Chapter 6: Processing
The room was still wrecked.
Nobody had fixed it. The beds stayed shoved against opposite walls, Bessie's mattress still floating in the middle of the floor with the desk lamp clipped to its frame, off now, dark. The fairy lights sat coiled in a paper bag by the door like something dead. The sheet was balled in the corner; nobody had mentioned washing it.
They'd eaten dinner in the dining hall like normal people. They'd talked about a sociology reading. Then they'd come back and closed the door and stood around not knowing how to start, because last night had been the biggest thing any of them had ever done and today the whole floor had been looking at them sideways.
Now it was eleven and the moon through the thin curtains laid a pale stripe across Bessie's bare mattress in the middle of the room, and the three of them were sprawled on Leslie's bed because it was the widest arrangement, two pushed against the wall and one lying across the foot.
"Processing," Megan announced to the ceiling. "That's what we're calling it. Feelings in the dark. Like a book club."
"Shut up," Leslie said, but she said it softly. "You cried too."
"I did not."
"You were wet-eyed. I saw you."
"That was sweat."
Bessie, lying across the foot with her legs dangling off the edge, laughed once, low. "You were crying. I could hear it in your voice when you said 'that's her, that's what she sounds like.' Your voice went up a whole pitch."
Megan was quiet a second. "Fine. I cried a little. It's just, I've been carrying that fantasy since I was fifteen and you," she pointed in the dark, in Bessie's direction, "you did it. On day one. You said the thing and then we just built it, like it was nothing."
"It wasn't nothing," Bessie said.
"No. It wasn't."
The moon stripe lay across Leslie's shins. She could hear the heating pipes ticking, the same pipes she'd listened to for two years while being quiet. "Can I say something weird?"
"Rule's the rule," Megan said.
"Last night was the best thing that's ever happened to me and I keep wanting to apologize for it. Like, out loud, to my mom, to God, to whoever." Leslie turned her head on the pillow. "That's the small town in me. I know it's dumb."
"It's not dumb," Bessie said. "I've been apologizing in my head since freshman year."
"Yeah, but you don't do anything you don't mean. I watched you, Bess. Strapped to a bed with a blindfold on, you still ran the meeting. You counted. You set the rules. I don't apologize for things like that. I apologize for wanting them in the first place." Leslie's hand had come to rest on her own stomach without her noticing. "That's the thing I'm processing. I want stuff. Loud, gross stuff. And I still hear my mom's voice going, Lesley Marie."
"Honestly," Megan said, "the shame is kind of the good part for me. Don't judge."
"I told you Tuesday," Leslie said. "I don't judge. I came to the word 'shame.'"
"So did I," Bessie said.
They lay there. Somewhere down the hall a door shut and a girl's voice carried through the wall, ordinary, complaining about a group project. All three of them listened to it the way they always listened to the walls now. It was going to be a habit for the rest of the year, Leslie thought. Maybe the rest of their lives.
"First times," Megan said, out of nowhere, or maybe out of that listening silence. "That's what I keep circling. Last night all our big fantasies were out on the table. But nobody's told the little ones. The first ones. Where it started."
"You want origin stories," Leslie said.
"I want to know what thirteen-year-old Les was like. I feel like I deserve it, I've had my fingers in you four times this week."
Bessie snorted into the dark.
"I was fifteen," Leslie said. Her voice had already gone lower, the bedroom register, and she felt the shift land on both the other girls, felt the mattress adjust. "And there was a girl named Dana Kirkwood. Soccer. Long legs, hair she was always shoving behind her ears."
Megan made a small sound. "A crush. Les had a girl crush."
"I didn't even have the word for it. I thought I just wanted to be her friend. I thought about her all the time. I'd go to her games and watch her run." Leslie's hand slid an inch down her own stomach, under the waistband of her shorts, no further, just resting there. "One night her family was away and we were at her house alone, and we were watching a movie and she put her feet in my lap, just casual, and I started rubbing them, and she went quiet, and I could feel her looking at me in the dark."
Leslie could feel both of them looking at her now.
"And I rubbed her feet for like twenty minutes, terrified, and then she said, 'Les, can I tell you something,' and I said yeah, and she said, 'I've never let anyone touch me like this,' and my whole body got hot. Not in my face. Lower."
