Don't Try This at Home
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Roe’s shoulders hunched in despair. “The good news is, that means there’s an after-office meeting of everybody but the upper management, who tend to disapprove of gambling on corporate premises.”
“Wow.” Matt thought about it for a moment. “It’s like the world’s most ideal fuckup.”
“No, that would be me.” Roe buried his face in his hands. “What I wouldn’t do right now for an office with a window. That opened widely enough to climb through.”
Matt stood up and brushed off, trying to straighten up what used to be his clothing and scrape together what had once been a collection of brain cells. “Well. Do we face the music, or hide here forever?”
“Hide here forever,” Roe said firmly. “I have some Tic Tacs in my desk drawer. We can last for days. They’ll forget about us.”
“Roe?”
“What?” It was a sigh.
Matt smiled. “Roe… it’s gonna be okay. We go out there, we deal with it, we go home. Trust me, we’ll live.”
Roe stared at him. “You can’t possibly be serious.”
Matt nodded firmly. “We go, we deal, we leave. You think you can’t do it, but you can.” He paused. “All you have to do is give up that whole… being perfect thing you keep doing. Just give up, Roe. Nobody’s perfect, least of all you.” He stopped. “Okay, now, what I actually meant to say was—”
“No, stop, I understand.” Roe ran a hand through his hair and started tucking the torn bits of his pants into the waistband of his underwear. “This is a travesty.”
Matt shrugged. “This is life, dude.”
They patched themselves together, girded their limply spent loins, cleared their collective throat, and sallied forth… into what turned out to be an ocean of coworkers who were either smirking knowingly or giving large, fake, uncomfortable smiles that said, I know what you sound like when you squirt, and there is not enough bleach on earth to wash that knowledge from my brain. Roe fumbled for words, his face red and bewildered. It was actually Matt who led them out quickly, tossing out some uncomfortable smiles of his own, not even bothering to explain or apologize.
They made it out to the parking lot and tried not to sprint to Roe’s car, shutting themselves inside. Roe promptly curled up into semi-fetal position, somewhat hampered by the steering wheel, and groaned loudly. “Oh my God. Matt, I fucking hate you.”
Matt stared at Roe, feeling the beginnings of heartbreak. “What?”
Roe looked at Matt and said, “I just… I just mean, you were amazing in there, you didn’t even look scared or bothered. At all.” His eyes were filled with something like wonder. “You do this every day of your life, don’t you? Face the music for some awkward misstep and go on working and living and being with people?”
Matt smiled. “Well… yeah.” He paused. “And Roe?”
“Yes?”
“I fucking hate you right back. So, so much.”
Roe smiled. “I hate you worse.”
“Not a chance, dickhead.”
“My loathing is boundless, cockface.”
“Your Mom is boundless, you cunt. Oh. Oh shit. Um.”
Roe stared, and this time, they both started laughing at the same time. Matt launched himself at Roe and ignored the yelp of alarm, smothering Roe with clumsy kisses that were amazingly well-received. He heard a murmur that might have been, “I so fucking do not hate you, you sexy, amazing stud.”
I so fucking do not hate you back. The two of them were laughing and tugging at each other’s clothes, unable to wait for the drive home, and Matt realized that this relationship was probably going to cause them a vast amount of mutual embarrassment.
And it was going to be a lot of fun.
THERE was a new word around the office for an event so heinous that it absolutely destroyed the reputation of a perfectly respectable human being, to the point where that person had to be totally redefined in the eyes of everybody else. A word that meant “sex in public”. A word that meant “total and abject humiliation”. A word that encapsulated a fall from grace, but a fall into humanity, and perhaps that wasn’t so bad.
They were calling it the “Roepocalypse.”
BELL ELLIS made her writing debut at the age of eight with a series of truly dreadful stories about unicorns. She continued to happily produce abysmal fiction until she was distracted by several college degrees, a social life, and a steady career in software design. By the time she returned to her writing again, several of her acquaintances informed her that she’d fallen into the terrible habit of actually writing readable stories. She never recovered from this. Now she produces tolerable fiction at a furious rate in a tiny little house in the woods, to the dismay of her two cats, various family members, and legions of abandoned unicorns.
You can e-mail Bell at ellis.tales@gmail.com.
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