympians through a five-game winning streak, as they defeated the Scott Shining Stars, the Lefler Lions, the Lux Lightning Bolts, the Mickle Missiles, and a team Danny considered to be among the two best teams in their district, the Dawes Trojans. This winning streak left them with a six-and-one record going into the final two games of the season against the Pound Squires and the Culler Cougars. Danny knew they could lose one of these games and still make it to the district playoffs. Of the two teams they had left to play, he felt the Squires would give them the most trouble.

  chapter

  fifteen

  The Monday after the Olympians’ win over the Dawes Trojans, Allison Doss was standing at the dry-erase board in Mr. Donnelly’s geometry class, attempting to find the locus of an equation that was part of that day’s workbook assignment, when her back began to hurt. The pain was minor at first. Allison dismissed it as muscle soreness from the previous Friday, when she’d accidentally fallen from the top of a three-person pyramid while cheering at the football game. She wrote x2 + y2 - 6x + 4y - 23 = 0 on the dry-erase board, received a satisfactory nod and congratulation from Mr. Donnelly for providing the correct answer, and then took her seat, the pain intensifying slightly. She rubbed her lower back for the rest of the class period and dry-swallowed two Advil caplets from her purse, but by the end of Mr. Donnelly’s geometry class she was in an abnormal amount of pain.

  Thinking that the pain might be related to an impending menstrual cycle, and having no tampons in her purse, Allison visited the restroom between classes with the intent of purchasing a tampon from the vending machine and inserting it just in case her period was beginning. Once inside the girl’s restroom, she purchased the tampon and went into a stall to insert it. As she pulled her pants and underwear down, she thought briefly about the fact that the last thing inside her vagina was Brandon Lender’s penis. She wished that he would respond to her Facebook messages.

  Just as she was about to insert the tampon, the pain in her back intensified to such a degree that she doubled over in pain. It seemed to move through her back and into her lower abdomen, which made her positive that it was related to her menstrual cycle. But in the past, it had never caused pain to this degree. She wondered if it had anything to do with the forced vomiting that had become a habit for her. If it was related, she felt that enduring intense physical pain every so often was a small price to pay. This was the last thought she had before she felt a heavy flow of blood stream down her thigh. She quickly rolled off a handful of toilet paper and did her best to stop the blood from making its way to her pants and underwear, which were around her ankles. Looking at the blood on the toilet paper, she noted that it was an odd shade of brown, much darker than any blood she had seen before. Along with the blood there were some smaller pieces of semisolid material. Allison had no idea what this was. Her assumption was that it was some kind of mucus associated with menstruation that she hadn’t expelled during any of her previous menstrual cycles. She became nervous and frightened, slightly frantic.

  She threw the bloodied toilet paper into the toilet and flushed it, but still felt blood flowing out of her vagina and down her legs. The pain in her back and abdomen were now at a level of intensity that made it difficult for her to concentrate on what she was doing. As she tried again to roll off another handful of toilet paper, the pain reached a point of intensity that overwhelmed Allison, causing her to collapse in the stall unconscious. She remained there for almost five minutes until a fellow student, Regina Sotts, happened into the restroom to urinate quickly before her next class and noticed a pair of shoes sticking out from under one of the stalls. After knocking on the door and inquiring as to the condition of the stall’s occupant—and receiving no answer—Regina kneeled down in a prone position that allowed her to see under the door. Seeing that Allison was unconscious and that she was lying in a slowly expanding pool of blood, Regina alerted the first member of the Goodrich faculty she saw in the hall outside, Mrs. Langston, who then notified both Principal Ligorski and Mrs. Heldinberg, the school nurse, who assessed the situation and quickly decided that an ambulance was needed.

  Allison regained consciousness as two paramedics lifted her onto a gurney, strapped her down, and rushed her through the halls of Goodrich Junior High School to an ambulance waiting outside. Allison was frightened and uncertain about what exactly was occurring, but above all she was glad this was happening while virtually all other students were in class, so that only the faculty members involved and Regina Sotts would know what was happening. She wondered how long she could keep it a secret from the rest of the school. She was not looking forward to the embarrassment of explaining it to anyone.

  The paramedics asked Allison a series of questions dealing primarily with what she had had to eat that day, if she had ever experienced a menstrual cycle before, and so on. It wasn’t until they had her in the ambulance that one of them asked, “Are you sexually active?” Allison had to pause for a moment before answering. She said, “No. I mean, not really.”

  The paramedic said, “I know this is really personal, but we have to know the answers to these questions if we’re going to be able to help you, okay?”

  Allison said, “Okay.”

  The paramedic said, “So we need to know if you’ve had sexual intercourse with anyone. And there’s nothing wrong with that if you have. You’re not in any kind of trouble or anything. We just need to know.”

  Allison said, “I mean, yeah, I guess I have.”

  The paramedic said, “Okay,”

  Allison felt another wave of intense pain in her back and abdomen and again passed out. When she regained consciousness this time she was in a hospital, nude except for a surgical gown. Her mother and father were present. Her mother was crying and holding her hand. Allison noticed a needle in the back of her hand. She followed the tube connected to the needle to find a bag filled with some kind of fluid that was flowing directly into her vein. She assumed it to be some kind
of medication or nutrients. The thought of something going into her body that she couldn’t expel at will made her nauseous. She thought about tearing the needle out, but she knew that would bring up questions from her parents and a reinsertion by a doctor at some point. She hated needles and was thankful that she had been unconscious when it had been inserted the first time. With some concentration on the thought of the needle in her hand, she was certain she could feel the contents of the bag flowing into her vein and then being circulated through her body, swimming through her blood. She was on the verge of vomiting but held it back. She felt better having control over the act, comforted that she wasn’t completely powerless in the situation.

  Allison said, “What happened?”

 

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