"What happened?" Megan asked, and her voice was already rough.
"We kissed. She taught me. She'd had practice, a boyfriend the year before, and I was just, I was a sponge. She took my hand and put it on her stomach and then she pushed it down, into her pajama pants, and she was bare under there and so warm, and she said, 'just like that, soft, don't rush.' I touched a girl's pussy before I'd touched my own on purpose. That was the first night I touched myself too. She talked me through it, over the phone, later that summer. Same voice she used to tell me where to put my fingers."
The mattress creaked. Megan's hand was moving under her blanket, slow, unmistakable. "God. Keep going."
"That's the whole story. That's the first time. I thought about her feet in my lap for a year." Leslie pushed her shorts down off her hips in one motion, kicked them to the floor, and pulled her panties aside. Two years ago she'd have died before doing this in front of anyone. Now it felt like talking. "Who's next."
"Slumber party, sophomore year of high school," Megan said, no hesitation, fingers already working, her breath quickening as she spoke. "Six of us in my friend Kayla's basement. Somebody's older sister had left porno magazines in the garage, and one girl smuggled a stack down and we're all in sleeping bags passing them around in the dark, giggling, pretending to be grossed out."
"Were you grossed out?" Bessie asked. Her voice had gone quiet and even, the way it did when she was interested.
"I was transfixed. I couldn't stop looking at the pages, at the girls spread open with their heads tipped back, at the way the flash had caught the shine between their legs. Everyone else was passing them along and laughing and turning away fast, and I was memorizing them, page by page, like I was going to be tested. Then Ashleigh, drunk on two wine coolers, dares everyone to keep the magazine one more round and close their eyes and think about what they saw." Megan's breathing hitched. "So we're all lying there pretending, six sleeping bags in Kayla's basement, and I could hear it. The fabric. Four other bags, all of them moving. Tiny little movements, these slow secret shifts of hips, of elbows, of flannel dragging against flannel, nobody saying a word, nobody even breathing loud, the magazine going around in the dark hand to hand like it was nothing. Like we weren't all lying there slick and aching, doing exactly the same thing with our hands under the covers, listening to each other rustle."
She paused, and in the moon stripe her eyes were open, glassy, staring at the ceiling.
"My fingers were in my pajama pants before the dare was even finished. I remember the carpet smell, that basement mildew mixed with popcorn, and the dryer thumping away upstairs, and all that soft flannel rustling, five other girls, and not one of us brave enough to say it out loud. The magazine was still going around in the dark, hand to hand, and I took it with my other hand because one was already busy, already soaked. I lay there looking at nothing, eyes shut, replaying the pages, the girls spread open with their heads tipped back, that shine the flash had caught between their legs, and I thought I'd die. I thought I'd die if I didn't finish, and I thought I'd die if anyone heard me. My hips were moving on their own, slow, so slow, dragging my clit against my own fingers through the slick, and every tiny shift of a sleeping bag near me made me freeze and then start again, desperate, listening. I came so fast it scared me. It hit me in waves and I bit down on my pillow so hard my jaw ached for two days, shaking, sure somebody had to have heard, sure the whole basement smelled like it. Nobody knew. Nobody ever knew. I've been chasing that ever since, being the one who knows, being the one in the dark with a secret nobody else can hear."
"Did anyone say anything?" Leslie asked, fingers circling slow.
"Nobody ever said a word. Next morning it was like it never happened. But after that night I touched myself every single day and I thought about that basement every time. All those girls in the dark pretending not to." Megan laughed, breathless. "God. It explains everything about me, doesn't it."
"It explains you completely," Leslie said.
"Bess," Megan said. "Yours. And don't say you were a late bloomer, you listened to six girls through doors, there was a before."
Bessie was silent long enough that Leslie turned her head. In the moonlight her face was unreadable, but her hand was already under her waistband, moving.
"Sophomore year. Water polo, girls' locker room after a meet. It was nothing. That's the whole point, it was nothing, just girls changing, talking, dripping pool water." Her voice stayed level and it was somehow the filthiest voice in the room. "One girl, our captain, stood at her locker talking to me about homework while she toweled off, completely naked, completely casual, and I stood there in my bra answering her about calculus and thinking about nothing else in the world except her."
"Nothing happened," Leslie said.
"Nothing happened. She got dressed. I went to class." Bessie's hips shifted, a small roll against her own hand. "But I went home that night and I thought about it, and I realized the thing that did it wasn't her body. It was the room. It was that she was like that in front of everyone and nobody was watching, and I was the only one in the whole room who was looking. Nobody knew. That was the part. Being the only one who knew."
"Six doors," Megan whispered.
"Nine rooms," Bessie said, and her breath broke on the number, and her hand kept moving.
Down the hall a door opened and closed. All three of them froze, hands stilling, listening to the girl's footsteps fade toward the bathroom, and none of them pulled their hands away, and when the footsteps were gone Leslie reached across in the dark and found Megan's wrist.
Megan let her hand be taken. Then she turned her wrist over and laced her fingers through Leslie's, and neither of them said anything about it, and their hands kept moving on themselves in the dark.
"Okay," Megan said, breath already uneven again. "New topic. Current crushes. Real ones, present tense. Who's got you ruined right now?"
"You first," Leslie said. "You're the one who brought it up."
"Fine. There's a girl in my Thursday lab. Premed. Dark hair, glasses, always pushes her sleeves up to her elbows and writes with this grip, like she's stabbing the page." Megan's fingers worked faster under the blanket. "She wears these little shorts to the rec center and I've watched her stretch and I think about her hamstrings for hours. I want to put her against a wall and kiss her until she forgets her GPA."
"What's her name?" Bessie asked.
"Doesn't matter. It's a fantasy, not a plan. That's the point of crushes. What's yours, Bess? And don't say nobody, you're dripping on my sheets."
Bessie laughed, low, hips tilting into her own hand. "My team. Obviously. Half my team."
"Half," Leslie repeated.
"Kiara. She's my back line partner. Big thighs, brown skin, she takes her shirt off at practice and ties it around her waist and I forget plays. She calls me 'Chen' in this low voice when she wants the ball, and I'd give her anything if she said my name like that." Bessie's breath picked up. "And Priya, our keeper. Loud. Bossiest person alive, screams at the whole field, fingers me, I mean fingers, sorry, points at me after every goal we let in. I think about what those hands would do if she was angry at me for a different reason."
"God," Megan said. "Bossy keeper. That tracks for you. You'd fold in a second."
"I would fold instantly. That's the honest answer." Bessie's voice stayed even, which was somehow worse. "I want her to grab my jersey and drag me into the equipment shed and tell me exactly what she's going to do to me and then do it. I don't even want to talk. I want to be handled."
"And you'd want people to know," Leslie said. "That's the real thing. You'd want the whole team to hear it through the door."
Silence, three seconds. Then Bessie: "Yeah. Fuck, yeah. I've thought about it. The whole team in the van outside, knowing what's happening in the shed, hearing me, nobody saying anything after. Like your basement, Meg. That's why your story almost killed me on Tuesday."
"That's an exhibitionist fantasy," Megan said, delighted. "Our quiet little watcher wants an audience of eleven."
"I want to be known. It's not the being seen. It's the being heard, and everyone knowing, and nothing changing on the surface." Her fingers were loud now, wet, and she didn't slow them. "What about you, Les? You've been quiet."
Leslie's face was hot. "Mine's worse."
"Worse than the shed?"
"Different. It's not about the audience. Mine's about control." She pushed her panties down to her thighs and let her legs fall open in the dark, past caring. "I think about someone deciding everything. When I eat. What I wear. When I'm allowed to touch myself. Sitting in class thinking, she didn't say I could, and being wet about it all day. I want to be owned. Not for a night. For a while. Long enough that it stops being a game."
"That's why you were so good at topping me," Megan said. "You know exactly what the bottom wants."
"I know because I want it harder than I give it." Leslie's fingers circled her clit, slow, and her voice dropped. "There's a thing. I haven't told anyone this, ever, not even Dana."
"Tell us," Bessie said, quiet.
"When I come. Sometimes I want a hand on my throat. Not squeezing hard. Just there. Like, hold me still, remind me I'm yours." She swallowed. "I've done it to myself, my own hand, and it makes me come so hard I see spots. A boy tried once and did it wrong and I never asked again. But God, last night, when you had my jaw in your hand, Bess, I almost went right there."
Megan's fingers stopped. "You want to be choked."
"Choked. Held. Owned. Whatever word you want. When I come I want to feel like I can't get away and don't want to."
"Look at her," Megan said to the ceiling. "Front row chair, theater seating, and all she wants is a hand at her throat."
"Rule's the rule," Bessie said. "I'm not judging. I'm filing it away." Her breathing was short, fast. "Both of you, listen. Since we're being honest. When one of you is telling me what to do, my brain goes somewhere else. Somewhere easy. And it's the best feeling I know. So when we do Thursday next week, with the audience, I want one of you holding me down at the end. Not the cuffs. Hands. I want to be kept."
Leslie reached over and found her knee, gripped it. "Done. That's done."
Down the hall the pipes ticked. Megan's hand had resumed, faster now, and Leslie could hear all three of them, three rhythms in the dark, nobody hiding.
"Kiara and Priya," Megan panted. "Bess, you've got to at least look at Priya differently at practice tomorrow. You can't unhear yourself right now."
"I've been looking at her differently since August." Bessie's voice finally cracked, the composure slipping out of it. "I think about her mouth. She's got a little gap in her front teeth and it shows when she yells and I think about it on my clit."
"Jesus," Leslie breathed.
"What do you want her to do? Specifically," Megan said. "Make it dirty. Audience rules."
"I want her to shove me against the tile after a loss. Wet uniform, pool smell, door locked. I want her to put those keeper gloves on and pin my wrists and eat me until I'm embarrassed about the noise. And I want her to tell me I let the team down while she does it."
"I'm coming," Leslie said, half laughing, not stopping. "I'm actually coming to a goalkeeper."
"Then come," Megan said. "But say it loud. Nobody's quiet in this room anymore."
Leslie's orgasm rolled up fast, her hips lifting off the sheet, and she imagined the hand, someone's hand, any of theirs, pressing warm and firm against her throat, mine, she thought, I'm theirs, and it hit her hard, her mouth open against the pillow, moaning without any thought of the wall.
Megan followed within a minute, gasping Kayla's basement out loud like a swear. Bessie held out longest, quiet for once in the wrong way, until Leslie leaned over and put her palm flat around the front of Bessie's throat, not squeezing, just there, and said, "Come for Priya."
Bessie came with a broken sound, her whole body bowing, grip snapping around Leslie's wrist.
They lay there breathing. After a while Bessie, still holding Leslie's hand at her own neck, said, "Thursday. That. Again. Both of us."
"Thursday," Leslie agreed. Her hand was still at Bessie's throat, and she could feel the pulse coming down under her palm, slow and heavy. She didn't move it yet. "Before Thursday. One more thing. Meg."
"Mm."
"The slumber party. You told us what happened. You didn't tell us what you wanted to happen." Leslie rolled onto her side, facing the shape of Megan against the wall. "If you could go back into that basement, knowing what you know now. What would you do?"
There was a long quiet. The pipes ticked. Megan's breathing had almost steadied, and Leslie could hear it change again, pick up, just from the question.
"God," Megan said finally. "Okay. Honesty rule." She turned her head on the pillow. "You understand I'm not that girl anymore, right? She's like a photograph. I'm just telling you what I'd want if I walked into that basement tomorrow, as me, like this. Twenty-one, wrecked, four orgasms behind me this week."
"Walk in," Bessie said. Her voice had gone low and even again, the interested voice.
"Okay. So the magazine's going around. Everybody's pretending to look at the pages. And me, I don't pretend." Megan's hand had slipped back down under the blanket and Leslie heard the wet sound of her, unhurried. "I'd sit up. Right in the middle of six sleeping bags in the dark. And I'd say, so, are we all doing this or are we just going to lie there faking it?"
"Jesus," Leslie breathed.
"Because that's the thing I've thought about for six years. Somebody had to be the one who said it out loud, and nobody did, and we all just lay there in the dark listening to each other's sleeping bags and pretending. That's my origin story, Les. It's not the magazines. It's the silence. I've been trying to break that silence ever since. That's why I caught you that night. That's why I say everything."
"So you say it," Bessie said. "Then what?"
"Then it's on me. I've named it. Six girls looking at me in the dark." Megan's breath hitched. "And I'd be the one they watch. That's the version. I'd push my bag down and touch myself in front of all of them and let them hear how loud I am, and I'd dare each one of them, one at a time, to do it too. And if somebody was too scared, I'd go over to her bag and put my hand on her stomach through the fabric and just leave it there. Not move it. Just let her decide."
"And Kayla?" Leslie asked. "The basement was hers."
"Kayla was the brave one. She'd go second. I know she would." Megan laughed, breathless, her hand moving faster now. "And then it's just all of us in the dark, all that fabric moving, and nobody pretending anymore. That's the whole fantasy. Six girls not pretending."
"That's not a slumber party fantasy," Bessie said slowly. "That's the hallway fantasy. Yours is the same as mine, you just came at it from the other side. I listened. You wanted to be the one they all listened to."
Megan was quiet a second, and then she made a sound half laugh, half moan. "Six years of therapy money I could have saved. Fine. Yes. I wanted to be the loud one in a room of quiet girls. And then I got kicked off the cheer squad for being too loud, and I partied four nights a week, and here I am directing an audience room in my dorm." Her fingers were loud now, shameless. "The photograph girl would have died on the spot if she heard me say this."
"The photograph girl built you," Leslie said. "Be nice to her."
"She was so scared," Megan said, and her voice went soft for a second, and then rough again. "She was so scared and so wet in that sleeping bag and she told absolutely no one for six years. I'd go back just to hold her hand. Right through the sleeping bag, like I said. Just so she knew somebody knew."
Leslie reached across and did it. Found Megan's hand under the blanket, over her own knuckles working, and left hers there on top, not moving, just resting on the back of Megan's fingers.
Megan's breath broke. "Oh, fuck you. That's exactly the move. That's exactly it."
"That's the point," Leslie said. "Somebody knows now."
For a while the only sounds were the three rhythms again, Megan's speeding up under Leslie's hand, Bessie's slow build from the foot of the bed, and Leslie's own, which had never quite gone away after the goalkeeper. The moon stripe had crawled up onto Bessie's empty mattress in the middle of the room, and Leslie looked at it, the stage with nobody on it, and thought about photograph girls everywhere, lying in the dark wanting somebody to say it out loud.
"Second round," Megan panted. "Somebody talk dirty to me, I earned it, I just did self-therapy with my fingers in me."
"You want the basement?" Leslie said. "Fine. You're back in it. Sleeping bag around your ankles. Five girls watching you in the dark and you can't see any of their faces, just hear them." She squeezed Megan's hand once. "And one of them is too scared to touch herself, so you take her wrist and bring her hand down with yours, both of you together, and you feel her fingers start moving under yours."
"Yes," Megan gasped.
"And nobody's quiet. That's the rule you'd make. Everyone has to say one true thing out loud, no matter what it is, and everyone has to hear it."
"Oh my god," Megan said, hips lifting off the sheet. "That's the rule. That's my rule, that's the honesty rule, I invented it at fifteen and didn't know it." Her breathing went ragged, fast. "I'm close. I'm close, Leslie."
"Come for the girl who said it out loud," Leslie said, and Megan came with a choked cry that she didn't try to soften at all, loud, ringing off the stripped walls, audible to anyone walking past on the other side of the door.
Nobody said anything about the wall. That was the point too.
Bessie was last again. Leslie crawled down the bed to her, hooked her chin over her shoulder, and slid her hand down Bessie's stomach to where her own fingers were already working, and added hers on top, both of them rubbing Bessie's slick clit together in the dark.
"Kiara's voice," Leslie murmured in her ear. "'Chen. Ball's yours.' Then Priya's, angry, right against your ear in the shed. Say the true thing out loud, Bess. Rule's the rule."
"I want the whole team to hear me," Bessie said, wrecked, hips driving up into both their hands, and she came on the words, gripping Leslie's forearm, crying out with nothing held back.
They lay in the dark a long time after. Then Bessie, hoarse, said, "Megan. Your photograph girl. The one in the sleeping bag."
"Yeah."
"Next Thursday, when the audience is here. She gets a chair too. Front row. Next to Leslie's."
Megan was quiet. Leslie felt her smile in the dark before she heard it.
"Deal," Megan said. "But she has to say one true thing out loud. Rule's the rule."